Jin Hao came to find me that night, which was not unusual — he'd been finding me in the late hours regularly since the first battle, showing up at the edge of my fire with tea he'd made too strong and things he'd been carrying since dawn. What was unusual was the way he sat down, which was not his usual controlled fold into a cross-legged position but a drop, too fast, like a man whose legs had finished arguing with him and simply voted to stop.I waited."I've been having something," he said, to the fire. "For about two weeks. I didn't want to tell you because we were managing the converts and the festival and the culture-building and it felt like one more weight you didn't need." He looked at his hands, turned them over, back. "I've been waking up in the middle of the night with no memory of what I dreamed. That's not new, I've always slept badly. But it used to be that when I woke up, I knew immediately where I was, who I was, what needed doing. The way soldiers

Reed Hollow was louder the second time.That was the first thing I noticed, and it took me three full steps inside the gate to understand why: the shuttle had stopped swinging. The last movement left in the town, the last tiny pendulum of evidence that physics still had opinions here, had finally used up what motion I'd given it three weeks ago, and now it hung perfectly still on its thread, and without it the town was the quietest place I had ever stood in while simultaneously being alive.Eleven of us in a row inside the gate. Lin Mei at my left shoulder, close enough to touch. My mother at my right. Maybe behind me and slightly to my left, the position she'd started taking in unfamiliar places, the one that put her where she could see my face without being in front of me — I'd never asked her why she did that. I thought now that I understood."Can you feel it?" I asked my mother.She had the key-thing in her hands, wrapped in cloth, both hands around it, the way you'd carry somethi

The Reaper found me an hour later, outside the walls, sitting with my back against the sandcastle charm on the gate post while the others made camp.It didn't arrive theatrically. It was simply there, the way it had been there in the dawn after Perhaps's rescue, materialized out of the air between one breath and the next, its terrible edged presence settling into the space beside me the way an old, uncomfortably knowing acquaintance settles into a chair next to you at a table you thought was all yours."You went in," it said."I did.""You came back.""I did.""The others before you—" it began."I know about the others before me. You told me. They ran out of anchors." I didn't look at it. I looked at the camp, at Lin Mei coaxing a reluctant fire into competence, at Maybe explaining to Perhaps what she'd felt when I came back, at Tuo Shan setting down his pack and beginning, with the careful deliberation of a man doing so

I reached for it. Toward it. Into the pause.The Hollow resumed and the sound went with it, and I grabbed every thread I had and pulled.---Tuo Shan caught me before I hit the stones.I didn't register how hard I'd come back until I felt his arms around my chest, solid and immediate, the weight and warmth of a man who had practiced being an immovable object in the same spot for sixty years and had recently discovered that the same discipline could be aimed outward instead."I heard something," I said, immediately, before anything else, because it would be easier to lose my balance again than it would be to lose the certainty of what I'd heard."From the six thousand?" Lin Mei, kneeling in front of me, hands on my arms, checking."From whatever's left where the six thousand were. It's not nothing yet. There's still — they're still there, in some form, in the pause. Like sound heard from very far away." My voice had gone rough in a way it hadn't the first time. Something about the seco

I was sitting with the cold fire at the camp's edge, the last one awake, when the Reaper arrived.Not the one I'd spoken with before. Or, not precisely — it had the same shape, the same terrible edged beauty, but there was something in the way it occupied space that evening that was slightly different, the slight difference of a person who carries news and knows how the news sits before they've said it."The council met," it said, settling into the dark with the ease of something that lives in it."Which council. Mine or yours.""Both, as it happens, on the same day." It studied the cold fire. "Your council — the traditional sects — produced a formal request that the Void-Touched cease and desist from further attempts to interact with the Hollow, on the grounds that the process is destabilizing for the surrounding cultivation environment and may, quote, *invite further incursion by providing the entity with a navigable pathway into inhabited terri