He let that thought sit for a couple of breaths before he said the other thing that had been waiting on his tongue.

’You have the wildest mood swings of any voice that has ever set up inside my head. I am not going to get used to the way you flip between the version of you that makes jokes at my expense and the version of you that talks like a general planning a campaign. I keep waiting for somebody else to walk in and take notes.’

[ It is the same me, Xuan. The work is different. ]

’I know. I am just saying it is striking.’

[ Move toward the main tunnel. I need a line of sight on the mouth to start mapping the interior. And memorise what I draw. I want a physical copy in your father’s hands the morning we get back. ]

He waited until the two guards finished their smoke and got to their feet. Their boots scraped past him at three metres’ distance, the bitter herb thick in their wake, and they did not glance once toward the timber stack.

When their voices had moved off toward the barracks at the eastern end of the perimeter, he slid out of his triangle and worked his way along the inside of the palisade toward the lower workings. Pathfinder threaded him through the gaps. Behind a stationary ore cart, through the trench where the drainage water lay black and oily, under the lee of a coal pile that smelled of old fire.

He came to rest fifteen metres from the mouth of the main tunnel. The bore of it ran into the side of the mountain like a black throat. Pit-props of dark timber, banded with iron, marched into the dark in two rows. Two lanterns hung at the lip on hooks, burning weakly in the morning damp. A guard on a three-legged stool just inside the mouth chewed on something, his pole-arm propped against his knee, his head nodding the small slow nod of a man who had been on shift for too long.

The deeper sound of the mine reached out: the dull bite of picks, the rolling complaint of a stuck cart wheel, the soft thump of waste rock tipped into a chute somewhere down the second gallery, working voices muffled by stone.

Mira’s overlay bloomed over the mouth of the tunnel in his vision.

It began as outline. The cavern of the mouth, the two galleries that branched at the first chamber, the ventilation shafts marked in thinner lines. As the minutes passed and the Qi signatures of guards and miners moved through the workings, the panel filled itself in — passages he had no eye on, branching tunnels at depths he could not see, the rough shape of a second level forty metres down, a third dimmer level below that. Mira built it as a wire frame, then thickened the lines with weight. Which galleries were active. Which were abandoned. Where men with cultivation signatures held position as opposed to the ordinary labour.

He committed the shape of it to memory chamber by chamber. Mira drew. He recorded. They worked together for a long quarter of an hour, focused without words.

[ First level mapped to seventy percent. Second level, forty. The third is below my range from here without you walking the upper galleries. We can do better when we come back with the operation. For today, this is enough. Tuck it away. Start considering how you want to leave. ]

He had begun to consider exactly that when something behind him moved.

The footstep wasn’t either of them. Wrong distance for the tunnel guard, wrong weight for the watchman. Wrong sound under it. Gravel ground beneath a boot that knew how not to grind.

Pathfinder caught it a beat too late. Rings flared into red around a point behind his left shoulder, a Qi signature the system had not registered until the man had decided to let it be registered. The pressure was high. Higher than the guards. Higher than the watchman. Not the elder, but a man who knew how to walk quiet, and who was, by the colour the rings had turned, somewhere in the high reaches of Qi Refining.

Lin Xuan did not breathe.

The man on the lower path had paused two heartbeats earlier. 𝘧𝓇ℯ𝑒𝓌𝑒𝑏𝓃𝘰𝘷𝘦𝘭.𝒸ℴ𝓂

He was not pleased to be awake at this hour. He was not pleased to be drawing patrol on the western perimeter when his rank should have put him in the barracks with a cup of warm wine in front of him. But his sect did not run on what pleased him, and the new Elder up the hill did not believe in letting the morning shift swap with the night without an overlap walked by someone with eyes. So he was walking the overlap. Eyes open. Pole-arm across his shoulder. Foul mood in the well of his stomach.

What broke through the mood was a sound smaller than a sound should have been. The kind of nothing that comes from a man holding position inside a perimeter where men were not supposed to be holding anything. He felt the small wrong before he heard it, the way an experienced hand at a craft can feel a knot in the wood before the saw finds it.

He stopped on the path. He turned his head a fraction. He let his Qi rise from where he had been keeping it folded and pushed the edge of it out into the air, asking the morning what it had been hiding.

The morning told him: a point of presence where there should not have been one. Behind the coal pile. Tucked into the shadow at the foot of the palisade. Holding very still.

His hand tightened on the haft of his weapon. His voice rang out hard and clear across the perimeter. A voice that already knew the shape of the answer he wanted and had begun to plan what to do if he did not get it.

"Who goes there?"