The boy's name was Kit.
At least, that's what he said when he first arrived—quiet, eyes wide, shoulders hunched like someone who'd learned how to make himself small. He stood at the edge of the herb house, blinking against the candlelight, his arms wrapped tight around his torso even though the night was warm.
He smelled of exhaust, sweat, and the sharp chemical tang of city streets. A faded jacket clung to his frame, one sleeve torn at the seam. He wore no shoes.
Luli found him first.
She'd gone outside to gather night-blooming flowers for a tea she was preparing for someone who couldn't sleep. The air was heavy with honeysuckle and smoke. She nearly stepped on him where he crouched near the edge of the garden wall, half-concealed by creeping thyme and wild ginger.
When she asked his name, he didn't answer right away. Just stared at her with the kind of silence that has nothing to do with language and everything to do with survival.
Then he said, barely audible: "Kit."
He spoke Thai like someone born to it. His consonants soft, rounded. But his features carried the fine-boned edge of Chinese heritage—his mother, he would later say, had come from Guangzhou. His father from Phitsanulok. Neither had stayed long enough to matter.
Luli offered him water. Her hands steady. Her voice calm.
He drank it too fast, coughed, then apologized in a rush of Thai-accented Mandarin. Luli only nodded and led him inside.
Yuren met them at the door, hair tied back, a streak of flour across his temple. He'd been baking—soft rolls for the children who would arrive the next day from the northern checkpoint. He looked at Kit and said nothing, just stepped aside and let him pass.
Jianyu came last, silent and watchful, arms crossed over his chest. Kit flinched at the sight of him, then caught himself, swallowing the fear. Jianyu saw it. Filed it away. Didn't press.
Later, when Kit was wrapped in a clean blanket and curled in a corner of the loft with a mug of warm rice porridge, he told them everything.
Or at least enough.
"My cousin brought me up from Hat Yai," he said, eyes trained on the knot in the floorboards. "Said there was work. Said I could send money home."
He paused. Took a shaky breath.
"It wasn't work."
He'd been sold to a small ring in the eastern provinces. Men who trafficked in silence. Who fed their boys red pills to keep them obedient and painted on smiles like makeup. Men who used language like a leash, who punished disobedience with locked doors and withheld meals and worse.
Kit had tried to run three times.
The last time, he made it all the way to a checkpoint in the hills—where a courier for the River Line saw him sleeping under a bridge, recognized the mark on his wrist, and gave him directions. "Follow the stream," she had whispered. "The current will know where to carry you."
He had walked for two days with no food. Through thorn brush. Through cold nights. Through fear so thick it coated his skin like sweat.
And now he was here.
With three strangers who gave him food, a bed, and did not ask for anything in return.
"Why?" he asked finally, voice cracking. "Why are you helping me?"
Yuren answered. "Because someone helped me."
Luli said nothing, just reached out and brushed Kit's hair from his eyes, the gesture so gentle it made him flinch.
That first week, Kit barely spoke. He stayed close to the windows, wary of closed doors. He refused to eat if anyone else was at the table. At night, he slept with his eyes half open, curled like a question mark around a pillow he gripped like a lifeline.
Meilin, curious as ever, watched from afar. She didn't approach. Not until the sixth morning, when she left a drawing beside his plate—a tiny dragon with heart-shaped wings. "For your dreams," she said, and then ran off without waiting for a reply.
Kit cried that night for the first time.
Not loudly. Just a soft, stuttering sound, like something breaking open. Yuren sat near but didn't touch him. He simply sat and listened until the silence came back.
Eventually, Kit began to speak.
He helped Luli gather herbs. He shadowed Jianyu, watching how he moved like water—controlled, efficient, never unpredictable. He asked questions about the river, about the symbols carved into trees, about the strange, coded whistles they used to signal safe passage.
"You're not just hiding people," he said one day. "You're… moving them. Like a current."
"Exactly," Luli said, smiling. "We move people where they can begin again."
Kit was silent for a long time.
"I want to be a current."
"You already are."
One evening, Jianyu asked if Kit wanted to send a message to his family. Let them know he was safe. Kit looked down at his hands. "I don't think they care," he whispered. "They sold me as soon as the money ran out."
No one pressed him again.
Instead, Yuren gave him something else.
A blank notebook. A brush pen. And a single question.
"What do you want to be called?"
Kit looked at the page for hours that night. He stared until his eyes burned. Until the ink bled beneath his fingers.
When he returned the book the next morning, a single name was written inside.
Sunan.
It was his maternal grandfather's name. The only man who had ever spoken to him like he mattered. Sunan meant "good word." A blessing. A prayer.
So that's what they called him.
Sunan.
He began to study the maps of the River Line. He memorized names, dates, herbal codes. He practiced throwing knives with Meilin in the yard. Learned to light fires with wet wood. Built traps. Learned the hand signals used by runners in the southern passes.
He was quick. Precise. Focused.
"Like a reed in water," Jianyu said. "Looks soft, but bends without breaking."
By winter, Sunan was running escort routes. Only the shorter ones. Only with a partner. But still—he moved. Not as a victim. Not as a shadow.
As a current.
And when they passed through the checkpoint outside the old monastery, he paused and looked at the city below.
"What if he's still looking for me?" he asked Jianyu, voice low.
"He might be."
"What if he finds me?"
Jianyu's hand rested briefly on his shoulder. "Then he'll find the River Line."
Sunan nodded once.
He didn't look back.