The night wind cut like knives across their faces as A Jin dragged Lin Yan over the ragged mountain trail. Behind them, bootfalls hammered the dark—relentless, measured, closing fast. Their pursuer moved like a shadow: light-footed, sure, and far too quick for a wounded man and a "frail" village girl.
"This way!"
A Jin yanked him toward a cleft veiled in tangled vines. They slipped sideways into the slit of rock—black as a well, slick underfoot, barely wide enough for a single person to squeeze through.
Outside, the footsteps halted. Low curses, the rustle of vines. The killer had found the opening. He was deciding whether to follow.
"Go—deeper," A Jin whispered, breath tight. She led; Lin Yan clung close. The air turned stale and damp, thick with the smell of earth and something older—something that felt like it had been waiting here for years.
After the time it takes a single stick of incense to burn, the passage widened and the faint tap…tap…tap of water echoed ahead. A Jin stopped, weighing paths in the dark.
"An abandoned mine?" Lin Yan rasped, catching the suggestion of chisel marks on the walls and the rusted bones of old tools underfoot.
"Mm." Her voice bounced off stone. "I was here once as a child with my grandfather. It's a maze. With luck, it'll shake him."
The luck ran out at once. From the black throat behind them came the crunch of a boot on gravel. The killer had committed.
"Move!"
A Jin chose a downward shaft and plunged in.
The mine was a hive of tunnels, a giant ant nest carved into rock. Darkness ruled. Now and then, a thread of moonlight slanted through a hidden fissure, painting dust and webs the color of old bone. The ground slipped from stone to spoil and back again, treacherous as glass. One wrong step could spill them into unseen pits.
The footsteps stalked them without hurry, never too near, never far. This was a patient hunter, reading eddies of air and the tremor of sound, pinning them by echo alone.
"He's hearing us," Lin Yan whispered, lungs burning. His shoulder wound had ripped open during the scramble; warm blood seeped through the bandage.
"I know." A Jin's breath hitched, but her tone stayed steady. "He's using the echoes. We can't stop. We have to reach that place."
"What place?"
She didn't answer.
They wove through the black, scrambling up warped rails of an old mine cart track, crawling belly-down through a tunnel that would barely let a child pass. Twice Lin Yan felt the cold of the killer's intent skim his spine, close enough to taste.
At last A Jin pulled him into a cavern—a rough rest hollow where miners once slept. She pressed him behind a jut of rock and lifted a palm for silence. They barely dared to breathe.
Footsteps paused in the mouth of the chamber. Then, after a long beat, they faded down another branch.
Both of them sagged to the floor, spent.
Only their harsh, strangled breathing filled the dark.
"Why did you come?" Lin Yan managed, voice a scrape of stone.
A Jin was quiet for a moment.
"I went to the elder to beg him for more time for you," she murmured. "When I came back, your room was empty. I saw the window and guessed you'd gone to the smithy."
"It's forbidden. No one goes near it."
"Forbidden? Why?"
"No one says." She shook her head. "The elder and Lei keep it shuttered. I only know that long ago, a stranger worked there, then vanished, and the place went dead. After that came talk of bad luck, hauntings—so people stayed away."
A stranger. A smith. Vanished.
Lin Yan's heartbeat quickened. It fit the mute blacksmith too well.
"And you… you're not afraid of 'bad luck'? Or of me bringing it?"
He sensed the shape of her smile in the dark, wry and soft.
"I'm an orphan scratching food from a mountain. What's left to fear? I just don't want to watch someone I hauled back from the river die in front of me."
She paused; her voice hardened.
"But the man chasing you—he's not a bandit. He's trained. What are they? And what are you?"
Lin Yan said nothing. After a night like this, more lies felt thin as paper.
He was shaping the truth when—
crk—
A pebble ticked across stone from the tunnel they had used. Not the one the footsteps had faded into.
Both of them froze. Cold bled into their bones.
Trapped.
The retreat had been theater. The killer had mapped the mine as surely as they had blundered through it—looping around to their flank… or behind.
The air itself seemed to sharpen with his intent.
"Run!"
A Jin shoved Lin Yan toward the depths and turned, staff in both hands, to face the dark.
Staggering, Lin Yan caught a flicker at the edge of vision: on a slab of rock in a shadowed corner, a faint symbol scratched into stone—so worn it was almost nothing—yet its lines echoed the strange markings on the iron token hidden against his chest.
Then steel sang.
A Jin's shout, the whip-crack of wood, the hiss and crash of a long blade—violence burst into the cave like a storm.
Turn back—or keep running?