The herb sheds breathed with the scent of drying chrysanthemum and cut pine. Night wind rattled the shutters, a rhythm almost steady enough to pass for safety.
I lit no lantern. Lotus discipline taught that shadows conceal better than walls.
Ge Ji Ming stepped through anyway, sabers slung but eyes bright in the half-light. He carried the scent of the river and the faintest copper tang of blood.
"You shouldn't be here," I whispered. "You shouldn't be alive," he replied, voice even. "The Courier's darts don't miss."
His hand brushed his sleeve, and I noticed the shallow tear where my Silver Thread Needle had deflected one strike. Fate had spared him… or resonance had.
I drew in a slow breath. "We train once. Enough to understand the bond. Then never again." He smiled crookedly. "You're already lying."
He was right. My hairpin thrummed near him, the lotus engraving glowing faint like a heartbeat. Denial was fragile as paper.
I began anyway. "The Moon-Breath Lotus cycle is inhale four, hold two, exhale six. Internal, circular, never broken."
He folded his arms. "Sky Wolf teaches forward momentum. Strike, split, kill. Circles are for dancers."
"Then dance… or die," I said, sharper than intended.
For a moment, silence, then he obeyed. Inhale. Hold. Exhale.
On his third cycle, the resonance returned, low and insistent. My qi unfurled like ripples on water; his afterimages split and bent back, not wild but orbiting me. Together they formed a spiral neither of us could have shaped alone.
The shed creaked. Herbs quivered on their strings. Dust motes swirled in a pattern that looked like script, letters no mortal hand had written.
He opened his eyes. "So this is Shuangxin." His voice was hushed, reverent. "Say the word aloud and fate hears you," I warned.
Too late. The word had already taken root between us.
I broke the cycle, snapping the resonance apart. The silence that followed was heavier than sound.
He leaned close, almost too close. "One day we'll need this."
"And one day it will kill us," I answered.
A soft sound outside, the scrape of wood against stone. My hand lifted, weaving Quiet Pond Domain. The shed hushed into silence, but through the veil I glimpsed a figure.
Not the Courier. Kang Ya Zhen.
Her vermilion robes glowed faint in lantern-light as she paused at the alley's bend, fan half-raised, eyes scanning the shadows. She turned her head. Listening. Waiting.
Ji Ming's hand brushed his saber. I gripped his wrist before he could move.
"No," I mouthed.
We stood still until the sound of her footsteps receded. Only when she vanished into the night did I release him.
"She knows," he said flatly. "She suspects," I corrected. My voice was steadier than I felt.
The lotus hairpin was burning against my scalp, warning of fate tightening.
"Tomorrow," Ji Ming whispered.
"No," I said again. "Tonight was already too much."
But when he left, the herbs still shivered as though our qi lingered, and the dust motes swirled in that impossible script.
A message, or a warning. Either way, I was already bound.