Kaien's report came the evening of the eighth day, while I was still sleeping.
Wei Zhengnan let me sleep for the full six hours I had promised and woke me when it was dark outside with a cup of tea and the information arranged in his own careful way — not a pile of fragments, but a sequence, which was how he organized things when he had been thinking them through while I rested.
"Kaien spoke with the physician's son," he said, when I had drunk half the tea and returned to something resembling alertness. "A street encounter near the Prefecture administrative building. Completely natural — Kaien recognized him from the old neighborhood, stopped to exchange pleasantries. He observed him for approximately ten minutes across two separate exchanges."
"What did he find?"
"The son was not nervous. He was pleasant, ordinary, slightly in a hurry but without the specific quality of a person managing hidden knowledge. Kaien's read was that he had nothing to conceal."
