Spring of year four.
Suyin's inner disciple mentorship opportunities had not been restored. The curriculum reassignment had been made permanent by administrative default — these things became permanent when no one appealed them, and the appeal process required an Elder sponsor, and finding an Elder sponsor willing to antagonize Elder Sorrow was a social cost that the available Elders had calculated and declined to pay.
She was adapting, because she was constitutionally incapable of not adapting, but the adaptation had a cost that Kai watched accumulate the way he watched everything — precisely, without being able to do anything about the tracking.
She was spending more time in research. More time in the library. More time in the specific productive solitude of someone who has adjusted their social calculus after finding the social world unreliable and found that solitude, at least, doesn't renegotiate its terms. She was doing excellent work and receiving less recognition for it than her cohort and filing the gap with the kind of focused efficiency that looks like contentment and isn't.
He brought her lunch on the days she forgot to leave the library. He was honest with her about the inquiry's trajectory. He was honest about what he thought Elder Sorrow was going to get away with. He was honest about the limits of what he could do, and she was honest about not requiring him to do more, and this honesty was the thing they gave each other that neither of them got from the rest of the sect.
"You're going to leave," she said one afternoon, over the lunch he'd brought. "Not this year. But soon."
He looked at her.
"I've been doing the calculation," she said. "Your cultivation path is heading somewhere the outer sect can't contain. Maybe the inner sect either." She ate a piece of the bread with the automatic attention of someone whose body is performing hunger without her primary focus being available. "I've been deciding whether to feel bad about that."
"What did you decide."
"That feeling bad about it is a self-interested response," she said. "What I actually want is for you to go wherever you're going and have the resources you need to get there." She paused. "What I actually feel is—" she stopped. "I don't know what I actually feel. Something large that I don't have a precise word for."
He did. He had the word and didn't say it because some precise words do more damage than imprecise ones, and because he was seventeen and she was eighteen and whatever they had built between them was the most reliable thing in his life and he was constitutionally incapable of risking it through naming it.
"I'm not going anywhere this year," he said.
"But next year."
He thought about Wei Fangs' notebooks. He thought about the terminal structural stress and the twelve cycles and the listening feeling in the cultivation yard and the fact that something in him was cracking in exactly the way a filter cracks when it has been running at over-capacity for too long.
"I don't know," he said. Which was true. He didn't know if he would leave or if something would happen to him or if the floor would finally open before he had a chance to make choices about it.
"Okay," she said, and went back to her research, and he sat next to her in the library and the afternoon sun came through the east window and the black vein was visible even in daylight now, and neither of them mentioned it.