The Kunlun Files

Chapter 15: Do You Really Not Recognize Me?

Past five in the morning, Lu Feng's fever spiked again.

He lay there with cooling patches stuck to his forehead and palms, his eyes gone red from the heat, his lips cracked. He'd been burning on and off for hours now — down a degree, up two, as if something inside him were stoking the coals every time they cooled.

The earth's energy had begun to warm those days, and that kind of heat puts a restlessness into people. In the old calendar it answers to the fire season — the grass on the plain burns and withers in turn. Watching his fever come and go like a tide, I thought: some fires don't come from the weather.

"I feel like I could breathe fire right now," he croaked.

"Show me."

"Dajie. I'm not going to burn to death, am I?"

"No."

"If I died, would you be sad?"

"I wouldn't," I said. "Your family would."

He sighed at that, and something like sorrow flashed through his eyes — and then I heard his soul speak.

*Do you really not recognize me?*

I kept my head down and went on peeling the apple in my hands, slow and careful, the skin coming off in one long red ribbon.

*You see me,* the soul said. *I know you see me. Why do you pretend you don't?*

I didn't answer. I knew that once I truly answered, there were things even I might not be able to hold.

The soul fell quiet, deflated. And then the beast in my chest decided to join the fun: *Let's see how long you can keep this up.*

The nurse came and put him on another bottle, her shoes squeaking softly on the ward floor. Outside the window the sky was going from black to that deep blue that means morning has decided but hasn't started. I watched the medicine fall drop by drop down the tube into him, and I knew his heart was hurting worse than his body. It always works that way — sick bodies make soft hearts. And besides, his soul was about to torment him again.

I wrapped my hand gently around the IV line. The fluid inside was cold. His fever kept coming back, and only part of that came from the yin wound the thing on Xiao Hao had left in him. The rest came from his soul — or you could say, from his own thoughts.

The soul had been reaching for an answer from me. A response. Every day, in a hundred small ways — a dream it sent him, a chill it put in his hands, a word it pushed to the tip of his tongue — it had been testing whether I would look at it. I had walled off every probe and given it nothing, so it was probing by extremes now. Fever was an extreme. I knew it would worry at him four or five days before it let go.

He hadn't said a word of it. His soul had said it all for him.

To be moved is because of love. To refuse to be moved — that is because of love too.

Holding that cold tube, I silently began a chant, and as its energy ran from my palm into the line, the stabbing pain came back to my chest. I let it come. Cold fluid in, warmth through — his breathing eased before the drip was half done, and at some point he slid under into real sleep.

The voice was there again, and I answered it the way I always did, in the space behind my heart: *Why not keep him company and walk a stretch of road in earnest? When the bond runs out, he'll leave on his own.*

How could a bond ever run out? What ends in this life only settles the last life's account. The next life goes on paying this one's.

*Why must you think so far? The present is what matters.*

Those words work on other people. I can see past-life karma for what it is — I don't get to live like other people.

*You're really not moved at all?*

I am moved. But the world's love comes in more than one kind.

Halfway through that bottle, his temperature finally slid down.

Master Wu arrived not long after, smelling of cold morning air. "You kept watch all night — my driver will take you home to rest. I called Lu Feng's family; they'll be here later."

I cut the apple into slices and set them on his nightstand, within reach of his good arm. As I left, Lu Feng stirred, and his eyes followed me to the door, full of protest. And his great soul, curled up tight in the corner of the room, looked like a wounded child.

In the elevator down, the tiredness finally caught up with me. A night's watch is nothing. A night of being looked at by something that large — that takes something out of you.

Walking me out, Wu said abruptly, "Introducing the kid to you — I still don't know if that was good or bad. Dragging you out in the middle of the night, too."

"Some things can't be filed under good or bad. They're what was going to happen."

"I was flustered last night."

"Being flustered is normal."

"You fixed something for him, didn't you?"

"Nothing worth mentioning."

"You're always like this." He shook his head, then: "In a few days I'm going out of town on business. Come with me."

"I can't talk business."

"There's a plot of land over there. I want you to look it over. A partner's offering it for a project, and the price is good — I've had a few people read it before, and they all say it's excellent land. But something's never sat right with me. I want your eyes on it before I sign anything."

"I don't know feng shui."

"Doesn't matter. If you've looked, I'll be easy."

We'd reached the hospital gates. His driver was already bringing the car around.

"Then just carry a baby around the plot and watch how it reacts. There you go."

"And if something there *is* wrong and it hits the child?" He was dead serious. "I did take my dog once, though. A while after we arrived, it started barking like mad at nothing and wouldn't stop. Tugged it all the way back to the car."

"All right," I said. "I'll go with you and take a look."

So many things in this world turn on the moment of asking. My baby suggestion had not been a joke — it was a divination, cast right there on the sidewalk, and Wu's answer had told me more or less how this business of his would unfold. He'd thought of the child's safety before his own gain. That was the hexagram's first line, and it was a good one — but the dog was the second line, and it was not.

A word spoken becoming a prophecy — in our world, that happens all the time. People just don't notice when it happens to them.

His answer had already told me what I needed to know about the trip. What it hadn't told me was what the dog had been barking at.

I went home to sleep on it.