They stayed in the fortress that night.
Not by choice. Xin's channels needed hours before he could walk without help, and the seven freed students needed longer than that just to remember how to exist in uninterrupted time.
Lian came in at the four hour mark, decided the situation was stable enough not to require Shen Bao, and made a fire in the fortress courtyard with the pragmatic efficiency of someone who had grown up in difficult terrain.
Nobody spoke much in the first hour.
Chen Wei sat closest to the fire, both hands wrapped around a cup of water that Lian had produced from her pack. She drank it slowly, examining the sensation of thirst and its resolution like someone rediscovering a language they had spoken as a child.
The six others sat in varying states of the same rediscove
