We formed the bucket line as fast as we could.
Luan Feng at the well, Luan cousins stretched from the south wall to the clinic, the garrison soldiers who had come running from the outer post filling in the gaps. The river was faster than the well and someone had already started a second line from the bank, Zhao Lin and Zhao Jun both knee-deep in the shallows passing buckets up the chain, the water dark in the firelight and not enough.
I was four places back from the clinic wall, taking the bucket from the cousin behind me and passing it forward, taking another, passing it. The motion was mechanical. It was not the problem.
What is the actual threat here.
I passed a bucket. Took another.
The fire will burn what it has already taken. The buildings are burning. What is still at risk.
I passed it forward. The cousin behind me shoved another into my hands.
People. Where are the people and what is hurting them.
I turned my head without stopping the pass and looked at the compound.
Suyin was across the yard with four of the Luan cousins, pulling bodies away from the burning buildings, dragging them clear of the heat. Liu Jun first, brought out through the clinic door while the roof above it was still going, two cousins carrying him by the shoulders and ankles. Then the Wei brothers, taken out of the dormitory and laid on the ground beside the training area. Suyin moved between them with her hands on their necks and wrists, checking each one, and her face told me everything before I could cross the yard to ask.
Gao Shu was at the forge doorway.
Shan Pei had his hands on her shoulders and was trying to move her and she was not moving. Her father's body was on the ground in front of her and she was screaming his name and clawing at Shan Pei's grip. Shu Shu came off the training ground wall, and she was larger than she had been an hour ago, visibly larger, her frame broader, her presence heavier, the growth sudden and unmistakable. She lowered herself beside Gao Shu and Shan Pei lifted the girl onto Shu Shu's back and the animal moved toward the east gate, away from the smoke, three of Hao's children clinging to her back as well, Gao Shu bent forward over Shu Shu's neck still calling for her father, her voice going raw, until they were through the gate and out of the worst of it.
Luan Mei had the eastern dormitory open and was moving people through it. Bolin had the cultivation hall doors back. Children in the yard, the older ones helping their mothers, the younger ones standing where they had been put and some of them were—
Coughing.
A girl near the cultivation hall doorway, seven years old, bent double with it. Three others near the south wall, faces turned into their sleeves. Hao's youngest sitting on the ground with her hands on her knees coughing so hard her back shook.
Fire may burn but it is the smoke that kills.
I dropped out of the line and was moving.
The smoke was low and thick between the buildings, channeled by the walls into the corridors where people moved, where children stood. I had been standing in the bucket line passing water at a clinic that was still on fire and the smoke had been building the whole time.
I found Suyin as quickly as I could to pull her away from the Wei Brother’s bodies while the fire was fastly encroaching upon her and the Academy.
Her eyes stayed on the fire.
"The smoke is in the yard," I said, close to her ear over the noise. "The children are coughing and it will get worse. We need everyone away from it now."
She didn’t look at me.
"B-B-But my brothers, and the fire—"
"The smoke will kill us all before the fire does."
She read my face and immediately realized how deathly serious I wa.s
Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.
"Back!" Her voice carried across the yard. "Everyone back from the smoke, move to the east gate, move to the river path, get the children out first. Luan Mei, east gate, take everyone. Move!"
The line broke apart and reformed, people grabbing children, Bolin sweeping two of them up under his arms, the cousins pulling the elderly toward the east gate. Ma and Tao moved through the yard ahead of them, steering women and children toward the gate with their arms spread wide, keeping them moving, keeping them from turning back toward the smoke.
Xu Bing was already at the east gate.
He had a child on each hip and was waving two others through the gate ahead of him, speaking low and fast, and there were six more behind him steering them away from the smoke. He had read the yard before anyone called it, made the calculation, and moved.
The depot was a skeleton. The clinic was still burning. The garrison storage was the last thing with any real volume and the wall beside it was going. I looked at the smoke column rising from the storage building and thought through it quickly.
Fire needs three things: fuel, heat, and air. Remove any one of them and it stops.
Fuel was there. Heat was there. Air was ambient Qi — all energy in this world moved through the same channels, and fire fed on Qi the same way cultivation did. If I could draw the ambient Qi from the air around the fire and pull it toward myself, I could deprive the fire of what it was burning through —
I spread my hands and started working out how much volume I would need, and whether my channels could hold it without rupture.
I looked up.
There was a figure outside the east gate.
Standing fifty feet beyond the wall, away from the evacuated families, positioned with deliberate distance between itself and everyone else. Hands pressed together at the chest. Head down.
Hao.
I did not understand for a full second. I saw the posture and could not place it because I had never seen him stand that way, had never seen him that still.
Then the smoke column bent.
It leaned toward the gate, a slow lean at first then faster, drawn toward the figure outside the wall the way water draws toward a drain. The fire inside the garrison storage guttered, surged, and leaned the same direction. The flames stretched sideways, horizontal, reaching toward him. The smoke peeled off the burning buildings in streams and moved toward him, and I watched Hao's skin begin to darken.
It started at his hands. The color spread up his forearms and into his neck and face, gray and ashen, the look of a forge fire cooling into dead coals. The ambient Qi of a burning compound was flooding into him through his pores, through his channels, in volumes his Mai were never built to carry. I could see it happening. I was already running.
The garrison storage fire went out.
The clinic flames went with it. The smoke peeled off the last of the embers in a single visible current and vanished into him. The compound went dark. Embers and moonlight and the smell of ash.
Hao's silhouette outside the gate folded at the knees.
I went through the gate and caught him before he reached the ground. We went down together into the cold earth outside the wall and I pressed my palm flat against his chest.
His skin was burning to the touch, fever-hot, the heat of channels overwhelmed past what they could disperse. His face had gone gray from the jaw up, lips to cheekbones, the same gray as Gao Ren's forge coals after the fire died. I pressed my fingers to his neck and found his pulse, fast and shallow, and pushed my awareness into the channels to read what was moving.
The Mai were packed. The major pathways had compressed under the volume of absorbed energy and two of them had already closed completely and more were narrowing by the second. His heart was working too hard against channels that had no room left to move through. His lungs were straining.
I formed the Mother's Touch sign with my left hand. Two fingers curved, thumb extended, aimed at the pericardium pathway at the center of his chest. Where the thumb points, the Qi follows. I pushed.
The pathway resisted. I pushed harder. Something gave fractionally and I held the opening and pushed again, trying to widen what had compressed, trying to give the trapped energy somewhere to move so the channels behind it could breathe.
His face was gray and his skin was burning and he was not waking up.
"Wake up, brother," I said. "Please. Wake up."
I adjusted the sign's angle and pushed into the lung pathway on the left side. The pressure there was enormous. I held the opening and breathed through it and pushed steadily and did not stop.
"Wake up."
The families came back through the east gate. The children's voices, Luan Mei calling names, Suyin already moving toward me. The fires were out. The smoke was gone. Hao had done what I had been working out how to do and his body had taken the cost alone.
I pressed both palms to his chest. His skin burned under them. His face was gray, still gray, and he was not waking up.
I pressed harder.
"Wake up. Wake up—"
His skin burned under my hands. His face was gray. He was my brother and he was not waking up.
"HAAAAAO!"
A record of those present at the River Fork Academy, Hekou Village, following the events of the fifteenth day of deep winter.
Pei Liang — Founder, River Fork Academy — Alive
Pei Hao — Senior cultivator, militia commander — Incapacitated
Wei Suyin — Head of clinic, zone instructor — Alive
Wei Bolin — Zone instructor — Alive
Duan — Militia trainer — Deceased
Gao Ren — Forge master — Deceased
Gao Shu — His daughter — Alive
Luan Mei — Head of household operations — Alive
Shan Pei — Militia, cultivator — Alive
Liu Jun — Clinic staff — Deceased
Luan Feng — Administrative records — Alive
Wei Kang — Militia, Wei brother — Deceased
Wei Lun — Militia, Wei brother — Deceased
Zhao Lin — Zone assistant instructor — Alive
Zhao Ping — Militia, field coordinator — Deceased