Chapter 7: What Waiting Looks Like
The labor contractor's compound was not what Wei Liang had imagined.
He had imagined something obviously terrible — walls with guards, chains, the visible architecture of suffering. What he found instead was worse in a specific way that he had not prepared for. It looked ordinary. A collection of low buildings behind a wooden fence in a valley between two unremarkable hills, surrounded by fields that were currently being worked by figures too small and too numerous and moving with the particular mechanical patience of people who had stopped expecting the day to be different from the one before it.
He stood at the top of the hill with Song Bao beside him and looked down at it for a long moment.
"How many people," Song Bao said quietly.
"Too many," Wei Liang said.
They had left Auntie Shu at the herb supplier's compound two days ago — the old woman had looked at them with eyes that understood more than she said and told them to be back in three days and not to do anything that would cause her paperwork. Wei Liang had bowed. She had waved him away with the efficiency of someone who had already decided to be worried about this later.
Hou Deming's letter of introduction was in Wei Liang's robe.
He took it out now and looked at it. The camp supervisor's name was written at the top. A man named Guo Wensheng. Hou Deming's cousin had described him as practical — a word that covered a wide range of human qualities, most of them useful and some of them dangerous.
"Ready," Song Bao said. It was not a question.
"Yes," Wei Liang said.
They walked down the hill.
Guo Wensheng was a broad man with a ledger that he carried everywhere and consulted constantly, the way some people consulted their conscience and others consulted their fears. He read Hou Deming's letter twice, looked at Wei Liang, looked at Song Bao, looked back at the letter.
"You are here about a child," he said.
"My sister," Wei Liang said. "Wei Xiu. Female. Age seven. Processed through Huai Province resettlement six weeks ago."
Guo consulted his ledger. Found the entry. Looked at it.
"She is here," he said.
Three words.
Wei Liang absorbed them without expression.
"I need to see her," he said.
"She is a contracted laborer," Guo said. "The debt attached to her placement has not been—"
"How much," Wei Liang said.
Guo looked at him. At his outer disciple robe. At his thin wrists. At the particular quality of stillness that tended to make people recalculate how much trouble something was going to be.
He named a number.
Wei Liang reached into his robe. He had brought everything he had — the saved portions of his stipend from the weeks Hou Deming had not stolen it, the small amount Song Bao had contributed without being asked, the coins Auntie Shu had pressed into his hand at the herb compound with the words for incidentals and the expression of someone who knew exactly what kind of incidental she was funding.
He counted it onto Guo's table.
It was not enough.
He looked at the pile of coins. At the number Guo had named. At the gap between them that was not large but was real.
Song Bao reached into his own robe without speaking. He added what he had.
Still not quite enough.
Wei Liang looked at Guo.
Guo looked at the coins. At the letter. At Wei Liang's face.
He made a sound that was not quite a sigh and not quite a decision but was something in between.
"The remaining amount," he said, "can be considered a goodwill adjustment in consideration of the letter of introduction." He swept the coins off the table into a drawer. "Follow me."
She was in the third building.
A long low room with sleeping mats in rows and the smell of too many people in too small a space and not enough ventilation. Most of the mats were empty — the day's work was still happening in the fields. But at the far end, on a mat near the wall, a small figure was sitting with her knees pulled to her chest and her face turned toward the narrow window above her.
Wei Liang stopped in the doorway.
He looked at his sister.
Six weeks.
In six weeks she had become smaller somehow. Not just thinner — though she was that, visibly, in the way that children become thin when nobody is monitoring whether they are eating enough. Smaller in a different sense. The way a flame becomes smaller when the wind has been blowing against it for a long time. Still burning. But working harder than it should have to.
She had not heard him come in.
He crossed the room quietly and crouched down in front of her mat.
She looked up.
For a moment she did not understand what she was seeing. Her eyes moved across his face with the confused disbelief of someone encountering something they had stopped allowing themselves to expect.
Then understanding arrived.
Her face did not break into a smile. It did not produce the dramatic reunion expression that stories described. What happened was quieter and more devastating than that. Her face simply — changed. The careful blankness that six weeks of this place had built over it cracked open and underneath it was Wei Xiu. His sister. Seven years old with her mother's eyes and her grandmother's stubbornness and a cough that had shaped her entire small life.
She did not speak.
She leaned forward and pressed her forehead against his shoulder.
Wei Liang put his hand on the back of her head.
He did not speak either.
They stayed like that for a moment that had no specific length — longer than a few seconds and shorter than it needed to be and exactly as long as it was.
Then she coughed.
It was worse than he remembered. The sound of it — that thin catching desperate sound — was deeper now, more settled into her chest, the sound of something that had been left untreated long enough to find a more permanent address.
He pulled back and looked at her face. Her eyes. The specific quality of the light in them — dimmed. Still there. But working harder than it should have to, the same way the flame worked harder against the wind.
He reached into his robe and took out the pressure point paper.
"I need you to breathe slowly," he said. "Can you do that."
She nodded.
He placed his fingers at the first point on her wrist. Then the second. Then the third — the one that Elder Mao had shown him specifically for respiratory distress, the one that opened the chest and slowed the cycle that made the coughing feed itself.
He pressed carefully. Precisely. The way Elder Mao's hands moved — not with force but with exact placement, the way a key works not because of how hard you push it but because of where you put it.
Wei Xiu's breathing slowed.
The tightness in her chest — visible in the way she had been holding her shoulders, raised slightly, braced against the next attack — released by a fraction.
She looked at him.
"That helped," she said. Her voice was smaller than he remembered too.
"Yes," he said. "But it is not enough." He looked at her honestly. "The illness has gotten worse. The herb compound I have will help but there is something else needed. Something more." He paused. "I am going to find it. I need a few days."
She looked at him for a long moment.
"You just got here," she said.
"I know."
"You are going to leave again."
"For a few days. Song Bao will stay with you. You will not be alone."
Her jaw tightened slightly. The stubbornness underneath the dimness. Still there.
"I have been alone for six weeks," she said. Not as an accusation. Just as a fact. The way she stated facts — cleanly, without decoration, with the particular directness of someone who had learned early that pretending things were other than they were cost more than it was worth.
Wei Liang looked at his sister.
At seven years old she had already learned that.
He felt something move in his chest that was not sadness exactly and was not guilt exactly but contained both of those things and something larger than either.
"I know," he said. "I am sorry."
She looked at him for another moment.
Then she nodded once.
"Find the thing," she said. "Come back."
"Yes," he said.
Song Bao appeared in the doorway behind him. He looked at Wei Xiu with the round-faced open expression that was simply what Song Bao looked like when he was moved by something and had not yet had time to manage it.
"I am Song Bao," he said. "I am going to stay here while your brother is away. I have bread." He reached into his robe pocket and produced a wrapped piece. Held it out.
Wei Xiu looked at it. At him. At the bread.
She took it.
Song Bao sat down on the mat beside her with the comfortable ease of someone settling in for exactly as long as was needed.
Wei Liang stood.
He looked at his sister one more time. At the dimmed light in her eyes that was still there. Still burning against the wind.
I am coming back, he thought. Three days. I am coming back with what you need.
He turned and walked out into the pale afternoon.
He had a mountain to find.
End of Chapter 7