All that week I said nothing. Not to Elisa, not to anyone at school. Elena called me to training again, I accepted but stayed distracted; twice I missed a simple defensive move — Elena noticed.
"Your head is somewhere else today," she said, lowering her sword and looking me over while wiping the sweat off her forehead. "Could it be that you fight while sinking into something and forgetting your surroundings too? What's making you think this much?" "I'm just tired," I said, telling a very small piece of the truth, avoiding her eyes.
Elena looked at me a while longer, then shrugged and didn't press — perhaps she sensed that pressing me too hard in those days wouldn't do any good. Dex too came over to me once more that same week and asked "are you alright?", looking me over at length with those silver eyes, as if he were smelling the change inside me.
"I'm fine," I had said, but those looks of Dex's made me a little more uneasy each time; as if he had already noticed something I hadn't.
And Master Ren, when he came home the next day, behaved as always — as if that night had never happened. He cooked, he read a book, he said "you're late, Kai," just as he had hundreds of times before. But I wasn't as comfortable as before when watching him now. Every time he reached his hand toward something, every time he fixed his eyes on a point a moment too long, a voice inside me whispered, "this man is hiding much more from you."
One evening, while sitting at the table, I noticed him holding the fork in his hand a moment too tightly — a small thing, perhaps something with no meaning at all, but I had started to see every detail as a clue. Elisa made a joke, Master Ren laughed, but I felt that his laugh came a moment late, as if he had first calculated something and then reacted. Or maybe by then I was analyzing everything too much.
On the Friday evening of that week, Master Ren again said "I'm going to visit an old friend," put the same light bag on his back and put on the same dark cloak. While Elisa was washing dishes in the kitchen, I stood in front of the door and watched him, arms folded across my chest, without making a sound.
"This time I'm coming too," I said finally, in a voice decisive enough to surprise even myself.
Master Ren stopped. He turned to me; there was neither anger nor surprise on his face — only that usual tired, measured look, as if he had been waiting for this moment.
"No," he said briefly. "Go home, keep an eye on Elisa."
"Master—"
"Kai." His voice was harder this time, with an almost metallic tone. "There are things you're curious about, I know. But being curious and being ready are not the same thing. You aren't ready yet."
He closed the door behind him and left. The sound the door made as it closed came to me more final, more definite than any I had ever heard in our home. And I went back to the kitchen and acted with Elisa as if we were having a normal evening; I dried the plates, listened to her gossip about a friend at school, laughed, and at one point even genuinely enjoyed myself. But inside me a decision had already been made. I was going to decide for myself whether I was ready. Before Elisa went to bed she stopped for a moment in front of the door and looked at me. "Brother, are you really alright? You've been very distracted lately."
Actually, both the secrets the Master was hiding and the thousand-and-one scenarios running through my head, and at the same time the collision in my brain of the possibilities that the things I was thinking were both true and false... By now the thoughts had started to hurt. Ten minutes after agreeing with the Master, I would arrive at the idea of how absurdly I was thinking. But I couldn't say these things to my sister.
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"I'm fine," I said, smiling. Telling her that lie, I felt a real sting inside me for the first time. Lying to my sister weighed on me this heavily for the first time in my life.
After Elisa fell asleep I quickly decided to go after Master Ren. I dressed silently and threw a few things into my backpack — water, a bit of money, a metal kitchen knife. Even though I wasn't sure I could defend myself with it, I wanted to feel a weight in my hand, that's all. I looked out the window; the sky was cloudless but starless as always. I greeted the moon I had grown so close to lately, and left the house.
I had no idea which direction Master Ren had gone, but I knew one thing: our neighborhood was right at the edge of the 4th District, close to the Anomaly Barricades, the outermost, most out-of-sight part of the city. If he was going somewhere secretly, he was probably going further out, to a place with fewer eyes.
I opened the door quietly and went out. The streetlamps were far sparser here than in the center; many of them were broken anyway, and the ones that remained gave off a flickering yellow light. Walking in the dark I realized for the first time that there was such a thing as real darkness in this city — a darkness the neon lights of the center never reached, lit only by the moonlight and the distant Barricade lamps; looking at that darkness was full of a silence that left a shiver on my skin.
At one corner a patrol group — a few people from the city security unit — was moving with slow steps, sweeping the dark gaps with their flashlights. I quickly slipped into the shadow of a doorway, held my breath, and felt my heart pounding as the light passed over me. The flashlight moved away, the patrol turned the corner, and I let out a relieved breath and continued on my way. Even that small moment had made me feel a great deal because of the drama of the situation. Why did I suddenly feel the need to hide? At most they would have sent me home. But the fear of not reaching the thing I wanted, the possibility of missing something I finally wanted, forced me to behave that way.
Using my Control stat, I suppressed my Chi as much as possible, almost as though I didn't exist. There were four techniques in total that Master Ren had taught me. One of them was this, the technique that lets you conceal yourself; Master Ren called it "Night Walk." The "Inner Sight" I used at school was the second. And there was "Separation"; that one was more like meditation — I gathered my Chi in a particular place, and Master Ren said it was the most important, but I didn't know why it was so important. Of course, that night the Night Walk was working very, very well; I wrapped myself in a silence in which I could almost hear my own breath. I moved between the buildings, across the rooftops. In this part of the city the buildings were low and old; jumping from roof to roof wasn't hard for someone at my level — a small Chi burst, a gap of two or three meters, a light landing, the slight give of rusty tin under my feet. Below, in the streets, there were a small number of people wandering at this hour of the night — some drunk, walking unsteadily, some clearly waiting on street corners on business that wasn't well-intentioned. This was very far from the "safe city" image we're taught at school; it was as if it were another world. In the end this was the 4th District, we should be grateful there's security at all. It's not very bad, but I can't call it the best either; at least if you die there'll be a token investigation.
About twenty minutes later, in the distance, I saw a single figure moving toward an abandoned warehouse district. The cloak, the walking style, that characteristic slight limp — yes, that small limp left over from an old injury, something only someone who knew him very closely could notice — it was Master Ren. I held my breath, jumped to the next building, and kept following while keeping my distance, adjusting my steps to his rhythm, hiding each of my steps in the sound of his. For someone at his level, Night Walk alone might not be enough.
The warehouse district lived up to its name — rusty steel skeletons rose toward the sky, broken glass reflected the moonlight in pieces, and enormous buildings with faded old company logos on them stood as if collapsed on top of one another. This place looked as if it had once been the city's industrial center, but by now it was only an abandoned ghost district; a place where the wind made metal sheets rattle faintly and even a human voice echoed. Somewhere, a cat or a small mutated animal ran rustling through the darkness; I watched after it a moment, then moved on.
Master Ren went in through a door of one of these buildings — apparently locked, but actually standing slightly ajar. I waited a while, leaning against the edge of the roof, feeling my heart pounding; then I too approached and put my eye to a large crack beside the door.