They did not sleep much after the road closed.
Keshi remained beside the marker until his mother carried a blanket to him and, after failing to persuade him home, sat down too. Every hour he knocked the old pattern. Sometimes the false village answered. Sometimes the second signal answered from farther away. Once both came at nearly the same time, and the boy flinched as if someone had called his name from opposite sides of a room.
Tianhui spent the night under Luo Pei's supervision because his channel had gone numb from shoulder to palm.
"That was reckless," she said.
"It preserved one reachable relation."
"One child is located. One is missing somewhere we cannot describe." Luo Pei tightened the binding around his shoulder. "I asked whether it was reckless."
"By any useful medical definition, yes."
"Good. Accuracy may yet keep you alive."
"Do not tell Lan Jue."
"She already knows."
Of course she did.
At dawn Xiulan changed the board.
She erased the single mark beside ANU and wrote:
ANSWERED — ONE CONTINUITY LOCATED.
SECOND CONTINUITY — SIGNAL ONLY.
Keshi read the lines twice.
"Write her name again."
Xiulan turned. "Which one?"
He pointed at the second line. "That one. She is not a note under the first one."
The charcoal remained in Xiulan's hand.
Qiao Ming came to stand beside her. He said nothing for a while, which was usually how he approached the sentences he found dangerous.
"The board was meant to prevent us from deciding too quickly," he said at last. "If the categories make the same mistake, change them."
Xiulan nodded.
She wrote ANU a second time.
The two names sat one beneath the other.
Keshi approved.
The first contact with the located Anu happened shortly after sunrise. Lan Jue kept it narrow, voice only. No images. No open road. Tianhui wanted more information and received three separate medical objections before he could argue.
Anu's voice came through the marker rough with crying.
"Keshi?"
He nearly climbed into the well.
"I am here."
"You sound far."
"So do you."
"That is stupid."
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"Yes."
"Good."
The children fell silent.
Adults had been preparing for a difficult conversation. The children had apparently prepared for none.
Keshi picked mud from beneath one thumbnail. "Do you remember the mill?"
"Yes."
"Which part?"
"All of it."
"That does not help."
"I remember falling by the well and standing by the east street."
Keshi stopped moving.
Xiulan glanced at Tianhui. He was already listening more closely.
Anu continued. "I remember seeing me."
"Did it hurt?" Keshi asked.
"No."
"Were you scared?"
"Yes."
"Which you was scared?"
A long pause.
"Both."
Keshi's thumbnail stopped scraping at the mud. No adult tried to make the answer easier.
Lan Jue asked permission before continuing. "Anu, I need to know whether the memories feel different. One older, one weaker, one like a dream."
"They are both mine."
"Do they disagree?"
"Yes."
"About what?"
Anu thought. "Where I put my left foot."
Qiao Rui, listening from behind a pillar she believed made her invisible, whispered, "That is a stupid thing to split over."
Qiao Ming pulled her gently into view.
Anu heard. "I know."
That made Qiao Rui grin despite herself.
Tianhui asked the next question slowly. "Do you remember the other Anu after the road closed?"
"No."
"Do you feel her now?"
The silence lasted long enough for Lan Jue to check the plate.
"Sometimes," Anu said.
Keshi leaned forward. "Where?"
"I don't know."
"What does sometimes mean?"
"When I forget to think about her."
Tianhui's channel, deadened by the previous night, seemed to tighten anyway.
Lan Jue wrote the phrase down exactly.
After contact ended, the adults argued over what it meant. Keshi did not. He went outside and kicked the same wall he and Anu had once used for their rat signal. Old Meng shouted from the mill that if the wall fell, Keshi would rebuild it himself.
The boy shouted back, "Then don't make bad walls."
Old Meng muttered for several minutes about the decline of respect and continued repairing the wheel.
That afternoon, the second signal returned.
Three. Two. Three.
Faint.
Tianhui stood beside the well but did not open a road.
Keshi came running.
"Answer."
"No."
The boy stopped so hard his heel skidded in mud.
"You answered the other one."
"We knew the relation."
"This is Anu."
"Perhaps."
Keshi's face reddened.
Tianhui crouched, though the movement hurt. "Last night something used Anu's pattern before we understood where it came from. We also saw someone at the boundary. If I answer every signal that sounds familiar, eventually someone will learn what we are willing to open for."
Keshi stared at him.
"You think she could be lying?"
"I think the signal could be copied."
The boy's anger shifted from Tianhui to the road. That was healthier, though not easier.
"How do we know?"
"We make the relation prove itself."
Keshi scowled. "You always make simple things sound like work."
"They often are."
This time they did not answer with the old pattern.
Keshi chose something no stranger should know: seven knocks, a pause, then one, then four. It meant nothing. He and Anu had invented it after Anu broke a jar and needed Keshi to distract her mother. The second signal went quiet.
For an hour, nothing happened.
Then the road marker replied.
Seven.
One.
Four.
Keshi began to cry before the final knock.
Tianhui kept the road closed.
It was one of the hardest decisions he had made since waking.
They had proof of relation. They did not have proof of destination.
The warning in the old route manual returned to him: do not answer a relation you cannot name.
This relation had a name.
Friend.
Its location did not.
Tianhui explained the difference to Keshi. The boy listened until he understood, then hated him with greater precision.
"I know why," Keshi said. "I still hate it."
"That is allowed."
"Good."
"Do not become pleased that I agreed."
"I wasn't."
"You were."
Keshi walked away before Tianhui could answer.
Xiulan had watched the exchange from the shrine steps.
"He is going to remember this."
"I hope so."
"That was not reassurance."
"No." Tianhui sat beside her. "I do not think all remembered things should reassure us."
They watched Keshi go to the mill.
After a while Xiulan said, "You chose the Anu you could hold."
"I chose the relation that remained stable."
"The other Anu is still signaling."
"She is. I will not call that a victory."
"You kept one child reachable."
Tianhui watched Keshi disappear toward the mill. "I was required to choose. Rightness is a larger claim."
Xiulan rubbed charcoal from her thumb. "That is still not reassurance."
"It is the most honest answer I possess."
The northern boundary remained empty all day.
Near sunset, Lan Jue found a second line beneath COME.
The writing had appeared in the mud without a footprint beside it.
The characters were old enough for Tianhui to read without help.
REMEMBER.
He stood over the word until the light failed.
Feng Zhen's voice, usually so eager to comment on other people's mistakes, said nothing at all.