I stood up at some point — the point unmarked, no decision, no impulse, no trigger. The body stood because lying was not sustainable.

  Outside the door, the bowl had gone cold, the steam gone, the rice hardened at the surface. I stepped over it, the trajectory of someone who did not notice the bowl because the bowl was irrelevant.

  Past the garden — his garden, the three pots. My peripheral vision registered them, there, present and green but peripheral was all I permitted. Direct was not an option.

  I started walking.

  I walked through the settlement. Damaged walls on both sides. People — settlers, civilians, survivors — in their doorways, at their windows, in the positions of people watching something that should not be watched but that could not be avoided because that something was walking down their street.

  They moved out of my way.

  The small, instinctive adjustments bodies made in proximity to something wrong — stepping back, pulling children closer, turning sideways. The universal vocabulary of avoidance that didn't require language or understanding. Only proximity.

  Under my feet the grass turned brown — three paces, the radius smaller now than the thirty paces of the discharge aftermath but still present, persistent. Each step left brown behind it — the trail of someone whose trail was death.

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  An insect fell mid-flight in my radius, wings still, landing on the dirt.

  Leaves curled at the edges on the trees I passed, on the bushes, on the vegetation lining the path out — the slow wilting that autumn produced and that I was producing now.

  Past the east gate. Past the open ground. Past the place.

  I did not look at the place. The dirt where he had lain. The spot that was marked by — what? Blood, qi-residue, the chemical evidence of a body that had discharged and fallen and lain and been. Whatever marked it. I did not look.

  I went into the forest. To the trees that were large and old. The kind of trees that had been growing before this settlement existed and that would continue growing after this settlement forgot itself. Their age was their resistance. The grass died in my wake but the trees merely weakened — leaves losing rigidity, bark drying slightly, the subtle symptoms of exposure that would heal when the exposure left.

  I walked with no direction and no purpose. The body moved because the alternative was the house and the house was empty.

  I wanted to get away from people. Away from the settlement. Away from everything. The walls were holding as the proof. The proof that I had protected everything. But everything was a lie. Everything excluded him.

  His mother, his brother, his sister — somewhere in a village with a cracked well and dry fields, they would learn. Or they wouldn't and the absence itself would become the message.

  The forest closed behind me. The green — and then the brown path that I left. The trail of dead grass and curled leaves that told anybody not to follow. Because someone came this way that killed what she walked through.

  I walked.