The triggers accumulated the way water accumulated in a vessel with no drain — silently, measurably, until the vessel's capacity was exceeded and the excess had nowhere to go except over the edge.

  First there was you.

  You were still there. Always. For twenty-three days now. That's what you said at least in your own precision. This was your contribution to the shared reality. Twenty-three days of the ten-pace distanc, the notebook, cooking, your loud meditation, the questions that I sometimes answered but mostly didn't and the persistence that was not patience because patience implied waiting for something. But you were not waiting. You were working. Everything was data. Every silence was data. Every word I produced was data. Its count had risen from zero to single digits per day. An increase that you tracked.

  You were there and every day you were, was a day that my isolation was not total, which widened the crack.

  Then there was the wrongness.

  Other trees in different locations with the same anomaly. Branches, that weren't oriented as they should have been, a deviation from their expected growth. It registered as unease rather than alarm. Other shadows of different rocks with the same wrong angle. And once a sound. A bird call that echoed when there was no surface for it to echo from.

  The echo repeated twice before it stopped. You even stopped writing and looked up. You looked at the space where the echo should not have been. And it seemed to look back, which empty air is not supposed to do. And then you resumed your writing. Your pen moved faster.

  Echoes.

  You documented everything. Three pages of anomalies. The documentation was your fortress. If it was written, it was real and if it was real, it was not imagined and if it was not imagined, then the world was doing something you might not understand yet, but worth understanding.

  "The pattern is spatial," you said, reviewing your notes. "The anomalies cluster near you. Within fifty paces. Outside of that — nothing."

  So the wrongness was also my doing? The same as with the death zone.

  There were sects.

  You heard rumors. How you heard them, I did not track. Maybe you talked to someone, somewhere, in one of the intervals when I walked through the vicinity of other humans. You talked and you returned.

  "More are coming," you said. "Two groups. One from the west, one from the north. They know you're here."

  Which was kind of obvious. I left a trail of dead vegetation that could be seen from a ridge, because my existence announced itself in the language of ecological destruction. I did not intent to, but I was not surprised.

  Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  As if I could be surprised. Though, recently, there was plenty of reason to. The bird, the echo, your terrible knife technique with the ginger. Surprise was making small visits.

  The sects were coming. They would arrive and they would bring their formations, their calculations and their institutional authority. I would break them and the interaction would produce the nothing that all interactions produced.

  Except, there was an impulse to search them. To fight, turning-toward. The going-to-meet instead of waiting-to-be-found. The impulse was still there, below the disconnection, in the layer that operated without will. The impulse that said that more are coming, but it did not tell to avoid them. Eager to fight, to break something, to meet the world with the only response I had left.

  There was silence.

  You slept. Early and exhausted from walking, from the terrain's increasing difficulty, from the physical cost of following an immortal at a ten-pace distance for three weeks with a broken core. You slept deeply and your sleep was silent.

  I was alone.

  Not as I had been alone before, but in a new way. It included the awareness of someone else's presence and of that presence's temporary absence and the awareness that temporary absence was different from total absence. And the difference was worse.

  Total absence was the baseline. The disconnection worked best when there was nothing to disconnect from.

  Your temporary absence was interference. Something in me had adjusted, slightly, minimally, like a dark room adjusted to a candle. But for the night, the candle was out, which made the dark even darker than before. Twenty-three days of cooking, meditation and writing had shifted the baseline. And that meant that returning to the old silence was now noticeable.

  The silence was noticeable.

  The awareness that sound should be here and wasn't made me realize that expectation had returned. Which meant that wanting was closer than it was before — than it should have been.

  I sat by the dead fire. Brown grass. Stars. The humming in my chest.

  "Wei would have hated this."

  One sentence. Quiet. To no one — to the clearing, to the stars, to the space where your noise usually existed and where it didn't exist now. You heard it even in your sleep. You stirred. Your breathing changed. You looked and closed your eyes again. Ten paces away, breathing evenly, but you heard it. You were asleep again, but you had heard it.

  The sound of my own voice in the silence was the most alarming thing that had happened since the hut. Not the content — Wei would not have hated the forest, nor the sitting. But he would have hated the passive deterioration that I was performing. The actual alarm was that I had spoken to the absence. I had addressed some nothing as if it were available for conversation.

  Preference was leaking through the crack that your words had made and the question had widened. That the irritation had confirmed and the almost-smile had implied.

  The alarm was quiet — the internal recognition that a state had irreversibly changed. The glass could not un-crack.

  I was alone and the aloneness was unbearable. And I had enough of it.

  The fire was ash. The stars moved. Your breathing was the only sound. The even, unconscious respiration of someone whose body maintained itself while the mind was elsewhere.

  I sat. In the unbearable. In the enough.

  The four triggers were simultaneous. They all combined and multiplied four insufficient forces into one sufficient force.

  But sufficient force for what? I did not yet know. That would come in the morning. And the morning would come whether I participated or not. Which was what was changing.

  I sat until dawn. When you woke, I was sitting where I had been. But something was different now — structurally, silently, in the register that only careful observation could detect.

  You detected it.

  You opened the notebook. You looked at me. You wrote one word. Then you closed it.