He walked through the night.
The girl on his shoulder did not weigh enough to matter. She breathed against his neck. Short breaths, steady. The wound on her back was closing under the attention he applied to it. His awareness, threaded into the torn tissue, worked cell by cell. It was the only thing he could do well in his current state. Healing required precision, not power. Precision he had. Power he did not.
The road east wound through hilled terrain. Scrub forest. Cold air. Stars above him, clear.
He looked up.
The constellations were wrong.
He knew every star in this sky. He had memorized them before his containment. The patterns had shifted. Stars moved over time. They moved slowly, but they moved, and if enough time had passed the drift would be visible to someone who remembered where each one had been.
He calculated. He took the current positions and ran them backward against the stellar drift rates he had memorized. The math took him four seconds.
The number he arrived at was large enough that he stopped walking.
He stood on the road in the dark and held the number in his mind. Then he set it aside. The number would not change by examining it further. He began walking again.
...
At dawn, he found a stream.
He set the girl down on the bank. She was unconscious. Her breathing was deeper now, more regular. The wound was nearly closed. She would need food and water when she woke.
He needed water now. His throat was raw. His body demanded fluid with a desperation that was almost painful. After so long without a body, every need felt new and urgent.
He found a cup in the debris of his rags. A small clay cup, part of something he had carried when he went into the seal. It had survived. He knelt at the stream and lowered the cup.
The water flowed around it.
He held the cup steady. The stream parted at the cup's rim, flowed past both sides, and closed again downstream. The cup stayed dry.
He tried again. Same result. The water avoided the vessel. It was not the cup. He tried his cupped hands. The water ran through his fingers. He tried a leaf, folded into a cone. The water pooled for a moment, then found a way out. It dripped through the leaf's surface as if the leaf were a sieve.
He could not hold water.
He sat back on his heels and looked at his hands. Wet from trying. Dry inside. The water would touch him but would not be contained by him. Something about his physical state repelled containment. An excess of something that the water could feel and he could only partly understand.
He knew what the excess was. He did not have the energy to address it.
He lowered his face to the stream and drank directly. That worked. The water entered his mouth and stayed. Containment functioned when the container was his body, not an external vessel.
He drank for a long time. The water was cold and tasted of minerals and distance. He had not tasted water in a very long time.
...
The girl woke at midday.
He had carried her to a flat clearing near the stream. She lay on grass. Her eyes opened and she looked at the sky. She did not move for several minutes.
Then she turned her head and looked at him.
He was sitting three feet away. His rags were drying in patches. His hair hung in his face. He was eating berries he had found near the clearing. The berries were sour. He ate them with attention. Each berry was a distinct experience. After what he had been through, each flavor was a conversation.
She looked at him the way she looked at everything. Flat. Recording. Her eyes moved across his face and his clothes and his hands and the berries and the stream and the sky.
"We are walking east," he told her.
She did not respond.
"You are injured. The wound is closing. You will need to eat."
She looked at the berries in his hand. She did not reach for them. She did not look away.
He placed three berries on the grass beside her hand.
After a while, she ate them.
...
He picked her up and they kept walking.
East. Because east was away from the sect's territory. Because the road went east before it went anywhere else. Because the sun rose in the east and he had not seen a sunrise in longer than the trees on these hills had been alive.
The sun came up over a ridgeline and hit his face and he stopped walking. He stood on the road with the girl over his shoulder and the light on his skin and he closed his eyes.
Warmth. Light through his eyelids, red and orange. The heat of a star filtered through atmosphere. He had known the physics of sunlight for longer than this era's oldest texts had existed. He had never needed the physics. The sunlight was warm. That was enough.
He opened his eyes. The road continued east through the hills. Somewhere ahead there would be a settlement. Somewhere ahead there would be food and information and a world he did not know.
He walked.
Behind him, the valley where the village had been grew smaller with distance. Smoke still rose from Grandmother Liu's chimney. The cooking fire had not gone out yet. It would go out soon. Nobody was there to feed it.
He did not look back.