The boots were plain, but well-made. Dark leather, worn in all the right places. But there was something about the way they kissed the ground: firm, sure.
The stride behind them was controlled. As if every line of weight and counterweight had been considered and then made to look casual.
Jinx tracked the boots as they crossed the mirror, letting her eyes rise along the reflection.
Clothes made to blend. Dark trousers. A plain charcoal-grey tunic.
Her eyes found his waist: high carry, compact scabbard, the angle of a duan dao, a short saber, set for running, not ceremony. But no telltale colour at the waist.
Black Lotus.
The market did what it always did when Black Lotus drifted too near: it didn't scatter, not in daylight, but it thinned. Voices softened. Shoulders angled away. People invented errands that took them two steps to the side. A stallkeeper suddenly remembered he needed to arrange his jars.
Her attention snagged on the forearm: a coil of dark metal resting there like jewelry, neat and composed. Most people would have read it as ornament.
Jinx didn't.
Dark hair pulled loosely back, a few strands falling around his temples. Jaw set in something that wasn't quite a scowl and wasn't quite calm.
He looked young.
But his body betrayed him. Too young to move with that kind of assurance.
Everything about the way he carried himself screamed trained. He threaded through bodies with automatic small shifts that spared him from contact: turning a shoulder here, shifting his weight there, accepting just enough jostle to look normal and no more.
But his attention was elsewhere, somewhere turned inward that her eyes couldn't follow.
She reached out with the quiet, disciplined extension of her Qi that Jade Wind had honed in her since childhood. A touch, not heavier than a breath, sweeping along the air where his presence cut through the crowd.
What came back made her brows draw together.
His Qi didn't flicker like a loose flame. Instead, it was heavier, denser, banked deep. Like river water compressed behind a dam. Much more than what his clothes suggested. More than what he'd want strangers to sense.
So what are you?
Jinx leaned the slightest fraction closer to the bronze, letting the world narrow to that small, framed slice: him, moving through her city as if he belonged and didn't, at the same time.
The moment she pressed for a clearer read, his Qi shifted.
Not flaring. She knew what that felt like.
This was subtler: a tightening, a narrowing of lines. What had felt like banked water drew inward, sheathing itself.
Her breath stilled.
His eyes in the mirror flicked up. His gaze slid across random people without focus before aligning with the bronze mirror.
Dark irises. Focused.
Straight into her.
It was only an instant. But it was direct. No mistaking it.
He sees me.
Heat brushed low under her ribs.
Jinx tore her eyes from the mirror and angled her head toward the stall instead, pretending a sudden fascination with a row of lacquered combs. One hand reached out, steady enough, sliding over carved wood. Her posture loosened by a calculated fraction, shoulders dropping as if she'd never noticed anything at all.
But her pulse hammered against her tongue.
Footsteps approached behind her. Not hurried. Measured. Soft, considering the boots.
His Qi shifted again as he came closer.
What had drawn tight now smoothed—not relaxed, exactly, but deliberately evened. The sensation of someone smoothing a hand over the surface of disturbed water, making the surface calm on purpose.
Probably just another disciplined fighter who hates markets, she told herself. Not her business. Not Jade Wind's contract. Mistress Yun's voice flickered in memory: "We deliver what's written, not what's hidden. Leave the hidden things to those who chose that mud."
She didn't turn. Didn't look back.
And he passed.
Close enough that the air between them changed temperature for a heartbeat. Close enough that something faint—soap, warm skin, and something like smoked tea—reached her nose before the wind stole it.
His Qi slid by her like a blade in its sheath.
Not flaring. Not brushing hers on purpose. Simply moving. Contained. Intent under glass. But there was a flicker in its current as it brushed the edge of her awareness, the smallest stutter in the smoothness.
Curiosity.
That, she recognised. It resonated a little too closely with the echo in her own chest.
Her hand tightened imperceptibly on the comb. The stall-keeper glanced up, ready to haggle.
Jinx set the comb back down without buying it, mumbling something noncommittal, and stepped away from the stall.
The crowd pressed close on all sides. A cart rattled past with bundles of dried herbs. Someone laughed too loudly near her ear. The world went on as if nothing in it had shifted.
She did not follow him.
She could have. Her body knew how: shadow a target three paces behind, watch the set of their shoulders, anticipate turns before they made them. It would have been easy.
Instead she took the side street opposite, senses attuned to the fading imprint of his Qi until it disappeared into the noise of the city. Only then did she let out the breath she'd been holding.
He saw me.
Certain as the weight of the naked blade at her back.
Jinx clicked her tongue once, softly.
She cut across the flow of people with the precision her sect had drilled into her for years, heading at last toward the apothecary street.
She walked the rest of the way back to the Jade Wind Pavilion with her chin high, her pace steady, her mind fixed firmly on the Mistress's latest lecture about emotional turbulence. The Ministry of War doesn't need our hearts, Mistress Yun had said. They need our feet. Don't give them more than that.
But every time she closed her eyes, even for a blink, the bronze mirror flashed behind her lids.
Her own reflection. And behind it…
Dark hair, unreadable eyes, and that slight coiled stillness. The way his Qi had tightened when he felt her, then smoothed itself.
He's hiding something, she thought.
That, more than his face or the quiet power in his stride, was what hooked under her skin.
It was the certainty that he, too, was practicing vanishing in plain sight.
And in a city where the Ministry of War hired some sects to walk in the open and others to disappear people in the dark, a man who tried to be both at once was exactly the kind of trouble Mistress Yun would tell her to avoid.
Jinx found, to her irritation, that she was already wondering when she would cross his path again.