The Veil lay thicker tonight.
It clung low over the stone, pooling in the hollow of the alley like ground-hugging clouds, blurring edges, swallowing lantern glow. Jinx slipped into it with the quiet ease of someone who had done this too often, her steps light enough that only the Veil itself knew she was there.
Down in the river fog, Yunzhong thinned, sound dampened by wet stone and slow water. The usual noise of the city, voices, carts, dogs, fell away into a dull, distant grain. In its place came something quieter: the slow press of other people's feelings soaked into stone.
Most folk walked faster in Veil Zones. Said they didn't like how their hearts beat there. Said it felt like the city was thinking too loudly.
Jinx liked these places.
Here, no juniors watched her footwork. No Elders corrected her stance. Her Qi could loosen and stretch inside her skin; her thoughts lined up where she could see them.
Wind Gaze, Pavilion Master Yun Fang called it. Let the world blur, then choose what you sharpen.
The Elders disapproved of how often she came. They preferred their disciples to train on courtyard stones, not in "unsettled streets". And anything that smelled too much like unseen methods made the Pavilion nervous. Jade Wind did not want that kind of attention from the Bureau.
She stepped deeper into the Veil Zone. The air tasted damp, metallic.
A presence moved at the edge of it.
It cut through the drifting haze with a steady, unhurried rhythm. Not a patrol. Not a drunk. The step was too clean, too evenly spaced, like someone who knew exactly where his feet belonged.
Who would linger in a Veil Zone at this hour? she thought.
Only idiots. Or men whose sect taught them the streets already belonged to them.
For a moment, irritation flared, sharp and proprietary. This was where she came to be unobserved. Finding someone else at ease here felt like trespass.
She dropped lower behind a half-collapsed archway, letting the mist swallow her outline. Her breath lengthened and thinned until it barely fogged the air.
Wind Gaze reached out first.
She narrowed her awareness the way Yun Fang had drilled into her: let the fog be the page, and look for the ink. The Veil's blur resolved into a faint moving outline ahead. At this distance, most disciples would have seen only a smudge; to her, the shape sharpened.
A figure, taller than most men. Shoulders relaxed. Cloak hanging easy. The silhouette of a sash at his waist, its colour swallowed by mist. But the length and fold of it were wrong for Outer ranks. Thicker. Heavier. She focused a fraction more.
Crimson Red.
Her breath hitched, once, then flattened again on instinct.
Jinx had only ever seen a Crimson Red sash from another sect at a distance, on men whose orders moved whole districts.
It meant he was a Senior Ascendant. One rank above her. Almost certainly Black Lotus. Licensed to "keep order" in Yunzhong.
Black Lotus, whose inner ranks were rumoured to work hand in glove with offices Jade Wind never named in writing.
If he filed a report, they would take his word first. Men's. A Senior Ascendant's. The seal would come after, but it would not change the outcome.
And then her stomach dropped a little lower, because as she studied the outline, something clicked: that line of shoulder, that angle of head, that quiet, self-contained stride. She had seen it before, rippling in bronze.
The man in the mirror.
The one whose reflection had cut through a dozen others at the market and pinned her.
The way he carried himself sealed it. That calm only came from Black Lotus.
Black Lotus. Crimson Red. Him.
Old Crane's muttering slid through her memory.
"If you must cross Black Lotus paths, girl," he'd rasped over his pipe, "find the one who hasn't forgotten what a body costs."
He hadn't given her a name. Just a rank. And a hint: a tilt of his head toward Black Lotus territory, as if that narrowed it down.
And now someone she'd seen at the market, and who fitted Old Crane's description, was here in the Veil.
Her hand dropped, automatically, to her sash. Fingers curled around the worn leather, her thumb resting on the comforting curve of one of her swallow-wing knives. She didn't draw it. Not yet. But she knew exactly how long the arc from sheathed to thrown would take.
She held her breath and pressed her awareness just a little deeper into the Veil, refining the echo in front of her.
Wind Gaze sharpened the outline: the way his weight rolled smoothly through each step, the quiet precision of his stride. Under the fog-light image, his Qi felt… dense. Compressed. Like a river forced through too narrow a channel.
At the market, his presence had been banked. Here, it felt like the air of a room just before a blade is drawn. Something hard and unpleasant thrummed under the control.
Too much power. Too close to the things she wanted to understand but wasn't supposed to see. Too dangerous to approach.
She told herself she was only confirming Old Crane's gossip, and making sure she'd recognise the man again if she saw him in daylight. She let the Veil echo show her more.
The fog-figure sharpened along its edges. The line of a jaw. A straight nose. A mouth in a neutral or thoughtful line. His head was slightly bowed, as if deep in thought, not scanning alleys for threats.
So. He likes Veils as thinking streets too.
There was something invasive about it. This man, whose sect turned most of Yunzhong wary, walked alone where other men and most women hurried.
For a moment, he kept moving as if utterly unguarded.
Then something in him closed.
She felt it more than she saw it.
His Qi drew in. Not with the ragged spike of someone startled, but folding inward, clean and decisive. As if a hand had closed around a burning coal, hiding the light without cooling the heat. The Veil's hum shifted under her awareness. Wind Gaze slipped against that new surface and skated off; suddenly she couldn't read depth, only outline.
A cold shock ran through her spine.
He knows.
The echo on her inner sight kept walking for two more slow, measured steps, before it turned its head.
This was slower. Intentional. The deliberate angle of a man choosing where to look.
The shadow-face angled through the Veil's haze until its vague features faced exactly where she stood, pressed to the damp stone with her hand on her sash.
Her throat went dry.
He shouldn't be able to see me. Not like this.
Her stance was clean. Her Qi was folded tight. Her shadow blended with the stone. Jade Wind had tested her Veil work against other inner disciples; none of them had picked her out quickly.
He was looking through the mist. Straight at her.
He didn't need to move to make the danger clear. His sect did that. The Crimson Red sash at his waist did that. The faint taste of trained suppression in his Qi did that.
A man who could feel his way to her through the one medium she trusted most and pin her there with nothing but attention, aware of her, measuring her, without giving anything back.
Heat crept along her neck, part embarrassment at being caught, part sharp awareness that if he chose to close the distance now, in this narrow fog, she would be badly outmatched, both in skill, and in what the city would assume about how this encounter should end.
She stepped back automatically, slipping into shadow, trying to become as still as the stone beside her.
She eased the swallow-wing free, the cold metal whispering like a warning.
The pressure in the Zone thickened, like a slow internal squeeze against her ribs. That familiar tug toward old, unwelcome stories. Flood water, ledger names, boards splitting underfoot.
The Veil did that when she lingered. It pushed at whatever you kept buried, until memory rose like weather.
She shoved it back on instinct.
Not now.
That's when his echo wavered, held for the length of a breath, and vanished. As if he'd waited to be sure she noticed.
Her awareness struck empty fog. The loss of him hit like a correction. You get what I allow, and only until I decide otherwise.
Jinx sucked in a breath and reached again, Wind Gaze darting out in wider circles, seeking any trace: a weight on the air, a pressure against the Veil, the residual warmth of strong Qi.
It was like sweeping a hand through water that refused to hold any image at all.
He's either gone, she thought, or hiding so well that even an Elder would curse.
Elders did that, sometimes. Old men with three times her experience. Not anyone else.
Every part of her training said: withdraw, cleanly. Every part of her spine hated turning her back on something she couldn't see.
Her hand tightened around her swallow-wing, thumb pressing into its curve. The cool metal bite grounded her.
The fog to her left suddenly thickened. No sound. No clear movement. Just that shift in texture.
She made herself move first, not him. She stepped out of the wall, wrist loosening. The swallow-wing flashed once in the dimness as she threw.
Not a killing throw. Low and wide, skimming the Veil above the paving. A long crescent meant to pass just ahead of where that disturbance had been and then meant to arc back to her palm. A way to force spacing, or at least make him mark his position.
The blade slid into the mist without a sound. Even in fog, the sense of its arc should have been there. She felt the thread snap, as if someone had pinched it clean between two fingers. And then…
Nothing.
Her jaw clenched. She waited.
The hair at the back of her neck prickled.
Did the Veil just eat my knife? she thought, or did he catch it?
If he'd caught it, it was a message: I could have ended this. I chose not to.
Either way, the Veil had just drawn a line.
Old Crane's warning slid through her thoughts again, sharper this time. "If you must poke, girl, do it from upwind."
From upwind. From rooftops. From a distance. Not in a blind alley where the fog blurred your edges and a man like that could walk right through you if he chose.
Enough.
Slowly, Jinx let her Qi draw in, tight and neat. She doubted she could hide from someone like him in here, but maybe she could keep herself from bleeding any more of her presence into the Veil any longer.
Then she eased back, one quiet step, then another. Weight rolling through her feet, cloak brushing her calves, knife under her palm a cool, steady line. She kept her shoulders level, head straight, refusing to look like someone fleeing, even as every instinct told her not to turn her back until she was clear.
The Veil thinned around her knees. Lantern glow strengthened at the edge of vision. The alley mouth opened onto the more ordinary dark of Yunzhong's streets, where sound carried clean and wind.
Only when she stepped out of that dim, humming pressure and back onto the stone did she finally let herself exhale fully.
A Senior Ascendant from Black Lotus.
Possibly the man Old Crane had meant. Or possibly the reason he'd warned her at all.
And now he might have one of her knives.
She told herself, firmly, that leaving had been the sensible choice.
As she slipped into a side lane, she catalogued what she'd learnt: his rank, his control, the fact that he could erase his echo at will, the way he had turned his attention toward her without moving his body. The new tension in his Qi, like someone tightening a rope inside their own chest. And the way her swallow-wing had simply failed to return.
She'd have to go to Master Rong to get him to make another one of those knives.
But something else refused to quiet.
Not the way he'd looked at her.
Just the knowledge that in the one kind of quiet street she'd thought of as hers, there was now someone else walking with the same ease. Someone who had felt her watching, measured her presence, and then chosen to take himself completely out of her reach.
Jinx added him to the list of things she was supposed to stay away from.
And somewhere under her ribs, curiosity stirred anyway, sharp, disobedient, and already aware it might cost her something she wouldn't get back.