Jinx had learned to come back like nothing touched her.
Not watched too long, not followed too close, not spilling her Qi where anyone could taste it. Not claimed by the city's stories.
Tonight, the Veil had come back with her.
Not the fog itself. That slid off her clothes on the climb, dissolving into ordinary chill. It was the feel of it that stuck: that slow, inside-out pressure the city called "Veil" always left behind, like someone had cupped a hand around her thoughts and squeezed.
By the time she reached Jade Wind's inner walkways, her shoulders ached from how hard she'd been pretending to move loosely.
Lanterns burned along the cloister, soft yellow in disciplined intervals. Most disciples were already in evening forms or at dinner. The Pavilion had that particular quiet she liked best. As if the noise had gone to roost somewhere else.
Yan Hui was exactly where Jinx expected her to be.
Third cloister from the west court, sitting cross-legged on the polished wood, back against a pillar, a thin stack of bamboo slips balanced on her knee. A lamp burned low at her side, wick trimmed precise. Brush in hand, she was drawing tiny dots along the margin of a copied Veil map, a private habit of Hui's, marking where "stories snag".
Jinx stopped a step away.
Yan Hui didn't start. She finished her little cluster of dots, blew once on the ink, then glanced up.
"You're late back," she observed. A statement, like everything else she cared about. Her gaze slid once over Jinx's face, down to the damp at her hem, back up again. "Veil Zone?"
Jinx snorted softly. "You're not supposed to call them that. Jade Wind term is 'Broken Mirrors'."
"And 'don't loiter there' in Mistress Yun's," Hui replied, setting the slip aside. "Sit."
Jinx hesitated, then lowered herself opposite her, one knee crossed, one knee raised. She rested one forearm on her raised knee and let her hand hang, fingers deliberately loose, the other hand down on the planks.
For a few breaths, they just sat. Wind murmured along the tiles. Somewhere further down the walk, a bell chimed the hour.
Yan Hui studied her the way she studied Veil currents: patiently, without pushing.
"Your Qi's still running too high," she said at last. "Talk before it starts talking for you."
"You sound like Yun Fang," Jinx muttered.
"I sound like someone who assumes you wouldn't have come to me for a dull patrol report. So… Broken Mirrors. What happened?"
Jinx looked past her, toward the dark beyond the rail, where the mountain dropped away into cloud.
"West warehouse Zone," she said. "Fog was thick."
"And you went alone." Not a question.
"I don't take juniors into the Veil," Jinx said. "My own thoughts are loud enough. If I go alone, at least I know."
Hui made a small sound of agreement. They both knew the pattern.
Most people who stepped into Veil Zones only ever felt the first layer: a faint drag in the chest, thoughts turning inward, old anxieties chewing a little louder. If they were sensible, they walked straight through and never lingered. If they lingered, the Zone obliged, pressing their own unresolved knots to the surface until they ran out, irritated and raw, blaming "bad air".
Stay longer, and the Veil's second skin began to show. Other people's left-behind pieces: half-remembered panic, grief with no face, the urge to run or weep or reach for someone who wasn't there. Hence the name Broken Mirrors. Places where too many endings had gone wrong at once.
Jinx and Yan Hui could usually ride the first layer without being dragged into the second. Qi training gave you that much. Veils became… useful. Dangerous, but useful. Places to think where most people didn't like to look.
"Tonight it started the same," Jinx went on. "That… squeeze." She tapped lightly at her sternum. "The way it makes you think too loudly at yourself. Old things poking up."
Hui's eyes flicked once to her, then away again. She didn't poke any particular memory.
"I decided not to let it choose the story," Jinx said. "So I walked. Let Wind Gaze skim along the alley instead."
"And?" Hui asked.
"And I wasn't alone," Jinx said. "Footsteps ahead, cutting the fog."
Her fingers curled, then straightened.
"I skimmed," she said. "Light touch. Just enough to get outline and rank. Crimson Red. Senior Ascendant."
Yan Hui's brows lifted a fraction. "Black Lotus sends a Senior Ascendant alone into a Veil? That's new."
"Maybe he likes the quiet too," Jinx said. "The Zone pressed at me; it slid off him like it didn't know where to catch."
She drew a breath that snagged faintly on the memory.
"At first," she added.
Hui's brush turned idly between her fingers. "And then?"
"Then he knew I was there," Jinx said quietly. "I didn't move. Didn't bleed more Qi than a breath. One moment I could read how his weight shifted through his feet. Next moment… It was like he pulled a curtain over himself. The weight was still there, but my Wind Gaze just… slid off."
Hui's mouth compressed into a thin line. "That's… more control than most talented disciples bother with."
"I know," said Jinx. Her gaze went distant, back to fog that was no longer there.
"I kept watching," she said. "Outline still moving. Shoulders, head, the line of the sash. He walked two more steps. Then he turned his head." Her fingers twitched. "Toward where I was."
"He saw you," Hui murmured.
"He looked straight through the Veil," Jinx said. "Through my method. Echo-face lined up exactly with my body, even though I was folded behind stone. It felt like…" she stopped, jaw tightening, then forced it out. "Like someone putting a blade to the back of your neck in a room you thought you'd cleared."
The boards under them creaked faintly as the night air shifted.
"Did the Veil do anything?" Hui asked. "Any bleed from other stories? Or was it all… him?"
"That's the part that bothers me," Jinx said. "Usually by the time I've been under that long, something old starts trying to climb up my throat. Tonight… nothing. The Zone went quiet and let me look at him instead. Like it was listening too."
"Mm." Hui let the non-answer sit between them. "And after he looked at you?"
"He vanished," Jinx said.
"What?"
"One breath he was there in my Gaze. Next breath there was just fog. Like the mirror swallowed its own reflection."
Yan Hui put the brush down very carefully.
Yan Hui's mouth tightened, the way it did in forms when an opponent changed pace too smoothly.
"If he's truly Crimson Red," she said, "then someone is wasting him."
A beat. Her eyes lifted.
"Or hiding him."