The radiator in the apartment clanked twice and went silent. The fog hadn't completely disappeared, most of the block was covered in it now. Even if those three men had followed them, they'd have a hell of time trying to find the door, much less which room he was in.

  Daniel sat back down, after looking through the window.

  Neither of them had said anything. Five minutes now, maybe ten. Long enough for their breathing to slow, for the sweat to cool on their skin, for the adrenaline to settle down into something heavier that sat in the chest like a rock.

  Daniel's apartment had never felt this small.

  He sat legs stretched across floorboards right under the window. Dust gathered in the corners. A water ring marked the wood where he'd left a glass three days ago and forgotten to move it. The window behind him never closed right. It let in a thin whistle of air, cold fingers on the back of his neck.

  A few feet away, Li Mei sat against the opposite wall.

  She looked different without the mask.

  The fox face had made her into something archetypal. A character straight out of an old fairytale. Painted eyes, frozen smile, the kind of image that belonged on a temple wall or in a fever dream. Without it, the certainty bled away.

  She was just a girl with a ponytail coming undone, dark circles shadowing her eyes, blood seeping through the cloth she'd wrapped around her arm. Young. Tired. Hurt worse than she wanted to show.

  The broken mask hung from her belt. One painted eye stared up at the ceiling, serene and mocking. The other half was somewhere else. Crushed under someone's heel, probably. Or sitting in a puddle, the lacquer slowly dissolving.

  Somewhere in the building, a television buzzed through the walls. A laugh track, pause, laugh track again. The beat of the city going on without a care.

  Daniel watched her holding on to her side. She'd cracked a rib, maybe. Or bruised something that shouldn't be bruised. He'd seen her take several hits but how bad they were, he wasn't sure.

  "You're hurt worse than you let on."

  Li Mei didn't answer. Her gaze moved around the apartment instead, looking around to see what was there. The futon was shoved against the wall, the blankets still tangled from this morning. The milk crate right next to it, like a nightstand.

  She was measuring something. The distance between who she'd thought he was and who actually lived here.

  Her eyes stopped at notebook on the floor.

  Daniel's stomach dropped.

  His notebook was open; pages covered in his cramped handwriting. Beside it, the stack of printouts from the library.

  Diagrams and pictures could often tell him the points, but figuring the actual location required him to flex and throw punches. If he judged the spot wrong, the meridian would cramp up his hand, or sometimes he'd just punch out with more force than he intended, leaving himself more open. Tighter moves, and better flow.

  Weeks of work. A couple months of obsession. Spread across wood boards like evidence at a crime scene.

  Li Mei pushed herself up but grimaced in pain. It hurt. She braced her good hand against the wall for half a second before letting go and crossed the room in four steps, favoring her left side, and picked up the notebook on the floor before he could decide whether to stop her.

  "Hey…" mumbled Daniel, moving towards her, but she was already flipping through the pages, looking through his things.

  Daniel sighed and then stayed where he was.

  What happened to my personal space? You really just going to go through my things like that?

  He watched her, thinking about it more. She's going to think it's dumb. She probably had dozens of actual training manuals, hand-picked specifically for her use only. She'd think all of this guesswork he had been doing was probably silly.

  The dismissal he expected didn't come.

  She turned a page, and then another. Her fingers were long, worn in places by whatever training methods she did. She traced one of his diagrams. The Hand Yangming.

  "This is wrong."

  She pointed at a junction near the elbow.

  "The Hand Yangming doesn't branch here. The qi flows straight through to Hegu."

  "It does for Tiger Claw."

  Her head came up, scrutinizing his gaze.

  "The qi pools at that spot before the strike," Daniel said, awkwardly. "I tested it. When I route through the standard path, the technique loses maybe thirty percent of its force. But when I branch at that point, let it gather before releasing…"

  "I know what Tiger Claw does."

  The way she said it almost sounded like she knew the move before he had mentioned it. She looked back at the diagram and traced his annotations with her finger, delicately pointing out key positions that he had agonized over for the last few weeks.

  "This shouldn't work."

  She flipped a page and then stopped at his diagram of the Lung meridian.

  "The circulation is incorrect here. And here." Her finger moved. Stopped. "You've got the Lung and Large Intestine crossing over the same point. You're fighting against other points of your body."

  "But…it gives me more power…"

  "You're compensating." She tapped a notation that he had marked. "Here. And here. You're routing around your own errors. Burning extra qi to force the technique through a bridge, so they don't collide"

  She set the notebook down but didn't close it. She simply left it open.

  "That's inefficient. Wasteful. You're probably exhausting yourself three times faster than if you did it properly. Yeah, you get more power, but you are spending more energy trying to make two things work at the same time."

  "Ah?" mumbled Daniel.

  So, was this why he hadn't been able to improve his twenty-minute qi recovery ever since he had started?

  You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

  "You should have hurt yourself."

  Daniel shrugged. He didn't know what to say to that.

  "I had already thought that you gotten lucky and just stumbled into techniques you didn't really understand."

  "I mean I kind of did…"

  "But this isn't just stumbling. This is a complete wild circulation system. Broken in places. Incorrect in others. You just made up something, and it just happened to work."

  The television next door changed channels. Voices rose and fell through the wall. An argument, maybe, or just someone talking too loud on the phone.

  "How long?"

  "How long what?"

  "Since you started."

  "September. A couple months, maybe."

  Li Mei stared at him.

  The kind of genius that appears once in a generation.

  The silence stretched. Cold air crept through the gap in the window, blowing around Daniel's shoulders. He could see his breath if he exhaled hard enough. Faint white clouds that disappeared before they reached her.

  "Give me your arm."

  "What?"

  "Your arm." She crossed back to him. Her good hand reached for his wrist. "I'm showing you something. Then we're even."

  Her grip was hard. No care, no hesitation. The way a doctor might take your pulse before delivering bad news.

  She turned his arm over, exposing the inner forearm. Pale skin, blue veins visible beneath.

  "The first time we met, I struck here." Her finger touched his shoulder, just below the collarbone. "Lung 1. Zhongfu. Harder to reach in a fight, but it shuts down the entire arm if you hit it clean."

  Her hand moved to his forearm.

  "This one is easier." She pressed a point just below the elbow crease. The depression between two tendons, soft tissue over bone. "Lung 5. Chize. Less dramatic, but you can reach it mid-combat. Disrupts the qi for a few seconds. Long enough to end most fights or cause a pause."

  "How many points are there?"

  "On the Lung meridian? Eleven. Each one does something different." She pressed harder. "On the Large Intestine, twenty. The Bladder has over sixty. "

  "That's a lot…how did you remember it all?"

  Li Mei looked at him weird as if he was asking a strange question.

  "You just do. Practice it again, and again till you get it into your head. Why? Did you think there was some mystical technique that let me memorize everything?"

  "Maybe?" said Daniel, shrugging. Was the difference between them that big? He didn't know anyone who could just sit down and memorize hundreds of points without a cheat sheet.

  "Tsk," mumbled Li Mei, shaking her head. "Anyway, the qi gathers here before flowing to the hand," she continued. "Every technique you throw passes through this point first. Doesn't matter how strong they are, how fast, how well-trained."

  "Okay."

  "Feel where I'm pressing."

  He took a deep breath as if to meditate. Back to Standing Meditation. Let him relax and feel everything in his body. Her finger on his skin. The pressure against muscle. The faint impression of her touch, almost lost against the cold air seeping through the window.

  "There's a major point underneath," she said. "Can you feel it?"

  Daniel closed his eyes.

  He had learned to feel his own meridians before, but this was different. A pocket of heat beneath her fingertip, maybe half an inch down. It shimmered underneath her hands, putting pressure on his arm. This was her qi.

  "Yeah." He opened his eyes. "I feel it."

  Li Mei's hand went still.

  "So, what does it feel like?"

  "It feels like a small match was lit and was tossed down pond." He searched for better words.

  "How deep is the pond?"

  "Half an inch. Maybe less. Close to the surface, but it feels a lot deeper when I close my eyes."

  She released his arm.

  Stepped back.

  "Let me try," Daniel said. "On you."

  He reached for her arm before she could object. His fingers found her wrist, turned it over the way she'd turned his. He was looking for Lung 5, trying to remember the exact position.

  His other hand came up to stabilize her forearm.

  And for a moment their palms pressed together.

  Li Mei went rigid.

  She yanked her arm back. Swatted his hand away with more force than necessary. He saw her wince, before drawing back from him.

  "Find it on someone else. You won't have your opponent's cooperation in a fight."

  Daniel held up both hands. Backing off.

  "Sorry. I didn't mean to…"

  "Don't touch me."

  Three words. Sharp enough to cut.

  The space between them felt different now. Something in the mood had changed, and it wasn't going back.

  Li Mei turned toward the door.

  "Wait."

  She stopped. Didn't turn around, but stopped. One hand braced against the doorframe.

  Daniel felt he should say something but the words got caught up in his throat. Sorry? I didn't mean it? But what was he even sorry for? All of it was a mess in his head. He was never really great at dealing with girls.

  If Li Mei had been a guy, he could have just made a joke. But somehow, joking with her seemed like a bad idea. His mind swirled and then grasped at one thing he noticed during their escape from the three men.

  "In the alley," he said, slowly. "The way you redirected their attacks. It wasn't just blocking. You were using their force against them. Turning their momentum."

  She was very still.

  "I've read about it," Daniel continued. "Tui Shou. Push hands. The forums talk about it, but nobody seems to actually know how it works. But that is Tui Shou right?"

  "Where did you hear that term?"

  "The internet. Some old training manuals."

  "I don't teach Tui Shou."

  "I'm not asking you to teach me the whole thing," said Daniel, scratching his head. This wasn't really what he wanted to ask. Actually, he wanted to just say hey, can we just not be awkward and talk like we did before. "Just the principle. How do you feel their center? How do you know which way to…"

  "I said no."

  She turned now. And something in her face made the words die in his throat.

  "The pressure points are enough." Her voice was level again. Controlled. "That's what I owed you. We're even now."

  Daniel nodded slowly. Filed it away with everything else he didn't understand about her.

  "Okay. Sorry about earlier."

  Li Mei watched him for a moment longer, then turned back to the door.

  "The pressure point I showed you. Lung 5." She didn't look at him. "The location shifts depending on the person. You need to learn to feel it through their skin, not just know where it should be."

  "Why tell me that?"

  Her hand found the knob. Rested there.

  She asked a question back at him.

  "Why did you help me?"

  Daniel waited for her to turn. She didn't.

  The honest answer was that he didn't know.

  "I don't know."

  Li Mei was quiet.

  A car passed on the street below, headlights sweeping briefly across the ceiling.

  Then she opened the door and walked out.

  No parting words, just footsteps in the hallway, fading toward the stairwell. The creak of the building settling around her absence.

  The door hung open. Cold air drifted in from the hall, mixing with the cold already pooling beneath the window.

  Daniel sat there for a while.

  The notebook lay open on the floor where she had left it.

  He looked at his arm.

  Eleven points on the Lung meridian alone. Twenty on Large Intestine. Over sixty on the Bladder. That was an awful lot to remember. He remembered back at the time he was at the museum, looking over the Dim Mak exhibition and the Wudang manuals on pressure points.

  It felt overwhelming then and it felt overwhelming now. So many points to memorize. Like being handed a textbook and being told you had a test tomorrow, good luck. Looked like all those nights cramming at school wasn't a complete waste of time after all.

  Maybe, instead of thinking of it as an unsolvable problem, take it one step at a time.

  He pulled the window closed as far as it would go, which wasn't far, and crossed to the notebook on the floor. He put it on the milk crate and flipped to a fresh page.

  Lung 5 – Chize, he wrote. Pressure point. Inner forearm, elbow crease, depression between tendons.

  Gathering point for qi before it flows to the hand. Disrupting it kills the technique at the source. ~30 seconds of numbness. Maybe longer with more force.

  Location varies by person. Need to practice finding it through touch.

  He paused. Tapped the pen against the page.

  Lung 1 – Zhongfu. Shoulder, below collarbone. Shuts down entire arm. Harder to reach, but more effective.

  She mentioned 11 points on Lung meridian. 20 on Large Intestine. 60+ on Bladder. That's over 300 points on primary meridians alone. Years of study just to learn the locations. More years to apply them in combat.

  Another pause. The pen hovering.

  She asked why I helped her.

  I don't know.

  He thought about the old martial stories. Wuxia. Wu for martial, xia for hero. Put together, it literally meant: Martial Hero (Wuxia). Heroes who saved the weak and fought the corrupt because that's what martial heroes did.

  It was a beautiful story. It was the story Daniel had always wanted to be true. Was that it? Was he just living out a script he'd memorized from a hundred VHS tapes?

  The easy answer. Typical Daniel, doing what he thought heroes were supposed to do.

  But tonight none of those felt right.

  He stared at the words until they blurred. No answers came. None ever did, not at this hour, not when he was this tired.

  He set down the pen.

  Crossed to the futon.

  Lay back and watched the water stain on the ceiling. The shape of it had always reminded him of something. A face, maybe, or a map of a country that didn't exist. Tonight it just looked like something broken that no one had bothered to fix, melting into the ceiling.

  Why did you help me?

  The question followed him down into sleep.