Blood tastes like copper, memories like distance.

  The metallic flavor was in my mouth because the sleeve-wound had sent a fine spray that reached my lips. Blood. Mine. The taste connected something older than thinking.

  Two thousand years ago — or close to it. The approximation that all deep memories carried, the imprecision that the passage of centuries imposed on the timestamps of experience. Two thousand years, give or take the lifespan of a civilization.

  She was a warrior. In Zhèn — or was it Zhēn? The tones decayed first when a name died. A province that no longer existed under any name, in a conflict that no longer existed in any record. The cause — I no longer remember. Something about borders, or grain, or the kind of insult that required a generation of corpses to settle. The kind of war that consumed a region for a generation and was forgotten within three because the next war was already happening.

  She was blind.

  This was the detail that survived when most details hadn't. Blind — eyes that did not receive light, that had ceased to function either from birth or from damage. She fought without seeing. She fought with the compensatory awareness that blindness produced. Hearing, spatial memory and sensitivity to air movement that told her where bodies were.

  She hit me.

  The only swordstroke in two thousand years that I hadn't seen coming. Not because I was slow. Because she was different. Because her attack came from a vector that vision-dependent organisms did not anticipate, from an angle that existed in the perceptual framework of someone who navigated the world without the primary sense that everyone else relied on. She cut where sighted fighters didn't cut. She moved where sighted fighters didn't move. And she hit me.

  My left side. Below the ribs. A sighted fighter would have avoided that location, too difficult to reach from standard combat positions. For her — the approach was natural. It was where her perception told her the opening was.

  Blood flowed. Mine. The same copper taste that was in my mouth now, millennia later, in a clearing with two unconscious spirit-beasts and two disabled bandits and a researcher with a notebook.

  The wound healed. Then too, the same involuntary closure. But I remembered the moment before it closed. The instant when the pain was present and felt like a connection. The momentary bridge between my body and the acknowledgment that my body existed in a world that could touch it.

  The blind warrior died three days later. In the same conflict. Killed by someone less interesting. The mundane death that warriors experienced when the war was large enough and probability caught up. In a conflict of this scale, everyone dies except me.

  I remembered her face. Scarred — the pattern of facial scarring that indicated a life of combat that predated the blindness or coincided with it. She had fought her entire life which spanned approximately forty years.

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  Forty years. For her, a full lifespan.

  I had watched her die from a distance. Close enough to observe, far enough to not intervene. The gap between observing and intervening was the space I inhabited. The space was wide.

  The memory closed. The copper faded. The blood on my arm dried.

  You watched me from ten paces. You had been watching throughout, the unfocused attention that indicated internal processing, the visible signs of someone whose consciousness was elsewhere while the body remained here. You recognized memory-states. You had learned to.

  You wrote. Then you spoke.

  "How often," you said, "have you done that?"

  "Done what."

  "Let something hit you."

  The question was so like you. Not how-do-you-feel, not are-you-okay, but the operational version that treated the behavior as data rather than trauma.

  "Enough," I said.

  "But you could have avoided it?"

  "Yes."

  You wrote the answer. Then you put the notebook down. Put it down. The gesture that indicated a shift from professional to personal, from documenter to person, the rare transition that occurred when the data exceeded the emotional capacity of the collector.

  "You're spiraling," you said. "You know you're spiraling."

  I did not answer. The spiraling — if that was the word — was the escalation that my recklessness followed. From letting a wolf-beast approach, to moving toward cultivators, to allowing a blade past the guard. The trajectory was clear. The trajectory pointed toward more. More contact. More pain. More of the only thing that felt real.

  "I'm not going to tell you to stop," you said. "But I'm going to write what I see."

  "You always write what you see."

  "Yes. And what I see is someone who is testing how much damage she can feel before the feeling stops."

  The accuracy was uncomfortable. Not because it was wrong. Because it was the kind of right that required the observer to have understood the subject at a level that the I preferred not to be understood at.

  That evening, I cooked.

  Poorly. Not with any of the competence that you brought to the task or any of the accumulated knowledge that millennia should have provided. I cooked because — I did not know why. The impulse arrived and I followed it the way I followed the direction you set. Without resistance, yet without being in it. But cooking required attention. Choices. The kind of directed engagement the disconnection still impaired.

  The rice burned. The vegetables disintegrated. The ginger — your ginger, borrowed without asking — was cut too thin and dissolved into the water, because it was too hot. The heat destroyed the volatile compounds that made ginger ginger.

  The smell of burnt rice hung over the camp like an indictment. Acrid, persistent, the olfactory equivalent of a failed argument.

  You said nothing. Your face said everything. The compression-face, one that lived between clinical observation and personal offense, was directed at the pot with the intensity of someone watching a crime in progress.

  I said nothing.

  We both knew.

  The meal was inedible. I did not eat it, not from the disconnection's appetite suppression but from the recognition that the product was not food. You did not eat it either, from the same recognition, expressed through diplomatic silence.

  You cooked a second meal. Quietly. Cut the ginger at a proper thickness. Distributed the heat properly. And the result, your meal, was edible.

  I sat six paces away and watched you cook the replacement for my failure and recognized that my failure mattered. Not because the food was bad. Because the attempt had been made. The first voluntary domestic action since the forest. Giving you another data point that I tried.

  You wrote it down. Of course you did.