Spirit and Steel

Training began the next day. Her mother handled the left hand; for the right, Celeste called in a debt she'd been holding for sixteen years.

The man who arrived at their door was small, old, and moved with the particular economy of motion that suggests either extreme frailty or extreme capability. His name was Master Park, and he had been Jin Soo-hyun's teacher before Jin disappeared.

"He didn't disappear," Park said, sipping tea in the Beaumont kitchen with the casual comfort of someone who had been here before. "He completed the Chrysanthemum Path. The final stage requires dissolution. The chi becomes so refined, so conscious, that the body is no longer necessary."

"You're saying he evaporated," Aiyana said flatly.

Park smiled. "I'm saying he became what the chi always was. Everywhere. In everything. In you."

Aiyana looked at her glowing right hand. "So my dad is my chi."

"Your dad is all chi. But yes — the particular expression in your meridians carries his signature. His consciousness. His choices." Park set down his tea. "Which is why we must be careful. Chi that thinks is chi that can disagree."

Training was divided into mornings and evenings. Mornings with Park: meditation, breath work, the slow forms of the Chrysanthemum Path that looked like dance and felt like holding lightning in a jar. Evenings with Celeste: the rhythms, the prayers, the careful negotiation with spirits who were amused, intrigued, and slightly frightened by the girl with two kinds of power.

The spirits had a name for her. They called her The Bridge.