Curien had been losing weight for three months, and the compass in his pocket had been spinning for two. He sat on a flat rock above a pine valley in the western hills and watched the needle turn. North. East. North again. His grandfather had carried this compass through a war and died with it under his pillow. It had never lied before. Curien was twenty-three years old and dying, and he needed it to stop lying now. The sickness was not a sickness. A year ago demons had cut something out of him in his sleep, and he had woken knowing two things at once. He was the reincarnation of Sun Wukong. The immortality that came with that name was gone, carried off in pieces, and his ordinary human body was burning through what was left of his ordinary human life. An old monk had come to him in a dream after that, silent, holding up a golden hoop. Put it on, the dream said without saying. Become him again. Curien understood the price. Wearing the hoop would erase Curien completely and leave only Sun Wukong in his skin. He had been searching for the hoop anyway, because the alternative was dying in a rented room before winter. He opened the leather journal on his knee. Six months of entries, each one a place he had walked to and found nothing. A cave near the southern border. A ruined shrine by a river. A monastery that turned him away at the gate. Pressed leaves marked each dead end so he would not return by mistake. He was running out of pages and out of months. He had no idea where the hoop was. He had been guessing. The needle stopped. It pointed northeast and held there, trembling once, then steady. Curien stood up so fast his vision went gray. He waited for the needle to drift. It did not drift. He followed it for two days through pine and wet stone. On the second afternoon he came around a ridge and saw what the compass had been pulling him toward. A stone archway stood alone in a clearing, taller than three men, carved with weathered script in a language he could not read. Set into the center of the arch, fixed in stone as if grown there, was a golden hoop. Moss had crept up the pillars. No path led to it. No one had walked here in a long time. Sitting at the base of the arch, calmly, as if waiting, was a panda with three small monkeys arranged around its feet. The monkeys looked at him. The panda did not. Curien stopped at the edge of the clearing with the compass still in his open hand and understood that the easy part of his problem was over. He had found it. Now he had to decide whether to put it on.