Qinghe drew three lines down a sheet of clean paper and labeled the columns: intended effect, bodily result, and what happened around it.
“I want a fourth,” Yan said.
She dipped her brush. “What for?”
“What we don’t know.”
“That could fill the whole page.”
“Then leave room.”
Qinghe made a fourth column. They sat at the small table in the infirmary annex, the first lozenge label between them. She wrote its promised qi gain and the expected headache in the first column. Yan wrote the qi he felt in the second. They left the third blank: no unusual change to the room or anyone else. In the last, he wrote “cause unknown.”
“The notice you receive stays out of the clinic record,” he said.
