The call came at 3:47 AM.
Elian was already awake, unable to sleep, when his phone screamed to life. Samuel's voice on the other end was barely controlled, ragged with something that might have been shock or grief or both.
"Oga. The market. It's on fire."
Elian was dressed and running before the sentence finished.
---
The sky over Mushin market was orange.
Even from kilometers away, Elian could see the glow—an angry, pulsing light that painted the undersides of clouds and turned the pre-dawn darkness into something from a nightmare. As he got closer, the smell reached him: smoke, burning fabric, roasting grain, and underneath it all, something sweet and terrible that he didn't want to identify.
By the time he arrived, the market was an inferno.
Flames leaped from stall to stall, co
