The white light from Toby’s eruption didn't just blind me; it felt like it peeled the very skin off my reality. When my vision finally returned, the turquoise house in Bo-Kaap was a skeleton of splintered wood and floating dust. The gravity had returned, dropping me hard onto the debris-strewn floor. My lungs burned with the scent of ozone and ancient plaster.
"Toby?" I coughed, my voice a broken whisper.
There was no answer from my son. He was slumped in the corner, his small body curled in a ball, deep in a trance like sleep. The effort of "taking their faces" had drained him to the bone.
But it was the center of the room that made my heart stop.
Two men were lying in the wreckage. They were identical in build, identical in height, and both were dressed in the remains of black tactic
