Ash and Ember

The pack is already gone. I can hear them , the howls threading north through the dark, moving farther with every count. I've been counting a lot tonight. Stars first, then minutes, then the spaces between one howl and the next until the spaces got so long they stopped being spaces and just became silence. The kind of silence that means something. The kind that means they're not coming back. I sit on what used to be a wall. It's mostly rubble now , old Phoenix-era stone, my grandmother said once, her voice going careful and quiet the way it did around things that still held power. The ruins stretch out around me in the dark, all collapsed arches and cracked foundations swallowed by weeds. I've always felt something strange here. A warmth under my sternum, low and stubborn, like a coal that refuses to die. I've never told anyone about it. You learn early which things are safe to say out loud. I'm ten years old and I've been here for three hours and I'm not crying. Not because I'm brave. I gave up on that particular hope sometime around hour two, when the howls shifted and didn't shift back. When I understood that waiting wasn't going to change anything. Brave would imply I still thought there was something to fight through. What I feel instead is just , flat. Settled. The way a stone settles when it's finally hit the bottom of the water. I take stock. It's something to do with my hands while my chest tries to cave in. One boot with a loose sole that slaps against the ground when I walk. Half a heel of bread Sophie pressed into my palm before the migration started , Sophie, who is not cruel, who just isn't paying close enough attention to notice when someone falls behind. The headscarf my mother knotted tight around my hair before we left: we don't need you embarrassing us in front of the other families, Mona. I take the headscarf off. Fold it once, twice. Tuck it in my pocket. Out here with no one watching, I don't have to be an embarrassment. The walk home takes until almost dawn. I keep my steps even. My breathing measured. I decide , somewhere around the third collapsed arch, where the weeds grow waist-high and something moves in the dark at the edge of my vision , that I am not going to run. Running means admitting I'm scared, and I've decided not to be scared tonight. The ruins are quiet except for wind. The warmth in my chest flickers when I pass close to the older stones, the ones with glyphs worn down to almost nothing. I don't look at them. I keep my eyes on the path. I think about what I'll say when I get home. I think about this for a long time and I don't come up with anything. The settlement is already awake when I arrive , fires lit, the smell of breakfast smoke hanging low in the morning cold. I walk through the eastern gate and nobody looks up. The gate-warden, old Pryor, glances at me and then away again, like I'm a thing he's already accounted for and dismissed. I push down the part of me that hoped he might say something. Ask where I'd been. Look relieved. Our door is unlocked. It's always unlocked. Nobody's ever worried about me walking in. My father is at the dining table with Leon and Selena, three plates already cleared. My mother moves between the table and the kitchen with the focused efficiency of someone who has decided the morning is going fine. Nobody looks up when I step inside. The door closes behind me with a soft click. Then my father sees the mud on my boots. Sees the missing headscarf. His expression shifts. I know this shift. I've been cataloguing it since I was old enough to understand that the space between my father's brow and his eyes means something. It's not worry. It's not relief. It's the specific, weary irritation of a man who has been inconvenienced. "Where have you been?" His voice is level. That's somehow worse than if he'd raised it. "We've had to explain your absence to three different families." I don't answer. I go to the kitchen corner. I find the scraps from last night's dinner , two cold pieces of bread, a smear of dripping left in the pan , and I eat standing up because sitting would mean staying, and I haven't decided yet if I'm staying. I keep my face blank. My spine straight. I have been practising this since I was seven: letting nothing that's happening inside me reach the surface. Not the cold in my bones. Not the three hours on the ruined wall counting stars because there was nothing else to do. Not the way the pack's howls sounded when they moved north. Easy. Unbothered. Like they'd simply forgotten to carry something. Like I was luggage they'd decided they didn't need. I'm getting good at the blank face. It used to take effort. Now it's just , there. A thing I put on the way you put on a coat. I'm almost done eating when Selena drifts through the kitchen. She's already dressed for the day, hair loose, wearing the expression she puts on when she's in a good mood and wants everyone to know it. Selena is beautiful in the way that gets noticed from across a room. She came out of the same parents I did and somehow took everything that was supposed to be split between us. "You look terrible," she says pleasantly. Not meanly. That's the thing about Selena , she's never mean on purpose. She just says what she observes, the way you'd comment on the weather. "Did you sleep in the ruins?" I don't answer. "You did, didn't you." She laughs. Easy. Unbothered. The laugh of someone for whom being left behind has never once been a possibility she needed to consider. "You really should try harder to keep up. Nobody's going to wait for you ," And that's when I feel it. Not sadness. Not anger. Something older and stranger than either , the coal under my sternum catching, flaring, a heat that pushes outward from my ribs like it's looking for a way through. My vision goes strange at the edges. The pan on the counter rattles. Selena stops talking. We both look at the pan. It goes still. The warmth drains out of me as fast as it came, leaving me cold and hollow and aware, suddenly, that my hands are shaking. "The wind," I say. My voice comes out steady. "It does that sometimes." Selena looks at me. For the first time this morning, she's actually looking at me , not through me, not past me, but at me, with an expression I don't have a name for. Something uncertain. Something almost like, "There's no wind," she says quietly.