---
A grandmother tried to hide under a table with two shaking girls. Natasha found them because the girls could not stop crying. She did not speak. She did not smile. She ended it quickly, as if speed could somehow count as mercy after the fact.
The dog ran. It made it farther than most of the people did.
By the time the moon reached the broken top of the western fence, the village had fallen completely silent.
Not quiet in the peaceful sense. It was quiet in the aftermath of someone just stopping bombing after they won the war.
The kind of quiet made of cooling blood, dying flames, and bodies settling into stillness.
One roof had caught. Fire climbed it slowly, sending sparks upward. A cart wheel turned lazily where someone had knocked it loose.
The child Alex had left alive earlier had stopped crying.
Not because it had become brave. Because Sofia found it while circling back and decided unfinished sounds annoyed her.
