The morning had the quality of something unhurried. Light moved through the wheat in slow, rolling waves, and the air carried the smell of turned earth and the faint sweetness of whatever his mother had left cooling on the windowsill. Eli worked the far row with a hoe whose handle had been repaired twice and would need a third time before summer's end, pulling at the stubborn roots that always seemed to find the same patches of ground no matter how thoroughly he cleared them the season before.
It was the kind of morning that made the smaller frustrations feel manageable. The blisters on his palm. The way the work never fully finished. The quiet arithmetic of what they owed against what they had.
He paused to drink from the canteen he'd left hanging on the fence post, looking back toward the farmhouse where the shutters on his sister's window were still closed. Mara slept late when she could, which their mother allowed with the particular patience of someone who understood that childhood was a season with a definite end. Eli had stopped begrudging it sometime around his fifteenth year, when he'd realized that understanding was its own kind of growing up.
He capped the canteen and turned back to the row.
That was when he saw the man.
He stood at the field's edge where the cleared land met the tree line, perfectly still in a way that had nothing restful about it. The distance made the details imprecise — dark clothing, a frame that suggested neither particular height nor particular build — but something about the stillness itself carried weight. The way a shadow falls wrong. The way a sound cuts off where it shouldn't.
Eli lowered the hoe slowly.
"Hey." His voice came out steadier than he felt. "You need something?"
The field absorbed his words without return. No movement from the figure. No acknowledgment at all, which was somehow worse than a hostile reply would have been. A man who shouts back at you is a man who exists in the same world you do. This felt like something else.
Eli set the hoe against the fence post and squared himself toward the tree line, shielding his eyes against the light. "I asked you a question."
Still nothing. The figure stood the way objects stand — without intention, without discomfort — and the morning, which had been so ordinary a minute ago, began to feel like a set piece arranged around something he didn't yet understand.
He was still trying to locate what exactly unsettled him when the second man appeared.
He came out of the tree line to the first man's left, taking a position with the same terrible stillness. Then a third. A fourth. They emerged at intervals that felt deliberate, unhurried, each one stopping and becoming motionless as if they had found the precise coordinates of where they were meant to stand. By the time the seventh had taken his place, they formed a line that stretched across the full width of the field's edge like something being drawn.
Eli's pulse had moved into his throat. He didn't reach for the hoe, because some part of him already understood that the hoe had become irrelevant.
The first man reached into his coat.
Eli ran.
The decision wasn't made so much as discovered — his body moving before the thought fully assembled itself, boots finding the ground in long, careless strides that cared nothing for the crops he'd spent the morning tending. He was shouting before he'd closed half the distance to the farmhouse, his voice ragged with something that stripped away any attempt at composure.
"Mama — get Mara, get away from the windows—"
He hit the door with his shoulder and came through it into the kitchen, where his mother stood at the counter with flour on her hands and an expression of pure bewilderment. She had the particular stillness of someone whose mind was working hard to reconcile what she was seeing with what she expected to see — her son, home in the middle of the morning, wild-eyed and breathing like something chased.
"Eli, what on earth—"
"Men." He was already moving past her toward the window, pressing himself to the wall beside it to look out at an angle. "At the tree line. Seven of them, armed, they were just—"
Mara looked up from the floor where she'd been arranging her carved wooden animals into some private configuration that followed rules only she understood. She was eight. Her face held the open, uncomplicated curiosity of someone who hadn't yet learned that certain expressions on adult faces meant the world was about to change.
"What men?" she asked.
"Eli." His mother's voice had shifted. She had moved to the other side of the window, and whatever she saw there had completed the work his entrance had started. The flour-dusted hands went still at her sides. "How many did you say?"
He never got to answer.
The explosion came from the eastern side of the house, and it came with a physical force that had nothing metaphorical about it — the air itself seemed to contract and then release, a pressure that arrived before the sound did and threw Eli sideways into the counter hard enough to knock the breath from him. The window above the sink dissolved inward. Something in the ceiling cracked and shifted. The hanging pots swung wildly on their hooks, one of them coming free and clattering across the floor to where Mara had been sitting a moment before.
Smoke. Heat. The high, continuous ringing that replaced all other sound.
Eli pushed himself upright and found his mother pulling Mara against her chest, both of them low to the floor, his sister's face pressed into their mother's shoulder with her eyes screwed shut. There was blood on his mother's forearm from the glass. Not much, but there.
The eastern wall had a wound in it now. Through the smoke and the settling dust, daylight showed through in a way it had never been meant to.
More voices outside. Boots on dry ground.
Eli looked at his mother. She looked back at him over the top of Mara's head, and whatever she found in his expression, it confirmed something she'd been hoping not to confirm. She pulled his sister closer and said his name very quietly, just once, in a tone that contained several things at once — a question, a plea, and beneath both of those, the particular grief of a woman who had perhaps always understood that mornings like the one before could not last.
The footsteps were at the door.