Consciousness returned the way water fills a cracked vessel — slowly, unevenly, pooling in the wrong places first.
Pain was the first coherent thing. Not the sharp, clarifying kind that announces a specific wound, but the diffuse, total kind that suggests the body has stopped keeping inventory and simply declared everything a loss. Eli became aware of his wrists before anything else — the rope there had done its work thoroughly, cutting into skin that had already given what it had to give. Then his ribs. Then the side of his face, where something had dried and tightened in a way that pulled at his cheekbone when he tried to open his eyes.
He managed one. The world came in blurred and reddish, and it took him a moment to understand that the red was his own blood, dried in the lashes, reconstituting slightly in the heat.
Heat. Fire, somewhere behind him and to the left, consuming what remained of the fence posts along the eastern field. The crops he'd tended that morning — the ones whose roots he'd catalogued by rote, whose growth he'd measured in the particular private arithmetic of someone who depended on them — were black shapes against the lowering afternoon sky.
He was tied to the main support post of the barn's outer wall. The rope crossed his chest in two places. His mother was bound to the same post at his left, and Mara—
Mara was at his right, her head dropped forward, her small chest still moving. Barely, but moving.
"Mama." His voice came out as something that barely qualified as sound. He tried again. "Mama."
His mother stirred. The movement cost her. He could see that clearly even through one eye and the haze of whatever was wrong with his head — every shift of her body registered in her face as something she had to absorb and set aside before she could be present again.
"I'm here," she said. Her voice was steady in the way that only extraordinary effort makes a voice steady.
The men moved through what remained of the farmhouse with the unhurried ease of people who understood that the reckoning had already happened. There were seven of them, as there had been at the field's edge, though they had added masks at some point — crude things, carved or painted into the shapes of faces that suggested something other than human, expressions fixed in configurations that no living face could hold. They ate from the kitchen's stores, or what the explosion had left of them, and they spoke to one another in the low, easy tones of men at rest.
Eli watched them the way an animal watches a predator — not with the paralyzed fascination of fear, but with the focused, involuntary attention of something trying to find an edge.
"Why?" The word left him before he'd decided to say it. One of the men near the door looked over. "Why are you doing this?"
The laughter came from two or three of them at once, and it had the quality of a sound that had been made before, in other places, over other people asking the same question. It was not a cruel laugh, particularly. That was almost worse. It was simply the laughter of people who found the question faintly ridiculous.
No answer came. They returned to their meal.
The torment was systematic in a way that suggested practice. They moved from one to the next with the patience of craftsmen, and the afternoon unwound in a series of intervals that Eli marked not by time but by the sounds his mother and sister made — sounds that changed as the hours passed, becoming quieter, more interior, as the body learned to contain what it could not escape.
He asked again, the second time, with considerably less voice than the first. His face was turned toward the man crouching nearest to him, the one whose mask depicted a long, downward-curving mouth.
"Tell me why."
The man considered him for a moment with the blank attention of the mask.
"Because you were supposed to protect them," he said. The voice beneath the mask was ordinary. That was the thing Eli would carry afterward — how ordinary it sounded, how devoid of heat or weight, as though it were an answer being read from a ledger rather than delivered. "And you couldn't. That's why."
He stood and moved away, and the words settled into Eli with the particular, irreversible quality of true things. Not because they were fair. But because they had found the exact seam of guilt that had been forming in him since the moment he'd seen the man at the field's edge and felt dread rather than moving immediately, decisively, toward his family.
The fire had claimed the house entirely by then. The smoke column was visible for miles, he knew — had he been standing in any other field, in any other life, he would have seen it and understood what it meant.
They left without ceremony as the sun's edge met the horizon, gathering themselves from the wreckage of the farm with the same unhurried ease with which they'd arrived. The leader — the one who had spoken first, who had pulled the weapon at the field's edge — paused near the remains of the gate and said something to the man beside him in a voice low enough that Eli couldn't piece it together until one word surfaced clearly: capital.
"That's where it begins," the leader said. And there was something in his tone that was not anticipation, exactly, but the quiet certainty of someone approaching a task they have prepared for thoroughly and expect to complete.
Then they were gone. The sound of them faded into the direction of the road, and the farm was silent except for the fire and the settling of ruined wood.
"Mara." Eli pulled against the rope with what he had left, which was not much. "Mara, look at me."
His sister lifted her head. Her eyes found his with the slow, searching quality of someone returning from a great distance, and what he saw in them — not fear, not pain, but a kind of bewildered trust, the expression of a child who still believed that her brother's gaze meant safety — took something from him that he understood he would not recover.
"Eli," she said.
"I'm getting us out." He worked his wrists against the rope, feeling the skin tear further, not caring. "I'm going to get us out, do you hear me? Just stay awake. Keep your eyes open."
His mother said his name softly. He couldn't look at her — not with the way she sounded, not yet. He focused on the rope, on the post, on the mechanical problem of the knots.
He was still working when Mara's clothes caught.
It began at the hem. A tongue of fire from the burning debris scattered across the yard, small and opportunistic, finding the fabric and climbing it with terrible patience. Eli heard himself make a sound he had no name for — something that lived below language, below thought, below everything he had constructed over nineteen years of himself.
"Mara—"
She looked down. She looked back at him. She did not scream, which was somehow the most unbearable thing in a day that had exhausted the category.
The fire found his mother next. And then, with the indiscriminate appetite that fire always has, it found him.
Pain of that magnitude does something to the architecture of time. The intervals stopped making sense. There was only the fire and the rope that held him to the post and his sister's face, which he fixed on and refused to release, because releasing it felt like a choice he was not willing to make even as everything else was taken.
He heard his mother's voice once more, low and continuous, and it took him too long to understand she was praying — not in the form of supplication, but in the older form, the one that is simply a way of speaking the names of the things you love before they are taken from you.
Mara's hand went still.
The rope was the last thing holding him upright.
What came out of Eli in those final, total minutes was not eloquent. He would not have recognized it as a vow, in the way that vows are typically understood — formal, witnessed, measured. It was more animal than that. It began as his sister's name and moved through his mother's and then kept going past the edge of language into something that was simply sound, simply breath, simply the last assertion of a body that refused, on some cellular level, to accept what the world was telling it.
But beneath the sound, beneath the heat and the ruin of everything he had been that morning, something else was happening. Something that had no patience for grief yet — grief was a country he would reach when he had the luxury of stillness — but had instead arrived at a clearing in him, cold and absolute and very quiet.
They had gone to the capital. That's where it begins, the leader had said, in the tone of someone who did not expect to be followed.
Eli's fingers found the frayed edge of the rope as the fire climbed higher.
That's where it begins.
He breathed the smoke in and breathed it back out and let the vow settle into him the way water settles into cracked earth — fully, permanently, reaching every place where something had broken open.
He would follow. He did not know how, or in what condition, or after how long. He knew only the cold arithmetic of what had been taken and what was owed, and the fire, for all its fury, had not touched that.