Nobody moves.
We're all just standing there, staring at the far end of the ruins, watching that pile of rubble like it's about to do something terrible.
The sound comes again — slow, uneven scraping. Like something dragging itself across stone.
Liu Hao's hand is still on her weapon. Chen Wei hasn't moved at all, but the air around her feels different. Tighter. The grief from a second ago hasn't gone anywhere — it's just hardened into something sharp.
I'm the one standing closest to it.
Great.
I take one step forward. "Hello?" I say, which is probably the dumbest thing I could have said, but nothing else came to mind.
Silence.
Then the rubble shifts, and a broken beam slides off the top of the pile and hits the ground with a crack.
And from behind it —
A hand.
Small. Covered in dust. Fingers curling around the edge of a stone, pulling.
I move before I think about it.
I cross the distance fast and drop to my knees.
It's a girl. Maybe seven or eight. She's wedged herself into the gap between two fallen beams, curled up small, clutching something to her chest — a flower, dried and crumbling, like she picked it a long time ago and just never let go.
She flinches when she sees me.
"Hey." I keep my voice low. "It's okay. I'm not going to hurt you."
She stares at me with huge, red-rimmed eyes. Her whole face is puffy from crying. Not recent crying — the kind that's been going on for days. Maybe longer.
I sit back on my heels and give her space. "You can come out," I say. "Slowly. I've got you."
She doesn't move right away. Just stares at me, deciding.
Then she looks past me.
And her whole face changes.
I turn around.
Chen Wei is standing a few feet back, completely still. She's staring at the girl like she's seeing something she wasn't sure still existed.
The girl scrambles out of the gap so fast she nearly falls. I catch her without thinking, my hands under her arms, and she barely notices — she's already reaching past me, already moving toward Chen Wei with everything she has left.
"Wei-jie!" Her voice breaks apart on the name, high and desperate.
Chen Wei is already moving too. She catches the girl, pulls her in, holds on tight.
The girl buries her face in Chen Wei's shoulder and just — falls apart.
Liu Hao makes a sound like she's been punched somewhere soft. She turns away slightly, jaw tight, blinking fast at nothing.
I stay where I am, a few steps back, watching a little girl cry like she's been saving it up for weeks. Maybe she has been.
After a while — I don't know how long — the crying gets quieter. Not gone. Just... smaller. The girl pulls back just enough to look up at Chen Wei's face, her own face blotchy and wet.
"I kept coming back," she says, her voice tiny. "Every day. I kept coming back to look." She glances toward the ruins, toward the direction of what I'm guessing was a shop of some kind, and her chin wobbles. "Mama said she'd come find me but she didn't come and I waited and waited and—"
"I know," Chen Wei says quietly. She smooths the girl's hair back from her face, gentle. "I know, Little Carp."
Little Carp.
The name settles something — makes her real in a way that "the girl" didn't.
Little Carp scrubs her eyes with the back of her hand and takes a shaky breath. "It happened so fast," she says. "I was in the flower shop helping Mama and then there was noise and then—" She stops. Swallows hard. "They were flying. The bad ones. Up in the sky." She points upward with one small finger, and the gesture is so simple and so awful that I have to look away for a second. "Lots of them. And then the fire came and Mama grabbed me and said run. She said run and don't look back."
The ruins are very quiet.
"So I ran," Little Carp says. "I didn't look back."
Nobody says anything.
She's still holding that dried flower, I notice. Crumpled now from being squeezed too hard. She probably doesn't even realize she's doing it.
"You've been alone this whole time?" Liu Hao asks, careful.
Little Carp shakes her head. "There's others. At my house." She points toward the tree line — the dark stretch of forest just past the edge of the ruins. "Papa built it small so no one comes. We've been hiding."
Chen Wei looks up sharply. "Others?"
"Mn." Little Carp nods, sniffling. "Some people from the village. And old man Shen — he's hurt but he's okay I think. And some of Wei-jie's friends." She pauses. "They're loud at night sometimes. Crying."
Liu Hao and Chen Wei exchange a look I can't fully read.
"Take us there," Chen Wei says.
The forest house is small.
That's the first thing I notice — it's genuinely small, the kind of place built for a family of three on a quiet afternoon, not for however many people have crammed themselves inside it and into the small clearing around it. There's a blanket hanging over the window. Voices, low and careful, from inside.
Little Carp pushes the door open and squeezes through first.
A beat of silence.
Then noise — sudden, overlapping, chaotic. Someone says she's here and someone else says who's with her and then the door swings fully open and I'm just standing in the back watching a small forest house absolutely erupt.
They come out in pieces. Villagers, older people, a couple of kids who grab onto Little Carp immediately. A man with a bandaged arm who I'm guessing is old man Shen, moving carefully, eyes sharp. And then —
Others. Younger. Dressed well, even now, even after everything — the kind of clothes that don't look right covered in forest dust and dried tears. They come out slower. Like they're not sure what they're walking into.
One of them sees Chen Wei and stops dead.
"...Young Lady?" Her voice comes out barely above a whisper. She's maybe a year or two older than Chen Wei, her hair half-undone, her eyes red-rimmed. Behind her, two more stop in the same way — that same frozen, disbelieving look, like they're seeing a ghost.
Then the first girl's face crumples entirely and she crosses the clearing in three steps and grabs Chen Wei's hands in both of hers, and she's shaking, and she's trying to say something but it keeps breaking apart before it becomes words.
More of them come forward. All of them the same — that same fractured relief, that same barely-held grief, that same you're alive you're alive you're actually alive written all over their faces.
I take a small step back.
Liu Hao appears beside me, quiet. For once she doesn't have anything to say either. She just watches Chen Wei stand in the middle of all of them, holding on and being held, and her expression is something I've never seen on her before.
I look around at the clearing. At the villagers hovering at the edges. At the kids clinging to Little Carp. At old man Shen watching everything with tired, careful eyes.
All of this.
Hidden in a forest, in a house built small enough that no one would come looking.
Waiting.
I shove my hands in my pockets and breathe out slowly.
I still don't know what happened here. I still don't know who flew in the sky and brought fire down on a clan that was fine just months ago. I still don't know who the sword in the ruins belongs to, or what the bracelet means, or any of it.
But I know what it looks like when people have been surviving on nothing but hope for a very long time.
And I know what it looks like when that hope finally gets something back.
Little Carp tugs on my sleeve.
I look down. She's looking up at me with those big red-rimmed eyes, the dried flower still in her hand.
"Are you Wei-jie's friend?" she asks.
I think about it for a second.
"Yeah," I say. "I think so."
She considers this seriously. Then she nods, like I've passed some kind of test, and goes back to the other kids.
I almost smile.
Almost.