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People emptied through the fence in a rush of smoke and shouting. Gale was at the front, herding bodies into the Meadow while the air turned sharp in his lungs. He still felt the weight of a boy slung over his back, ribs like kindling, still heard the scream of a woman who wouldn’t leave without her husband. He shoved them, begged them, cursed them toward the trees until his throat cracked. Heat pressed on him, iron-hot, the ground trembling under the first bombs. A child cried in a man’s arms. His brothers stumbled ahead. His mother’s face had gone tight with terror.
But he hadn’t seen her.
Not once in the crowd of Seam faces streaked with soot, not in the chaos by the fence, not after when they gathered in the field to count who had made it. He told himself she must have already gotten out, that someone else had pulled her through, that she was with the merchants collecting on the far side of the Meadow. But when he searched the cluster of white-faced families, no glimpse of her, no quiet shape of her in the dusk.
He told himself she’d gotten out earlier. That she’d been pulled along with her family, or that someone else had brought her through a different break in the fence. The lie came easy in the first hours, when his chest still burned from running, when the camp still throbbed with the noise of grief.
But by the next morning, when the district gathered its dead and counted the missing, no one said her name.
So he went back.
He wasn’t the only one. Men who could still stand upright and swing a pick went with him. Teenagers old enough to carry water or dig with their hands followed too. They crossed the broken fence, into what was left of Twelve.
The Seam still stood, crooked and scorched, roofs torn open like wounds, but houses recognizable.
The merchant quarter was something else. It was as if a second sun had come down on them.
The ground crunched underfoot, glass melted into black puddles, brick powdered to ash. Iron gates were bent, shopfronts flattened. They moved in a line, listening for cries, for coughing under the rubble. Sometimes they found them. A boy pulled out from under a stairwell, coughing up soot. A woman pinned by a beam, ribs broken but alive.
They carried each one back through the fence. Each survivor made Gale push harder. Survival was possible, the lie said. Hold on a little longer.
But when he came to stand in the gutted square, to stare at the black shells where the Mayor’s row had stood, his heart twisted. He couldn’t stop picturing her there. That was where she would have gone. Back to her parents’ house. Back to the square.
He didn’t let himself think about what had passed between them before the bombs fell. He only remembered sharp words, the kind that left a sting. She’d been angry. Hurt in a way he hadn’t known how to fix.
And then the sirens. He hadn’t had time to make it right.
Now the houses had fallen in on themselves. Walls split down the spine. Fences ripped from their posts. He called her name anyway, voice hoarse and raw. He shouted until it was only air scraping his throat.
The others didn’t look at him. They had their own ghosts to chase.
At dusk, when the men trudged back with whatever living they’d found, Gale lingered at the edge of the square and stared into the ruin until someone shouted for him to move. Always the last to turn away. Always looking.
By the fourth day, fewer voices answered from the rubble. On the fifth, fewer still. On the sixth, none. The silence was its own answer. He went back anyway.
Every stone he pulled loose, he thought of her. His hands bled, skin split and raw, and he hardly noticed. The ache in his chest drowned everything else.
He thought the way she lifted her chin when she was angry, how her voice stayed steady even when her eyes wavered. The curve of her wrist when she poured tea, spice lingering on her hands. Mornings when she tugged him back into bed. The way she could turn a room with words, quick and exact, with a wit he hadn’t expected. The grit that made him forget she’d been raised soft.
He hadn’t told her any of that. Not with the kind of words she might have needed. He’d given scraps—a look when no one watched, a touch on her sleeve. Nothing whole. Nothing that could carry the weight of what came after.
Now there was rubble, ash, the stink of iron. He dug like it might count for something, as if labor could buy her back.
The others shouted names, prayers, curses. Gale shouted hers. Silence answered. He told himself silence didn’t mean what it meant.
Fear sat in him like a second heartbeat. He’d known fear before. Fear of hunger, of Peacekeepers, of the mines swallowing men whole. This was different. It wasn’t sharp and sudden, it was slow, gnawing, and constant. The fear that she was gone. The fear that the last words she’d spoken to him would stay the last.
He hadn’t been gentle with her. He thought about that often, while the stones scraped his knuckles, while dust filled his throat. She’d deserved better than the blunt edge of his temper. She’d deserved someone who could meet her steady gaze without flinching. Instead, he’d given her the hardness he gave the world. And she had given him something else. Something he hadn’t even recognized as love until it was too late.
That guilt pressed harder than the stones. He thought of her face when she’d walked away, the tightness of her mouth, the hurt she hadn’t tried to hide. He had let her go. He had let her walk back toward the square alone.
Now he combed through the ruins of as if it might undo the choice. As if, by sheer force, he could pull her from the wreckage and place her back where she belonged. He imagined it so vividly that sometimes, when the smoke shifted, he'd see her. He hated himself for that hope, but he couldn’t stop.
Every brick he lifted, every beam he shifted, carried the same thought, let her be here; let me find her. And each time, the thought fell through his fingers like dust.
He didn’t like remembering it. Didn’t like how easily the scene replayed in his head. She’d stood near the table, her back straight, hands clenched tight at her sides. She wasn’t one to raise her voice but her words cut all the same.
You hurt me worse than anyone ever has.
He’d wanted to argue, to tell her she didn’t understand, that she was wrong. He’d thrown words back at her, defensive and brittle. She hadn’t listened.
I hate you.
He’d never heard her say that to anyone before. She’d been angry with him plenty of times, exasperated, disappointed. But that was different. This had been raw, a wound she couldn’t hide. And he hadn’t followed her out the door when she left. He’d assumed she’d gone to her parent's.
And when the sirens came, when the bombs fell...
Those were the last words he pulled from her mouth. Not fondness, not forgiveness, not even indifference.
Hate.
He told himself she hadn’t meant it, that anger had sharpened her tongue. He clung to that as tightly as he clung to the lies about her escape.
But the truth cut through both. She had been hurt, and it had been him who hurt her. That was what she carried with her in the end.
The others thought his silence was exhaustion. That the soot in his eyes, the rawness of his throat, the hard set of his jaw were just the marks of labor. They didn’t see the loop of memory behind it, the words replaying, the look on her face as she said them.
By the eighth day, he was the only one who went back. Everyone knew if anyone had survived, they wouldn’t still be waiting to be found.
His mind knew it. His hands refused. They tore at wreckage until blood smeared and his arms shook. His body moved like a dog trained past reason.
At night, when the Meadow went still, he lay awake with those words pressing against the inside of his skull. You hurt me worse than anyone. I hate you. He’d turn them over like stones, trying to wear them smooth. They never lost their edge.
Once, in the space between sleep and waking, he heard boots in the grass and the tent flap lift. His body betrayed him. He jerked upright, heart pounding, eyes fixed on the opening like she might step through, dirty and ash-streaked. Shame burned hot after. He hated himself for waiting on something he knew would never come.
Like a dog, ears pricked, body tense, waiting for footsteps.
He told himself he was stronger than this. He’d survived worse. He’d lost his father, buried friends, watched children starve. He kept walking, kept hunting, kept feeding the ones who still breathed. None of that prepared him for this kind of waiting. Every small sound in the dark twisted hope into him. Guilt turned to a hunger that couldn’t be fed.
Some mornings, when he went back into the ruins, he caught himself searching for something—anything—she might have left behind. A ribbon, a book, a shard of her life he could hold. He found nothing. The fire had eaten her whole.
He wondered if she meant it. Those last words. If hate and heartache were what she carried at the end. The thought gnawed worse than silence. It would be easier if he could believe she’d forgiven him, if he could pretend she died loving him. He didn’t have that comfort.
He told himself it didn’t matter. The dead didn’t carry hate. The dead didn’t carry anything at all.
He carried it.