The noise did not stop all at once.
It thinned.
Like smoke drifting apart, like breath slowly returning after being held too long.
Iyisha sat in Malcolm's lap on the balcony of a building, a blanket wrapped around both of them, her back pressed to his chest while the world below tried to remember how to exist again. Gunfire had become distant, then rare, then gone, replaced by voices that carried grief instead of rage.
People moved through the square in small, broken groups.
Some knelt beside bodies.
Some called names that did not answer back.
Some clung to one another as if letting go would undo the fact that they had survived.
Below them, the surviving raiders were dragged out from hiding places, hands raised, faces stripped of bravado, and shot without ceremony. Iyisha did not flinch at the sound. She barely seemed to register it at all.
She was too aware of Malcolm.
