In this world, girls learned early how to make themselves smaller. Not out of modesty, but survival. Elara had mastered it—the way she lowered her eyes before men spoke, the way her footsteps barely disturbed the dust, the way her breathing softened when fear tightened her chest. Darkness did not frighten her; it instructed her. It taught her where not to stand, whom not to trust, and how easily a life could be misplaced.
Her mother used to say that night was only dangerous if you believed it was watching you. She stopped saying that the year she disappeared.
The city had not mourned. Cities like this never did. It absorbed loss the way stone absorbs rain—silently, without change. Elara continued living in the same narrow room, walls cracked like old bones, ceiling stained by leaks and years. Each morning she queued for ration bread, each evening she returned before the lamps dimmed. A girl alone learned the cost of being seen.
Romance, if it existed here, was a rumor—passed quietly between women who no longer expected it for themselves. Love was dangerous. It asked for vulnerability, and vulnerability invited theft. Elara told herself she did not need it. She told herself many things to survive.
But then there was him.
He appeared first as an interruption. A voice in the dark corridor one evening when she was late. Calm, almost careless. He did not step closer. That, more than anything, unsettled her. Men here always stepped closer. He spoke her name as if it were already familiar, as if it had weight.
She should have run. She didn't.
Their encounters were brief and unpromised—glances, half-sentences, shared silences that lingered longer than words. He never asked questions about her past. She never asked why his hands shook when he thought she wasn't looking. Whatever bound them was fragile, unspoken, and therefore dangerous.
The darkness watched.
Tragedy arrived the way it always did here: without warning, without fairness. One night, the tower sirens wailed—low, ancient sounds that meant disappearance, punishment, or worse. Elara returned to her room to find the door open and the floor marked with unfamiliar boots. Nothing was taken. Everything was changed.
By morning, she understood the truth no one had taught her aloud: survival was not enough. To remain alive in this world, she would have to lose parts of herself—or fight to keep them.
And love, she realized too late, was not a shelter.
It was a wound that refused to close.
Still, when the night came again, Elara did not hide.
She stood in the dark and waited—
not because she was fearless,
but because something inside her had already learned how to break.