Morning came quietly.
Toviro was the first to open his eyes. He sat up slowly, taking in the small room Haqi had given them.
To his left, Ozair was sprawled across his mat like he had been dropped from a height, one arm hanging off the edge, breathing slow and heavy.
To his right, on the other side of the room, Mina and Elina lay side by side. They looked asleep. They weren't.
Toviro turned his head and found Aryan sitting against the far wall, awake and already dressed, staring at nothing in particular with the focused look of someone whose mind had been working for hours.
"Couldn't sleep?" Toviro said quietly.
Aryan had already noticed him. He shook his head. "Kept thinking about Mayo. What he's going through right now."
Toviro nodded. There was nothing useful to say to that, so he said nothing.
The words lingered in the room.
One by one, the others began to stir. Even though Mina and Elina had already been awake, they shifted slightly as the room came to life. No one moved or spoke, but the quality of the silence in the room was different now, the kind that comes when everyone is awake and everyone knows everyone else is awake and no one wants to be the one to say so.
Ozair stopped snoring. His eyes opened a sliver, fixed on the ceiling, and stayed there.
Then Aryan turned his head toward Toviro.
"Hey." He paused, then turned his whole body to face him, pulling his knees up. "How did this happen?"
Toviro looked at him.
"We were ordinary people." Aryan's voice was quiet but steady. "Ordinary lives. Everything was normal. Then all of it just..."
He turned his face toward the window, toward the pale sky outside. "A prophecy... Ah, give me a break." He let out a slow breath.
"When did we get stuck carrying something this heavy? Tell me… Since when did we inherit this fate? The weight on our shoulders... it's just too damn heavy."
The room stayed silent.
But Mina raised herself slightly from where she lay. Her mouth parted faintly as silent tears slipped down the side of her face, and she made no move to wipe them away.
Ozair had gone completely still. He was staring at the ceiling, and the look on his face said Aryan had just said out loud what had been living inside all of them without a name.
Elina looked at the wall.
It wasn't that Aryan had never spoken before. He had. But not like this. He had always been the cold one, the composed one, the one who processed everything privately and showed the result but never the working.
No one had known this was sitting inside him. Not Ozair. Not Elina. And hearing it from him, in that quiet and precise voice, made it land harder than it would have from anyone else, because it meant it was real.
Toviro looked at him for a long moment. His expression hadn't changed, but something behind it had.
He closed his mouth, looked down, and let a breath out through his nose.
Then he said, "I don't have the answers, Aryan. I genuinely don't… I don't know when our lives turned into this." He paused.
"But everything you just said, every single word of it, is the exact truth. And if this is the weight we carry, then fine." His eyes found Aryan's. "But you're not carrying it alone."
Aryan held his gaze for a moment, then looked back at the window.
Nobody spoke after that. But the room felt different, the way a room feels after something that needed to be said has finally been said and everyone can breathe a little more honestly.
Within the hour they were up, dressed and moving.
Mina had said very little since the night before, but her eyes carried the kind of quiet determination that made it clear she had made up her mind about something and was simply waiting for the world to catch up.
They left through Haqi's front door and moved out into the winding streets, making their way toward the city.
The morning sun was still low when they passed through Kabul's main gate, but the city was already fully alive around them.
Merchants called out prices from either side of the road. Carts ground past over the uneven stone. Children moved through gaps in the crowd that adults couldn't find. Soldiers stood at intervals along the main road, watching the flow of people with the bored attention of men doing a job they have done a thousand times before.
Ozair stepped sharply to the side as a man carrying a tower of crates came through without looking.
"Does this city ever slow down?" he muttered.
"Doesn't seem like it," Aryan said.
They pushed through the crowd and reached Haqi's shop.
The front was still shuttered and locked. Haqi stepped forward, worked the lock open, and they filed inside and sat down on the carpet in the familiar low-ceilinged space.
Toviro looked at Haqi. "Where do we go first in situations like this?"
Haqi thought for a moment. "Public records office. That's where people go to file cases officially. If you want to make a legal claim, that's the place."
Ozair repeated it slowly under his breath.
"We go there second," Toviro said. "First we need more information about Mayo's situation. That means a guard station."
"Which one?" Aryan asked.
"The 73rd."
Aryan was quiet for a moment. Then he said, "If we walk into the station asking about Mayo, won't they get suspicious? We don't have time for that kind of trouble right now."
Elina glanced at Toviro. "He has a point."
Toviro considered it, then nodded. "You're right. We can't afford complications. We reference a different station." He paused. "The 72nd."
"So after that we go file the case?" Ozair asked.
"Correct."
Ozair stood. "Settled then. Let's go."
Toviro rose with him, and the others began to move. Then Toviro stopped and turned back.
Mina was still sitting. Her hands were in her lap and she was looking at the carpet between them, her jaw tight. She had barely slept. She had barely eaten.
Every hour since they had left the jungle without Mayo had been sitting on top of her in a way she hadn't been letting anyone see, but it showed now in the lines around her mouth and the way she was holding herself very carefully still.
"Stay here," Toviro said, gently.
Mina looked up immediately. "No. I'm going. I have to save my son."
Toviro stepped back to her. He knelt down and took her shoulders in both hands, and they stayed like that for a moment.
"I know," he said. "I know exactly what this is costing you. But you can't go like this, and we don't all need to go. It draws attention." He held her eyes.
"We made you a promise. We made it before we left and we're keeping it. Mayo comes home. That hasn't changed."
Mina looked at him for a long moment. Then the tension around her jaw softened, just slightly, and she looked down.
Toviro stood. He looked at Elina and said, "Stay with her."
"Roger," Elina said.
He was already walking toward the door when he stopped and turned once more. "You can go out into the city if you want. See the streets, find some air. There's no problem with that."
Elina nodded.
And then it was Toviro, Aryan, Ozair, and Haqi who stepped out of the shop and into the noise and movement of the morning city, the crowd swallowing them almost immediately, the day already pulling them forward toward whatever came next.