"When you are done, then you can have dinner."
Himitsu's voice was calm. Too calm. The kind of calm that means you have disappointed someone who does not raise their voice because they do not need to.
She handed us a plate of salted biscuits and a jug of water as if we were visiting children instead of the cause of a small national incident.
"I was not expecting to sit so long," I muttered, dragging a rag across the shelves. Dust clung stubbornly to lacquered wood, to carved edges, to objects that had watched generations come and go without ever once running off to Stone Garden unannounced.
Heiwa knelt on the floor, wiping in clean, deliberate strokes. The intensity of it made it look like I'd suggested we abandon the province and start selling oranges by the roadside.
"If anything," I shot back, dipping the rag into the bucket, "you were the one who got us to Stone Garden."
"If we had gone to the shop first and informed everyone—"
She stopped mid-swipe, knuckles whitening around the cloth.
We weren't really scolded. That would've been easier. Anger flares and dies. Disappointment lingers. It sets up residence.
The sun was high, merciless. Heat crawled along my spine. Sweat tracing slow lines down my back as we moved from shelf to shelf, room to room—undoing nothing, but pretending labour could balance recklessness.
"Have you put out the futon?" Heiwa asked, irritation hovering just beneath the surface.
"Yes, I have." The answer left my mouth sharper than necessary.
Outside, cicadas screamed into the afternoon as if the sky itself were overexposed.
"Even the newspaper had news on the incident," Heiwa said, wringing out her rag. "Which made matters even more complicated."
I let out a short laugh. "But it seems the Chairman was not wrong about it being a gas explosion."
The memory of the headline rose in my mind—
LOCAL GAS LEAK CAUSES STRUCTURAL DAMAGE. NO CASUALTIES.
Clean. Simple. Contained.
My smile died halfway.
A gas explosion.
As if reality were a chalkboard someone could casually wipe down and rewrite before the public woke up.
Was that all it took? A statement, a headline, a collective nod—and history rearranges itself?
"Was it the person Ezra said was tracking us?" Heiwa murmured.
I bit into a biscuit. Too salty. It scraped against my tongue.
"Did you say something?" I asked, pretending I hadn't heard but had replied too quickly.
She let the silence hang long enough to mean something. Then— "It's nothing. Let's carry on."
Where is Ezra?
The question hovered like humidity—thick, unavoidable.
"I can't believe that our weapons were seized," I muttered as I opened the storage room.
Inside was a mess that looked like it would consume the rest of the day. Crates stacked carelessly. Objects tagged, retagged. Confiscated from whom? From what version of events?
"It's a good thing we left the worst for last," Heiwa replied.
Or maybe we always do.
Dinner was hotpot—steam rising in soft spirals, beef and broccoli simmering in broth rich enough to forgive the world for a moment. Normally it would have felt like comfort.
I chewed slowed than necessary.
Tonight it felt ceremonial.
Miss Hazel and Zinnia had moved out while we were gone. The empty space they left behind was louder than their voices ever were. Knowing everyone had been looking for us—searching, worrying, adjusting the narrative in real time—sat heavy in my chest.
My throat dried; I reached for water more often than food.
No one mentioned Stone Garden.
No one mentioned the vacuum.
No one mentioned how the air had been stolen from our lungs like a page torn clean from a book.
Instead: Gas explosion.
Contained.
Resolved.
History, overwritten before it could stain.
After dinner, I stayed in the bath longer than necessary. The water cooled around me, but I didn't move. My skin still felt strange—like it remembered something the newspaper refused to print.
Steam blurred the edges of the room. For a second, I wondered if this was how it started—truth dissolving into condensation.
"We messed up," I said when Heiwa returned to the room.
She did not face me. "Where's Ezra?"
"I don't know."
We lay back to back, separated by little more than fabric and pride.
The sky outside was moonless. The air dense, unmoving. Even the night felt edited—like someone had decided stars were unnecessary tonight.
Leqdic n uxxam d iɣeblan.
The cleaning of the house and the washing of mistakes.
But you can scrub floors. You can polish shelves. You can rewrite headlines.
What you cannot easily clean is the feeling that something else rewrote you first.
And somewhere in the silence between us, that thought refused to be wiped away.