When Soufiane came back into himself the world smelled like coals and iron and rain before the rain had come. He coughed, mouth full of grit. The beam had crushed his ribs but not his will; hands were searching under wood, angry voices above, the chaos a live thing. For a blind heartbeat he feared he had died and gone to a place where men hurt each other for sport.
Then a hand—Abderrazak's, all callus and warmth—found his wrist and hauled until the wood cracked away and Soufiane tumbled free into a spatter of mud and blood. The sky was smeared with smoke and dawn, and the sawmill was a thing between ruin and funeral pyre. Men were crawling like rats from the wreckage. Some were dead. Some were screaming. Some were running.
Mourad lay close by, coughing, eyes wild. He gripped Soufiane's sleeve with the last of his strength. "You came," he rasped. "You came and—"
"You stay alive," Soufiane said, pushing the words into him like medicine. Mourad nodded, the look in his eyes settling into a hard, grateful thing.
They had hours, if that, before Ayoub's men regrouped. Ayoub himself had vanished into the forest after the explosion—gone either to lick wounds or to lure them into a deeper trap. But he had left his mark. He had turned the sawmill into an altar of vengeance and then walked away to gather those hungry for payback.
"We can't stay," Abderrazak said simply. "He'll harry us to the road. We push north, hit the old quarry—your base idea. We get a defensible place and we pick our next moment."
Soufiane listened, but his mind was elsewhere—on the thing he had found in the dirt when the timber came down. He dug it free with his free hand, fingers fumbling through mud. It was a small wooden toy, a crudely carved boat, its paint flaked but still stubbornly blue. He stared until the edges stung. He fit the toy in his palm and felt the weight of everything he'd been searching for.
Cynthia—he thought, the neighbor's name surfacing like a sleep-lost memory. The child's small voice. The face he had not yet seen. The promise that had led him across oceans and borders.
"Did you see him?" Mourad mouthed.
"You were gone when Ayoub raided them," Soufiane said. His voice was rough, but fierce. "We have to move. We find Younes."
They moved as a unit—ragged, bleeding, but alive. Amal leaned on Meriem, and Abderrazak jammed the stolen rifles into a pack. The rescued men shuffled, some weeping quietly, others staring through the smoke with eyes that would not unsee what had happened. They moved toward the quarry, toward the hidden caves, toward a place to breathe and to plan.
Ayoub would hunt. He would use the forest and fear and fire. He would come back to finish what had begun. Soufiane knew that the war was not simply about murder and revenge; it was the war for what was left of decency in a world gone raw. He would have to end Ayoub because Ayoub's survival meant a future of terror for everyone: camps of the enslaved, butchered villages, the spread of men who believed force made law.
They reached the quarry by nightfall, its caves yawning like patient mouths. Abderrazak barricaded entrances with stone and timber salvaged from the ruins; Mourad and three others carried what medicine they could. Soufiane sat perched on a low ledge and looked at the horizon. The toy boat lay on his palm, blue against his skin.
"Tomorrow," he said to the small circle that formed around him—Amal, Meriem, Abderrazak, Mourad—"we do two things. We heal who we can. Then we find Ayoub. We finish it."
Abderrazak's lips curled. "You mean we hunt the hunter."
Soufiane cradled the little boat as if it were fragile, because it was. "We end this. We end him."
They slept little. Night sharpened into day. They turned every lead and rumor into a map—scout reports, stolen men who'd slipped away, the names of routes Ayoub favored. Soufiane felt the old training rise: listen, wait, pick the bone.
When they struck, it was at dawn, on the ridge above a small clearing where Ayoub's men had come to pit and sharpen blades. Ayoub had returned with a smaller, angrier force—fa- tigue and pride feeding his cruelty. He stood framed in a doorway of light with a pistol at his hip, face split with the hunger of a man who had been humiliated.
Soufiane moved like winter. He had no room for hesitation. The quarry had given them edge and cover, and Abderrazak's men—those few loyal—cut off the exits. Mourad and Meriem took the flank. Amal, her breath steady with morphine and recovery, provided the signal: a single cry that broke the morning into a new sort of violence.
Ayoub turned, surprised at first, then furious.
"You come to die?" he barked, a laugh in his voice that sounded older than him.
Soufiane did not answer. He stepped into the light, toy boat clenched in his fist as if it were all the proof he needed. The world narrowed to distance and breath. They moved toward each other—the hunted and his hunter—until blades were raised. Ayoub had a knife; Soufiane had steel and the memory of every name lost.
They traded strikes like men who had learned violence as language. Ayoub fought like a cornered beast—brute force and snap. Soufiane answered with lean efficiency: a block, a twist, a cut that cost. Around them the fight was smaller—men grappling, falling.
Then Ayoub lunged, and the edge of his blade found the space under Soufiane's ribs. Pain razored through him. He tasted salt. He thought of Younes and the blue paint of a toy boat, and everything steadied.
He raised his hand and drove his blade home—no flourish, no cruelty, just the clean end of something that had to stop.
Ayoub staggered, eyes wide with disbelief and a spark of respect, then slumped. His breath left him in a sound Soufiane would never forget. Men around them stopped, stunned into silence as the largest of their breeds fell like any other man.
Soufiane looked down at the fallen tyrant. He felt no exultation, only a bone-deep tiredness, like someone who had been rowing all night and finally let the oar slip. He felt the look of the men around him change slightly—less fear, but more of the dangerous weariness of people who had learned that justice costs blood.
When it was over, they dragged Ayoub's body out of the light and burned it on a pyre—mockery and warning together. The flames took the smell of his arrogance and turned it to ash. The men who had followed Ayoub looked on, some weeping, some silent. The valley had been bled, and with it a monstrous idea.
Soufiane stood a moment longer, the little toy in his hand now black at one edge from the fire. He felt Mourad near him and he knew the debt was paid—not with joy but with a weight that would last a lifetime.
They left the pyre before dawn had finished its wash of the sky. The group was smaller now; they had lost and saved and changed. The road ahead would take them north to the Netherlands—there would be a son to find, a neighbor named Cynthia to meet, and the slow, hard work of building something like family again.
But for the first time in a long while, Soufiane could imagine a map that ended not in ruin, but in a place that could be called home.