They were running before they had fully processed what they were seeing.
The street was wrong.
All of it.
Rocks jutted out of the earth in places they had no business being, torn upward from below as if the ground itself had been turned inside out by something with no patience for order.
Fires still burned in the rain, small and stubborn, clinging to the rubble of houses that had partially collapsed.
Others stood intact but gutted, their windows blown out, glass scattered across the pavement in patterns that glittered under the dark sky.
Bodies were scattered across the road. Some on the ground, some draped over the rocks.
None of them moving.
Elina closed her eyes as she ran. She could not look at them. She kept them closed until the shapes at the edges of her vision changed and she knew she had passed that stretch of road.
Ozair ran with his jaw set and his eyes moving over everything, reading it, trying to find what had caused this and feeling the anger build with every answer he couldn't find.
Aryan looked straight ahead and said nothing.
In his head, something moved fast and cold, the specific way his mind worked when the situation was bad enough that emotion couldn't afford to be the loudest thing in the room.
Toviro ran and felt things he had no names for.
Fear that wasn't fear exactly, something older and rawer, something that had no category in any system because he had never had a system for it.
These streets, these people, this damage—they reached him differently now.
They stayed.
They kept running until Mayo's house appeared ahead and they slowed without deciding to, their feet making the decision before their heads caught up.
They came to the wall beside the yard and stopped, breathing hard, and then they turned the corner.
The front door was wide open.
No lights inside. Just darkness, and a kind of silence that didn't belong to an empty house, but to one where something had gone wrong, something the walls had taken in and refused to release.
They looked at each other.
Then they moved toward it.
Toviro entered first.
His boots met the hallway floor and something else at the same time, something that shifted under his weight in a way the ground shouldn't.
He looked down.
Dark.
Red.
Spreading across the floor from somewhere ahead of him, not shaped, not placed, just there, the way something falls and stays where it lands.
He raised his eyes slowly and followed it back to its source.
Haruto Arasto lay across the hallway at an angle that no living person holds.
His face was turned upward.
The wounds across his chest, his head, and his hands were still open, fresh blood spread across them and along the floor, dark and wet, as if it had only just begun to settle.
He had cuts across his face deep enough to have filled it with blood, and it had dried in the lines of him, and he was very still.
Toviro shook his head, barely a movement. "It can't be him."
Elina's voice came out broken. "Oh my God."
Ozair dropped to his knees beside Haruto.
He put his hand on the man's arm and sat there for a moment that had no sound in it except the rain against the broken windows.
"No way," he said. "No way."
Aryan had gone pale.
He stood in the hallway with the blood on the floor between him and what he was looking at and said nothing because there was nothing to say.
Then from inside the living room, a voice.
"Help! Please! Someone help me!"
It was Mayo's mother.
They moved at the same time, all four of them, through the hallway and into the living room in a group.
Carrying themselves the way things carry themselves when they have stopped pretending at humanity.
Mayo's mother was pressed into the corner with her back against the wall, arms raised in front of her face, and one of the three had a blade raised above her.
Ozair didn't think.
His gauntlet was already on his hand and his hand was already moving.
The ground responded before he had finished the motion, stone erupting upward from the floor and slamming two of them sideways into the wall with a force that shook the room.
The third turned, registering the attack, beginning to react.
But Aryan was faster. He was already there.
He moved, and in the same instant his hands came up, water rushing out from his palms and pulling together midair, forming into twin daggers in his grip.
He stepped in fast, and his arms spun in a tight, fast circular motion, like a sharp turn taken at full speed, both daggers cutting outward together.
The water followed the motion, moving with him.
It surged forward in a spiraling current, wrapping around the figure and hitting it with everything the current had, driving it backward into the wall and holding it there until the body slid to the ground and didn't get up.
Elina raised Atar.
She had figured it out in the time between receiving it and this moment, some understanding arrived without instruction.
Her fingers found the string that wasn't quite there and pulled it back, feeling the wind gather in the bow's limbs and compress into something that had a point and a direction.
She aimed at the first person as it was trying to rise.
She released.
The arrow formed from the air currents as it left the bow.
It crossed the room in an instant and struck the man's head before he had fully stood, slamming him back into the wall where he collapsed, unconscious.
She was already pulling back again, aimed at the second, and released it.
Then the third, one motion flowing into the next without pause, three arrows in the time it would have taken most people to notch one.
Three figures.
All down.
All still.
The room settled.
Mayo's mother hadn't moved from the corner.
She was pressed against the wall with her hands still raised, looking at all of it, looking at the four people in her living room and the figures on the floor and the impossibility of what had just happened in the space of a few seconds.
Her breathing was audible.
Her eyes moved to Toviro.
"Who are you?" Her voice was barely holding itself together.
"Mrs. Mina." Toviro stepped toward her carefully. "It's me. It's Toviro. My appearance has changed but it is still me."
She looked at him.
Something in her face shifted slightly toward recognition.
Then her eyes drifted past him, past all of them, to the hallway.
She stood. Her legs shook with it.
She walked to the hallway doorway and looked through it and what she saw there took everything from her at once.
"NO."
The sound she made wasn't a word anymore.
She dropped to the floor beside her husband, grabbing his arm, calling his name again and again.
"No, you can't die. Don't leave me…" She shook his lifeless body. "Wake up. Please… wake up!"
Her cries broke into screams, filling the house, spilling out through the shattered windows into the rain, and the rain took it all in silence, never stopping.
None of them spoke.
There was nothing to say that would have meant anything against that sound.
They stood in the living room and the hallway as the rain came down on the broken street outside and Mayo's mother held her husband and would not let go.
Then Elina said it, barely above a breath. "Our parents."
The word landed in all of them at the same moment.
Ozair's expression changed completely.
Aryan was already turning.
They ran.
Back into the rain, back into the broken street.
They split as they reached the road, each running in a different direction, hearts racing ahead of their bodies, drenched and afraid, moving as fast as they could toward whatever waited at home.
The storm took them in without slowing.