Khalil built a fire for their dinner that day, Classic spitfire in a camping trip.
The flames caught low and held there, gold at the core where they were hottest and copper at the edges where they pressed against the garden's sourceless light, the two kinds of warmth negotiating a colour neither of them owned.
The smell that came off it had no business existing forty-three metres below the surface of anything.
It rose anyway — old, rich and animal-warm, the smell of a thing done correctly. Two metres away the camp stove sat cold and unused.
Khalil had looked at it on the morning of day seven with the flat expression he used for things he had decided were wrong and chosen not to say, and had built this fire every day since from materials whose provenance the garden had provided from somewhere.
