where Layaq, Usman, and Madhav are caught during their descent by an advancing patrol—and in the desperate attempt to flee across the frozen Jhelum, one of them falls beneath the ice while the others can do nothing but call out his name into the blizzard?

The cold arrived not as wind, but as warning.

Even before they reached the riverbank, the air began to change. It no longer moved. It pressed. Not like a hand, not like a storm—but like breath sucked from the lungs without asking. The kind of cold that doesn’t bite. It burrows. Deep. Beneath skin. Into the hollows between bone and will.

Layaq was the first to notice the change in the silence.

They had taken the northern descent, the one that skirted the stone quarries and dipped through the grove of poplars now stripped bare by the season. Their boots sank into a thin crust of ice layered over brittle leaves. Every step was loud in that peculiar way winter makes sound—too loud, yet utterly swallowed by the world around it.

Usman walked ahead, head low, scarf drawn tightly over his mouth. His breath puffed out in short bursts that trailed behind him like pale ghosts. The satchel on his shoulder carried little now—only flint, a torn shawl, and a jar of salt. His body was tense, not from fatigue, but from restraint. He had learned long ago that panic draws bullets. Calm keeps you moving.

Madhav was between them, his pace slower, his cough tight again.

He hadn’t spoken since they left the ridge.

He hadn’t needed to.

Each movement of his hand—gripping a stone wall, pausing to adjust the band of cloth tied around his ribs—told the others what they needed to know.

He was holding on.

But barely.

Below them now stretched the Jhelum, a broad ribbon of slate grey, its surface partially frozen, patched with sheets of white that shimmered faintly under the morning haze. In some places the river still flowed, sluggish and black. But here—near the bend by the abandoned pier—it lay frozen thick. The kind of ice that looks solid, but carries its treachery just beneath the skin.

“We cut across,” Usman said, without turning.

“No bridge?” Layaq asked.

“Too far. They’ll expect that.”

Layaq didn’t argue.

He adjusted the strap of his coat and pulled his sleeves down tighter.

They stepped onto the bank carefully.

The reeds here were brittle and pale, their tips bent by frost, their roots half-frozen in the mud. Footprints from jackals or stray dogs laced the shore in chaotic paths. But no human tracks. Not yet.

The first step onto the ice was tentative.

Usman’s boot touched, held, shifted.

Then another step.

No crack.

Just a faint groan from somewhere deeper down.

The river was holding—for now.

Madhav hesitated.

Usman looked back.

“It’s wide. But if we keep spread out, don’t stop, we’ll make it.”

Layaq moved beside Madhav, steadying him as he stepped forward.

The ice flexed beneath them like a held breath.

Step by step, they crossed.

The sound changed with each footfall.

Not a snap. Not a break.

But a kind of muttered whisper from beneath—like the river was remembering things it wasn’t supposed to speak.

Halfway across, the wind returned.

Sharp, sudden, slicing in from the east.

And with it—a sound.

Boots.

Distant, but distinct.

On the far ridge, two black shapes appeared.

Uniforms.

Rifles.

Patrol.

Usman froze only for a second, then turned back sharply.

“Don’t run,” he said. “Walk. Steady. We’re almost—”

And that’s when it happened.

A sound different from all others.

A crack.

Thin at first.

Then deep.

The kind that cuts not just through ice, but through bone.

Madhav had stumbled.

His right foot struck a thinner patch.

Layaq reached for him.

Too late.

The ice beneath Madhav gave way like glass collapsing under weight long denied.

There was no scream.

Only the thud of his body hitting the water and the loud, awful gasp as freezing liquid stole his breath.

“Madhaaav!” Usman shouted, already turning back.

But the ice around the break was spidering now—long fractures reaching out like veins from a wounded heart.

Madhav’s head surfaced, mouth open, hands clawing at the edges, blood already retreating from his fingers.

Usman dropped flat, crawling forward, spreading his weight.

Layaq crouched low, reaching a hand.

“Madhav! Hold!”

But Madhav couldn’t.

His lips were blue.

His eyes wide.

One arm gripped Layaq’s wrist, just for a second—long enough for a name to pass between them.

Then the crack widened.

And he was gone.

Beneath.

Swallowed.

As if the river had always been waiting to take him back.

Where Usman and Layaq, frozen and breathless, remain kneeling at the ice’s edge—until one glove floats up, still gripping Madhav’s rosary—and with it comes the unspoken vow that his name will not be erased by the current?

The sound of the river after the fall was not silence.

It was mourning.

A thick, humming stillness that pressed down on everything—the sky, the trees, the air in their lungs. It was not absence, not the end of sound, but the echo of something swallowed so violently that the world around it forgot how to respond. The hole in the ice, jagged and uneven, gaped open like a wound refusing to clot. Around it, the surface pulsed faintly, rising and sinking in trembling ripples as if the river itself still felt the weight of the man it had just devoured.

Usman did not move.

He lay flat on his stomach just meters from where Madhav had fallen through. His breath came out in frantic clouds, short and uneven, vanishing instantly into the cold air. One of his palms, pressed against the surface, was slick with melting frost. The other clenched so tightly into a fist that his knuckles had gone white beneath the glove. His jaw was locked, his teeth grinding together, not out of anger, but from the unbearable pressure building behind his eyes—of having reached too late by seconds that now felt like centuries.

Layaq knelt beside the breach, knees pressed hard into the thin crust of ice that hadn’t yet betrayed them. He leaned forward, eyes scanning the dark water beneath. His breath was completely still now. Not because he was calm—but because something inside him had forgotten how to inhale. One hand reached outward, hovering just above the opening, as though still trying to grab what had already slipped beyond flesh, beyond reach.

The surface beneath them groaned once—soft, warning, cold.

Then it settled.

Layaq remained kneeling.

He didn’t blink.

He didn’t move.

And then—just beneath the surface—a shape stirred.

Not large.

Not full.

A small object, wavering in the dim current under the ice. For a moment it was only a blur, caught in the strange half-light that filtered through the frozen skin of the river. Then it rolled slightly, and a patch of brown wool turned upward.

A glove.

Thin, water-heavy, clinging to itself in the way wet cloth does in winter. It floated lazily, caught in the slow undercurrent beneath the crack. It rotated once. Inside it, wrapped loosely in the fingers, something darker, smaller, shimmered faintly.

A strand of beads.

Madhav’s tasbih.

The rosary he kept always folded in the corner of his pocket—not for piety, but for counting, for marking time during long nights, for whispering through numbers when words became too dangerous. The beads moved in a slow spiral, catching light like scattered embers in smoke.

Layaq stared.

And then his forehead lowered, touching the cold ice.

It was not a gesture of worship.

It was surrender.

Not to fate, not to despair, but to the river—to its will, to its refusal.

He placed his palm next to the break, fingers splayed wide, as if trying to anchor himself to something that had already receded beneath the surface.

Usman crawled closer.

Not to stop him.

Not to speak.

But to be near.

To witness.

The rosary floated gently away from the glove.

Its thread had loosened, one bead slipping off, then another, rolling slowly under the ice in separate directions—like fragments of breath released one by one.

Layaq closed his eyes.

He did not speak Madhav’s name aloud.

Because saying it would make the loss too final.

Too irreversible.

Instead, he reached into his own pocket, pulled out the small copper coin he had carried for five winters—the one with the faded image of a lion and an unreadable date—and pressed it into the ice, just beside the fracture.

A marker.

An offering.

A promise.

Usman finally rose to one knee.

His breath was slower now, though colder.

He glanced down at the glove one last time—still floating, still slowly spinning like a prayer wheel without a hand.

“We cannot stay,” he said, voice dry, raw.

Layaq nodded, not as agreement, but because there was nothing else left to do.

The two men backed away slowly, careful with each step, retracing their movements across the ice. Neither looked behind them again. The hole did not close. The river did not speak. But as they reached the edge of the opposite bank, a crow called once from the trees—its voice harsh and solitary, cutting through the air like the last stroke of a bell.

And in that sound, they knew:

Madhav’s body was already part of the current.

And the current did not return what it carried.

Zooni, sensing the shift in the air and unable to sleep, begins folding blankets and boiling lentils before sunrise—preparing not for breakfast, but for news that arrives on the faces of men before it is ever spoken aloud?

The first hour before dawn was the hour of thinnest breath.

It was not yet morning, but it was no longer night. The stars above the valley had faded—not into sunlight, but into something stranger, something that resembled forgetting. Even the cold had changed its nature. It no longer bit. It pressed. Heavy and unmoving, like the memory of snow upon a grave.

Inside the cave, Zooni sat alone by the fire.

She had not closed her eyes since the men left. She had listened to their departure in full: the muted scuff of Usman’s boots against the stone, the clearing of Madhav’s throat as he gathered his shawl, the quiet discipline of Layaq’s silence. There had been no farewell. No murmured prayer. They had simply gone. That was their way.

She had not woken Ameena.

There was no point in giving the child worry she did not yet have language to carry.

Instead, Zooni had remained seated, her knees drawn under her shawl, her back straight, her eyes fixed on the fire that she kept alive not for warmth, but for continuity. The flames had dwindled during the night into a soft bowl of coals, red and breathing. She had not fed it often—only enough to keep it from vanishing. There was a kind of reverence in that restraint. The fire did not need to rise. It needed to remember.

She had folded the blankets.

All of them except one.

Madhav’s.

It still lay where he had slept, a faint crease pressed into the center where his body had once curled against the cough. She had not touched it. Not to clean. Not to smooth. She did not even glance at it often. But she felt its presence behind her, like a thought that hangs just outside language.

The lentils had begun to simmer. She had not meant to cook. But the hands have a memory of their own. Before the sun had touched the lip of the cave’s entrance, she had poured water into the blackened pot, added the red lentils from the smallest bag—the ones she saved for nights when someone returned with stories. She had stirred them slowly, watching the steam rise like breath from a sleeping child.

Three bowls now sat in front of her.

Not four.

Not because she expected loss.

But because the space for it had already opened in her. Quietly. Without announcement. As naturally as dawn creeps into the corners of a shuttered room.

She did not cry.

Tears were for the luxury of collapse.

And she had lived too many mornings to trust that collapse ever came when called.

Instead, she lifted one of the bowls, wrapped the hem of her shawl around the clay base, and held it near her face. She did not eat. She only breathed it in.

The scent of lentil and turmeric.

Of steam.

Of waiting.

Ameena stirred in her sleep behind her.

The girl murmured something—nothing coherent. A string of vowels or perhaps a name. Zooni turned slightly, just enough to see the girl’s hands twitch against the edge of her blanket. She did not wake her. Let dreams rise. Let sleep offer what the world could not.

Outside, beyond the threshold, the pine branches creaked against each other with the dull sound of aging wood. The wind had returned, not with rage, but with memory. It did not rattle the cave. It simply passed by the entrance, pausing long enough to remind her that the world beyond the stone walls still turned.

Zooni lowered the bowl and placed it carefully beside the others.

She stood.

Walked once to the mouth of the cave.

And looked out.

The sky was slowly taking shape.

A smear of pale grey, bleeding into soft amber at the eastern ridge.

But there was something else.

Not a shape.

Not a noise.

Just a difference in the air.

A thickness.

As if the cold carried news.

She stepped back inside.

Sat.

Folded her hands over her lap.

And waited—not for the men.

But for what they would carry back with them.

Because some things return in the face.

Long before the words arrive.

What returns to the cave is not just two men—but the weight of one missing.

Zooni heard them before she saw them.

It was not the sound of boots or breath, not the rustle of the curtain, but something quieter—a change in the rhythm of the cave itself. As if the air tensed slightly. As if the stone beneath her feet braced for impact. She had been stirring the fire, not to warm it, but to keep herself tethered. Her fingers moved with calm repetition—wood against ember, ash brushed into patterns that no one would notice but her.

Then the cave mouth darkened.

Not fully. Just a shadow—elongated, tired. Followed by another.

They did not speak.

Usman entered first.

He ducked under the curtain slowly, not like a man returning to safety, but like someone unsure if he was welcome back. His shoulders were hunched forward, not from the weight of his satchel—it was half-empty now—but from the kind of burden that settles between the blades and spreads like frost.

His shawl was soaked.

Not drenched, but damp in that heavy way winter water clings—seeping in from the hem, darkening the fabric inch by inch. His boots left prints on the stone, small puddles where the melting snow had begun to release its grip. His hands were bare. One knuckle was bleeding, though he didn’t seem to notice.

Layaq followed.

Slower.

He moved with a stiffness Zooni had never seen in him before—not the stiffness of injury, but of something locked deep in the chest, like a sob that had turned to iron. His right sleeve was torn at the cuff. There was mud on his shin, a smear of soot on his cheek. His eyes did not meet hers.

Neither of them said a word.

They stopped just inside the fire’s light.

Stood there.

Still.

As though waiting for permission to collapse.

Zooni didn’t rise immediately.

She remained kneeling beside the hearth, hands resting on her thighs, her gaze steady.

Then, quietly, she reached for one of the bowls she had set out earlier and passed it forward.

Usman took it.

He did not sit.

He simply held it.

The steam curled up between them, rising like breath from a grave.

Layaq did not reach for his bowl.

He stood slightly behind, his fists clenched at his sides, knuckles white.

Zooni’s voice, when it came, was gentle.

Not soft.

Gentle.

The kind that touches the skin without bruising.

“Did the river take him?”

Usman closed his eyes.

Just once.

Then nodded.

No words.

Just that.

A nod.

Layaq turned away sharply, walked to the far wall, and lowered himself onto the cold stone. He didn’t unwrap his shawl. He didn’t shift to face the fire. He sat with his back to the room, shoulders trembling—not from cold, but from something unspoken—something heavier than grief, and older.

Ameena stirred behind them.

She sat up slowly, rubbing her eyes, her small fingers pulling the blanket up to her chin as she blinked into the half-light. She saw Usman. She saw Zooni.

Then her eyes darted.

She scanned the space.

Counted.

One.

Two.

Then stopped.

Her lips parted.

She did not ask.

Children who have lived through loss do not ask when someone is missing.

They know.

They count once, and then they keep quiet.

Zooni rose and walked toward her.

She knelt beside the girl and drew the blanket higher over her shoulders, tucking the edges gently beneath her arms.

Ameena leaned into her, pressing her forehead against Zooni’s collarbone.

Zooni held her.

Rocked her once.

Twice.

No words.

Just warmth.

Usman set the bowl down near the fire.

Untouched.

He sat cross-legged now, his body folding slowly into itself, as if shrinking would keep something from falling apart.

Zooni looked at both men.

Her voice broke the silence again—quietly, but with the strength of stone laid in water.

“Tell me how.”

Layaq turned only his head.

Usman looked at the fire.

And then, carefully, deliberately, they began to speak—not to narrate, not to confess—but to offer fragments, the way hands offer water from a broken jar.

Zooni listened.

She did not interrupt.

And when the telling ended, and the last word hung in the space between them, she rose without sound.

She walked to Madhav’s bedding.

Folded the blanket slowly.

Pressed it once to her chest.

And placed it, finally, on the shelf where Dei’d’s shawl once lived.

There would be time for mourning.

But not yet.

Outside, the light had fully arrived.

And in the distance, over the ridge, a new sound rose—a call, faint and metallic, from a conch or a horn.

The State was stirring.

And the cave would not remain untouched for long.

where Usman climbs to the highest outpost above the cave to scout the southern path, and from the cliff, he sees smoke trails in the valley below—not from cooking fires, but from the scorched marks of search parties already too close?

The wind was sharp that morning—not because it was strong, but because it had direction. It came from the southeast, sliding over the high ridges, carrying with it the dry scent of woodsmoke and something else beneath it—iron, perhaps, or oil. It was not a natural wind. It carried memory, and intention.

Usman climbed before the others stirred.

He rose just after Zooni finished packing away Madhav’s bedding, while Layaq still sat staring at the wall with the stubborn, unfinished grief of someone not yet ready to cry. He took nothing with him except the old brass spyglass that had once belonged to Dei’d’s father—a relic with leather wrap fraying at the edge and a lens slightly clouded at the center. Zooni handed it to him in silence. He did not need to ask.

The trail to the outcrop was steep and narrow, weaving between boulders like a forgotten vein. It was not a real path. Only those who had fled before had known it—potters, weavers, shepherds, rebels. The snow along the slope was fresh but shallow, disturbed only by the occasional hoofprint of a mountain goat or the soft indent of a hare. Usman placed each step with care. Not from fear, but from respect. This mountain had carried too many feet running from too much for him to rush.

When he reached the ledge, he paused—not from exhaustion, but from reverence. The outcrop was no wider than a cot, framed on one side by a ragged pine and open to the valley on the other. From here, the land opened like a vast scroll—hill after hill, slope after slope, each one veiled in faint morning mist. The Jhelum coiled far below like a silver thread drawn too tight across a grey robe. It was peaceful from this height. Beautiful, even. And dangerous.

Usman sat slowly, the hem of his shawl gathering pebbles as he lowered himself to the cold stone. He pulled the spyglass from his pocket, wiped the lens carefully with his cuff, and raised it to his eye.

The southern slope came into view—sharply, then clearly.

He adjusted the lens.

The valley near the orchard was still.

But not empty.

Black dots moved along the ridge path—a patrol of five, maybe six. They were not in uniform. Not loud. These were the quiet ones. Scouts. The kind sent before the march, to see who runs. He moved the lens further west, across the dried riverbed that once fed the irrigation channel.

There—smoke.

Thin.

Not from a kitchen hearth.

It rose in a sharp column, unmoving despite the wind.

Controlled fire.

Not a meal.

A signal.

He followed its direction down the slope and found another—smaller, lower to the ground, likely from dried dung. It was placed deliberately behind a cluster of boulders near the trailhead. A scout fire, hidden from below but visible from above. It meant they were mapping.

The patrol wasn’t wandering.

They were encircling.

He lowered the glass.

Let his eyes adjust to the naked distance.

The wind shifted again.

This time it brought sound—not voices, not shouts, but the long, high-pitched whine of a conch being blown in the direction of Rainawari. The echo curved through the valley like a blade. It had been years since he had heard that sound in the open.

It meant a unit was in movement.

Horse-drawn.

Possibly armed.

Possibly ceremonial.

He clenched the glass tighter in his hand.

The mountains had never been silent. But now, they were speaking with clarity. The army was not searching. It was advancing.

Usman sat there for another minute, letting the knowledge settle into his chest like coals pressed into earth. He did not panic. He did not turn.

He folded the spyglass, slid it into his pocket, and descended with the same care he had climbed—with the solemn awareness that the story they had lived until now was no longer enough to protect them.

When he returned to the cave, his boots were dusted with frost, and his face was taut with the quiet of someone who had seen what others are not yet ready to hear.

Zooni was the first to look up.

She asked no questions.

She simply stepped aside and added another shawl to the bundle at the door.

She did not ask if it was time.

Because she already knew.

Where Usman sits before Ameena and tells her gently they must leave the cave—and when she asks why, he does not lie, but answers softly, “Because this place has heard too many names. And when names are known, silence is no longer safe.”?

The cave held its breath as Usman entered.

He did not rush. His boots crossed the stone floor with deliberate weight, each step marking time the way a hand counts heartbeats after a burial. The spyglass was tucked inside his shawl now, no longer cold against his fingers but warm with the knowledge it had brought—knowledge that could not be placed back on a shelf or folded away.

Zooni did not ask.

She did not need to.

She had already placed a second satchel near the hearth, tied with quiet hands, the knot firm but not panicked. Layaq sat nearby, his back to the wall, sharpening the same knife he had been sharpening for years, not out of need, but out of habit. The sound of stone against steel was slow, rhythmic, measured—not as a threat, but as punctuation to the room’s silence.

And Ameena—Ameena was crouched beside the fire, shaping damp clay into small balls, her fingers caked with the fine grey earth they had stored near the rear wall. She was not playing. She was focused. The way a child focuses when making something that she cannot explain, but knows must exist. Her thumb pressed gently into the center of each sphere, hollowing it, then smoothing the edge with water.

She did not look up when Usman sat beside her.

He waited.

He did not speak immediately.

Only watched her work.

His knees bent slowly as he lowered himself onto the floor, folding into the quiet not like a man interrupting, but like someone entering prayer.

The fire snapped softly beside them.

The scent of smoke curled through the air, touched with something older—deeper—like the perfume of soil before rain.

After her fourth clay ball, Ameena paused.

She brushed her hands on the hem of her tunic and glanced sideways.

“You saw something,” she said—not as a question, but as fact.

Usman nodded once.

“Yes,” he said.

She turned to face him fully now, her dark eyes solemn, wide, unblinking.

“How many?”

“Enough,” he replied.

She said nothing.

Usman drew a slow breath, then placed his palms on his knees.

“We have to go,” he said.

The fire cracked again—this time louder.

The sound seemed to fill the cave, bouncing off stone and silence like a message sent in the old ways, before paper, before ink.

Ameena looked at the clay pieces in front of her.

Then down at her hands.

They were still damp. Still trembling slightly.

“Will they find this place?” she asked.

Usman’s voice did not falter.

“They’re looking in circles now. Circles that keep getting smaller. If we stay here, we’ll be part of the next one.”

She didn’t cry.

She didn’t ask where they were going.

She only asked, “Are you afraid?”

Usman looked at her for a long moment.

The kind of look that does not skim across the surface of a child, but sinks into their story—their absences, their broken sentences, their too-quiet silences at night.

“Yes,” he said. “I am.”

Ameena nodded.

“Then I’ll come.”

He reached into the inner pocket of his coat and pulled out a single object—small, carved, no bigger than his palm. A wooden horse. Rough. Unpainted. But the shape was unmistakable: head bent in motion, legs curved in flight, mane etched by a single blade stroke.

He placed it in front of her.

She stared at it.

“I carved it in another winter,” he said. “When I thought I’d never leave the orchard.”

“Is this to keep?” she asked.

“No,” he replied. “It’s to remind.”

“Of what?”

“That you have legs,” he said gently. “Even when you feel you’ve only ever been carried.”

She picked it up slowly.

Held it.

Pressed the edge to her cheek.

Then nodded again.

Behind them, Zooni stood watching—not intervening, not guiding—just witnessing.

Because trust was not something they gave Ameena.

It was something she let them carry.

And now, she had lifted it—quietly—and placed it back in their hands.

They would not break it.

Not again.

Usman stood and offered his hand.

She did not take it immediately.

She rose on her own.

Then slid her fingers into his, not because she needed to, but because she could.

The clay figurines remained behind on the stone.

Four of them.

One slightly broken.

And when the cave finally emptied, they would be the only voices left.

where the group prepares to abandon the cave—and as Zooni walks to the back chamber one last time, she finds a faint mark on the wall she had never noticed before: a palmprint, smaller than hers, left by Dei’d in the red earth, a blessing hidden in plain sight?

Zooni moved quietly through the cave, her shawl gathered in one hand, the other carrying the satchel she had prepared hours ago but refused to tie shut—until now. It was morning by every measure but light. The sun had yet to crest the far ridges. But the wind had changed, and the air that entered the cave no longer smelled of sleep or stone. It smelled of footsteps drawing near.

They were ready to leave.

Almost.

Ameena stood by the hearth, wrapped in an extra layer, clutching the small wooden horse Usman had given her. She held it not like a toy but like an object with a task. Something that might be needed later. Something that might remember what she would not say aloud. Usman and Layaq were outside, tightening the ropes, testing the path. Their voices came only in gesture—the rustle of canvas, the faint thud of a boot repositioned, the low scrape of metal against bark.

Zooni turned once, looked over the space.

The cave, in its silence, did not protest. But it did not let go easily either.

The sleeping corner was clear.

The baskets stacked, empty but upright.

The old water jar with the chipped lip had been placed gently on its side, a gesture she learned from Dei’d—a way of telling the next wanderer that the jar had not been abandoned, only finished.

Only one corner remained.

The back chamber.

It had always been the quietest part of the cave, a slight bend in the rear wall where the ceiling lowered and the light fell differently. When they had first arrived, Zooni had used it to store roots and dried herbs. Later, it became a place where she sometimes sat alone, not to pray, but to feel closer to the stillness that Dei’d had carried like a second skin.

She stepped inside now, ducking slightly to enter.

The air here was cooler.

Stiller.

Her breath felt louder than usual, so she slowed it.

Let it settle.

There was nothing left to gather—no items, no hidden jars. She reached for the small wool pouch in the corner and pulled it gently toward her, only to feel something behind it shift—a faint rise in the wall. Not a crack. Not a hole. A shape.

She bent lower.

Brushed her palm across the surface.

And there, half-faded into the red earth, was a mark.

Not drawn.

Not etched.

Pressed.

A handprint.

Small. Delicate. But unmistakably human.

Zooni’s own hand hovered above it for a moment before she lowered her fingers, matching them slowly, carefully—only to find that the mark was not from a child, as she first thought.

It was from someone whose fingers had worked in grain, not ink.

The creases of the print were worn but deep—grooves from years of holding, kneading, pressing.

And at the base of the palm, a faint crescent.

A scar.

She knew it then.

It was Dei’d’s.

She didn’t speak.

Her eyes burned slightly, but she did not cry.

She pressed her own hand beside the print, leaving a new one—slightly larger, slightly warmer. Two prints side by side. One fading. One fresh.

For a moment, she closed her eyes.

Not to pray.

But to listen.

And though the chamber offered no sound, the silence she found was not empty.

It was full.

Of memory.

Of instruction.

Of a woman who had never asked to be named, but who had left her name in every girl she helped to survive.

Zooni opened her eyes.

And rose.

She stepped backward, not turning, as if to let the wall keep its dignity.

At the mouth of the chamber, she paused, then reached down and pulled her satchel closed.

Knotted it tight.

Then stepped into the cave’s center.

Ameena looked at her.

Zooni gave a small nod.

The girl came forward.

Took her hand.

Together, they stepped toward the light.

Outside, the wind waited.

But so did the trail.

And behind them, the cave breathed once more—

Not in mourning.

But in release.

where the group descends the mountain through a hidden gorge, and just before they vanish into the mist, Usman looks back at the cave—and sees not stone, but a house that had held the weight of all their names and returned them alive?

The descent began in silence.

Not by decree. Not by fear. But because none of them could speak yet. The first steps down the slope felt like walking out of breath—like the body still wanted to stay, as if one limb remained tied invisibly to the stone walls behind them. The cold had thickened slightly, coating the trees in a fine lace of frost that shimmered where the light hit it at a slant. The sun was rising, but it was not warm. Its light lay across the hills like cloth—not to heat, but to reveal.

Usman led.

He did not turn often.

He did not need to.

The trail was one he had scouted twice before—narrow, sloped, cut diagonally across a gorge that few remembered. A line once used by basket weavers who smuggled shawls to Poonch during the famine years. The trees that guarded its edges were not tall, but old. Their roots rose from the earth like ribs from a sleeping giant, twisting across the path, catching the soles of boots if you moved too fast. But Usman did not move fast. He stepped with reverence, as if the mountain itself had offered a path only reluctantly—and only once.

Zooni came behind him, her steps careful, one hand holding Ameena’s wrist—not tightly, but like a tether, a thread of presence. The girl followed without complaint. She said nothing. But her eyes missed nothing—the bend of each branch, the sound of loose stone underfoot, the weight of the wind pressing against her small back. In her free hand she carried the carved wooden horse, pressed against her chest like a compass.

Layaq took the rear, his body half-turned at every pause, eyes trained on the slope above them, on the ridgeline, on the faintest stirrings in the mist. He walked like a man guarding memory from being snatched. A sentry of everything unsaid.

The gorge curved steeply after the third switchback. Below them, mist had begun to collect—thicker than usual for morning. Not fog, but low clouds crawling between the folds of the earth, blurring outlines, turning trees into grey silhouettes. Somewhere beneath them was the streambed that had dried last summer. They would follow its bed later, once they reached the bottom. For now, they remained between earth and sky—half-buried, half-exposed.

After nearly an hour, they reached a shelf where the trail widened slightly—a flat outcropping of limestone, marked faintly by the fossil of a shell etched into the rock, as if the sea had once rested here before rising again in another world. Usman halted.

He did not speak.

He only turned.

And looked up.

The cave was no longer visible.

Not fully.

Only a hint of it remained—a crease in the cliffside, shaded by pine and shadow, its mouth barely more than a smudge between stone and sky.

But he saw it.

Or rather, he felt it.

Not as a place.

But as something that had held them.

He stepped a little to the side, clearing the view.

The others waited behind him.

He raised a hand—not to wave, not to reach, but to steady himself. His fingers curled slightly, then rested on the trunk of a narrow birch rooted at the ledge.

The breath he exhaled was slow. Not sorrowful. But full.

Because the cave was no longer just a refuge.

It had become something else.

It had taken their names—their pain, their small rituals, the sound of whispered stories at dusk—and held them without asking to change them. It had become a vessel for all that could not be spoken elsewhere.

He saw, in his mind, the four clay balls Ameena had left by the fire.

The handprint Zooni had discovered in the red wall.

The bent spoon that Madhav once used to stir water before pressing it gently back into the corner each night as if placing a bookmark.

The place no longer looked like stone.

It looked like memory made solid.

Zooni stepped beside him now.

She followed his gaze.

But did not speak.

She only stood there—shoulder to shoulder—not touching, not guiding, simply present.

Ameena reached forward and rested the carved wooden horse on the limestone ledge, beside the fossil.

It stood upright.

Unmoving.

But ready to ride again if needed.

Usman placed his hand gently atop the child’s head.

Layaq, at the rear, lowered his pack and knelt.

He took a single match from his pouch, struck it once, and lit a thin roll of pine bark.

The flame curled upward for just a second.

Then faded.

But its smoke drifted back toward the mountain.

A signal not for men.

But for the cave.

A parting breath.

Usman turned again.

The trail below beckoned—mist rising in soft plumes like fingers reaching up to welcome them into the unknown.

They walked on.

And behind them, the cave—now out of sight—held the weight of all their names.

And kept them safe.

where the group reaches the streambed and finds signs that the scouts have already passed through—fresh bootprints, broken twigs, and a strip of red cloth caught on a thorn, left perhaps not by the enemy but by someone trying to warn them?

The streambed came into view like an old scar—long healed on the surface, but tender still beneath the skin. It wound between the shoulders of the hills like a path carved not by intention, but by erosion, time, and once—violence. The water was gone now. It had dried during the last summer when the glacier upstream had melted too quickly, flooding and then vanishing, leaving behind only bone-colored stone, driftwood, and the memory of current.

They entered the basin single file, stepping lightly along the curved rock edges, their footfalls muffled by moss and silt. The gorge narrowed in places, hemmed in by roots that had broken through the earthen walls and twisted toward the sun in curling knots.

The air had grown warmer here, trapped between slopes, though the cold still clung to their breath in clouds. Mist lingered above the ground in slow motion. It was not dense enough to obscure, but it softened the edges of things—making each bush seem taller, each shadow more watchful, each step more deliberate.

Usman moved cautiously now.

Not just with awareness—but with expectation.

He paused at the base of an old willow, one knee bent, his hand outstretched toward a patch of clay beside the roots. He didn’t speak. He didn’t gesture. He only crouched and stared.

Zooni reached his side.

She saw it immediately.

A bootprint.

Not deep.

But fresh.

Recent enough that the clay had not yet fully dried in the heel.

It faced east—away from the cave, not toward it.

Whoever made it had passed through already.

Then another.

Smaller.

Fainter.

Following the same line.

And then, a few paces ahead—at the edge of a thorny bush where the streambed curved sharply—Zooni saw it: a strip of fabric caught on a bare bramble. No longer than her hand. Faded red. Frayed at one end.

It fluttered slightly in the breeze.

She walked forward, untangling it carefully.

It wasn’t military cloth.

It wasn’t uniform.

It had been torn from a shawl. Handwoven.

She turned it over.

Along the inner fold, stitched in black thread, were three letters: Z-E-N.

Zooni inhaled sharply.

Not from fear.

But recognition.

Zenab.

One of Dei’d’s girls.

Taken five years ago during a raid at Kani Kadal. She had been small then. Barely twelve. Zooni had tended to the wound on her foot from the iron cuff. Dei’d had hidden her in the grain basket for two nights before a trader smuggled her out toward Anantnag.

They had heard nothing since.

Until now.

Ameena, who had lagged just behind, reached them.

Her eyes scanned Zooni’s face.

“What is it?” she asked.

Zooni knelt to her height, showed her the cloth.

Ameena touched it gently, like one might touch a pressed flower found between the pages of a book left unopened for years.

“It’s a message,” Zooni said.

“From whom?”

“Someone who wants us to know—we’re not alone.”

Usman took the cloth, folded it, and tucked it into the small pouch he carried at his waist.

Then he looked up, past the ridge.

His voice, when it came, was low. Almost reverent.

“They came through. But they didn’t stay.”

“Are they ahead of us?” Layaq asked from behind.

“No,” Usman said. “I think… they’re circling. But someone in their shadow is walking differently.”

“Scouts?”

“No,” Zooni answered, eyes still on the thorn bush. “Whispers.”

They moved on.

But slower now.

Not with fear.

With vigilance.

Because to be seen is one thing.

But to be watched in silence by someone who knows your name—and chooses not to call it out—is something far more dangerous. Or sacred.

And behind them, the red cloth no longer fluttered.

It hung still.

As if it had delivered its warning.

And now waited for the next name to pass.

where as night falls, the group takes refuge beneath an outcropping of boulders, and Usman tells the story of how Madhav once convinced a landlord’s wife to free three bonded girls—not with a weapon, but with a riddle she could never solve?

They stopped when the sun had fully disappeared behind the western slope, and the mist that had followed them like a second breath began to settle deeper into the streambed, coiling into the hollows like incense offered to some unseen altar. The air had dropped in temperature, turning their breath silver again, sharper now, pinching at the corners of eyes and lips.

They found shelter beneath a natural overhang—an outcropping of black stone shaped like a jaw half-buried in the hill. It jutted out just enough to shield them from wind, with enough space for four bodies to huddle close and a small fire to burn low without being seen from above.

Zooni laid out the folded wool she had kept wrapped in her satchel—what had once been Madhav’s bedding. She did not unfold it all the way. She kept it doubled, as if still holding the imprint of his body. Ameena curled beside her, close enough to share warmth, but not clinging. She held the wooden horse in one hand and a stone in the other—found earlier near the stream, smooth and oval, the kind of stone you keep not for its use, but for its silence.

Usman lit the fire with careful hands. No sparks. Just the steady coaxing of tinder and breath, as if he were nursing a wound rather than flame. Layaq sat nearby, arms around his knees, his gaze fixed on the fire but not seeing it. His mind was still on the cloth—on the bootprints—on the knowledge that someone walked ahead or behind with eyes open and reasons unknown.

It was Ameena who broke the silence.

“Tell me a story.”

Her voice was quiet, but not shy.

Zooni looked at her.

“A story now?”

“Yes,” she said. “Not a lie. A true one. One with him in it.” She nodded toward the folded blanket beside her.

The fire cracked gently.

Layaq didn’t look up, but he shifted his shoulders, as if preparing to hear something he thought he wasn’t ready for.

Usman sat back, stretched out his legs, and exhaled.

“I’ll tell you one,” he said. “But only because he never told it the same way twice.”

Ameena looked at him with wide eyes, waiting.

Usman leaned forward, warming his hands at the flame.

“It happened in Sopore, two years before you were born. There was a landlord there, Brahman by name but broker by blood. He had three girls—bonded laborers—working in his grain store. Not bonded by contract, mind you. Bonded by silence. They weren’t even allowed to speak their own names.”

Ameena’s fingers tightened around the horse.

“One night, Madhav went in—not to steal. That was the strange part. He walked in through the front door. Not as a thief, but as a holy man. Robes. Sandals. A string of beads borrowed from a real fakir in the Wullar mosque.”

Zooni smiled faintly, knowing where this was going.

“He knocked on the door. The landlord’s wife opened it. She was clever, sharper than her husband. She said, ‘You’re no saint. I can smell mischief under your shawl.’ And he replied, ‘Mischief wears perfume. I wear dust.’ She invited him in. Why? Because he intrigued her. Madhav had that kind of charm—not loud. Curious. Like a riddle that looked back.”

Usman turned the stick in the fire.

“She served him stale paratha and overcooked spinach. He ate all of it. Then, when she poured tea, he said, ‘I’ve brought a test, not a sermon.’”

Ameena leaned forward.

“What kind of test?”

Usman smiled. “A riddle. He told her: ‘There are three sisters. One cannot cry. One cannot laugh. One cannot speak. They live under your roof. Set them free, and you may ask me one question I must answer honestly. Refuse, and you’ll never sleep without hearing them walk in your halls.’”

Layaq let out a short breath. A ghost of a laugh.

“She didn’t answer,” Usman continued. “She told him riddles were for children. But that night, she didn’t sleep. Nor the next. Nor the next.”

Zooni added softly, “On the fourth morning, the girls were gone. Let go before the sun rose. No reason given. No letter left.”

Usman nodded.

“Madhav never told us how. Whether she solved it, or simply grew tired of pretending not to hear.”

Ameena whispered, “What would have happened if she had answered wrongly?”

Usman looked at her gently.

“There was no wrong answer. Only silence. And she had carried too much of that already.”

They sat for a long moment after that.

The fire slowly leaned toward ash.

But its warmth lingered.

So did Madhav.

Not in name.

In riddle.

In rhythm.

In the fact that even in escape, they still made room for his voice.

Because stories were not what kept them alive.

They were what reminded them why they had to be.

where the silence of night is broken not by footsteps, but by a faint bell, far away, rhythmic and slow—a warning from the old shepherd path that someone is approaching… but not from the direction they expected?

The fire had shrunk to its final core.

Only a soft bed of orange and grey remained, glowing beneath the thin breath of ash that drifted upward, barely breaking the air. The stone around them held the heat unevenly—warm near the flames, biting cold just inches away. Zooni had placed Ameena to the center, between her and the firepit, wrapping the girl in two shawls. The child did not sleep deeply. Her eyes opened and closed in intervals, each time fluttering as if she were testing whether the night still held its shape.

Usman lay nearby, half-reclined, arms folded beneath his head. His body was still, but his eyes tracked the patterns of mist above them, the way it moved between the branches like fingers brushing through old books. Layaq was awake as well, crouched just beyond the ring of warmth, sharpening a small stick into a point—not as a weapon, but as something to do with his hands. Zooni, sitting upright against the overhanging stone, had not closed her eyes once.

And that was why she heard it first.

Not a voice.

Not a footfall.

A bell.

Faint.

Single-toned.

Rhythmic.

Not the kind tied to cattle or horses. Not the kind used for village rituals. This sound was slower. Measured. Metallic, but not sharp. It rang once every few seconds, and though it echoed softly off the rock walls, it came from only one direction—northeast, downwind, along the old shepherd’s path that zigzagged from the far ridge.

Zooni lifted her head fully.

She didn’t wake the others.

She only turned slightly.

Usman sat up without her needing to speak.

Layaq paused his carving.

All three listened.

One ring.

Pause.

Another.

Pause.

The timing was too even to be a wandering animal.

Too slow to be someone walking alone.

It was the rhythm of signal.

“Someone’s coming,” Zooni said, her voice just above the wind.

“But not from behind,” Usman replied. “Not from the cave side. This is the old shepherd trail. Few know it now.”

Layaq rose slowly.

“What kind of bell is that?”

Zooni answered, “Not a chime. Not a prayer bell. It’s a ghanti—like the ones hung around the necks of old pack goats in the Gujjar camps.”

Usman stood now, brushing the frost from his shawl.

“But there are no Gujjars this time of year,” he said. “They descend before snowfall.”

Ameena stirred beside the fire.

The wooden horse slipped from her hands.

Usman turned to Zooni.

“Stay with her. I’ll go.”

“No,” she said, already standing. “I’ve walked that trail before. If it’s a warning, I’ll hear it. If it’s a trap—” her voice caught only slightly, “—then I’d rather it be me.”

Layaq didn’t object.

He reached behind the stone ledge and retrieved the cloth-wrapped knife.

He held it toward her.

She took it wordlessly and tucked it beneath the fold of her shawl.

Then she stepped into the night.

The trail was dusted in white, the frost covering the stones like powdered chalk. Zooni walked without a lantern, without noise, each step measured, her weight placed on the balls of her feet, the way Dei’d had once taught her in the inner courtyard of the shrine, saying: “To hear what’s hidden, you must walk like you’re not asking the earth for permission.”

The bell rang again.

Clearer now.

It was close.

The trail curved sharply around a rock outcropping.

Zooni stepped forward, drawing near the edge, her hand resting lightly on the bark of a bare tree.

And there—through the drifting mist—she saw the figure.

A small body.

Hunched.

Dragging a long stick behind them.

The bell was tied to its tip.

Not around a neck.

Not on a beast.

It was intentional.

A signal.

She took one step closer.

And then the figure stopped.

Lifted its head.

And though the moon had barely risen, she saw it.

A face she knew.

Not from recent days.

From years ago.

Zenab.

Older now. Thinner. Her braid ragged, her cloak torn at one edge.

But her eyes—those eyes still carried the fire of the girl who once refused to kneel, even as her shackles bled her feet.

She said nothing.

She simply held up the bell.

Then pointed over her shoulder.

And mouthed, slowly, soundlessly:

They are not far.

where Zooni brings Zenab into the shelter and the girl tells them what she’s seen: the scouts have begun taking names from old records—and “Ameena’s name is on the list,” spoken aloud in a camp where she was never supposed to exist?

Zooni did not ask questions on the trail back.

She didn’t need to. And Zenab—now older, harder around the eyes, with a gait like someone who no longer assumed ground would hold—did not offer answers. She walked silently beside her, the bell now wrapped in her shawl to silence its sound. Her breath came raggedly, not from panic but from exhaustion, the kind that grows not from running, but from always being prepared to.

It had been years since Zooni had seen her—not since that night at the shrine, when Dei’d had smuggled her out under a sack of barley, two constables asleep in the outer chamber. Zenab had only been twelve then. Her hands still too small to carry her own shawl. Her mouth full of questions she wasn’t allowed to ask.

But tonight, she returned without warning, her steps sure, her silence louder than any scream.

They reached the outcropping just before full nightfall, the fire now little more than a slow sigh of coal, its faint heat barely enough to press back the cold. Usman rose the moment he saw her, his body moving forward, not in recognition, but readiness. Layaq stood a moment later, but remained rooted where he was. Ameena, already sitting up beside Zooni’s blanket, clutched her wooden horse close and narrowed her eyes, trying to make out who this new girl was—why she walked like she knew the trail better than the ones who lived on it.

Zooni stepped in first.

“She’s with us,” she said simply.

No one objected.

No one needed to.

Zenab stood in the ring of firelight, her shadow long behind her, her eyes scanning each of them—not searching, but remembering. Her glance paused when it reached Ameena. Not long. Not dramatically. But enough for Zooni to notice.

“Sit,” Zooni said.

Zenab did.

Her legs folded beneath her with the ease of someone used to crouching in corners, behind sacks of rice, beneath wagons. Her spine was straight, even when her shoulders sagged.

Usman handed her a cloth-wrapped piece of flatbread.

She took it, not gratefully, but like a soldier accepts orders.

Then, after two slow bites, she spoke.

“They’re not looking randomly anymore.”

Her voice was rougher than Zooni remembered. Scraped. As if each word was pulled from a throat lined with dust.

“They have a ledger. Names. First from the evictions. Then from the grain raids. Now…” She paused. Chewed once. “Now they’re reading shrine records. Women who took shelter. Children who were listed as ‘left behind.’ They’re matching names to rumors.”

Layaq narrowed his gaze.

“You heard this yourself?”

Zenab nodded.

“I was in their camp two nights ago. In the mess tent. They don’t think I speak Kashmiri. They talk loosely in front of those they think are mute.”

Zooni leaned forward.

“How close were they?”

“Two ridges north. But they’re splitting up. Small squads. Not looking for crowds. Looking for symbols. They think if they catch one of you, they’ll crush the story.”

Usman’s hands curled into fists.

“They don’t want arrests,” Zenab added. “They want erasure. Quiet. Unwitnessed.”

She reached into the fold of her cloak and pulled out a crumpled paper. Handwritten. Faint charcoal script. The kind copied quickly, from memory, not from command.

Zooni unfolded it beside the fire.

Four names.

All familiar.

The last line was not a name.

It was a phrase:

“The child rescued by Dei’d. May go by Ameena or Zooni’s girl.”

The words hung in the air like a knife, not thrown—but already bleeding.

Ameena leaned forward now.

“What does it mean?”

Zooni didn’t flinch.

“It means we move again.”

Usman stared at the paper.

“They’ve never used Dei’d’s name before,” he said quietly.

Zenab nodded.

“They’re losing patience. They’re calling ghosts now. Trying to prove they can unwrite what they failed to burn.”

Zooni folded the paper slowly.

Then pressed it into the fire.

It curled at the edges.

Blistered.

Then vanished.

But its meaning remained.

Ameena, watching it burn, asked softly, “Will they come for me?”

Zooni turned to her.

Knelt.

Pressed her forehead to the child’s.

“No,” she whispered. “Because we’ll never let them know where to find you.”

Behind them, the fire cracked.

The cave had fallen silent again.

But this silence was different.

It wasn’t fear.

It was preparation.

Because when they came now, they would not find the girl in the story.

They would find the story already walking away.

where they leave at first light, and as they cross the salt-bleached field of Gulgam, they pass an old shrine wall where someone has written in red clay: “We remember what they tried to forget.”

Dawn came with a pale defiance.

There was no sunrise in the way poets described it—no golden spill, no rosy promise. The light bled slowly into the valley, thin and hesitant, filtered through a layer of high, unmoving cloud. It was as though the sky had lost its courage sometime in the night, and now offered only the bare minimum to those still awake beneath it.

They left early.

Before birdsong.

Before the mist had lifted from the low shrubs.

Zenab walked ahead now, guiding them through the lower passes of the Gulgam flats, her gait steady despite her torn cloak and tired limbs. She moved with the memory of someone who had crossed these lands many times before—each time not as a traveler, but as a question the land had not yet answered. Her eyes swept the fields not in fear, but in familiarity, as though the land itself whispered through the frost, “This way. Not that.”

The flats stretched wide before them—an open basin rimmed with broken fences and brittle trees. Once a thriving rice field, Gulgam had been abandoned in the famine years. Now it bore only salt and bone-colored grass, cracked underfoot like brittle paper. A few scattered stones remained—boundary markers, field altars, remnants of walls that once divided land by lineage and loss.

Zooni walked beside Ameena, her hand resting lightly on the girl’s back, guiding without force. The child was quieter this morning, her breath shallower. She hadn’t asked another question since Zenab’s warning. But her eyes searched every mound, every crooked tree trunk, as though each might hide a mouth waiting to speak her name.

Usman and Layaq walked in silence. Each held a walking stick—carved not from tradition but from necessity. The frost clung to the grass in crystalline veins, crunching softly beneath their feet with each step. The field offered no cover. They were exposed. But this was the only way.

Halfway through the basin, the path curved alongside a crumbling shrine wall—built of sun-dried brick and yellowing lime, its top long collapsed, its corners softened by decades of wind and water. It was not a place of worship anymore. Only the ghosts still knelt here.

Ameena slowed as they approached.

So did Zooni.

There—along the largest slab of the remaining wall, in script that was uneven but bold, someone had written in red clay:

“We remember what they tried to forget.”

The letters were fresh.

Still slightly damp.

Zooni stepped closer, studying the writing—not for meaning, but for authorship. She ran her finger along the bottom curve of the final حرف (ḥarf) and knew at once that it was done with a finger, not a stick. No flourishes. Just pressure. A hand pressed to earth and then to wall.

Zenab paused a few feet ahead, watching them.

“I didn’t write it,” she said.

Zooni didn’t ask.

“I saw it two nights ago,” Zenab added. “It wasn’t there the week before.”

Usman stared at the wall, jaw tight.

“It’s a reckoning,” he murmured.

Layaq nodded. “Not revenge. Not warning. Just… insistence.”

Ameena stepped forward and read the line aloud—not in a dramatic tone, but like reciting a math answer in class. Flat. Clear.

Then she looked at Zooni and asked, “Can they hear that?”

“Who?”

“The ones who burned the books. Took the names. Chained the women.”

Zooni didn’t answer right away.

She crouched, took a clump of the red clay near the shrine’s base, and pressed it between her fingers. The grit caught in her skin.

She looked at Ameena.

“No,” she said. “But they fear it. Because clay doesn’t forget. And clay is everywhere.”

Zenab turned then.

“We keep moving. This field is watched. Always.”

They left the wall behind.

But not the words.

The basin narrowed soon after, the ground sloping upward into brush and shadow again.

But for a while longer, even as they walked, the phrase hovered near them—unwritten now, yet still felt.

It followed them like breath.

Because remembering is not about monuments.

It’s about footsteps that do not hesitate when history calls their names.

where they reach the edge of a ruined orchard, and Zenab reveals there’s a woman waiting ahead—one of Dei’d’s oldest companions—and she knows how to get them out of the valley unnoticed… but she asks for something in return: to bury her son’s name back into the land where it was erased?

By late morning, the terrain changed again.

The brittle frost of Gulgam gave way to a stretch of broken orchard—once the pride of a local grower, now a thicket of twisted trunks and half-dead roots, their branches clawing at the pale sky. What remained of the orchard no longer bore fruit. Only scars. Deep grooves at the bases of apple and plum trees where bark had been stripped, either by animals or men. A few trees leaned as if in mourning, roots exposed like ribs, their bark bleached silver by years of wind.

Zooni paused beneath one such tree, laying her hand on the curve of its trunk.

The sap was gone. The warmth of spring forgotten. But the tree stood. Not out of pride—but out of refusal. It had once been harvested for profit. Then for firewood. And now, it remained only as witness.

“We’re close,” Zenab said.

She pointed toward the far end of the orchard, where the trees began to thin, and the land dipped slightly into a hidden fold of the valley.

“Beyond that rise. Her hut’s beneath the ridge.”

Usman narrowed his eyes. “Who is she?”

Zenab didn’t answer at first.

She stepped ahead, past a row of dried fig trees, their limbs creaking in the breeze like bones shifting in sleep.

Then she said, softly, “She was one of Dei’d’s oldest companions. Before the shrine. Before the brothel raids. Before the hunger marches.”

Zooni straightened.

“She’s alive?”

“She is,” Zenab replied. “But not entirely.”

They continued walking, slower now, as if the land itself demanded reverence.

At the edge of the orchard, tucked beneath a rocky ledge, was a low stone hut. It seemed to rise from the earth itself—built not on the land, but inside it. Smoke trailed faintly from a mud chimney. No fence. No animals. Just a single rope tied from the hut’s door to a nearby tree, from which hung five pieces of red thread.

A signal.

Not alone. Enter only if memory is intact.

Zenab stopped at the rope.

“She doesn’t speak until she sees eyes,” she said. “She trusts nothing else.”

Usman stepped back.

“This is your thread,” he said to Zooni.

Zooni nodded.

She walked forward, slowly, crossing under the rope without touching it. The moment her foot touched the flat stone at the hut’s entrance, the door creaked open.

A woman stood within.

Bent, but not weak.

Her face was lined like bark, deep grooves cutting through skin the color of river rock. Her eyes—milk-grey but steady—locked on Zooni’s instantly.

They stared at one another.

Seconds passed.

Then the old woman exhaled. One long, heavy breath. She stepped aside.

Zooni entered.

The air inside the hut was heavy with dried herbs, old ash, and something else—faint but unmistakable: the smell of camphor and cardamom. A blanket hung over a stack of grain sacks. A clay bowl sat beside a kettle, steam curling from its spout.

The woman sat slowly, cross-legged, her knees cracking audibly.

Zenab entered last, standing just inside the threshold.

“She knows why we’re here,” Zenab said.

The woman nodded.

“I do.”

Her voice was dry—but clear. The sound of wind through the ribs of a broken window.

“You need a way out. Past the border post. Through the back channel. The one beneath the salt arch.”

Usman stepped forward. “You know the path?”

She turned her face toward him—not slowly, but directly.

“I built the path,” she said.

Then her gaze returned to Zooni.

“I’ll give it. The map. The markers. The hour to move.”

“But?” Zooni asked.

The woman leaned forward. Her hands trembled now—not with fear, but with the weight of what she was about to say.

“There is a name,” she whispered.

Zooni tilted her head.

“My son. Taken in the same sweep they took Dei’d. Branded a thief. A defiler. A nothing.”

A pause.

“They burned his school records. They sealed the grave. They gave him no stone.”

Silence thickened.

Ameena leaned into Zooni’s shawl, barely breathing.

The woman continued, “I ask only this. That before you leave—before you cross out of the valley—you bury his name into the earth. Somewhere clean. Somewhere that isn’t ashamed.”

Zooni nodded once.

Firm.

“Yes,” she said. “Give us the name.”

The woman reached into the folds of her cloak.

Pulled out a small wooden plaque—faded, but still whole.

On it, burned by hand:

SAMIULLAH MOINUDDIN
Born to Love.
Buried by Order.

Zooni pressed it to her chest.

She didn’t cry.

Neither did the woman.

Outside, the trees did not stir.

But somewhere beneath the roots, something long-forgotten exhaled.

And waited to be named again.

where the group begins their final descent toward the salt arch passage—and as they walk, Zooni carries Samiullah’s plaque close to her ribs, and Ameena asks, “Will they know we passed?”—to which Zooni answers, “Only the wind will remember the way our breath sounded.”?

The wind shifted as they began the descent.

It no longer pressed from the north, where the patrols camped and the names were being recited like curses. It now came from the east, brushing gently across the shoulder of the valley—an unexpected softness, like a hand laid on the back in farewell.

Zooni walked at the center of the line, Samiullah’s wooden plaque pressed beneath her shawl, against her chest. The grain of the wood scratched slightly through the cotton. She did not mind. Its edges, though smooth, reminded her with every step that she was carrying more than a name. She was carrying a denial corrected.

Zenab led them down a deer path that twisted along the southern slope of the orchard, narrow and invisible to anyone who had not walked it barefoot as a child. The thorns along its edge had not been trimmed in years. Still, Zenab passed through them like water, her fingers brushing aside branches, her eyes constantly scanning ahead.

Usman walked behind her, every few steps glancing over his shoulder, as if the forest behind them might grow eyes. He said little, but his hand remained close to the hilt of the old sickle he now carried—curved and blunt from years of harvesting not wheat, but risk.

Layaq stayed at the rear, silent, the imprint of the shrine wall’s red clay still haunting his gaze.

Ameena walked close to Zooni, gripping the edge of her shawl with one hand, and in the other, the stone she had found back in Gulgam. It was warm now from her palm. She had not let go of it once.

As they reached a plateau—one of the last open stretches before the passage into the salt ravine—Ameena tugged lightly on Zooni’s sleeve.

“Will they know we passed?” she asked.

Zooni stopped.

The question floated in the air, unafraid.

“Who?” she asked.

“The ones at the camp. The ones who looked for me,” Ameena said. “The ones who counted names.”

Zooni turned toward her, crouched so their eyes were level.

“They will look,” she said softly. “They will send boots. Dogs. Drones. They will follow footprints, even dreams.”

Ameena’s fingers tightened slightly.

“But,” Zooni continued, “they will not find you.”

“Why?”

Zooni brushed a strand of hair from the girl’s forehead.

“Because only the wind will remember the way our breath sounded.”

Ameena blinked.

Then smiled—just faintly.

Not in innocence.

But in defiance.

They moved on.

Below them, the earth gave way to a salt flat—once an ancient lakebed, now cracked with thin lines of white mineral streaks that shimmered in the midday light. In the center, barely visible unless you were looking for it, was the arch: a natural stone formation, hollowed over centuries, large enough for a cart to pass through. Its opening was shadowed by two boulders. From a distance, it looked like nothing at all—just part of the terrain.

But Zenab veered toward it without hesitation.

When they reached the arch, she slowed.

“This is as far as I go,” she said.

Usman stopped beside her.

“You won’t come?”

She shook her head.

“I have others to warn. Other names.”

Then she turned to Zooni.

“Bury him beyond the border,” she said. “In land they haven’t corrupted yet.”

Zooni nodded.

They embraced—just once. Not tight. Not long. But fully.

Zenab turned, already walking back into the orchard before the rest had moved.

They passed through the salt arch one by one.

Each person stepping not into safety, but into another story.

One they would have to shape as carefully as they had survived this one.

Behind them, the wind blew once through the arch.

Carrying no names.

Only breath.

And the sound of footsteps refusing to vanish.

Next Chapter: Chapter Sixteen: Ashes to Punjab