4338.208 · July 27, 2018 AD
The Smoke We Couldn't Reach
Rose steps outside for the first time and the world is enormous and empty and wrong. A tiny skink earns a name and a knighthood, but the joy lasts only seconds before hunger folds her in half. Smoke threads the horizon — too far to walk to, too faint to trust. The phone has one bar left, then none, then nothing at all. By nightfall, the building feels different. Not emptier. The opposite. Something old and patient has taken notice, and the dark presses closer than it did before.
The morning begins with a small act of courage — leaving the building. The landscape outside is flat and featureless and stretches in every direction without offering a single thing that might help. Rose finds a skink on a rusted pipe and gives it a title and a story, the way she does when the real world stops making sense. The moment of lightness collapses almost immediately. Hunger has moved past the gnawing stage into something that sits heavy in her stomach and behind her eyes, and when it hits properly she cannot hold herself together.
Through the tears, they spot smoke — a thin line rising from somewhere beyond the scrub. It could be a house, a campfire, a person. It could be nothing. It is impossibly far away, and neither of them is in any state to walk towards it. Rose connects it to the man with empty eyes and wonders aloud whether that is where he lives.
The phone becomes the day's central anxiety. One bar of battery. Mack switches it off to preserve what is left, and they ration its use the way they have been rationing everything else. When the golden light of late afternoon finally makes the landscape look almost beautiful, Mack powers it on for one last attempt to reach Mum. The screen flickers once and goes dark. The phone is dead. The last thread connecting them to anyone beyond this place has been permanently severed, and both children understand what that means even as they pretend otherwise.
The second night settles differently from the first. Hunger has lost its edge and become a dull, constant weight. Mack gives Rose his jacket without being asked. She wants to know if the man is coming back, and Mack's answer — that they are not his kind — is a quiet, terrible piece of reasoning for a boy his age. It means he has been thinking about what they saw, categorising it, trying to understand the rules of a man who drags strangers through light. The conclusion he has reached is not comforting so much as clinical: they were seen and dismissed, and dismissal is the best protection they have.
Above them, the stars look like eyes. And within the building itself, something has shifted. Not a sound, not a movement — a quality. The space feels less abandoned than it did the night before, as though something old and patient within its structure has registered their presence. Rose falls asleep holding Mack's hand, aware on some level beneath language that the building is no longer simply shelter. It is watching.
