0000 – Free food should taste good!

The afternoon had that particular stillness to it – the kind where the heat stacks up between buildings and refuses to leave. They were walking the long way back from school, which was Pia's idea, which meant it wasn't a decision so much as a fact that had already happened by the time Fira realized it.

"You're walking too slow," Pia said, without slowing down herself.

Fira adjusted her bag strap and said nothing.

"Good. Keep up."

That was enough. With Pia, any silence that followed never felt uncomfortable – it just meant Pia was thinking about something, which was almost always true, and eventually she'd say it or she wouldn't.

They passed a row of parked motorcycles, a warung with its plastic chairs pulled out onto the sidewalk, an older man asleep with his mouth wide open. The city doing its ordinary business of being alive.

*warung* = small family-run shop or eatery, common on Indonesian streets

Pia was saying something about corruption swallowing the school free food program. How they kept getting food that was already almost spoiled, day after day after day. The faint sour smell rising from the plate before she even lifted the spoon. She'd rather sit in silence and choose nothing at all over putting any of it past her lips.

Fira wasn't really listening. She was watching the way Pia's hands moved when she talked – the small emphatic gestures, the way her wrist turned when she was making a point. She had seen these so many times she no longer needed to look to know them.

When the light changed, she almost missed it.

Not the traffic light.

The light.

It came from the parking area across the road – a flare of orange so sudden and so total that Fira's first thought, for one stupid half-second, was that the sun had fallen sideways. Then the sound arrived, late the way sound always is, a pressure in the chest before it reached the ears, and the ground gave a single hard shudder like something underneath the city had turned over in its sleep.

The shockwave knocked them both down. Fira hit the pavement on her palms and knees. She heard Pia land nearby – still standing somehow, one hand braced against a parked car, golden hair thrown sideways by the blast. A sharp intake of breath, not a scream – Pia never screamed in fear, even now apparently. For a moment, neither of them moved.

When she looked over, Pia was sitting upright on the pavement, one leg folded beneath her, hair loose and catching the orange light like she'd posed for it. For one completely inappropriate second, Fira thought she looked like a painting.

Then the fire roared and the painting was just a girl on hot asphalt.

Someone behind her said it. Just once, not even loud – missile – the way you say a word you don't fully believe yet.

The fire was enormous. That was the thing no one tells you – how much space fire takes up when it's serious. It filled the parking area. It climbed. The heat reached them from across the road, a pushing heat, the kind that has weight, that leans against your face and tells you to go. Glass was still falling somewhere. Car alarms had started, multiple ones at different pitches, and underneath all of it there was a sound like the air itself cracking open.

Fira got to her hands and knees. Her palms were bleeding. She didn't feel it yet.

Pia was sitting up. She was looking at the fire. Her school bag had slid off her shoulder and was sitting next to her on the pavement like it had been set down neatly, which it hadn't. There was a cut above her eyebrow that she hadn't noticed. She was very still. For Pia, who was never still – who moved when she thought, who talked when she breathed – the stillness was worse than anything else.

People were running around like ants from a disturbed nest. Not everyone – some people had stopped entirely, frozen the way animals freeze, some deeper instruction taking over. A woman was yelling something that dissolved in the noise before it could become words. Someone was trying to move a motorcycle away from the spreading heat and then stopped trying. The smoke had a color that Fira had never seen before, not quite black, something darker than black.

She wanted to say something. To Pia. Are you okay, or we should move, or just her name – Pia – to pull her back from wherever she'd gone inside herself. But Fira's mouth didn't open. Her chest was full of something that had no name yet. It wasn't panic. Panic is loud. This was the opposite – a screaming so deep inside that it never made it to sound, just sat there in the sternum and pressed.

Fira looked at the fire. The fire looked back, the way only a big enough fire can, like it has always been there and the building was just temporary.

Pia's hand found hers on the pavement. Not reaching. Not gripping. Just – there.

Neither of them spoke.

The city kept burning in front of them, and behind them the city kept being the city, and somewhere in between, on a strip of ordinary afternoon sidewalk, two seventh-graders sat in the space where ordinary had been a minute ago, and held very still, and waited for something they didn't have a name for yet.