Their mother brought the rest of the food to the table and sat and their father put his phone face down in the way he did when the meal was starting, a habit he’d built when they were young and had kept, and for a few minutes the kitchen was just the four of them and the food and the grey morning outside the window and nothing else.

"You have practice today?" her father asked, looking at her.

"After school," she said. "Late. Maybe seven."

He nodded. "I’ll pick you up."

"You don’t have to, I can take the—"

"Seven is late," he said, in the same tone her mother used for *sit*, and she recognized it and let it go.

Her brother was eating with the focused efficiency of someone who was running slightly behind and had prioritized food over pace, which was a reasonable choice. He had their father’s jaw and their mother’s eyes and had been, for the last two years, in the process of becoming someone she didn’t entirely recognize yet but was watching with the particular attention of someone who wanted to know who he was going to be.

"You didn’t sleep," she said quietly.

He glanced at her. "I slept."

"You were up."

He was quiet for a second. "Bad dream," he said, quieter.

She looked at him. He was looking at his food.

"Same one?" she asked.

He shrugged, which meant yes.

She didn’t push. She knew the shape of it — he’d told her once, months ago, in the late-night way of siblings who talked when everyone else was asleep, and she’d listened and hadn’t made it bigger than it was and that had been the right call because he’d looked relieved by the smallness of it. She bumped her shoulder against his and went back to eating and he went back to eating and that was enough.

Her mother was talking about something at work, a colleague, a scheduling problem, the ordinary texture of a life happening in real time, and her father was listening with the attentive patience he gave her mother in the mornings, the full version of himself that he saved for when he was paying attention to someone he loved.

Yuna ate and listened and looked at her family across the table in the ordinary morning light and felt the particular feeling she sometimes got and could never name exactly — not happiness exactly, though it was close to that, more like the awareness of happiness, the standing slightly outside a moment and seeing it clearly enough to know it was good.

She had that feeling now.

She didn’t know why it felt like something she was trying to memorize.

---

Practice ran long.

Her coach was in one of his moods where good was not good enough and the team ran drills until the gym lights felt punishing and three of the second years were crying in the way of people who were too tired to stop themselves and not embarrassed about it anymore. She wasn’t crying. She was past the point of crying and into the place that was just endurance, just the next repetition, the next set, the body doing the work while the mind stepped back and let it.

She was good. She had always been good. The coach knew it and the team knew it and she knew it in the quiet way of someone who had been good at something for long enough that it stopped being surprising and started just being part of the picture.

She showered in the locker room after, alone except for two of the second years who left quickly, and stood under the hot water until it started to cool and then got out and dressed and went outside into the evening where her father’s car was at the curb exactly as he’d said it would be.

He had tea in the console. Canned, from the convenience store, but warm.

She got in and the door closed and the city moved past the windows on both sides and her father drove in the comfortable silence he was good at and she held the tea with both hands and looked at the street.

"Good practice?" he said.

"Long," she said.

He made a sound that meant he understood.

The city at night was the same city it always was, lit and moving and indifferent in the specific way of cities, thousands of lives happening simultaneously in the small lit windows of every building they passed. She looked at it the way she sometimes did and thought about the scale of it, all those people, all those evenings.

"Dad," she said.

"Mm."

She looked at the window. "Nothing," she said.

He glanced at her briefly. Looked back at the road. Didn’t push.

She leaned her head against the glass and watched the city go by and held the tea and thought about nothing in particular, which was not nothing, which was everything she had, which was enough.

---

She was asleep before eleven.

The dream started the way it always started — ordinary, a classroom or a hallway or a kitchen, the texture of a normal day. She was in the school gym. The floors were polished. The lights were the same lights. Someone was talking far away.

Then the sound changed.

Not loud at first. Just wrong. The quality of it shifting from background to something that pulled at the attention the way a sound only did when it meant something, and she looked around the gym and it was empty now, suddenly empty, and outside the high windows the light was the wrong color, too orange, too much, like every sunset happening at once.

She went to the window.

The city was on fire.

Not a building, not a block. The city. The scale of it was wrong in the way that scale was wrong in dreams, too large to process, too real to dismiss, and she pressed her hand against the glass and looked at the orange sky and the dark shapes moving through the streets below and felt something in her chest lock tight with a fear that was not dream-fear, was too specific, too weighted, was something that knew.

She turned around and the gym was different now, larger, and the doors were wrong and the lights were going one by one, and something was in the building with her that had not been there before, and she could feel it the way she could feel the pulse sometimes, that particular pressure at the edge of awareness that meant—

The glass broke.

She woke up.

---

Seven forty nine in the morning. The same grey light. The same ceiling.

She lay in her bed and breathed and felt her heart doing what hearts did when they were coming down from something and looked at the ceiling and waited for the dream to finish dissolving the way they did.

It didn’t.

It sat in her chest with the specific weight of the ones that didn’t dissolve, the ones that left a shape behind even when the images were gone, and she lay there for a moment longer and then sat up and pushed her hair back and put her feet on the floor.

Down the hall the television was on.

The floorboard in the kitchen creaked.

She could smell rice.

She stood up and went to the bathroom and looked at her hands in the mirror for a moment, long fingers, wide palms, her father’s hands, and then she picked up her toothbrush and started her morning and did not think about the dream, or tried not to, or told herself she wasn’t.

The sound of her mother’s voice came down the hallway.

"Yuna, come for breakfast!"

She spat, rinsed, set the toothbrush back beside the blue one, and went.

---