The Weight of Weakness
The alarm goes off at six-fifteen, and Yacine is already awake to meet it.
He lies there for a moment, staring at the water stain on his ceiling shaped vaguely like a country that doesn't exist anymore, and listens to the building creak around him. Somewhere below, pipes groan through their morning ritual. Outside his window, three floors down, the reconstruction cranes have already started their slow mechanical bowing over what used to be Rue Al-Mansur before the Continental Wars turned it into rubble and then, eventually, into this—a half-finished neighborhood stitched together from old stone and new steel, scarred but standing.
He gets up. He showers. He eats the same breakfast he eats every morning, a boiled egg and toast that his mother leaves out before she goes to her shift at the textile plant, and he does not look in the mirror longer than he needs to, because the mirror has nothing new to tell him.
Same face. Same narrow shoulders. Same boy who has never, not once in fourteen years of life, made a wall crack just by touching it.
The walk to school takes him past the old bomb crater that the city never bothered to fill, just fenced off and painted over with a smiling…
