The Night the Sky Burned
The lamp burned low, fed by a sliver of black-market oil that cost three days' wages and would last perhaps two hours more. Dante watched the flame bend sideways in a draft that found its way through the seams of the window boards, and he thought, as he often did in these quiet moments, that their lives were very much like that small fire—fed by too little, guarded too carefully, always one careless breath from going dark.
The apartment occupied the fourth floor of a crumbling tenement in the Ninth Sector, four rooms stacked like afterthoughts above a textile mill that filled the nights with the clatter of looms. Water stains bloomed across the ceiling in shapes his sister liked to name—a rabbit, a sickle, once memorably a fat little imam that had sent her into muffled giggles until their mother clapped a hand over her mouth and hissed a warning that made the giggles die at once. The walls were thin enough to carry a neighbor's cough from one room to the next, thin enough that the Cera family had learned, out of necessity, to live as though always being listened to.
Because they usually were.
"Fold it smaller," his mother murmured, not looking up from the table where she bent…
