They scattered like they had been given somewhere to go for the first time in days, and maybe that was exactly what it was.
Elina and Aryan left first, heading toward the clothes market down the road.
A few minutes later Toviro walked out the front door with his staff and didn't say where exactly he was going because the mission was self-explanatory.
Downstairs, Ozair and Mina had already started pulling things from cabinets.
The house filled with the quiet sounds of work, bags rustling, boxes stacked, footsteps moving with purpose.
Mayo stood in his room.
He had watched it all from the window, Elina and Aryan disappearing around the corner to the right, Toviro's figure growing smaller on the left until the overgrown street took him.
Then he looked up at the sky. The sun was properly out now, cutting through the cloud cover, falling warm and flat across the rooftops and the wild plants growing over all of them.
He looked back into his room.
His study desk sat in the corner, the way it always had. Books he hadn't opened in weeks. A pen without a cap.
And lined along the back edge, exactly where he had placed them days ago, a row of small figurines in various superhero poses, stiff little things with painted expressions, frozen mid-action.
His eyes moved across them and stopped on the blue one.
He picked it up.
It was lighter than he remembered. The paint had worn slightly at the edges, the blue a little dull at the fingertips where he had handled it too many times as a kid.
He stood there holding it as the memory came without permission.
—
He had been small, small enough that sitting on his father's shoulders felt like being at the top of the world.
Haruto had been walking fast that day, not quite running, weaving through a busy street with Mayo balanced above him, one hand gripping his father's head for stability.
They passed a shop.
A toy shop, the window kind, with everything visible from outside. And there in the display, in a cardboard box with a clear front panel, were two figurines. One red. One blue.
Mayo had seen them from above and gasped.
"Dad, look! Red, the loser, and Blue, the hero! Look at them!"
Haruto had slowed.
He craned his neck to see what Mayo was pointing at, then understood.
His expression had done that thing it did, the quiet amusement that never quite became a full smile but got close.
"Aren't those from that show you watch every day?"
Mayo had nodded so fast and hard his whole body moved. "Yes. Those are my heroes." A beat. "I want to be like them."
His father hadn't said anything to that. Just looked at the box for another moment, then kept walking.
That night, Mayo had been on the floor in front of the TV, watching his show, when the front door opened.
He always knew his father's footsteps.
He jumped up before Haruto had even crossed into the living room, sprinting toward him, and when he was close enough he launched himself forward, arms out.
Haruto had caught him without bracing, held him up properly, and they spun, both of them laughing, round and round in the middle of the room while Mina stood in the kitchen doorway and shook her head at them with a smile she wasn't trying to hide.
Then Haruto set him down and crouched to his level.
In his hand was a shopping bag.
He reached in and pulled out the box, the same one from the window. Red and Blue, side by side behind the clear panel.
Mayo went absolutely still.
Then he lost his mind entirely.
He grabbed the box with both hands, stared at it, looked at his father, then back at it again.
Haruto opened it for him and Mayo reached in and touched both of them. First Red, then Blue, like he needed to confirm they were real.
Then he threw his arms around his father's neck.
"Thank you, thank you, thank you, Daddy—"
Haruto laughed, a real one, and hugged him back.
"One day," Mayo had whispered, looking at the blue one, "I'll be a hero like them. I'll help everyone."
When Mayo finally let go, still buzzing, Haruto put a hand on each of his shoulders and looked at him.
His father's hands had been warm and steady on his shoulders. His eyes had been soft in that particular way, the way that meant he was being completely serious.
"You are already my hero, Mayo."
—
Mayo came back to his room.
The figurine was still in his hand. Outside the window, the overgrown street sat quiet in the afternoon light, and somewhere down the road the sound of Ozair moving boxes carried faintly through the floor.
A tear ran down his face before he decided to cry.
He let it. Just one moment, standing there with the blue figurine and the memory and the weight of everything it came attached to.
Then he wiped it away with the back of his hand, set the figurine back in its spot at the edge of the desk, and stood up straight.
He looked at it one more time.
One day I'll be a hero like them.
He turned away from the desk and sat on the edge of his bed, and the house moved around him while he breathed.
The clothes market was quiet and dim, most of the automatic systems down, the emergency lights casting a flat white glow over the aisles.
Elina moved through it with purpose, one arm already full of folded things, occasionally holding something up to the light to check the material.
"How about this?" She held up a jacket toward Aryan, deep green, practical cut, good collar.
Aryan glanced at it and nodded.
She put it over her arm, moved two steps, and held up another one.
She had figured out early that Aryan's clothing opinions could be gathered through binary response, and had adjusted her approach accordingly.
She was choosing her own things and Mina's with more deliberation, considering fit, layering, and how much movement each piece allowed.
The world they were heading into didn't have a dress code, but it had weather and terrain and probably things that would try to ruin whatever they wore, so practical won over everything else.
Aryan, for his part, moved through the men's section with the same quiet efficiency he brought to most things.
He ran his hand along a rack, stopped on something grey and durable, held it up and assessed it briefly. "For Toviro."
He moved on. Found a dark one with good structure. "This one for Mayo." He started to pass the next rack, then stopped.
He reached in and pulled something out.
It was something ridiculous.
Garish and oversized, bright clashing colors, enormous buttons, a collar that belonged nowhere in this century.
The kind of thing that existed in a shop purely as a novelty, forgotten on the wrong rack.
It was a full clown costume.
Aryan looked at it for a moment. Then something shifted in his expression, small and controlled, but genuinely there.
He put it over his arm.
"This would look good on that joker."
Back at the house, Ozair and Mina had found their rhythm.
Ozair had taken the food, working through the kitchen methodically, pulling things from cabinets and shelves and loading them into bags in a rough order of priority.
Water bottles were stacked in their cartons beside the door. Dry food in one bag, tins in another.
Things that traveled well toward the front, things that didn't toward the back.
It was more organized than anyone would have expected from him. But Ozair, when given a clear task, could be very focused. He just didn't always have clear tasks.
From down the hall, Mina called him.
He found her in the bedroom, where she was pulling blankets and pillows from the closets and laying them out on a large piece of heavy cloth on the floor.
She was kneeling beside it, gathering the corners.
"Help me tie this," she said. "So they don't come loose."
He crouched on the other side without comment and they folded the cloth in over the pile together, pulling opposite corners tight, Mina directing where each fold went and Ozair following without needing anything explained twice.
They worked without much talking, which was its own kind of comfort.
When the first bundle was secured, he moved to help with the second, the pillows, same process.
Outside the window the afternoon had gone gold, the sun dropping toward the rooftops, the shadows of the overgrown plants stretching long across the street.
By the time they finished, most of the essential things were in piles by the door, organized and ready.
Somewhere across the city, Toviro was still looking.
He had been through four vehicles already, two with dead batteries, one with a cracked axle, one too small for all of them and their supplies.
He needed something big enough, solid enough, and with enough left in the tank to matter.
He walked farther down the road with his staff, eyes moving, patient in the way that meant he hadn't given up. Just recalibrating.
The city sat around him, half-wild now, strange and quiet under the three-mooned sky that waited on the other side of dusk.
Somewhere in all of it was what they needed.
He kept walking.
Tomorrow, they would leave.
Whatever came next, they would face it together.