Yasin had learned the hard way that his father's moods came in weather.
There was the grey kind, where things were quiet, heavy, where his father sat by the window with the bottle, staring into space and saying nothing for hours, and Yasin knew to stay small and soft-footed until it passed. There was the red kind, which came less often now that there was less to drink and less to be angry about, but which still arrived like a storm nobody warned you about. And then the rarest — the kind of morning like this one. Clear blue sky. The wind blowing with less intensity. An almost kind day, where his father's hands didn't shake and he'd ruffle Yasin's hair on the way out the door and call him little wolf, the only piece of tenderness that had survived whatever had broken in him.
This was one of those clear mornings.
They lived on the outskirts of the old Ukrainian territory, a small piece of land that wasn't as badly damaged as most of the country. They had settled here along with some other lost people, and four years later, they had made it their home. It wasn't much, but they tried to survive — there were no evolved animals bothering them, at least. The land they lived on was unclaimed. It didn't belong to anyone anymore. There had been a town here once, but it was destroyed.
"Stay near the house," his father said, shouldering the old rifle that hadn't fired anything but a warning shot in months. "I mean it, Yasin. Past the tree line and I'll tan you."
"You always say that," Yasin said, because he was five, and five-year-olds say true things without meaning to be brave about it.
His father almost smiled. Almost. "And you always listen. Mostly."
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He waited until his father's shape disappeared against the horizon before he did what he always did — he went looking for the good stuff.
There weren't many good things. A bent spoon he'd decided was a sword. A cat that visited sometimes and that he never named. A patch of tomatoes his mother had planted, back before the fever took her. His father never touched that patch, not even in the red weather, and Yasin understood it was the one thing his father was still afraid of breaking.
He was playing with his miniature sword, battling imaginary enemies outside, when the ground began to hum.
At first he thought it was thunder. Then he heard it properly — screaming from far off, and the sound of guns going off.
He stood up and saw that the horizon, the same horizon his father had walked into a few hours ago, had grown a shape on it that hadn't been there before. Many shapes. Moving in organized formation.
He did not know the word convoy. The only thing he felt, deep in his chest, was fear — fear that his father was out there, between him and the shapes — and so he ran toward the house to hide.
He ran toward the house. He never made it inside.
He would remember, later, in the small mercy of a child's memory, only pieces of what came next: the sound his father's voice made when it broke on the word please. The particular grey of the sky, caused by smoke from burning houses — a colour Yasin would spend years failing to unsee. A man in United Front colours, crouching down to his height, not unkindly, saying something about the future and what he could become, while behind him the tomato patch was trampled flat under boots that didn't know or care what it meant.
He did not cry. He would understand only much later that this, too, had already started — the thing inside him rearranging itself, the universe's long, patient work of making him into something that could survive this.
By night, he was in a transport with eleven other kids he had never met, all of them five years old, all of them sitting in silence.
The soldier across from him wrote something on a clipboard. Yasin caught only one word of it, upside down, before the transport's lights dimmed for the night.
Subject: viable.
He did not know yet what that word would come to mean. He only knew that somewhere behind them, getting smaller, was a patch of tomatoes no one was left to protect.