From the shifting wall of smoke behind her, voices burst through, hoarse, panicked.

“Bette!”

It was Nyah, her silhouette emerging first, coughing hard, a cloth pressed over her mouth. Behind her came Kamau and Elijah, both hunched low, arms shielding their faces from the heat. They skidded to a halt when they saw her.

“We have to move!” Kamau shouted over the roar, his voice cracking. “The whole place is going up!”

“No!” Bette barked, waving them off, her voice ragged but unyielding. “We don’t abandon this. Not all of it. We save what we can.”

“Bette—” Nyah tried, stepping forward, but Bette cut her off.

“Find anything you can,” she said fiercely. “Blankets, sacks, stamp the flames. We have minutes. Not seconds. Nyah, inside the house, fire extinguishers under the sink and in the pantry. Now!”

Nyah hesitated for half a breath, then turned and vanished into the smoke.

Elijah ripped his shirt off and began beating at a creeping tongue of flames.  Kamau grabbed a feed sack and followed suit, already soaked with sweat and soot. Around them, the night had become a battlefield lit in hellish orange, and Bette stood at its centre bloodied, scorched, and utterly unbending.

Amid, the chaos, the hessian sack lay where it had initially fallen, slumped awkwardly on the scorched ground, partially illuminated by the ragged glow of nearby flames.

No one was paying it any notice, too much was happening. Shouts, crashing footsteps, the roar of burning wood. Smoke billowed thick and low, curling like a living thing through the compound.

And yet the sack moved.

Just a little at first. A subtle roll, like a trick of the light or a gust of heated air shifting its weight. It shivered again, edging half an inch forward, then settled. The fire nearby cracked and snapped, and it could have been anything, the pull of gravity on loose earth, the tightening of the coarse fibres as they baked under the heat. Maybe it was the wind. Or the fire playing games.

Another twitch. Then a lurch.

The knot at the top of the sack had begun to smoulder. The fibres, dry and old, frayed easily in the growing heat. It strained under some internal pressure, something weighty pushing from within. A sudden jerk, and the knot gave way entirely, spilling open like a wound.