The sound that came out of Nara from behind those trees was the specific kind that made birds go quiet.
Then silence.
Then the forest resumed itself — the birds recalibrating, the insects picking up where they'd left off — with the total indifference of an ecosystem that had been processing louder events than this since before any of them existed.
The five of them stood in the undergrowth.
Nobody moved.
Then, from between the trees: rustling. The specific, deliberate rustling of clothing being rearranged. A breath. The sound of a hand finding a tree for support.
Nara emerged from the undergrowth.
She came through the gap between two palms with the specific, assembled dignity of someone who had decided, somewhere between the last sound she'd made and now, that dignity was the register she was returning to. Her shirt was on. Her underwear was on, or seemed to be. Her hair had things in it — bark dust, a small leaf at the temple — that she had not fully addressed.
