The air smells like fire and rain. Smoke clings to the streets, winding through the ruins like a ghost searching for a body. I step carefully over the broken stones, my boots sinking into the mud, my breath shallow as I listen. Always listening.

The city is dying.

The war is still here, thick in the air, pressing against my skin. But the worst of it has moved on. The enemy is retreating. Or maybe we are. It’s hard to tell the difference anymore.

I press my back against a crumbling wall, the bricks warm from the fires that still burn in the hollowed-out buildings. I clutch the papers inside my coat—a name that isn’t mine, a history rewritten in ink. It has to be enough. It will be enough.

I slip through the alley, stepping over shattered glass, my heartbeat a drum against my ribs. In the silence between explosions, I hear the city breathing—whispers behind closed doors, a baby crying in the dark, a radio playing a song no one sings along to anymore.

The checkpoint is just ahead. Two soldiers. Their rifles hang loose in their hands, their faces hollow with exhaustion.

I keep walking. Not too fast. Not too slow. Just another shadow moving through the wreckage.

One of them lifts his hand. “Papiere.”

I nod, pull the documents from my coat with steady fingers. He scans them, his eyes flicking to my face. I make myself meet his gaze—calm, uninterested, the way people do when they have nothing to hide.

The seconds stretch long and thin.

Then, with a grunt, he waves me through.

I step forward, each footfall a prayer.

One step. Then another. And another.

The moment I am past the checkpoint, the breath I have been holding slips from my lips, vanishing into the cold air.

I do not look back.

The war is not over. Not yet.

But for the first time in years, I feel it.

The faintest taste of freedom on my tongue.