“Can’t find my phone,” she tells him. “Main line down in the house.”

“Then go get someone.”

“No time! I can’t leave my baby!” She kneels a few feet away. Pulls at the debris with her bare, bloody hands. So he starts to pull, too. Soon, he hears people behind him. Villagers, three men and two women, coming to help on their own. One of them tells him the village is in a bad state and rescue workers haven’t even made it there yet. Other areas were hit harder by the earthquake. Together, they clear the rubble from the landslide, which smashed into the staff house, causing it to collapse on itself.

He fights it, but a wave of heat builds inside him.

It gets so bad that he remembers Ahmići. Another cursed place. He’d been so young himself, barely twenty, when the army had sent him overseas. And that village. Both mosques had been mined, but he didn’t know that at the time. He only saw the one. Then the bodies in the houses, burned. The people burned. Their corpses.

He is pulled back to Bosnia, a place he has tried so hard to erase from his memory. Now he remembers the children most of all. It was why he left the military, those images of massacred children burned into his brain.

Something broken inside him.

Riya speaks to the others in her language. One of the men offers to take over where Dao is working, but he sends the man away with a single look. There’s a baby down here, she’d said. It’s now hitting him.

A child is buried under here.

Dao doesn’t stop. Now his hands are bloody, too. They work in silence, moving chunks of the building away.

Dao is the one who sees it first. The beam, fallen across a crib. Peeking out from under it is a chubby little arm covered in dust.

Riya goes to the child and pulls its little body out. She’s crying, keeling over. Rocking back and forth on her haunches. This is what she was hiding. Why she didn’t want him to go asking after Anto the Invisible. She brought her kid here to this place, even though it was against her work contract to do it. There was a no-child policy in the staff house. Boss’s orders.

She brought her kid here to die.

The child cries. It’s alive. But the knowledge comes too late. Something inside Dao snaps.

He strikes the little maid across the mouth, opening the cut on her face even further.

She stumbles but, in a flash, is up again. One hand holding her child, she hits him back. It takes every single one of the villagers in the compound to pull them off each other, and only then because he’s weak with exhaustion. Riya is screaming, she’s so furious.