Tirad can smell fire and smoke. He is afraid to turn his head and lose control of the boat. But he wants to see where the smell comes from. He used to love the smell of logs burning, for him it associated with the Spawn-Scorching ceremony, a ritual of light and warmth and rebirth after becoming unburdened from all his faults. The Spawn-Scorching fire would gather everyone around, get rid of all the impurities and wrong doings, turning them to ashes and smoke. But now, this smell reminds him of death, pain and agony, the stench of the soft skin of the children burning as they cry for help and the choking of women who are unable to save themselves and their children from the painful death. It is no more the reminder of gatherings, but a sign of division and divorcement. Fire means losing Lealy, blisters on her soft arms, the blushing and peeling of her neck and breasts’ skin and filling her lungs with smoke. Fire means death on a large scale. Losing vast to the scale of the world, screaming as high as the roaring thunders and a profound pain as the deepest waters. And he knows that he will hate such smell forever. Still, he turns his head to see what is going on. Dalia has lit a small fire in a tin buckle and is sitting next to Narivan with a torch in her hand. She doesn’t seem to have the courage to do what she has to. Narivan must have told her to take care of the wound this way. Tirad wants to watch but he can’t take his eyes from the sea, afraid of losing the boat’s balance. Yet he doesn’t want to miss what’s going on the deck. He has one eye to the front and one eye to the deck. Dalia takes the torch to Narivan’s thigh and burns the deep wound. Narivan screams with fear. Tirad jumps from his loud cry, loses the wheel for an instance. But he has to calm himself down take control of his nerves and the steering wheel.

Dalia comes to him. She says they have to turn of the engine and fish. She searches for a net but she can’t find any around. She takes a knife and jumps into the water. Tirad goes to Narivan. He has passed out, probably from the pain of burning his wound; he has lost a lot of blood. He sits by his side next to the small fire of the tin buckle, listening to the sound of the chunks burning and waiting for Dalia to come back. Dalia climbs the boat with the knife between her lips, holding two small bloodstained fish in her hand. She sits next to him and peels off the fish. She takes the fat under the fish skin with the tip of her nail-less fingers and puts them on Narivan’s burn mark. His wound is not bleeding anymore but the skin around it seems soar. This was the first time Dalia had done such a thing and she has burned too much of the skin around the wound. Dalia covers the wound with a cloth. She looks like Lealy as she attends to the wound but her body posture is different. Her muscular arms are thin and her breasts hardly hang from her body as she bends over Narivan. She doesn’t have Lealy’s white desirable line between her breasts that would take away Tirad whenever she bent over, taking away his breath and raising his heartbeat. Dalia makes a shelter over Narivan’s face and leaves the fish flesh to be roasted for lunch.