The first night after Silence-Sound Guest left was the coldest.
It wasn't the damp of the Land of Rain, but the chill seeping from the wound in her left shoulder-as though fine sand were grinding inside her veins, wearing half her body numb. Serina hadn't returned to Konoha for a medical team to receive her. She shut herself inside the village schoolhouse with its half-collapsed roof, cut cable insulation she had scavenged from the dam area into narrow strips, and wound them tight around her shoulder dressing to stop the bleeding.
The pain was dull, like someone scraping her bones over and over with an old file. She made no sound.
She dismantled the broken watch with its frozen hands from the corner of the desk and laid it beneath the oil lamp. The gears weren't broken; it simply wouldn't run. She nudged the balance wheel twice with a steel ruler. When she let go, it obediently stopped in the same place again. As though reminding her: once you reached the Boundary River, time no longer belonged to you.
Outside the village, the fingernail-sized black spot hovered above the well's rim. Now and then it twitched in the night, like a child still sniffling in its sleep.
Serina watched it all night.
The next morning, among the children stunned unconscious by the nursery rhyme, one little girl with pigtails still hadn't recovered her sense of taste.
The little girl crouched beside a discarded copper pipe, holding the brown-rice porridge the old woman had cooked. Tears plopped into her bowl. She couldn't say "hot" or cry "it tastes awful." Serina crouched down and took the bowl, blowing on it three times herself. Each breath pulled at her chest and shoulder together in a spasm of pain before she handed it back.