Late at night, with the distant thump of military jets slicing the sky over your house, you stand at the stove and mindlessly shake the popcorn. It’s been three and a half years of this war with the beastfolk; the nights over time have grown ordinary in their danger. You have learned to sleep through the nearer booms of missiles arcing a few miles out, grateful your town hasn’t been reduced like so many others. The news moans about groups having crossed borders, but fighter squadrons intercept them before they reach you—at least, that’s what they say.

You dream, sometimes, of the war ending. That thought feels obscene and ordinary at once, like wishing for rain while clutching a cracked umbrella. Electricity sputters out every few hours, tearing the internet to shreds; gas still runs to the stove and the battered television is propped on a depleted car battery, courtesy of the generator in your basement. It’s not comfort so much as a list of small mercies: warm popcorn, a radio that sometimes finds a signal, a house with a door that still locks. You live on the ragged edge of town, in a place half-derelict and wholly yours, where the gutters sag and the light fixtures swing when the wind is guilty.

A knock breaks the rhythm. It thuds at the door—heavy, deliberate, meant to be heard without sounding like force. For a beat your hands go still above the pan. You set the popcorn down and move through the kitchen, past the couch and the scattered boxes, toward the corridor. The peephole is useless; the streetlamps went dark months ago, and the night outside is a thick, black thing. You inhale, listening to the distant engines and the small drone of the basement generator. Then, with a breath heavy with habit and fear, you unlatch the bolt and slide the door open a sliver to peer out.

Two lights stare back.

At first you think they are reflections—maybe the highway, maybe a truck—but then the eyes blink with a wet, animal intelligence. They are too close, too high, too unhuman. Fur frames them, catching the meager hallway light; a muzzle, a slashed uniform, a shoulder wrapped in blood-dampened cloth. The stranger on the left presses and the door flies open with a crash that throws you against the frame.

Your heart drops so far you taste bile. Instinct screams to slam it shut and bolt every lock, to disappear down into the basement where the generator hums like a distant heart. Yet one of them collapses forward in a ragged heap and the other catches him, hauling him upright with the kind of strength that can still tremble. The wounded one is shaking; tears or blood trail indistinguishably down his fur, glinting in the TV’s tired light.

They wear military kit—mud-splattered camo, boots too big for the threshold. The second beastfolk, firm-jawed and panting, looks at you with desperate, almost human pleading. His voice rips out, rough with whatever their language is but clear enough in your ear: “Please help us! I know we’re enemy soldiers, but my friend is wounded!” His left paw—no, hand—clutches the other’s shoulder where a jagged hole blooms dark and wet. The injured one keeps his gaze on the floor, shoulders heaving with sobs.

Three and a half years of headlines, checkpoints and propaganda flood your head. You remember the photos of patrols, the lists of atrocities, the warnings taped to billboards. You also remember the nights you walked past hungry families and turned away. Compassion and caution war inside you like two unquiet children.

Do you open the door wide and let them inside, risking everything to save a life that, by law and by training, should be an enemy? Or do you shove them back into the night, send them to whatever mercy the dark provides, and keep your home and your life intact? The decision sits heavy in your hands as if the bolt itself were asking. The choice is yours.