The warlord came down from the mountains in a caravan of white trucks. No flags. The village had been taken three times that year by three different armies and the old woman selling oranges in the square did not look up when the trucks passed.

In the command center they watched the feeds. Satellite images grainy and green. A man in fatigues pointed at a screen. Another nodded. The building would be struck at dawn. It had been a school. Then a barracks. Then a mosque. Now it was whatever they said it was.

The refugees moved along the highway in a great column. They carried what they could carry. Some pushed carts. Some pushed wheelchairs. Behind them the smoke rose black and oily against the sky. They did not know where the highway went. Only that it went away.

In the capital the diplomats met. They drank water from crystal glasses and spoke of zones and corridors and ceasefires that would not hold. Outside the windows the city gleamed with money. Money that flowed from oil, from arms, from the buying and selling of the world’s slow collapse.

The girl found the cellphone in the rubble. Its screen was cracked but it still glowed. She scrolled through photos of people she did not know. A birthday cake. A beach. A man holding a child. She turned it off to save the battery and slipped it in her pocket. At night she would turn it on just to see the light.