The tribe sits in rows and waits to hear who lives.
No one speaks. This is how I know it is bad. When the hunt goes well, we are loud. Here the mouths stay shut and the eyes stay down. A false fire burns overhead, white and cold, and it does not flicker, so no one can look into it and be calmed. There is no smoke. There is nothing to tend. Just the waiting.
They have brought their weak ones through a door that swallows them. Behind it, unseen hands do things to the sick that the rest of us are not allowed to witness. I do not trust a healing you cannot watch. In my tribe, when a child burns with fever, the mother holds her. Here the mother holds a small paper cup of brown water and stares at a wall.
A spirit lives in the corner. It shows tiny bright people running and laughing inside a flat stone, but no one in the room laughs with them. The bright people do not know their audience is grieving. Cruel little ghosts.
An old one has waited so long he has begun to sleep sitting up. His mate keeps her hand on his knee. Not holding him back. Just holding.
Then a name is called. Every head lifts. Every heart in the room asks the same thing: is it mine, is it mine, please let it be mine so the waiting ends. One family rises. The rest sink back down.
This is a cave where the tribe bargains with death and is not told the terms.