Minh's funeral smelled of incense, rain, and boiled water.
That was the part Lâm hated first.
Not the white cloth. Not the closed coffin. Not the photograph placed too carefully near the altar. The smell. Ordinary homes had ordinary smells, even when the world inside them had been cut open. Someone had boiled water for guests. Someone had wiped the floor. Someone had arranged chairs in rows that made grief look organized.
Minh's shoes sat near the doorway.
Neatly.
Too neatly.
Lâm stared at them until the edges blurred.
Minh never left shoes like that. He kicked them half-sideways, one heel crushing the other, as if entering home had always been more important than leaving proof of manners. The neatness felt like a stranger's apology.
Lâm's injured hand tightened around the envelope he had brought and not opened.
Inside was an old practice schedule he had never returned.
Useless now.
The word did not stay on the paper.
It moved into his hand.
Into the wrist that no longer trusted a shot.
Into the shoulder that had tried to punch Thuận before the body remembered it was damaged.
Into the empty space beside him where Minh should have stood making some stupid comment about Lâm bringing homework to a funeral.
Useless was not a feeling anymore. It was a room he had been locked inside.
People whispered because whispering made them feel respectful while still allowing curiosity to eat. Chemical exposure. Investigation. Poor family. School violence. That clinic woman. That martial arts rumor. Such a good student. Such a quiet boy.
Lâm wanted to throw them all out.
He did not.
That restraint did not feel noble.
It felt like another injury.
Every polite bow, every lowered voice, every cup of tea accepted from Minh's mother became proof that Lâm could still behave while something inside him learned uglier shapes. He understood then why people in dramas broke objects. Objects made clean sounds. People did not.
Outside the house, the city kept making smaller versions of the same story.
On one school forum, Minh was a victim of illegal supplements.
On another, he had joined a fight and paid for it.
In a parent chat, Hạ Yên became a clinic doctor, then a school counselor, then an illegal researcher, each version forwarded with the same sticker of a worried cartoon face.
Someone wrote that the closed coffin proved contamination.
Someone else wrote that closed coffins proved cover-ups.
Both sounded certain enough to hurt.
Minh's mother sat near the altar with a face that had learned too much in one night. When guests came too close, she rose and moved through them with tea, each cup placed carefully enough to keep her hands from shaking.
Lâm bowed.
He could not look at the coffin.
Closed, because officials said the body could not be viewed. Contamination. Investigation. Safety.
Safety had become the cruelest word in the room.
Lâm's hand began to ache in rhythm with the incense smoke.
That was impossible, of course. Pain did not follow smoke. But grief loved false patterns. The mind wanted a rule so badly it would invent one from anything: incense, rain, shoes, a closed coffin, an envelope full of practices no one would attend.
He looked at the coffin and thought, with a clarity that frightened him:
If I had gone, I would have died too.
Then another thought came, uglier because it wore Minh's voice badly:
At least then you would not be standing here.
Lâm closed his eyes until both thoughts passed.
They did not pass.
They learned where to hide.
Thuận stood outside the gate.
He had arrived in a clean shirt and bruised knuckles. Tân Thành waited behind him, eyes red with anger he had nowhere to spend. Tân Phong stayed near the alley mouth, watching phones, faces, cars, because usefulness had become his way of not falling apart.
"Go in," Tân Thành said.
Thuận did not move.
"I don't know if I have the right."
"He fought with us."
"He died after we opened the route."
Tân Thành flinched.
Tân Phong looked away.
The sentence was not accusation. That made it worse.
Thuận stepped through the gate only when Minh's mother saw him and nodded. Permission from grief felt heavier than any order Hạo Nhiên had given.
Inside, Thuận bowed low.
He did not speak to the coffin.
He spoke to the floor before it.
"We failed to keep the route clean."
Lâm heard him.
"What route?"
Thuận turned.
The room did not become silent all at once. It lost sound by pieces. A cup stopped against a saucer. Someone's whisper broke in half. Tân Phong stopped watching the gate.
Lâm stepped closer.
"What route?"
Thuận's face changed before he could control it.
Surprise first.
Then understanding.
Then guilt so clear even grief could read it.
Lâm saw all three and something in him broke through the part still trying to behave inside another family's house.
"You knew," he said.
Thuận did not answer.
That was answer enough.
Lâm hit him.
Not well. Not like training. Not like revenge in a story where anger made the body clean. His injured hand failed before the strike finished, so the blow landed with his forearm and shoulder more than fist. It still turned Thuận's face.
The failure made him angrier than the hit.
Even rage could not use his hand properly.
That humiliation opened something black and childish in him. For one second, Lâm hated Thuận not because Thuận had failed Minh, but because Thuận could still stand in a fight and accept punishment with a body that obeyed him.
Then he hated himself for noticing that.
Tân Thành moved.
Thuận lifted one hand without looking at him.
Stop.
Tân Thành froze with his teeth bared.
Tân Phong took half a step, then stopped too when Thuận's fingers tightened.
Lâm hit him again.
This one caught Thuận in the chest.
"He told me nothing," Lâm said.
Thuận accepted the hit.
"I know."
Lâm shoved him hard enough that Thuận stepped back into the row of plastic chairs. One chair scraped the floor. Someone gasped. Minh's mother looked over and did not speak.
That mercy was worse than anger.
"What happened?" Lâm asked.
Thuận's mouth opened.
Closed.
He looked toward the coffin, then down at his own bruised knuckles.
"The fight broke out before we understood the center," he said. "We cleared the outside. We thought we were making a path."
"For him."
"Yes."
"And?"
Thuận's throat moved.
"And I could not protect him from where that path ended."
Lâm hit him a third time.
Tân Thành made a sound.
Thuận's hand stayed raised.
No.
Lâm's injured hand finally gave out. Pain tore up his arm so sharply his knees almost followed. He grabbed Thuận's shirt with the good hand instead.
His broken hand hung between them like evidence.
Not evidence of the ambush anymore.
Evidence that life could take the same boy twice without finishing him either time. First the court. Then Minh. A dream died cleanly only in stories. In real life it left appointments, exercises, school forms, people saying functional, people saying brave, people saying Minh would have wanted as if the dead became permission slips.
"He kept me away."
Thuận looked at him.
"Yes."
"And you let him."
"Yes."
"Why?"
Because he asked, Thuận could have said.
Because you were hurt.
Because I thought this was another school route with worse teeth.
Because I was arrogant enough to believe control and protection were cousins.
He said none of it.
"Because I chose wrong," Thuận said.
Lâm let go as if the shirt had burned him.
For a second, he looked ready to hit him again.
Then his eyes found Minh's shoes near the doorway.
Crooked, they should have been.
Careless.
Alive.
The strength left Lâm so suddenly Tân Phong reached out before remembering he had no right.
Lâm did not fall.
That made it worse.
Falling would have given people a task.
Hold him.
Bring water.
Call someone.
Lâm stayed upright, so the room had to keep pretending he was only grieving normally. That was the darker cruelty: if a boy did not collapse, adults trusted the shape of his body more than the ruin inside it.
At the altar, Minh's photograph smiled with a school-photo discomfort that had nothing to do with death. The image felt obscene. Minh should have been annoyed by it. He should have complained that his hair looked stupid. He should have texted Lâm to delete any copy.
Instead, people bowed to it.
The incense burned down slowly.
Hạ Yên had no public altar here.
That absence sat beside Minh's coffin like another coffin nobody had permission to name. Lâm knew enough to understand Hạ Yên was gone. Not enough to understand how. He remembered her through fragments: clinical calm, sharp eyes, a voice that made panic feel examined, and Minh's habit of lowering his voice whenever her messages arrived. Calling her only a clinic woman would have been easier. By then, it would also have been a lie.
Now even that name had nowhere to stand.
Lãnh Phong did not come.
Everyone noticed.
No one said it.
Lâm hated him for that.
Then hated himself because some part of him knew absence could be another kind of protection. He did not want wisdom. Wisdom was what people gave you when they had already taken the thing you loved.
He wanted Lãnh Phong to enter.
He wanted the man to look at the coffin and fail to be calm.
He wanted proof that monsters could lose too.
Then another part of Lâm, smaller and more poisonous, wanted Lãnh Phong to stay gone forever so hatred would have somewhere permanent to live.
The thought disgusted him.
It also steadied him.
That was how Lâm knew grief had begun making bargains with the worst parts of him.
Near the doorway, Tân Phong's phone buzzed. He checked it, face changing by less than a breath.
Thuận saw.
"What?"
"Nothing useful."
"Say it."
Tân Phong swallowed.
"Huyền Tinh channels are calling it containment."
Tân Thành's hands curled.
Lâm laughed once.
The sound made three guests look over.
Containment.
Minh had become a word before the incense finished burning.
At the back of the room, Quân appeared and did not enter fully. The blurred photo of his sister still lived on the edge of everything he had failed to stop: not an excuse, not innocence, only the leash he had mistaken for survival. He held a white envelope with both hands and looked like a person who had discovered apology was too small to carry.
Lâm saw him.
For one second, revenge found a clean shape.
Quân's face became a basket with no defender.
A shot with no hand pain.
A target.
Then Minh's shoes pulled his eyes back.
Crooked, they should have been.
Careless.
Alive.
Lâm turned away from Quân.
That was not forgiveness.
It was exhaustion refusing to become another weapon in the room.
But exhaustion was not mercy either.
Lâm knew, with a coldness that scared him more than anger, that if Quân had stepped closer and said the wrong apology, he might have used the good hand.
Not because it would help Minh.
Because for one second he wanted damage to leave his body and enter someone else's.
Outside, rain began again.
The sound softened the whispers and made the incense smoke bend toward the door. Thuận stood beside Lâm without asking. Tân Thành stayed behind them. Tân Phong watched the gate.
For the first time, the three schools did not matter.
Lương Thế Vinh. Lê Quý Đôn. Ernst Thälmann.
Names on uniforms. Names on buildings. Names adults used to organize blame.
The coffin stayed closed.
That was the only name the room obeyed.
When the ceremony ended, Lâm waited until most guests had gone. He knelt by the shoes and reached out with his good hand.
He moved the left shoe half an inch sideways.
Not much.
Just enough to make them wrong.
Just enough to make them Minh's.
Then he stood before anyone could stop him.
Thuận saw the change and said nothing.
Tân Phong saw and turned his face away.
Tân Thành wiped his eyes angrily, as if tears were another opponent being unfair.
At the altar, incense ash fell.
The photograph kept smiling.
Lâm finally opened the envelope he had brought.
Inside, the practice schedule was folded around one sentence he had written before the official call, when he still believed there would be another week.
Don't skip Tuesday shooting.
He folded it again and placed it under the edge of the altar cloth.
Not as evidence.
As homework for a dead friend.