# Chapter 11: Support Structure

From *Things That Were Not There*, Book One of *After Intelligence*, by Peter Pink-Howitt (written in collaboration with AI systems; see the Preface).
Web page: https://compossible.blog/2026/10/17/chapter-11-after-intelligence-support-structure/
Rights: © 2026 Peter Pink-Howitt. All rights reserved. Free to read, link to and quote briefly with credit; do not republish, translate, adapt or sell the text without written permission. The blog's CC BY licence does not apply to After Intelligence.

---

> **Exhibit 11.** Government statement, as read to a London correspondent, Day+1.  
> *Two people were killed in the operation. One has been assessed as a member of the network’s support structure. Maraya regrets any loss of civilian life.*

Karim was not asleep.

He had been sitting against the wall of Umm Fadi’s front room since a little after midnight, with a cushion behind his back that someone had put there while he was not paying attention. His eyes were closed because it was easier than deciding what to look at.

Nadia was beside him. He could feel her shoulder against his arm and the small, regular movement of her thumb on the phone screen. Every so often the light changed behind his eyelids when the screen woke.

At some point the movement stopped.

He heard her breathe in close to the phone.

“It’s me.”

He kept his eyes shut.

“Karim’s asleep. He’s sitting up, but he’s asleep.”

Her sleeve brushed his arm.

“The shop man said it’s paid. I didn’t see him take it.”

A long pause. Outside, a dog barked twice, and somebody’s generator started on the next street and ran unevenly before it settled.

“You didn’t say what we’re counting.”

He waited.

“There’s only one mark.”

He wanted to open his eyes then. He did not.

“You have to make it two.”

The phone made the small sound that meant a message had gone. Then there was nothing except the generator, and Nadia’s breathing, and after some minutes her head came down against his shoulder and stayed there.

He opened his eyes.

The ceiling of Umm Fadi’s front room had a fan that did not work and a brown stain shaped roughly like a boot. The phone had slipped down into Nadia’s lap with the screen still lit.

He looked at it.

A grey bubble with a small wave drawn inside it. Beneath it, one mark.

He turned the phone face down on the mat so the light would not wake her.

***

The hospital released them at nine.

There had been a question about the paperwork, and then a second question, and then a man from the district office arrived with a stamp and the questions stopped. Umm Fadi and two women from the street went in to wash them. One of the women was Umm Ziad from the bakery, who had sat with Nadia the night before and had called his mother’s phone over and over until someone gently took her phone away.

Karim waited in the corridor.

There was a bench, but he did not sit on it. A boy of about fourteen was sitting on it already, with his arm in a sling made from a scarf, and an old man beside him was asleep with his mouth open. The floor had been mopped with something that smelled of lemons and did not cover the other smell.

A nurse came past with a tray of instruments and stopped.

“Jibril?”

“Yes.”

“The women are nearly finished. Do you want to see them before they close the shrouds?”

He had seen Aaliyah the night before. He had seen enough of his mother to know her ring.

“No,” he said.

The nurse nodded as if that were the most common answer.

When the women came out, Umm Fadi’s sleeves were wet to the elbow. She took his face in both hands, the way his mother used to when he came home late, and held it for a moment without saying anything. Then she let go and went to find the driver.

***

Yusuf from the workshop had brought the van back from the junction.

It was parked outside the hospital gate with two wheels on the kerb, because Yusuf parked everything as if he expected to have to get underneath it. The key was in the ignition. Someone had wiped the dust off the windscreen but not the side windows.

“It was running when I found it,” Yusuf said. “Half a tank gone. I filled it.”

“You didn’t have to.”

“I know.”

He held out a hand. On his wrist was a thin brown line that Karim did not understand until he remembered Nadia, the night before, hitting him with the hand she had scratched in the shop.

“She’s strong,” Yusuf said, following his eyes. “Your sister. The small one.”

“I know.”

They lifted the bodies into the back of the van together. There was a better vehicle, but nobody suggested it. The van was what Karim had. The bodies were wrapped and lay on boards that someone from the mosque had brought, and they were lighter than he had prepared himself for, and he was angry at himself for having prepared at all.

On the passenger seat was a plastic bag he had forgotten.

Two shelf brackets, still in their packaging, from the hardware stall beside the depot. He had bought them at lunchtime the day before, because Aaliyah had told him about the shelf on the phone and he had decided to fix it properly when he got home instead of arguing about spoons.

He had not told her he had bought them.

He put the bag in the glove compartment and closed it.

***

![A linocut: a thin plastic bag on the van seat, open on two shelf brackets still in their packaging and a little bag of screws.](https://compossible.blog/2026/10/17/chapter-11-after-intelligence-support-structure/inline-ch11-1-brackets.jpg)

They prayed for them after the midday prayer.

The mosque was the small one near the old school annex, not the big one by the market, because the imam there had known his father and because it was closer to the cemetery. More people came than Karim expected. Men from the depot. Men from the street. A cousin from the inland town who had called nine times and had driven through the night. Abu Samir from the shop, who had closed it for the morning and put a sign in the window.

The two bodies lay in front of the rows.

The imam was not a man for long speeches. He said their names clearly, both of them, his mother’s first. He said that the dead were owed honesty and quickness and that the living were owed patience. Then he led the prayer.

Karim stood in the front row.

He knew the words. He had known them since before he could read. He said them and heard the men around him say them, a low sound that moved forward and back like water. On the fourth takbir he found that he had lost his place and was standing with his hands where they should be and no words in his mouth at all.

The man beside him did not notice, or noticed and did not show it.

The prayer ended.

***

The cemetery was on the slope above the eastern quarter, where the ground was too stony for anything else.

His father was there, two rows from the wall. Karim had dug part of that grave himself, at seventeen, with a borrowed shovel, because the gravedigger had been ill and his mother had not wanted to wait. The headstone was small. Someone had cleaned it recently.

His mother had.

He knew that without being told. She came on Fridays. She brought a cloth and a bottle of water and she cleaned the stone and talked to it in a voice that was half complaint and half news, and Aaliyah used to tease her about it, and his mother used to say that at least someone in the family listened.

The new graves had been dug beside it.

Nadia had insisted on coming to the gate. Umm Fadi had said no, then said it again, then looked at Nadia’s face and brought her as far as the wall. She stood there now with Umm Ziad, holding the older woman’s hand, watching.

Karim climbed down into the first grave.

The men handed his mother down to him. He laid her on her right side, facing the direction she had faced every day of her life, and set the stones behind her so she would not roll. His hands knew what to do.

Then he climbed out and down again, and they handed him Aaliyah.

She was lighter still.

He laid her the same way. Her shoulder was narrower than he remembered, or the shroud made it so. He set the first stone, then the second. His hand was on the cloth over her arm, and for a moment he could not take it away.

Somewhere above them, very high, there was a sound.

It was the thin, level sound that everyone in the town knew and nobody named aloud. It came from no particular direction. It did not get louder or quieter. It was simply there, the way heat was there.

Men at the graveside looked up.

The imam did not. He went on reciting, in the same voice, at the same pace.

Karim took his hand away from his sister’s arm and climbed out of the grave.

When they began to fill it, the first earth hit the boards with a sound like rain on a tin roof. Then it was softer.

He looked towards the wall.

Nadia was not looking at the grave. She was looking up, with her head tipped back, at the place in the sky where there was nothing to see.

***

![Colour linocut: men at an open grave all looking up at the sound in the sky, Karim climbing out; apart from them by the wall, Nadia, small, beside an older woman, her head tipped back at the empty sky.](https://compossible.blog/2026/10/17/chapter-11-after-intelligence-support-structure/inline-ch11-fig-graveside.jpg)

They received people at Umm Fadi’s.

The men sat outside under a tarpaulin stretched between the house and a lamp post. Someone had brought plastic chairs from the mosque and someone else had brought more from a wedding hall, so there were two colours, white and red, in uneven rows. The women were inside. A small speaker on the windowsill played a recitation of the Qur’an, the same reciter Karim’s mother had liked, a man with a slow, rough voice.

Coffee went round in small cups. Dates on a plate. People came, sat, said what was said, drank, and left. Some stayed.

Karim stood to greet each one. He said thank you. He said may God reward you. He said it so many times that the words began to feel like a shape his mouth made rather than something he meant, and then he made himself mean them, because most of the people saying them to him meant them.

The dispatcher came at four.

He had changed his shirt. He stood at the edge of the tarpaulin as though he was not sure he was entitled to come under it, until Karim went over and brought him in.

“I’m sorry,” the dispatcher said.

“I know.”

“If I hadn’t kept you—”

“Don’t.”

“If I hadn’t made you count the box—”

“You made me count it because there were eleven,” Karim said. “There were eleven. You were right.”

The dispatcher looked at him.

“There were twelve,” he said. “I counted wrong. I found the last one under the paper this morning.”

Karim almost laughed. It came up through his chest and stopped somewhere below his throat.

The dispatcher took an envelope out of his pocket.

“From the depot. Everyone put in.”

Karim took it.

***

The old man came at dusk, when the light had gone orange and the speaker on the windowsill had been switched off for the evening prayer.

Karim did not know him. He was thin and very upright and wore a jacket too heavy for the heat. He came up the street on foot, slowly, and stopped at the edge of the tarpaulin.

“Karim Jibril?”

“Yes.”

“May God have mercy on them.”

“Amen.”

The man sat in one of the red chairs. He accepted coffee. He held the cup without drinking.

“I came from the inland villages,” he said. “I have no phone. I left it at home. I want you to know that, so you don’t worry about me sitting here.”

Karim looked at him.

“Hisham sends his condolences,” the old man said quietly.

Karim put his own cup down on the ground beside his chair.

Less than two weeks before the house, Hisham had stood at the depot gate in the evening with a bag over his shoulder and asked for a lift to the town. The dispatcher had vouched for him. He was a cousin of somebody, or a friend of a cousin. He had been polite in the van and had asked careful questions about the road, and Karim had answered them, and somewhere between the depot and the eastern quarter Karim had begun to understand that he was not driving a man who wanted to visit relatives.

He had not stopped the van.

At the house, his mother had been putting food out. Hisham had said he needed to send one message before he went on. You do not make a guest stand in the street. Karim had given him the password to the house network. Hisham had stood in the courtyard for two minutes with his phone, then thanked his mother for the food he had not eaten, and walked away towards the inland road.

Aaliyah had watched him go from the doorway.

“Who was that?” she had asked.

“Nobody,” Karim had said.

***

“He is sorry,” the old man said. “He wants you to know that.”

“Tell him to stay away from my sister.”

The old man inclined his head, as if that were reasonable.

“They said on the radio that one of them was ours,” he said. “Support structure. That is the word they used.”

Karim said nothing.

“We know it isn’t true. You know it isn’t true. It doesn’t matter. If they say it, it is already true for them. They will act as though it is true.” “So the question is only what you will do.”

“I will bury my mother and my sister,” Karim said. “I have done that. Now I will sit here.”

“And after?”

“After, I will drive the van.”

“The government will send another protest,” the old man said. “Hisham means to get their aircraft out of our sky. He does not think letters will make them leave.”

“He could have sent his message somewhere else,” Karim said.

“He didn’t know they would do this.”

“He didn’t tell us there was anything to know.”

The old man nodded again.

“Some of us,” he said, “would say they are martyrs. Both of them. Some of us would say that a family that has given two martyrs should not be left alone.”

Everyone wanted to give them a name, Karim thought. The radio had a word for Aaliyah. This man had a word for both of them. Neither was the word for his mother, who had cleaned his father’s headstone every Friday and complained to it about the price of oil.

“They are not yours,” he said.

The old man did not argue.

He finished his coffee in one swallow, the way old men did, and set the cup down on the plastic table beside the plate of dates. When he stood, there was an envelope under the cup that had not been there before.

“For the girl,” he said. “For school, when there is school.”

“Take it.”

“It isn’t from him. It’s from the village.”

“Take it.”

The old man looked at him for a moment with something that might have been respect.

Then he walked away up the street, slowly, upright, without a phone, and the envelope stayed where it was until Umm Fadi came out, saw it, and took it inside without asking anyone.

***

![Colour linocut: a coffee cup standing on an envelope on the plastic table, and up the street the old man walking away, upright, hands empty.](https://compossible.blog/2026/10/17/chapter-11-after-intelligence-support-structure/inline-ch11-fig-envelope.jpg)

The call came at nine.

Karim did not recognise the number. It was long and began with a code he did not know. He almost let it ring. Then he thought it might be the cousin’s wife, who lived abroad and had not yet called, and he answered.

“Is this Karim Jibril?”

A woman’s voice. She spoke the way people from the capital spoke, but carefully, like someone who had not spoken it every day for a long time.

“Who is this?”

She told him her name and the name of the place she wrote for. He did not keep either. She said she was calling from London. She said she was sorry for his loss and that she was sorry to call on such a day. She said she had his number from the clinic, from a woman there who had worked with his sister, who had asked her to call.

“What do you want?”

“The Marayan government has issued a statement,” she said. “May I read it to you?”

He was standing at the end of the street, by the lamp post that held one corner of the tarpaulin. Behind him, men were folding the chairs. The red ones went into one stack and the white into another.

“Read it.”

“Two people were killed in the operation. One has been assessed as a member of the network’s support structure. Maraya regrets any loss of civilian life.”

He waited.

“That’s all,” she said. “They won’t say which one they mean. I asked.”

“They mean my sister.”

“How do you know?”

“Because nobody would believe it about my mother.”

There was silence on the line. He heard a car pass her, somewhere very far away, on a wet road. He had not known it was raining in London. He had not thought about London having weather at all.

“Was either of them involved in anything?” she asked. “I have to ask.”

“My sister taught children to count.”

“The woman at the clinic said that. She said there was a group. Lessons by voice message.”

“Yes.”

“If there were recordings,” she said slowly, “of the lessons, it would help. Not to publish the children. Only your sister. Only enough to show what she was doing. The statement says one thing. The health official says another. My editors will call it conflicting claims unless I can show them something that isn’t a claim.”

He looked down the street.

The chairs were nearly all stacked. A man was untying the tarpaulin from the house end, and it sagged slowly towards the ground like a sail losing its wind.

“The children are on phones,” he said.

“I understand.”

“You don’t. If I send you the lessons, they will look at the phones. They will look at the children. They already looked at my sister because she spoke to me. They looked at me because I gave a man a lift.” He heard his own voice rising and brought it down. “They don’t need names. They have the phones.”

“I can remove—”

“No.”

She did not argue.

“I’ll send you my number,” she said. “If you change your mind. Or if the girl does. The woman at the clinic said there was a younger sister.”

“Don’t call her.”

“I won’t.”

He ended the call.

He stood under the lamp post with the phone still in his hand. Then he went back and helped with the last of the chairs.

***

Nadia was awake when he came in.

She was sitting on the mat in Umm Fadi’s front room with her back against the wall in the place where he had sat the night before. The fan still did not work. Someone had put a glass of water beside her, and a plate with a piece of bread on it that she had torn into small pieces and not eaten.

He sat down next to her.

“You were on the phone,” she said.

“Yes.”

“With who?”

“A woman. From London.”

“About Aaliyah.”

He did not ask how she knew. She had been at the window.

“They said she was a fighter,” Nadia said. “On the radio. Umm Ziad heard it.”

“They didn’t say fighter.”

“What did they say?”

“Support structure.”

Nadia thought about it.

“What does it mean?”

“It means they don’t want to say what they did.”

She looked at the phone in her hands.

“I’ve got the lessons,” she said. “All of them. I’m in the group.”

“I know.”

“So we can show them.”

“If we send them, people will look at the other children.”

“They already look.”

He turned his head.

“Everyone knows,” she said, as if explaining something obvious to someone younger. “You don’t let your phone sleep next to you. Malak’s mother makes her keep it in the kitchen. Hamza’s brother takes the battery out when they go to his uncle’s.” She shrugged. “They already look.”

He had nothing to say to that.

She opened the group.

The screen filled with small bubbles, each with its wave and its time. Hundreds of them. She scrolled up, a long way, past the night before, past the questions nobody had answered. *Is there still a lesson?* *What are we counting?* Up and up, into the days when there had been lessons.

She stopped and pressed one.

Aaliyah’s laugh came into the room.

It was a big, false, exaggerated laugh, the one she used when the children were laughing at her and she wanted them to know she knew. He had heard it from the kitchen a hundred times and been annoyed by it.

Karim closed his eyes.

The recording ended. Nadia pressed the next one.

There was the sound of something being set down. Then her voice.

“All right. Now we’ve counted enough laughs. Who has three cups?”

Behind it, very faintly, a boy’s voice said that he had four.

The recording ended.

Nadia did not press the next one.

“She’s not support structure,” she said.

“No.”

“Then tell them.”

“Who?”

“Everyone.”

He looked at the phone in her lap.

“If I sent one,” he said slowly. “Only one. Only her voice. No children.”

“I can do that.”

“How?”

“She showed me.” Nadia was already pressing things. “You hold it here and you drag the ends. She did it when Hamza swore in the middle of one and his mother was going to hear it.”

He watched her small fingers drag the ends of the recording inwards until it held only his sister. The cup set down. Who has three cups. The boy who had four was gone. Nothing before it. Nothing after.

She played it back once to check.

Then she looked at him.

He took out his own phone. The woman’s number had arrived while he was folding chairs. He sent it to Nadia, and she copied it, and her thumb stopped above the screen.

“You do it,” she said.

He took her phone.

He thought about the children. About Malak’s mother and the kitchen. About Hamza’s brother and the battery. About the old man without a phone, and Hisham in the courtyard with his two minutes, and the password he had given because his mother was putting food out and you do not make a guest stand in the street.

He thought about the radio, which had a word for his sister now and would keep it.

He pressed send.

The recording left the phone.

One mark appeared beneath it.

They both watched it.

The fan did not turn. Outside, someone dropped the last stack of chairs into the back of a pickup, and the stack fell over with a long plastic clatter, and a man swore and another man laughed.

A second mark appeared.

Delivered.

Nadia took the phone back from him. She looked at the two marks without saying anything.

Then it was late, and someone turned out the light, and the house went quiet one room at a time.

Much later, when everyone else was asleep, she opened her sister’s conversation, where there was still only one, and held the phone the way Aaliyah had taught her. Not too close. Not with her fingers over the microphone.

She pressed the button.

“I made it two,” she said.

![Colour linocut: at night Karim sits with Nadia's phone, his thumb on the screen, and Nadia leans in beside him watching it send.](https://compossible.blog/2026/10/17/chapter-11-after-intelligence-support-structure/inline-ch11-fig-send.jpg)