"Alif."
It was a male voice, smooth and low, touched by some untraceable accent. Alif struggled to focus. He put his hand down and felt coarse wool: a carpet, swimming with red and white designs. He blinked rapidly. Dina was somewhere to his left, breathing high, panicked breaths. He flung out one arm with a vague idea of protecting her and heard a laugh.
"She's not in danger yet. Neither are you. Sit up and be a man, since you were man enough to come here." A shadow moved in front of him. Alif saw yellow eyes in a handsome, raceless face, neither pale nor dark, framed by black hair as long as a woman's.
"V-v-" Alif's tongue felt heavy.
"What a drooling mess you are. I didn't even hit you that hard." A hand reached out and took hold of Alif's shirtfront, propping him up. He took a few deep breaths and felt his head begin to clear. The inside of the tent was decorated like those of the Bedouin: a round brass tray on a folding stand, a camp stove, a thin cotton mattress. There was also a stockpile of automatic weapons in one corner. Dina was clutching the hem of his pant leg unconsciously as she stared past him at their host.
"V-Vikram?" Alif managed finally.
"George Bush. Santa Claus." The man grinned, displaying a set of white teeth.
"Are you going to hurt us?" Dina spoke in a wispy voice Alif barely recognized.
"I might. I easily could. In fact, I may without even realizing." The man shifted, and Alif noticed with horror that his knees seemed to bend the wrong way. He looked back at his face and attempted to forget.
"I'm sorry," he said, "sorry to bother you, Vikram sahib, I didn't mean to offend you in any, any way-"
"For God's sake, listen to yourself. Your girl is losing respect for you as we speak. You came here to ask me for something. I will probably say no and you may or may not leave with all your limbs. So let's get to it."
Alif forced himself to look the man steadily in the eyes. There was humor there: a predatory, unnerving humor, like the musing of a leopard in a pen of goats.
"I'm in serious trouble," he said. "I'm just a programmer, and I can't-I need someone who can protect me from the Hand. That's what we call the chief censor. We gray hats, I mean. Gray hats are programmers who work for regular people instead of a company. You know? It's a name we made up for him when we didn't know whether it was a man or a program or both. I'm in love with the woman he wants, and he found out, and he could put me behind the sun if he felt like it, I'd just disappear and you'd never see me again-"
The man raised a hand.
"I believe you. No one would come to me with a story so stupid unless it was true. But I'm not going to help. Number one, because you can't afford it, and number two, because my help would get you into even bigger trouble. So out you go."
Alif looked at Dina. Dina looked faint. For a moment worry overwhelmed his desire to scramble out through the tent flap.
"Could she have some water first?" he asked.
The man looked over his shoulder and shouted something in a language Alif didn't recognize. A female voice answered from somewhere just outside. A moment later a woman entered holding a clay cup. She wore the layered robes of a tribeswoman from the south and a red scarf was looped over her head and face. She looked at Alif and gasped. Alif looked back uneasily, discomfited by the recognition in her golden eyes.
"This is my sister Azalel," said the man. "Of course, that's not her real name-Vikram isn't mine, either-but it's as close as we can get in any tongue that you can speak."
"Alif isn't my real name," Alif volunteered, then cursed himself.
"Yes, I know. Your girl told me while you were drooling on the floor. She also told me your given name, which was foolish. Never tell a man your given name if you don't know his."
Azalel handed Dina the clay cup. Dina drank down its contents obediently and murmured her thanks.
"Now you'd better leave," said Vikram. "I haven't eaten all day."
Alif did not stop to ponder this statement. Putting a hand under Dina's elbow, he helped her to her feet. They hurried through the tent flap together and emerged gasping into the afternoon sun. By silent, mutual consent they half-trotted for several blocks before either of them spoke.
"Did you see-did you see-" Dina struggled to catch her breath, as though she'd been running.
"Are you all right? He didn't hit you, did he?"
"I don't know." Dina touched her forehead absently. "I thought I saw something awful, and I screamed, and then I was inside the tent. I think I may have fainted. You were lying there opening and closing your mouth like a fish. I was terrified that you might really be hurt."
Alif felt waves of gooseflesh travel up and down his arms. "We have to try not to panic," he said, mostly to himself. "We have to try to think this through and process it. Break it down into its composite parts until it makes some kind of rational sense."
"Rational? Are you mad? That thing was not human!"
"Of course he was human. What else could he be?"
"You unbelievable child-did you see his legs?"
The memory of Vikram's leonine joints sprang to life behind Alif's eyes. He felt dizzy.
"That could have been anything. The light inside the tent was strange. We were both upset. When you panic you start to think things that aren't real."
Dina stopped walking and stared at him with knitted brows. "I can't believe this. You read all those kuffar fantasy novels and yet you deny something straight out of a holy book."
Alif sat down on the concrete veranda of an apartment block. They had passed beyond the western edge of the souk into the outskirts of the New Quarter and were walking down a trim, manicured residential street.
"You've lost me. What am I denying. Instruct me in my religion."
"You don't have to get snotty. Remember: 'And the jinn We created in the Foretime from a smokeless fire.'"
Alif got up again and continued down the street, suddenly angry. He heard Dina make a frustrated sound.
"You lent me The Golden Compass! It's full of jinni trickery, and you were angry at me when I told you that made it dangerous! Why do you get mad when religion tells you that the things you want to be true are true?"
"When it's true, it's not fun anymore. All right? When it's true it's scary."
"If you're so afraid, don't tell me to be rational. Fear isn't rational."
"We can't all be you, Dina. We're not all saints." Alif reached over one shoulder to take his smartphone out of his backpack and discovered he wasn't wearing it. He turned around and looked at Dina in horror.
"The backpack," he whispered.
* * *
He let Dina lead him to an Anglo-Egyptian café a few blocks away and listened numbly as she ordered lentil soup, bread, and strong coffee. He obeyed when she coaxed him to eat. The clientele of the café was a mixture of western expatriates and the desi professionals who imitated them, moving in the sunlit, sanitized canopy of the New Quarter rather than on the forest floor with their unskilled countrymen. Alif regarded them uneasily, feeling shabby and adrift without his tools, his ID cards, the few physical artifacts he had been able to carry with him into this strange exile.
Dina was the only munaqaba in the place: the western women were bareheaded and barefaced, dressed for the autumn heat in linen slacks and T-shirts. The desi engineers and architects were all men. Yet Dina seemed less uncomfortable than he felt, asking the waiter for more ice and an extra napkin with clipped coolness, tucking the folds of her black robe beneath her without embarrassment.
"You're not hot?" Alif asked her.
"Are you kidding? It's freezing in here. They must have the air conditioner turned up all the way."
Alif laughed soundlessly and leaned on his arms against the table. "You're so brave," he said. "It's like you're out shopping for the day. I'm about to collapse. He must have taken the pack when I was half-conscious. My netbook, Intisar's book-everything that could possibly help us."
"I didn't see him take anything," said Dina, "but I was so frightened that I might have missed it."
"It doesn't matter. Without Internet access all I can do is run. Maybe I should just turn myself in and take my chances."
Dina shook her head emphatically. "You can't do that. State security will torture you and then dump your body in the harbor. You know how these things end."
Alif looked around at the elegant lemon-yellow walls of the café and the coordinating flower arrangements on each table.
"Your jinn are real," he said softly. "And this is the fiction."
He could feel her smile. She said nothing as she raised her hand to signal for the waiter and collect the check. Alif sighed when she paid it with her own money, having no other recourse but to sin against chivalry and let her. Dusk had begun to fall as they left the café. A muezzin clearing his throat into a microphone echoed up the street from a nearby mosque and, from much farther away, the pleading melancholy call from Al Basheera was audible. One by one the mosques sent out their melodic demands until the air was thick with sound: come to the prayer, come to the prayer.
"We may have to sleep in a mosque tonight," Alif observed.
"I don't know what I'm going to tell my parents," said Dina. "I haven't even checked my phone. I'm sure it's full of terrified messages."
"Well, don't tell them you're helping me-don't tell them about Vikram, either, or they'll think you've lost your mind."
Dina fretted under her breath, producing a mobile phone from a pocket in her robe. They walked deeper into the residential outworks of the New Quarter, past condominiums and apartment buildings modeled on some architect's fever dream of California and painted contrasting shades of salmon and sea green. This was territory Alif rarely visited. The City, Abdullah had once quipped, is divided into three parts: old money, new money, and no money. It had never supported a middle class and had no ambition to do so-one was either a nonresident of Somewhere-istan, sending the bulk of one's salary home to desperate relatives, or one was a scion of the oil boom. Though Alif came from new money on his father's side, he only saw it in driblets. Baqara District felt closer to the truth of things than the pastel oasis around them.
"I want to go home," he said abruptly. "This whole thing is ridiculous. I'll never take our second-rate street for granted again."
Dina gave an unladylike snort.
A breeze had come up from the harbor, exactly timed, as it always was, with the trailing edge of sunset; Alif smelled salt and hot sand. He took a breath. They had to keep moving: he must find a safe place for them to spend the night. He hoped the mosques in the New Quarter, none of which were more than a decade old, were not so posh that they would go against the established custom and turn out travelers. Alif was following this thought into its contingencies when he noticed a man wearing a white thobe and sunglasses. It was odd, he mused, to see a man in sunglasses after dark. A moment later the realization kicked in.
"Go," he whispered to Dina, shepherding her around a corner. "Go, go, go."
"What is it?"
"The detective from State."
She whimpered, then clapped a hand over her mouth, following Alif quickly down a street edged in hibiscus bushes. Alif didn't dare look over his shoulder until they had gone several blocks and then doubled back. He paused in the recessed doorway of a women's clothing store that had closed for the evening. Dina flowed in behind him like a shadow, pressing herself against the locked glass door. Alif peered out through a tangle of mannequin legs: there was no one on the street except for a janitor in a dusty uniform, sweeping out the entryway of an apartment building with a broom made of twigs.
"Is he still there?" whispered Dina.
"I think n-"
A loud crack interrupted him. Glancing down, Alif saw a perfectly round hole in the cement facade of the shop, no more than a few centimeters from his left arm. Dina shrieked. Without thinking, he threw himself over her, and they both tumbled to the ground as the glass display window behind them shattered. He felt her breath against his ear and the rise and fall of her chest, and for one vacant instant was pleasantly aroused.
Three more shots hit the storefront. Alif craned his neck: the white-robed detective was across the street, sighting down a pistol as calmly as if he were hailing a cab. He felt Dina struggle underneath him. She rolled, pushed him off, and half-stood. Alif made a grab for her arm.
"Don't, don't! Stay down!"
His heart sank as another shot ended not in a crack but in a gasp, and Dina slumped back down to the ground. There was a noise like a feral animal-Alif thought he himself had made it until he saw a tawny shape dislodge itself from the air and knock the detective flat on his back. Shaking, he gathered Dina's unresisting body and hid his face in the folds of her veil, whispering a prayer directed as much to her as to anything divine. He heard a man scream: a high, terrified gurgling sound, and then it was interrupted by the snapping of bone. The screaming ceased. Alif tightened his grip around Dina's limp shoulders.
"Come, children." The voice was sinewy and sated. Alif felt something close around his neck-a set of talons smelling of blood and shit-and found himself wrenched forward, separated from Dina by brute force. Then he was half-flying down the street, taking longer and longer steps until his feet no longer touched the ground at all.
* * *
"Give me your arm."
"No! Leave me alone-"
"Girl, listen to Vikram Uncle. That arm wants dressing. If you keep making this pious fuss I will break it off, dress it, and sew it back on."
There was a rustle of fabric. Alif struggled to sit and was immediately assaulted by nausea; with a groan, he lay back down. He neither knew or cared where he was. Turning his head, he saw Dina kneeling next to Vikram with her robe rolled up to her shoulder, exposing one red-brown arm: a bruised, bleeding bullet wound was visible halfway between her shoulder and her elbow. Relief flooded Alif's body, a sensation so intense that he momentarily forgot to be either nauseous or afraid. She lived. She had lived. His eyes stung.
Vikram was holding a pair of tweezers between his long fingers and peering at Dina's wound with an interest that was not absolutely wholesome.
"You can scream," he said. "It's all right." With no further introduction he plunged the tweezers into Dina's arm. She slumped to one side, balling her hands into fists, but made no sound.
"And there it is." Vikram held up a bloodied bullet in the tweezers. "You see that? That is a piece of your robe clinging to it there. The bullet pulled it in. That would have festered and poisoned your blood." He dropped the bullet into a saucepan sitting near his hyperextended knee. "Now we will clean it and stitch it up. You owe me your life, but your virginity will suffice."
"Try it and I'll kill you," muttered Alif.
"Good God, it's awake." Contemptuous yellow eyes regarded him. "You're threatening me? The girl here has more balls than you do. You'd have pissed yourself just now."
Alif sat up and swallowed hard to keep from vomiting. Dina looked at him blankly, eyes glassy with pain. They were back in Vikram's tent, he realized, which was rosy now with light from several glass lanterns set around the base of the arch. He smelled wood smoke somewhere close by. Vikram was bent on his task, swabbing Dina's arm with a wad of white cotton like some demonic nurse. When he was finished he took a curved needle from a box that looked like a pencil case and threaded it.
"This is the worst part," he said. "I think ten stitches. That means twenty needle pricks and some tugging. You really might scream." There was a plaintive note in the last sentence.
Alif looked away. Dina did scream, short panting yelps that made Alif tense in sympathy.
"Little mud-made beni adam," said Vikram, seemingly to himself. "Third-born little beni adam. Fragile as a fired clay pot, you are. You can look now, brother."
Alif glanced up: Dina's arm was bound expertly in white linen. She tugged the sleeve of her robe down over it with a hand that shook.
"Thank you," she whispered.
"Why did you change your mind?" Alif tried to look at Vikram without fear. "Why did you come to help us?"
Vikram half-smiled, jerking one side of his mouth to reveal a sharp incisor. "My sister says she knows you."
"Knows me?" Alif began to feel nervous. "I would remember meeting someone like her."
"I should think you would. She says you gave her shelter once during a sandstorm."
Alif stared stupidly at Vikram. He opened his mouth, thought better of it, and closed it again.
"I've been through your things," continued Vikram, putting away his instruments. "As it turns out, you're mildly interesting. You didn't tell me you had a copy of the Alf Yeom. There are almost none left in the seeing world. Humans aren't supposed to have it. I assume this is one of the copies transcribed by those old Persian mystics? Naughty of you to be carrying it around this way. I could get you a very pretty price for it."
"You mean the book?"
Vikram loped across the tent on all fours. He stopped in front of Alif and gave him a measuring look.
"Are you saying you don't know what this is?" He pulled Intisar's book out of nowhere and tossed it in Alif's lap. "Strange, as someone seems to have annotated it for you."
Alif frowned, looking from the book to Vikram and back. He opened the manuscript gingerly and leafed through it: tucked between the pages were yellow Post-its covered in Intisar's neat, upright script.
"These must be notes for her thesis research," he murmured. "I don't understand. The girl who sent me this told me she never wanted to see me again. Why would she give me something so valuable, especially if she needed it herself?"
Vikram tilted his head to one side in a raptorlike motion. "Perhaps she wanted to keep it out of someone else's hands."
"I guess." Alif held the book up to the light and began to read the first page.
* * *
The kingdom of Kashmir was heretofore governed by a king called Togrul. He had a son and a daughter who were the wonder of their time. The prince, called Farukhrus, or Happy Day, was a young hero whose many virtues rendered him famous; Farukhuaz, or Happy Pride, his sister, was a miracle of beauty. In short, this princess was so lovely, and at the same time so witty, that she charmed all the men who beheld her; but their love in the end proved fatal, for the greatest part of them lost their senses, or else fell into languishing and despair, which wasted them away insensibly.
Nevertheless, the fame of her beauty spread through the East, so that it was soon heard at Kashmir that ambassadors from most courts of Asia were coming to demand the princess in marriage. But before their arrival she had a dream that made mankind odious to her: she dreamed that a stag, being taken in a snare, was delivered out of it by a hind and that afterward, when the hind fell into the same snare, the stag, instead of assisting her, fled away. Farukhuaz, when she awoke, was struck with this dream, which she did not regard as the illusion of a wandering fancy but believed that the great Kesaya, an idol worshipped at Kashmir, had interested herself in her fate and would have her understand by these representations that all men are treacherous. They would return nothing but ingratitude for the tenderest affection of women.
* * *
"This is weird," said Alif, skimming ahead. "After that the king asks Farukhuaz's nurse to tell her stories that will encourage her to like men and accept one of the foreign princes. It's just a bunch of old tales like The Thousand and One Nights."
Dina rose unsteadily and limped toward the mattress where Alif had been sitting. She lay down on it, curling into a fetal position with her wounded arm held tight against her chest.
"What a rare idiot it is," scoffed Vikram. "The Thousand and One Days is not just a bunch of old tales, little pimple. That title is no accident-this is the inverse, the overturning of The Nights. In it is contained all the parallel knowledge of my people, preserved for the benefit of future generations. This is not the work of human beings. This book was narrated by the jinn."