“Jesse, come help me close this door!”
“Are the shadows keeping you company? We know how lonely you get, little Mina. So very lonely.”
Jesse’s shoulder joins mine, shoving against the door.
“Unless … uh-oh. Don’t tell me you’re scared of your own shadow,” the thing that isn’t Baba says, laughing. Ice sluices through my veins. “Your mother was never scared of her shadows. Then again, she rarely cared about anything long enough for its shadow to chase her.”
The picture of Mama as a teenager flashes through my mind. Her cold smirk and flat stare.
“You don’t know her!” I burst out, and I ram myself into the door over and over again. Pain explodes in my arm, but I would let the whole limb snap off before I let this thing keep talking. This creature in my father’s body, this nightmare that’s haunted me since I stepped foot in the Haikal villa—it doesn’t get to tell me who my mother was. It doesn’t get to eliminate the woman who raised me for nine years, who would drape me over her shoulders and spin us around until we were both dizzy and giggling, who would greet each morning by smoothing the furrow in Baba’s brow and kissing his temple, wholoved me.What right does it have to tell me she’s not real?
I beat against the door until it’s replaced by a wall of flesh and muscle. Jesse absorbs the blow across his chest before I can reel myself in. I gasp an apology as his large hand closes around my wrist. “Mansour, hey.” His tone is firm, steady. It cuts through my panic like a ray of sun in a storm. “The door is shut. It’s gone.”
We wait in tense silence, listening for sounds on the other side.
I hated not knowing what it had done to Baba. The one time I stuck around to witness the thing leave a body it had possessed, the person had been staggering around, completely dazed. They hadn’t remembered me,hadn’t remembered a second of their possession. At the time, it infuriated me—there I was, bleeding and terrified, and the person who’d hurt me could scarcely remember why they’d walked into the room.
Now, their amnesia is a blessing. I hear Baba shuffling outside, probably disoriented, struggling to recall what brought him to my room in the middle of the night, and my only strength comes from knowing none of this will remain with him. He’ll go to sleep with a faint headache, spared of any nightmares of a glowing door and orange eyes.
Eventually, the shuffling grows fainter as Baba returns to his bedroom.
Relief liquifies my muscles, and I sag into Jesse. His heart beats steadily under my cheek. Real and reliable, unlike everything else around me.
After a hesitant pause, Jesse’s hand settles between my shoulder blades. He rubs soothing circles into my back, his breath a warm caress against the top of my head.
“You sure there isn’t an easier soul out there for you to save?” I mumble. He smells divine, and I resist the urge to steal a deeper sniff of his collar.
A laugh rolls in his chest, rumbling against me. “I like a challenge.”
After a moment, I draw back, the shock easing away enough to remind me that I’m getting too cozy with a guy who’d wake up early just to avoid speaking two words to me. He’s being kind enough to comfort me—that doesn’t mean he suddenly wants to be friends.
“Your arm is bleeding,” Jesse says, zeroing on the clotted fabric stuck to my skin. “Come over to my place. I’ll fix you up.”
Since I don’t plan on going back to sleep for the rest of my life, I nod. “Let me grab a jacket.” I clear my throat, trying to rebalance myself. “By the way, we’re going through the front door, in case you were planning to scale my roof a third time.”
As I make my way to the closet, Jesse drops onto my bed. I pull out my fuzzy white jacket—the one Rainie says makes me look like a sentientcloud—from the hanger and draw it over my arms, yanking the zipper to my chin just in time to hear Jesse call, “Uh, Mansour? Is this yours?”
Jesse holds up my mother’s journal, pinched between two fingers, open to the first page.
I’d had this journal for nine years. I’d bought a magnifying glass to study the texture of the pages, flipped through it in search of a secret notation or a hidden message more times than I could count. In all that time, I never found anything beyond bare, bone-white pages waiting between the photo of my parents and my mother’s name at the front.
I gape at the pages open in Jesse’s hand, inked in top to bottom with my mother’s cramped, slanted writing. My vision darkens in the corners, hysteria squeezing a fist around my throat.
Jesse turns the journal back toward himself. “Is that a no?”
And there’s really nothing either of us can do about it when my knees give out, and I slide to the ground.
Bamba was tired of walking.
Night would fall soon, and she’d lost her blanket to the same woman who’d stolen her sleeping bench. On the bright side, she’d found a knife lying in the heaps of garbage scattered along the road out of the city. The dogs didn’t appreciate her crawling under the bridge and competing with them for food, though, and long scratches lined her arms and legs.
The knife had helped her even the score.
Regrettably, the blade didn’t have a handle. She’d already cut her palm twice, but at least she knew the next person who stole from her would deeply regret it.
The setting sun painted the road ahead in burnished gold, temporarily illuminating the miles of empty dirt and desert. The air wavered, soft and inviting, turning dust motes into shimmering diamonds. And the quiet—like a coffin lid had closed over Bamba, locking her in a living grave.
She should have stayed in the city. People who survived in the streets as long as Bamba had honed paranoia to an art. They were the ones who heeded unsettling rumors about places like these. Places where humanity had yet to leave its mark, where Masr was still ancient, its stories and superstitions pulsing hungrily beneath the rubble.
