The dog under the stairs began to bark at the empty courtyard, and Fatima put her hand flat over the scar before it started.
It started. A small hot tightness under her left collarbone, as if someone had laid a coin there that had been sitting in the sun. She sat very still at the sewing machine with her hand pressed to the place through her kameez and counted, the way she had learned to count. Eleven. Twelve. The dog barked and backed into the shadow of the stairwell with its tail low. Fourteen. Fifteen. Then the heat drew off, slowly, like a tide going out over sand, and the dog stopped and sat down and licked its paw as if nothing had happened.
Nothing had, that she could see. The courtyard of the building was white and empty under the sun that had not moved in a hundred and two days. The washing on the line hung straight down.
She took her hand away. The scar was the size of a thumbprint, pale and a little puckered, and it had been there since the night the reciter came. For more than a year it had been nothing, a mark she covered with her dupatta out of habit. Then the sun stopped. Since then it ached. At first she thought it was the heat. Then she began to notice when.
It ached when the dogs barked at nothing. It ached at the corner by the shuttered cinema, every time, and nowhere else on that road. It had ached so badly on the stairs last week that she had to hold the rail, and it was only Bilqis's son from the fourth floor coming down past her, home from the highway where the convoy had been, smiling, carrying a sack of flour on his shoulder. He had greeted her as he always did and called her big sister. She had not been able to answer.
She did not tell her mother any of this. Her mother had spent too long being frightened for her already.
They came on the Thursday by the clock, two women and a boy with a tablet, and Fatima knew they were on the stairs before she heard them.
This time the scar went hot all at once, a burn, as if the coin had been in a fire, and she dropped the scissors on the floor and got up and went out onto the landing with her hand clamped to her chest, because she did not want to be in the flat when it happened, whatever it was.
She sat down on the top step. Below her, on the turn of the stairs, the two women were knocking at the Siddiquis' door. They were pleasant-looking women in clean pale clothes. One of them had a clipboard. The boy behind them held the tablet up in front of his face, filming.
"We've brought water," the one with the clipboard was saying. "There's no charge. We only ask the one question."
Fatima did not hear the question. Her ears had gone full of a pressure like the inside of an aeroplane, and through it she felt something else on the stairs. It moved beside the women, and behind them, and it did not climb. The women climbed, step by step, and it was higher each time she looked, like an evening shadow that is longer whenever you look back at it. It was close to the wall. It was paying attention to every door on the stairs, as a cat attends to a row of holes in a wall.
She knew that attention. She had had it inside her, once, in the weeks before the frightened one came.
Her mother came out behind her onto the landing with her slippers on the wrong feet.
"What is it? Fatima? What's wrong?"
The women had reached the top step. The one with the clipboard looked down at Fatima sitting there, and smiled, and the scar under Fatima's hand pulsed once, hard, like something knocking from the other side.
"Is this your daughter, auntie? Is she unwell? We've got water. We've got medicine."
"We don't want anything," her mother said. "Thank you. Go downstairs."
The woman wrote something on her clipboard. The boy lowered the tablet. They went down without arguing, and the thing that did not climb went down with them, and by the time they reached the Siddiquis' landing the heat in Fatima's chest had gone back to an ache, and the ache to a dull heat like a bruise.
Her mother crouched beside her on the step and put her palm on Fatima's forehead.
"Mother," Fatima said. "Where's Sheikh Ahmed's number?"
"On the fridge. Where it always is." Her mother's face changed. "Is it back? Is it starting again? I'll call him. He'll come tonight."
"Nothing's back. I want to go and see him."
"Then he'll come here."
"I want to go there," Fatima said. "I have to tell him something, and I can't say it in that room."
Her mother looked at her for a long time. Fatima could see her not understanding, and loving her anyway, and going to get her chador.
The rickshaw driver took the long way round the water point on the main road, because there was a queue of fifty people at it and boys in pale shirts handing out cups. Fatima felt it as they passed, a flare under her collarbone that brought tears to her eyes, and then it was behind them, and the city went by, white and dry and hot, shutters down on half the shops, a man asleep on a string bed in the middle of a pavement with a newspaper over his face. Her mother had pressed a folded hundred-rupee note into her hand at the door for the fare and another for the way back, as if she were a schoolgirl, and Fatima had let her.
She held the end of her dupatta over the scar and thought about the night.
She did not remember most of it. She remembered the heat in the room, and the smell like hot metal, and the reciter's voice going on and on in Arabic, steady as rain. She remembered her mother's hands. And she remembered, as clearly as one face in a crowd, that she had not been alone in her own body. There had been someone else in there with her, someone young. It had not been the cold attentive thing from the weeks before. This one had been frightened, more frightened than she was. It had kept looking for a way out, like a bird that has come in through a window and cannot find the window again, and it had kept saying one thing, over and over, in a voice that came out of her own mouth. "Cannot leave." Her lips had made the words and she had not. Then something like "not mine," as if it were trying to give back a thing it had been handed by mistake. And at the very end, when the heat was worst, one word that had sounded nothing like the cold thing from the weeks before, a word a child says at a locked door.
Afterwards she had told the reciter. He had been kind about it. He had said that was what they did.
The office was where her cousin had said it would be, on the ground floor of a block near the mosque, with a calendar from a tyre shop on the wall that she could see through the window. The door was open. Ahmed was sitting at the desk with a notebook, and he looked up when her shadow fell across the floor, and she saw him know her.
"Fatima," he said, and stood. "Has something come back?"
She came in and did not sit down. The scar was quiet. It had been quiet since she turned into his street.
"I told you after," she said. "You said it was what they do. I've had months to think about it." She found she was holding her dupatta in both fists. "Something frightened was inside me that night. It wasn't lying."