Ithra wore a schoolteacher that day, a tired woman of fifty with a cardigan over her arm and a canvas bag of exercise books, because nobody in a city looks twice at a schoolteacher walking anywhere at any hour.
She walked the streets above the Cave for most of a clock's day. They were not the streets she had known. The city had split the way all the cities had split. Some districts had gone out to the road's people and were green, with water in the gutters and fruit rotting on the pavements because there was more than anyone could eat. The rest were dust. Between the two, along the ring road and under the flyovers, the ones who had left the dry districts and would not go to the green ones were camping in the shade of the concrete.
She stopped under the third flyover. A family had made a room there out of two blankets and a shopping trolley: a man, his wife, an old woman, a girl of six. They had a jerrycan with an inch of water in it and a plastic bag of flatbread. The man had drawn a line on the concrete with a stone to show the direction of prayer.
At what the city's mosques called the night prayer they stood up to pray in a row of four. Ithra, standing by a pillar with her exercise books, saw the second row form behind them.
Seven jinn: four Jann, two Hinn and an old Sila. They had come out of the shadow of the flyover's footing and stood behind the humans, a little apart, facing the stone line, and when the man said in Arabic that Allah is the greatest, they said it with him. The humans did not see them. The girl turned her head once during the standing, as if she had heard something behind her, and her grandmother put a hand on the back of her neck and turned it gently forward again.
They prayed together, the two rows, and the jinn left when it was done, back into the footing of the flyover, and the family lay down on the blankets.
Then the devils came.
Ithra felt them before she saw them, a pressure over the road like the air before a dust storm. They came down out of the jinn layer in twos and threes and drifted along the flyover, low, over the blankets, back and forth. One of them took a dog's shape and sat on the kerb ten feet from the girl's head and watched her sleep. None of them went closer than that. Ithra could not see what stopped them. She could see that something did, and that they hated it, and that they did not leave.
She counted them. By the end of the estimated night there were forty-one.
Soren was in the gallery when she came down, sitting on his stone in the place he had sat for eight centuries. He sat as he had always sat. The archivist of the deep record had told her, in the careful way junior jinn told her things, that the leader had been found kneeling on the floor of the lowest gallery but one, with his hands open on his knees, and had stayed there through two changes of the lamps.
She had not asked him about it. She did not intend to.
"I have a proposal," she said. "I would like to make it in order, and I would like you to hear the end before you answer the beginning."
Soren inclined his head.
"The Cave has stood apart from the human world since before you led it. That was right while the human world was what it was. It is not that world now. Thirty of ours went to the road in the first evening that didn't come. More have gone since. Tamar went." She did not soften it. "Every jinn who stays here and does nothing is a jinn the road can count on not to stand against it."
"Go on."
"There are believing jinn on the road with nowhere to go. There are humans with nowhere to go. Under the third flyover above us a family of four sleeps on concrete with forty-one devils around them, and believing jinn pray behind them in a row the family can't see. I watched it. Whatever keeps the devils off them is real. It's not ours. But they can't live on that concrete for the rest of the day, however long the day is." She set the canvas bag down on the gallery floor. It was full of children's exercise books. She had forgotten to put them back. "I propose that the Cave hide them. The believing jinn, and the humans who flee the road. Here." She went on before he could speak. "The outer galleries will hold four hundred if we clear the stores. The seep gives three times the water we use. The keeper of the niches can read the devil's mark on any jinn who comes to the gate, and turn back the ones who carry it. The human cells in the dry districts still bake, and they will send bread if we send them word. We have runners. I have the numbers written down, if you want them."
Soren was silent for a long time. In the gallery the light from the noon bar at the mouth lay across the floor where it had lain since the sun stopped.
"No human has crossed the threshold of this Cave in eight hundred years," he said. "Not one. It was the first law I swore to keep. The Cave's protection is what the Cave is. The rite is private. If we open it to humans, every devil on the road will know where they are."
"Every devil on the road knows where they are now. They're under the flyover." Ithra kept her voice level. "You stood apart once before. You stood apart while the network used your verdict to cover the surge. You told me afterwards that you didn't know whether you'd kept silent for the tribes or because part of you wanted the humans to suffer. I didn't answer you then."
He looked at her.
"I'm answering you now," she said. "It doesn't matter which it was. They suffered."
Soren's shadow lay on the stone behind him, dense at its heart, denser than the noon bar should have made it. He looked down at it as if he had only just noticed it there.
He stood up.
She followed him up the long passage, past the turn to the deep record and the old cut stone of the lower galleries, to the outer threshold where the Cave opened on to the world. The deputies came out of the side chambers as he passed and fell in behind, and the keeper of the niches, and a dozen others. Nobody spoke. Naim was among them, thin and upright, with his wrists in his sleeves.
At the threshold Soren stopped. Beyond it the human city lay white under the sun. Between the Cave and the city hung the old veil that made the mouth of the Cave look, to human eyes, like a fall of rock against a hillside.
"Open it," he said. "To the believing jinn, and to the humans who come from the road. To any of them who comes in peace. Post the gate. Feed them. Put them in the outer galleries." He turned to the deputies. "Send someone to the third flyover."
The veil went thin. Ithra watched the rock-fall turn to a dark opening in the hillside for anyone who looked.
It took the deputy less than an hour. When he came back up the slope he had the family with him, the man carrying the trolley's blankets, the old woman leaning on the wife, all of them looking up at the opening in the hill as if it might close on them.
The first to cross the threshold of the Cave was the girl. She had the plastic bag of bread in both hands. She stepped over the worn stone without looking down at it, and stopped. She looked up at the place where Soren stood, as if she could see him there, and held out a piece of bread.