Ahmed held the thermometer a finger's width from the scar and pressed the trigger, and the little screen read thirty-eight point nine.
He moved it two inches to the left, onto plain skin above her collarbone. Thirty-six point eight. He wrote both numbers in the notebook on his knee under the date and the estimated hour, and drew the small line he used to mean the same as last week, and then crossed the line out, because it was not the same. Last week the gap had been one degree.
Fatima buttoned her collar. She sat on the edge of the bed in the room with the cracked ceiling, where he had read over her in the dark more than two years ago. The curtains were drawn against the sun. Through them the room was the colour of weak tea.
"Tell him about the stairs," her mother said from the doorway.
"I'm telling him."
She told it the way she told everything now, flatly, with her hands still. Yesterday at what the mosque called four in the afternoon she had gone down for bread. Halfway down she met the boy with the tablet, the one who had come round with the two women in clean clothes. He was alone this time. He said good afternoon, big sister, and put out a hand to stop her, and the back of his wrist touched her chest. The scar went off like a struck match. The boy dropped the tablet, and its screen cracked on the step. He stood holding his wrist against his stomach and looked at her as if she had thrown acid on him.
"He didn't shout," she said. "He just looked. Then he went down and left the tablet."
"Did you see his wrist?"
"Red. Like a burn from a pan."
"This morning three of them came," the mother said. "Knocking at every door. Very polite. They asked for the girl with the mark on her chest. They said their master heals such marks." Her hand went to her own collarbone without her noticing. "Downstairs they told them nothing. Upstairs, I don't know."
Ahmed looked at the notebook. A degree last week, two now. He had been watching that scar for most of the year without pay, because he had made himself a promise in his office with her account on one page and a word in his own handwriting on the other. He didn't know yet what the scar was telling him. He had been patient with it.
"Pack a bag," he said. "A small one."
His phone rang on the stairs. It was Daniyal, the youngest of his five, who lived two streets over and had been watching the corner since morning.
"They asked about you," Daniyal said. "The one with the bandage. He asked the tea man which reciter comes on Thursdays."
"What did the tea man say?"
"Your name. He didn't mean anything by it. Everybody knows you." A pause. "Then he looked up at her window and said something to the others. I couldn't hear it."
There was no dark to move her in. Ahmed had thought about that before, in the abstract, the way he thought about a case that might come. A year of noon had taken the night away from thieves and lovers and anyone who needed to cross a city without being seen. Everything happened in the same hard light. The only cover left was crowds.
He did it by the list he wrote on the back of an envelope, standing on the landing. The mother went first, alone, in a rickshaw to her sister's in Malir, with her own bag and loud talk on the stairs about her sister's knees. Fatima wore her mother's black chador over her clothes and kept her head down. He brought the car round to the side lane rather than the front. Saleem, who taught boys their Quran in a garage in Lyari, met them at the market end with his father's keys.
At the corner, the camp's trestle table stood under its green banner with sacks stacked behind it and a queue of women with bags. The neem tree on that side of the street was in leaf. The one on Fatima's side had been bare since spring. The boy sat at the end of the table with gauze wound round his wrist, eating an orange. He watched the car go past. He didn't get up.
Fatima sat in the back with her hand flat on her chest over the chador and breathed through her mouth until they were three streets away.
The print shop in Saddar had been shut since the paper ran out. Its steel shutter was painted with the name of a press that had printed wedding cards for forty years. Behind the shutter a stair went down to a basement that smelled of ink and old glue, with a door at the top of the stair that Saleem's grandfather had made out of a ship's hatch. There was one bulb. There were stacks of unbound pages tied with string, a camp bed, a tap, and a drain.
When Saleem pulled the hatch shut and turned off the bulb to show her the switch, it was dark.
Fatima made a sound Ahmed had not heard from her before. She stood in the black with her bag in her arms and laughed, and then she was crying, and then laughing again.
"I forgot," she said. "I forgot what it was like."
He kept the hours by his own timetable, the notebook his seven had built at the beginning and his five still used. They prayed the sunset prayer at the time the notebook gave for it, in the dark, with the bulb off so their eyes could have it. They prayed the night prayer an hour and a half later.
Afterwards, in the dark, Fatima asked him whether he still thought it had been lying. She didn't say what. She didn't need to.
"I wrote down what it said," he said. "I've stopped telling myself what it meant."
"That isn't an answer."
"No. It's what I have."
She slept on the camp bed with her face to the wall like a child. Daniyal and the other three came after the night prayer by the back lane and sat on the stair in a row with their backs to the wall. Saleem slept sitting up against the unbound pages. Ahmed sat at the foot of the stair with his Quran on his knee and the thermometer in his shirt pocket and did not sleep.
At what the notebook called a quarter past two, Fatima sat up.
"It's burning," she said.
He put the bulb on. She had her hand pressed flat over the scar. Her face was wet. He did not need the thermometer. He could see the skin round her fingers flushed red.
The bulb dimmed. It didn't flicker. The filament sank slowly to orange, and the basement went brown, and stayed there.
At the top of the stair the hatch ticked once, like metal cooling. Then it ticked again, and kept on, faster. Something on the other side was leaning on the steel the way a man leans on a door he thinks is locked, testing it. Ahmed felt it in his teeth. Further off, at the pavement grille high in the far wall, something scraped along the bars and stopped and scraped again.
On the stair the four of them had gone silent. Saleem was awake and on his feet. He began the last three chapters of the Quran in Arabic, and his voice cracked on the second line.
Ahmed stood up. He did not go up the stair. He turned toward the hatch and began the Throne Verse in Arabic, neither loud nor soft, in the voice he used for a case. He knew what was on the other side of a door like that. In eighteen years he had read at more than a hundred of them. He read the verse to its end and began it again.
The hatch stopped ticking.
The weight against it did not lift. It stayed there and went still, like a hand on a door handle when its owner hears his own name said inside the room. The scraping at the grille stopped too. The bulb stayed brown. Fatima's breathing was the loudest thing in the basement.
Ahmed kept reading. He had learned in his second year never to stop.
Through the steel, low and very close, someone began to hum. It was five notes, low, the same five over and over, a tune for sitting beside running water when you think you are alone. Nothing pushed at the hatch now. The hum went on while Ahmed read, and it did not come in.