The dog under the stairs saw them before anything else in Karachi did.
It came out of the shadow of the stairwell stiff-legged, with its lips back off its teeth, and barked once at the empty air where Soren stood in the courtyard of the building. Then it saw Naim beside him and stopped barking. It backed away under the stairs again, whining, with its tail pressed flat between its legs. Animals read jinn the way water reads a stone dropped into it, by the rings. This one had read two stones, and one of them was sinking.
Soren had come up out of the jinn ways at the nearest gate Ithra could find him, an old well two lanes away whose holders wrote down the crossing and asked nothing. Even so, Naim had needed to stop twice in the dark between strata and stand with his hand on nothing until his fire steadied. Now he stood in the courtyard under a sun that had not moved in a year, in the thin grey shape he could not put off, and looked up at the stairs.
"Up there," he said.
"The second floor."
They climbed. Soren took the human form he kept for rooms like these, an old man in a grey coat, broad in the shoulder, a face nobody would remember. He did it so that his feet would be on the steps. He found that he wanted them there. The boy had never climbed these stairs. The boy had arrived through the wall from a sorcerer's floor three thousand miles away, already bound, already falling. It was the reciter who had come up these steps that night, reading as he climbed. Ithra had told him so. The household had told Ithra.
Naim took the steps one at a time with both hands on the rail. On each landing Soren waited for him without turning round.
The flat's door had been forced at some point and mended. The old lock was gone. A new brass padlock hung in a hasp screwed fresh into the frame, with sawdust still in the grain round the screws. A strip of paper was folded into the jamb at knee height. A man had put it there to tell him whether the door had been opened while he was away.
Soren looked at the paper for a moment with something close to respect. Then he let the form go and went in through the gap under the door, the way smoke goes under a door, and Naim went after him.
The flat smelled of floor soap and rice and closed windows. The curtains were drawn in every room. In the front room a card was taped to the fridge with a column of hours on it in small, upright handwriting, the five prayers for each day worked out by estimate, and beside each hour a tick in pencil.
The bedroom was at the end of the passage.
It was smaller than he had made it in his mind. A bed against the wall, a wardrobe with a mirror in the door, a window with the curtain drawn and the noon coming through it the colour of weak tea. The crack in the ceiling ran from the light fitting to the corner over the wardrobe like a river on a map. The patroller's report had mentioned the crack, he remembered. The patroller had been thorough.
"The corner by the wardrobe," Soren said. "That's where the jewel lay. The patroller found it there the same night."
Naim went to the corner and knelt. He knelt the way old jinn kneel at the niches, slowly, with his hands flat on his thighs. Then he put one palm on the floor tiles, and then the other, and stayed there with his head down. His shape thinned at its edges as Soren watched, the way breath thins on cold glass, and came back.
Soren turned to the window to give him that, and saw Fatima.
She was sitting on the floor in the gap between the far side of the bed and the wall, where nobody standing in the doorway would see her. She had a blanket round her shoulders and a thermos by her foot and a small Quran shut on her knees. She was very still. She had been still since before they came in. He had walked into a room and read it as empty, and she had been sitting in it the whole time.
He knew why, a moment later. There was a pressure round her that he had felt before only twice, at the doors of two sorcerers his hunters could not reach, in the purge. It stood at her shoulders, in front of her and behind her, in succession, the way the verse he had gone back to again and again this year described it. It did not press on him. It only stood there. In its standing the room had seemed empty to him, because he had come in looking for threats and it had left him none.
And under her left collarbone, through the cloth, he read the boy.
It was a seam in her, small, the length of a thumb. The ember had torn out of her there on its way to wherever it had gone. The boy's fire had passed through there in its last seconds and left the shape of its passing in her flesh, the way a flood leaves a line on a wall. He would have known it among a thousand. He had watched that fire grow in the Cave since it was the size of a candle flame.
She was looking at the window. She was looking at the place where the two of them would be, if she could see them.
He could leave as he came. She would never know. But he had come into her room, the room where she had lain while a boy burned inside her. To stand in it unseen and then go seemed to him a kind of theft.
He let her see him. He drew Naim up off the floor with a hand under his elbow. The two of them stood by the window together, and he let the form show.
She did not scream. Her hand went flat over the scar. Her breath went in and stayed in, and she looked at them for a long time.
"You're not from the road," she said.
"No."
"It doesn't burn. When they come up the stairs it burns." She looked from Soren to Naim and back. "It aches now. That's all. Sheikh Ahmed brought me back here after the basement. He says nobody searches a flat twice."
Naim was shaking. Soren could feel it through the hand on his elbow, a fine tremor, like a rope under strain.
"Was it yours?" she said. "The one who was in me. The frightened one."
Soren opened his mouth to answer for both of them, as he had answered for the Cave for eight hundred years.
"Mine," Naim said. "My son."
She looked at Naim then and only at Naim. She took her hand off the scar.
"He kept saying he couldn't leave," she said. "Over and over, in my mouth. 'Cannot leave.' Like somebody had locked him in and gone away with the key. He was more frightened than I was." She swallowed. "I want you to know I knew he was there. I wasn't on my own. I don't know if that's anything."
Naim made a sound. It was the cornered sound he had made in his first weeks in the Cave, but softer. It came apart in the middle into something Soren had not heard from him in all the centuries since they were young.
Soren held his elbow and looked at the crack in the ceiling. He had read the boy's last words in Ithra's report, as clauses, as evidence. He had built a verdict on them. He had never once heard them in a voice.
Below them, the street door banged.
Feet on the stairs: one man, not young, climbing steadily. Over the steps came a voice, low, reciting in Arabic under its breath the way a man hums to keep himself company. With the voice came the pressure Soren had felt round the woman, doubled, standing in the stairwell at the man's shoulders.
"That's Sheikh Ahmed," Fatima said, and did not get up.
The padlock rattled. The key turned. There was a pause while the man crouched, Soren guessed, to look at his strip of paper in the jamb. Then the front door opened, and footsteps came down the passage without hurrying.
Ahmed walked into the room with an old leather Quran under his arm and stopped, and looked at the two of them by the window.