Omid had found a jinn who would let him look at her feet, and he was lying on his stomach on the stone platform to do it, with his chin on his fists.
"Chicken," he said. "No. Normal. Normal feet."
"I told you," the woman said. She was sitting with her legs in the water to the ankle, as if it were a pond in a park. She had the face of somebody's aunt and a cardigan with a button missing. She had told them on the first night, before anyone asked, that she was a Hinn of the city and that the face was borrowed so the children would sleep.
Esther sat with her back to a column and her register on her knees and made the sixth stroke of the week.
There was no sun down here and no night either. There was the water, a hand deep and very cold, lying in a long hall of columns that did not match one another, and lamps on the platforms, and the sound of a city overhead coming through the stone like the sound of a neighbour's radio. The humans had the dry end. There were perhaps forty of them, from the cellars of Bab Touma and the streets behind it, families who had been sitting in the dark under their own houses when the dark came. The jinn kept the other end, and the middle, and the spaces between the columns where the lamps did not reach. Some of them wore faces. Some did not bother, and you saw only a thickening in the dark, a place where the lamplight bent, and you learned not to look straight at it.
Esther kept the clock. Six days. She had kept the date through a year of noon, and she had not expected to lose her nerve over six days of nothing.
On the first night the sun had gone down at last. Father Elias had rung the bell, and it had rung true, and afterwards the whole crypt had stood in the church and looked at the dark windows like people at a cinema. Three hours later somebody had knocked at the church door.
It had knocked politely, three times. Then it had said, through the wood, "Esti? Esti, it's me, open up, I've come to fetch you."
It had been Hadas's voice. It had been exactly Hadas's voice, the crack in the middle of it and the laugh waiting under it, and Esther had been halfway across the nave before her father caught her wrist. He had not said anything. He had held on. Father Elias had gone to the door and stood with his back against it and prayed in a voice she had never heard him use, and the knocking had come again, lower down, at the height of a child.
Then the stone at the back of the crypt, where she had always felt something like night, had opened like a curtain, and Rahma had stepped out of it with a lamp.
"Not you," Omid said to the woman in the cardigan. "Her."
Rahma was coming down the length of the hall between the columns, in her plain dark coat, walking in the water without lifting her hem.
"The gate opened yesterday, by your clock," Rahma said. "The people from the south have come in. Nine thousand of them, with sick and old, and the men who stood on the lorries let them through." She stood at the edge of the platform and spoke to all of them at once, the way Esther spoke to a class on the first morning. "Those of you who have a roof up there should go up today. The holders ask it."
"Is it safe?" said a man from one of the cellar families.
"It's held," Rahma said. "That isn't the same. I'll tell you what I can see, and I can see that it's held."
Esther's father had been praying when she came, facing a column a little to the left of the one Esther leaned on. On the second day he had asked Rahma which way Jerusalem lay from here, and Rahma had pointed and then said, "South, and a little west. That's not the unseen, uncle. That's a map." He had been pleased with that. He finished now and kissed the book and put it in its bag before he looked at her.
"Who wants the room?" he asked.
Rahma glanced along the hall, toward the far end where the lamps were few.
"Ours," she said. "Coming in from the east. His devils have been out on the roads since the light came back, and some of ours didn't stay ahead of them."
Esther looked where she had looked. Three of them were coming in through the arch at the end, slowly, in the water. She did not see faces. She saw shapes that had been burned at the edges, the way paper is burned, and one of them was being held up by the other two.
Zahra was already rolling the mattresses.
The stair had always been there. That was what Esther could not get over, every time. Rahma went up ahead of them with the lamp, and the stone steps turned once, and turned again, and then they were standing behind the stacked pews at the back of the crypt with the smell of old candles in their noses, and the wall behind them was a wall.
Mira was sitting on the bottom step of the real stair with a jerrycan between her feet. She stood up when she saw them and came across the floor and took hold of Esther with both arms, which she had never done before.
"Uncle's at the gate," she said into Esther's shoulder. "He went to look at them. He says the one at the front looks like a schoolteacher." She let go and looked at Omid and pushed his hair off his forehead. "You've grown. How have you grown in six days?"
"I saw jinn feet," Omid said. "They're normal."
Upstairs the church was full of light, lying in long yellow bars across the floor from the eastern windows. It had been lying there for six days. The sun stood over the roofs of the quarter at the height of a little after dawn and did not move. The pigeons on the courtyard wall sat with their feathers puffed out, unsure.
Her father stayed below with Reza to put the crypt back the way it had been. Mira gave Esther the second can.
"Everybody carries," she said. "Nine thousand people. The hospital's full of light-sick, the ones who can't bear the sun since the long day. Come on."
The well was in the courtyard of an old house near the east gate, a house with a fountain basin full of dust and a lemon tree that had died standing. Somebody had fixed a hand pump over the well shaft. A queue ran out of the courtyard door and down the lane, women and children mostly, with every kind of container: jerrycans, cooking pots, a plastic baby bath. Two young men took turns on the pump handle and did not talk.
In the corner of the courtyard, behind a blanket hung across a doorway, a woman was keeping the book.
Esther saw only her hands at first. They came out from under the blanket's edge, thin and dry, holding a pencil and a ledger, and the rest of her sat in the dark of the doorway where the sun could not reach. When Mira crouched and lifted the corner of the blanket a little, Esther saw a face grey with tiredness and a pair of eyes that screwed up at the light like a miner's.
"Mira," the woman said. "You brought someone."
"This is Esther. From Isfahan, with the families in the crypt. Esther, this is Halima. She trained half the cells in the south."
"A third," Halima said. "Name for the book?"
Esther gave it. She gave all of them: Hakimi, two. Karimi, three. Halima wrote them in a small square hand and drew a line under each household.
"The leaflet," Mira said. "Tell her about the leaflet."
"I put it into Hebrew," Esther said. "In Isfahan. With Zahra. And into Persian."
Halima looked up properly then, out of the dark.
"Pray as you pray," she said, "and mean it."
"That one."
"I put that line in." She almost smiled. "The sheikhs wanted three pages. I said give them one line they can't argue with." She turned back a page in the ledger, and then another, and stopped. "Hakimi."
She reached behind her into the doorway and brought out a folder. It was full of brown envelopes, opened and flattened, with papers inside them in different hands.
"These came through your uncle's church," Halima said to Mira.
"I carried some of them," Mira said. "I never opened them."
Halima went through the papers with one finger, page by page, holding them up close to her eyes. They were lists. Esther could see that much: columns of names, written very neatly, in Persian and English, with a stamp at the top of each sheet. Halima found the one she wanted and turned it round on her knee so that Esther could read it in the light.
At the top it said "Isfahan. Remained." Below that were the names Esther had written on the back of her register on the morning the buses left. All eleven, and her own.
Beside each one, in pencil, small and neat, someone had drawn a short stroke. Beside the last two names there was a second line in the same hand.
It said "Damascus. Bab Touma. With the priest."