The van sat on its springs as if it carried seven people. It carried eight. Ahmed had noticed that at the first fuel stop in Balochistan, and he noticed it again now, two thousand miles on, every time he braked. The eighth passenger weighed nothing.
He sat behind the driver's seat beside Fatima, an old thin man in a borrowed brown coat, with his hands on his knees and his eyes on the road ahead. Ahmed could see him in the mirror if he looked. He tried not to look. He had looked a great deal in the first days and learned nothing from it except how still a person could sit for how long.
Naim. Soren had given him the name in Fatima's kitchen, with the notebook open on the table between them at the word in its margin, and then he had given him the rest. Ahmed had listened to all of it. He had said nothing that night. Everything he could think of was too small. He had prayed afterwards, a long time, for forgiveness for the haste he had once called discipline, and in the morning he had gone to work because there were cases. Now he was driving the father of the boy he had burned to Damascus, and the father had not once spoken to him directly, and Ahmed had not once asked him to.
The road ran west across the desert in a straight grey line. The sun stood a little past the top of the sky and had stood there for what his watch said was two days. It was the third day of the forty, by the count the Mahdi's people had sent down the cells, the day that would be like a week. The light came in hard through the windscreen and lay on everybody's knees.
They stopped for the noon prayer when his notebook said noon. He had kept the timetable since the long day began, a column of estimated hours in his own small hand, and his five reciters had learned to trust it the way they trusted his diagnoses. They pulled onto the gravel shoulder beside a broken fence. The quiet one who drove the second shift found the direction with the phone compass and scratched a line in the dust with his heel, south and a little west. Ahmed checked it against the sun out of habit. The sun told him nothing. It stood where it had stood all yesterday and the day before.
They washed for prayer from the jerrycans, sparingly. Ahmed led. Behind him the five stood in a row and Fatima stood behind them, and when he raised his hands and began, he could hear the wind moving grit along the fence wire and nothing else.
Naim did not pray. He stood apart by the van with one hand on its warm side, as if to keep himself from being blown off. When Ahmed turned his head to the right and then to the left at the end, greeting whoever was there to be greeted, the old man was watching them.
The youngest of the five caught Ahmed by the jerrycans afterwards. He was from Hyderabad and he was twenty-four, and he was the best of them at reading eyes.
"Sheikh. With respect." He kept his voice down. "He's a jinn. We spend our lives putting them out of people. Now we're carrying one to Syria and sharing our water with him."
"He doesn't drink our water."
"You know what I mean."
Ahmed did. He had trained the boy himself. He had taught him the rule that had kept Ahmed alive for nineteen years and that had killed a boy in a bedroom in Karachi: they lie to delay, so you never stop.
"He isn't in anyone," he said. "He's travelling with us. That's all he's doing."
"And if he goes into one of us?"
"Then you'll know what to do. I taught you." He screwed the cap back on the jerrycan. "Before you do it, listen to what he says. All of it. To the end."
The boy looked at him strangely. Ahmed went back to the van.
Twenty miles on, a column came the other way.
It came along the other carriageway, past the concrete divider, at walking pace: trucks, tractors, a bus with its windows down, families on foot with handcarts, and among them animals fat in a way no animal in the desert should be fat. Over the column the sky was different. A grey cloud sat low over it and travelled with it, and from the cloud fell a light rain, and the road under the column was dark with wet while the road under the van was dust. People in the column were laughing. A boy on the roof of the bus held a melon over his head.
They were going back the way the van had come. Toward the camp, wherever it stood now. Toward the man.
Fatima made a sound. He looked in the mirror. She had a hand pressed flat under her left collarbone, over the place where the scar was, and her face had gone the colour of paper.
"It's all right," she said. "It's them. It's what's walking with them."
He knew the scar. He had made it. In the two years and more he had kept her case, he had learned that it ached when certain things passed close, and burned when they passed very close, and he had stopped trying to file it under any heading he had.
Then he looked at Naim, and kept looking.
The old man's hands lay on his knees as they had for two thousand miles. But the brown cloth of the seat showed through them. Ahmed could see the stitching in the upholstery through the backs of the fingers, the way you see the bed of a stream through moving water. As the column passed, the hands thinned further, and the face above them went grey at the edges, and the old man shut his eyes.
Fatima took one of the hands in hers. Ahmed watched her fingers close on it and meet almost nothing.
"I'm here," Naim said. It was the first thing Ahmed had heard him say since Karachi. "Keep driving."
The bridge at the dry river was down. Someone had blown the middle span, and the two halves leaned toward each other over a wide bed of cracked silt and white stones. On the far side, according to the cell that had planned their route, the second car would be waiting at a petrol station with a green roof.
They went down the bank on foot with the bags. Ahmed carried the water and his old Quran in its leather cover, worn soft. The five spread out in a line. Fatima walked beside Naim, and for the first hundred yards the old man walked as fast as any of them.
Ahmed was halfway across when he looked back.
Naim had stopped. He stood in the riverbed with Fatima beside him, and his coat hung on him like a coat on a hook. He took another step. It was a slow step, the step of a man going up stairs he has climbed every day of his life and finding them too high. Then another. The gap between him and the line of reciters opened, ten yards, twenty.
"Wait," Ahmed called to the five.
They waited. The boy from Hyderabad put his bag down. Naim took one more step and sat down in the sand, carefully, the way the very old sit, one hand going down first to find the ground.
Ahmed walked back. The sun stood over all of them and threw no shadow anyone could use. The silt crunched under his shoes. Behind him he heard a second set of footsteps, the boy's, coming back across the riverbed without being asked. Fatima was on her knees beside the old man with both her hands around his.
Naim looked up at him. Up close the face was no longer quite a face. It was a shape holding the idea of one, and the idea was slipping.
"Go on," he said. "I'll catch you up."
Ahmed looked down at the old man's feet. There were no prints behind him in the sand, not one, all the way back to the bank. He had walked a hundred yards and left no mark, and now he could not walk a hundred more.