The shade under the broken span was the only shade for miles, and they had carried him into it.
Naim lay on a blanket on the silt with his head on a rolled coat. He could feel the concrete overhead the way he used to feel weather coming, a weight of cool laid across his front. The rest of him he could feel less every hour. The fire that had been him for longer than this river had run was going out at the edges, the way a coal goes grey from the outside in, and he did not know how to stop it. He had never needed to know. For the whole of his life, death had been something that happened to other jinn.
Fatima sat beside him with his hand in both of hers. He had stopped holding the shape of a hand for her, and she held what was there anyway, as if she could feel it. Maybe she could. She had seen him at the window of her house in Karachi when no other human in the street could, and she had not screamed.
The reciters had made a camp at the far end of the span. He could hear them talking low. Ahmed was not talking. Ahmed sat on a stone at the edge of the shade with his old Quran closed on his knees and looked at the dry river, and once in a while he looked at Naim, and looked away again.
The sun stood where it had stood. Out past the shade the riverbed glared white.
He thought about the table. He did not want to, and he did. It came back the way it had come back in the Cave once he was clean enough to remember: the low table in Marcus's rooms, the glass of tea the man always set out for him that he never drank, the binding sitting on him like a hand on the back of the neck. Marcus asking questions in his pleasant voice, "What does the boy read? What does he want?" And Naim, forty years into it and worn to the grain, answering. He had never told it all at once. One thing a month, for years: that the boy read history, that he was quiet in company, that he dreamed his father would come back.
"I told him what my son dreamed about," he said aloud.
Fatima's hands tightened.
"I know," she said. "You told me. In the kitchen."
"Did I?"
"Twice."
Soren came across the riverbed from the west, walking.
Naim saw him a long way off, because nothing else out there moved. He came in his own shape, the one Naim had first known in the old war, tall and dark-edged and heavy, with that shadow trailing behind him across the white silt like spilled ink, too dark for any sun to have made. The reciters at the far end of the span stopped talking. One of them stood up. Ahmed said something short to him, and he sat down again.
Soren came into the shade and knelt on the other side of the blanket from Fatima. He did not say anything for a while. That was like him. In the old days they had sat whole nights on the passes saying nothing, two young jinn on registered work, before the war, before the Cave, before Naim had a son.
"Ithra told me which road," Soren said at last.
"You're going to Damascus."
"I'm going to Damascus."
"You never go anywhere."
Something moved in Soren's face that on anyone else would have been a smile.
He put one hand under Naim's head, lifting it a little off the rolled coat, and Naim felt it, the cool of it, water-cool, the first thing in hours he had felt all the way through.
"I'm dying," Naim said. "I didn't know we could."
"Neither did I. Not you." Soren's voice was flat and careful, the voice he used in council for things that had to be said exactly. "Your father didn't die in any war. Nor his. I'll find out why."
He thought about how long that would take, and how much of him was left.
"Tell the boy's niche," he said. "After."
He turned his head, which took a long time, and looked at the man on the stone.
Ahmed looked back. He was a tired man in a creased shirt with dust in the lines of his face, and in all the miles from Karachi Naim had not once said a word to him. He had sat behind him in the van and watched the back of his neck and thought about the bedroom with the cracked ceiling, and the voice reading, and his son.
"Reciter," he said.
Ahmed stood up and came to the edge of the blanket, and did not kneel.
"At the end. What did he say?"
Ahmed did not look away. Naim gave him that. He had expected the man to look away.
"He said he couldn't leave," Ahmed said. "He said it wasn't his, that it was a binding. I didn't stop." He drew a breath. "Then he said please."
Naim closed his eyes. Under his head Soren's hand did not move.
He had wanted his son to have called for him. He had wanted it for two years and more. He found, now that he had the true words, that he did not need the other ones. The boy had said please. He had been frightened and alone in a stranger's body and he had asked, politely, the way his mother had taught him to ask for things. Naim found he could carry that.
"Read something," he said. "You're going to read anyway. You read at every stop."
Ahmed hesitated. Then he went back to his stone and opened the old book on his knees, and turned to the place he wanted, and began.
He recited in Arabic, the opening of the chapter of the Cave. Naim knew it. He had learned it as a young jinn, long before the war, from an old Jann who had prayed in a mosque in Basra when Basra was new, and he had not said it in a hundred years. The words came across the silt in the voice that had burned his son. He waited, out of a habit older than he knew he had, for them to burn.
They went over him like water over a stone. Cool, and moving, and gone on downstream.
His lips moved with them. He did not choose it. Fatima bent close to hear and he did not know whether she could.
It went quickly at the end, as Soren had once said everything important did.
He felt the fire stop. It stopped moving mid-form and began to set, like water freezing in a pipe. He felt it gather at the place in him where his attention had always gathered, and harden there, and become small.
And he remembered the night his son died.
He had been in Marcus's rooms, under the binding, in the dark. He had felt it go past him. Something small and hot had torn through the layers of the world, going down, fast as a stone thrown into a well, and he had known in the whole of himself that it was his son's. It had not stopped for him. It had gone down to wherever such things went, and he had lain in the dark afterwards and not been able to say his own name.
He waited for that now. He waited for the tearing, the pull downward into the dark. He was ready for it. He thought perhaps it would take him where it had taken the boy.
It did not come.
Soren's hand was under his head. Fatima's hands were round his. Somewhere at the far end of the span one of the reciters was crying and trying not to be heard. Ahmed's voice went on across the riverbed, steady, not hurrying.
The last thing Naim felt was his own ember settle into the sand beside Fatima's knee, dark and smooth and a little warmer than the air, and lie there, and go nowhere at all.