The farmer's wife still had the bucket.
Rahma the Sila saw it as the family came down the long gallery toward the arch: the same dented zinc bucket she had carried out of the village fourteen months ago with sand in the bottom of it, which the woman had refused to leave behind then and would not leave behind now. It had held their water on the far side all that time. Now it held a folded blanket, a tin of tea and a child's shoe with the strap mended in green thread, and the wife carried it against her hip with the baby, who was not a baby any more and walked holding the bucket's rim.
Behind them came the rest of the family. The farmer with a mattress rolled on his back. The two older children. The old man with his stick, slower than he had been, and lighter, and laughing at something the boy had said.
Behind them came the others. Forty-one humans, from eleven villages and two towns, the last who were still across.
They had lived fourteen months in the long gallery behind the gate, on mats along the dry stone, fed from the tribe's tables and the seep, under lamps the jinn kept lit because they could not see. They had come out of it thinner than they went in, the way the taken always do, and with less of the time in their heads than had passed. The boy thought it had been one summer. His grandfather thought it had been a week and a long sleep. Rahma had not corrected either of them. It was not hers to say.
The council had met at noon under the bridge, in daylight, for the second time in its long life.
The word from Lud had come up the river roads in the night, on the backs of a hundred runners at once, so that by the dawn prayer there was nobody under the three arches who had not heard it. The man was dead. The son of Maryam had caught him at the gate of Lud and killed him. The devils who had flown south-east over Qamishli fourteen months ago in streams like starlings were coming back the other way now in ones and twos, low, fast, saying nothing, looking for holes. The gate had turned away nineteen of them since midnight.
Awf the Ifrit stood with his back to the middle arch, with his lamp, and said what he had come to say.
"We opened the doors because they couldn't manage without us," he said. "Now they can. Every day a human stays on our side is a day lost from his life on his own. Every day we stand at a human door in a human face, we teach them to open to faces." He looked along the riverbed. "I want them home before the rain comes back. I want us gone from their sight before they get used to us."
Nobody argued. Rahma had expected arguments. She sat on her block of the old embankment and looked at the council, and counted, because she had been counting since the cistern refuge was broken and could not stop. There were fewer of them under the bridge than there had been on the day the doors opened. The old Sila, her mother's aunt, who had been the last to raise her hand, had died in the cistern refuge, with humans and jinn around her. The two old Ifrit of the mill ruins were one Ifrit now. Rahma had carried that word too.
It passed with every hand. Then Awf looked at her.
"You brought most of them across," he said. "Take them home."
She took the human shape for the last time at the far end of the gallery, where the family waited, and she let them see her put it on, because they had asked her once what it looked like and she had promised.
It was not much to see. The air thickened in front of them and became a young woman in a grey coat with ink on her fingers, the same woman who had knocked on their door in the white noon with a sky full of devils behind her. The two older children had seen it a dozen times. They still watched. The youngest held the bucket and stared.
"This is the last time I'll do it," she said, to all forty-one of them, because Awf's rule was that it be said plainly. "The man is dead. Your villages are there. Your houses are there. When you go through the arch you'll be on your own side, and you won't see us any more. We'll be here. We're always here. We just won't come to your doors."
"And if we need you?" a woman from Amuda said.
Rahma did not know how to answer that. In the old days it would not have been asked. Before the doors, no human in the north had known there was anyone at the bridge to need.
"Then do what you did before you knew we were here," she said. "Pray. Name Allah on your doors and your food. He keeps out what should be kept out. He did before we came."
The old man laughed his short dry laugh.
"In seventy years I never had a jinn knock," he said. "Now I'll have to get used to not having one."
They went out the way they had come in, one family at a time, holding hands.
Awf stood in the arch with his lamp. Behind him, on the side humans see, there was nothing but three old spans over a riverbed and a sleeping dog and the plastic bags in the dead reeds. The light on that side was the light of the late afternoon, ordinary, gold, low over the dust, and a sun that would set when the sun sets.
He asked each family the gate's question as they reached him, in the same voice he asked it of princes and of thieves.
"Name and business."
The humans could not hear him. They answered anyway. They had learned. They gave their names and their fathers' names and their villages, and then one word, and it was the same word every time.
When the farmer's family reached the arch, the old man went first. He gave his name, and his father's, and the name of the village with the tractor across the road, and then he stood a moment with his stick and his free hand on Rahma's arm and looked out through the arch at the dust and the dog.
"Home," he said.
He stepped through. The farmer went after him with the mattress, and the two older children, and the wife with the baby and the bucket. Rahma went through last, still in her shape, holding the youngest by the other hand, out onto the dry bank on the seen side in the low gold light. She felt the arch close behind her. Not the stone. The other thing. The door her people had held open for fourteen months, both ways, to both kinds, drawing shut behind her like a curtain someone pulls across a window at dusk, so quietly that the dog under the middle span did not wake.
The family stood on the bank, blinking. The farmer was looking up the road toward the village, which was a smudge on the plain with one minaret. The wife had set the bucket down to settle the baby on her hip.
Rahma let go of the child's hand.
She let the shape go too. It went out of her the way a breath goes out, and she was herself again, standing on the bank on her own side of the world, a hand's width from them, and they could not see her. The farmer swung the mattress higher on his back. The old man said something about tea. The wife picked up the bucket.
They had gone ten steps up the bank toward the road when the middle girl stopped and turned round.
She was eight or nine, with her hair in one plait and a scab on her chin from the far side. She looked back at the bridge, at the three arches and the dog and the empty air where a moment ago a woman in a grey coat had been holding her little sister's hand, and she looked at it for a long time, frowning, the way a child looks at a place where a toy has just been.
Then she lifted her hand and waved at it.
Rahma, on her own side, a hand's width away, lifted hers and waved back.