The cushions in the old detention room still smelled of school: chalk, floor polish, the sour rubber of a hundred gym shoes. Muhammad sat on one with his back against the wall under the window. Sheikh Yusuf sat across from him with his knees drawn up like a much younger man. Three of the sheikh's students sat by the door with their notebooks open, the way students sit when they have been told they may listen and not speak.
Through the wall came the gymnasium settling for the night. A trolley of folding beds squealed on the boards. A child coughed, stopped, coughed again.
A paper folder lay on the low table between them. The map was inside it. The first evening, Yusuf had wanted it pinned to the wall, and Muhammad had asked him to leave it closed. Put a map on a wall, he had said, and every man who comes in talks to the map. The folder came out when they needed it.
Tonight it stayed shut.
"The young men at the door asked me again when the war starts," Yusuf said.
"What did you tell them?"
"I gave them the mops for the washrooms. They did not thank me."
"A war ends when the enemy is dead," Muhammad said. "Then the fighters go looking for the next one. This is a sickness. You treat it until the body is well, and then you put the instruments away."
"You will not say the word."
"If I say it, they will build for it."
"Then talk to me about how they build," Yusuf said. "The usual way puts you at the top. The first circle under you, their students under them, then the towns. Reports up, instructions down."
"It has worked."
"It is slow. By the time an order goes down three steps, the family that needed it has buried someone. Cut it at one step and everything under the cut goes dark. And the middle fills with men whose whole work is carrying messages, until the messages are all they love." He tipped his head. "You have something else. I can see it on you."
Muhammad reached behind him to the shelf where the kitchen had left a string bag of oranges for the morning, small and hard, the best the market had had all summer. He set it on the folder. The oranges shifted and settled. He held out his hand, and after a moment Yusuf put his penknife in it.
"In each town, the fewest people who can do the work there," Muhammad said. "One of them leads. She has given me her hand, or given it to one of you. She decides for her town without asking anyone."
He found a knot near the bottom of the bag and cut it. The string sprang open around one small hole. The oranges stayed where they were.
"No centre. Each cell knows its neighbours, a handful, the nearest or the ones with the same kind of case. News goes knot to knot, the way it goes between villages."
"Slower than a shout from the top."
"A fire in one village does not close the road." He cut a second knot, two rows over. The bag sagged a finger's width and held. "If a cell falls, the others go round it. When there are people enough, a new one ties itself."
"And if a spy gets in?"
"He finds one knot and the few strings it touches."
"And when you must tell everyone at once?"
"I tell you. You tell the leaders you trained. They tell their own. It takes days. Days are enough."
Yusuf took the bag by its handles and lifted it off the table, turning it in the lamplight, the way a jeweller turns a stone to find the flaw. The two cut ends hung loose. Nothing fell out.
"This is how your enemy is built," he said.
"Yes. I have watched him build it for weeks."
"You are copying him."
"Every net is tied like this. He ties his to catch people. We tie ours to pull them out."
Yusuf put the oranges down. One of the students had stopped writing to stare at the bag.
"The reciters who come to us already know their craft," Muhammad said. "They have the verses, the order, the long nights. Nobody taught them to see it coming. They are called when the house is already screaming."
He had written it down over three weeks of evenings, the things that came before the screaming. A woman stops halfway through a task she has done ten thousand times and looks at her own hands. A man's voice goes flat, as if he were reading out his own lines. A family stops sleeping in the same room and cannot say why. He recited the list now without the paper, and the students wrote it.
"In the first days, an ordinary person can meet it. The Book, a little water, a sheet with the order of the work on it, and someone at the bedside who is not afraid. It does not need a master."
"You will train shopkeepers to cast out jinn."
"To meet it early. The deep cases stay with the reciters."
"The scholars will say the tradition does not allow it."
"It is in the classical books. We read past it because nobody needed it."
"You are innovating."
"I am untying two kinds of work that were always tied together."
"You are innovating."
"If you want the word, I will not fight you for it."
Yusuf looked at him for a long time. Muhammad knew that look from the two days the sheikh had sat on a folding chair by the gymnasium door, watching him ladle lentils, before he ever crossed the floor. The question of whether had been settled then. Yusuf was working out how.
"Send me your citations before the first towns," he said. "I will put them in front of the scholars a week ahead. Most will accept enough. The rest we argue with together."
Before the students left, Muhammad spoke to the three of them directly.
"When you train the leaders, do not give them my name as the reason. Give them the method. If it works, they will keep it. If the work hangs on one man, it falls when he does."
Yusuf gave him the small nod he gave when Muhammad said a thing the sheikh had already thought and not wanted to say aloud.
He crossed the end of the gymnasium to reach the alcove. The folding beds stood in rows under the basketball hoops, and most of the families were asleep with their shoes lined up beneath them. On the third bed a girl of about twelve lay on her side, whispering numbers to the wall. Her mother sat up beside her with a blanket round her shoulders. Muhammad stopped and greeted her. She answered without taking her eyes off her daughter.
He prayed the night prayer in the alcove, the way he had prayed it every night since he was a boy in al-Qaryah, and then he sat on in remembrance of Allah for the time he always kept.
Something had changed in him over the weeks, and he had told no one. He slept four hours and woke before the alarm with his head clear. He decided in an hour what used to take him a week. In the mornings his heart ran a little quick, the way it had the summer he carried bricks for his uncle, before his body caught up with the work. He counted none of it as his own. It felt lent, and he could guess why a man would be lent that much.
There was a date somewhere ahead. He felt it the way his grandfather had felt rain in his knees two days before the clouds. The cells could train within the week, and in three months, if Allah willed, the surge would break. He had nothing to tell him whether the date would wait three months.
When he came out of the alcove the outer door was open on the dark yard, and a woman stood on the threshold in a white lab coat with a canvas bag over her shoulder. A hospital badge still hung from a cord round her neck. She had come straight from a shift. Her hands were red from a lab's soap.
She looked past the beds, past the students packing their notebooks, and found him.
"They said at the mosque you train people," she said. "I don't know any verses well. I know how to hold a needle steady and how not to faint. Where do I give my hand?"
The badge turned on its cord as she stepped in. Under the photograph it said Karima, and under that, haematology.