The cord on the map folder had a bow in it that Muhammad had tied four days ago, when the last region reported a quiet week. He had not untied it since. He looked at it while the other two lowered themselves onto the cushions, and he left it alone.
Nobody had announced an end. He had built the counter so that nobody would have to. Each town closed its own cases, and then its workers went back to their shops and kitchens, and the people they had cleared went back to their beds. The reports thinned. Then the weekly calls were about who was sleeping again and who was not, instead of who had been taken, and that was the ending.
The room had been the counter's centre all summer. It was the old detention room beside the school gymnasium, with one high window and a ceiling fan that knocked. The rug gave up chalk dust when you knelt on it. In the worst weeks eleven people had slept here in shifts, phones charging in a row along the skirting board. Tonight there were three, and one charger.
Sheikh Yusuf sat with his back to the wall, the way he did when his knees were bad. Halima sat upright, hands folded on the notebook in her lap. She had run nine cities from that notebook and a borrowed phone, and she still carried both everywhere, as if someone might call.
They waited for him. He let the quiet go on until it was finished.
He began with the names.
"Saleh, of the river town," he said. "He went into a house on the eleventh night and came out on the twelfth morning. He died on the stairs going down."
He gave each one the same way: the name, the town, how it had ended. Some had been killed in the middle of a case. Some had read over hard possessions before their training was finished and had come away carrying something into their own sleep. For most of those it had faded over the weeks. For a few it had not. A woman in the hill country no longer spoke. A young man from the coast could not stay in a room with the door shut.
"Samira, of the coast road. She is alive. She does not leave her mother's house."
"Idris, of the market quarter in the third city. A baker. He read over his neighbour's son for nine nights. On the tenth his heart stopped at the oven, with the trays still in."
There were fourteen. It took about ten minutes. Yusuf kept his eyes on the rug. Halima did not open the notebook. Three of the names had worked under her, and she did not need it for them.
The eleventh was Rukhsana, twenty years old, who had shown Halima's whole cell the quickest way to tell a seizure from the other thing: watch the hands, not the eyes. She had died in a stairwell in the fourth week with her phone still recording in her pocket. Muhammad watched Halima's jaw when he reached that name. It moved once, then held.
When he had finished he said, "I hold each of them."
"Yes," Yusuf said.
"Each one."
"We know you do."
He said nothing more about them. He would carry them in the gaps of whatever work came next, at the edges of prayers and on the walk between rooms, the way he had carried his father after the burial. That needed no speaking.
"The surge is over," he said.
"Yes."
"The trouble isn't."
Halima did not answer at once. Yusuf tipped his head a little to the side, which with him meant he was listening hard.
"I'm not trying to frighten you. I'm telling you what I have."
"And what do you have?"
"Not much."
"But something."
"Something."
She let it sit. A summer beside him had taught her that when he said he had little, he had little, and that pressing would get her nothing he hadn't already handed over.
"Tell us the little, then."
He tried. All week he had felt it and found no word that fit. He heard nothing and saw nothing. It was like coming into your own house late, in the dark, and feeling cold air on the back of your neck before you reach the switch: somewhere behind you, a door you shut is not quite shut. He had never kept a list of the world's doors. He could not have said where this one was, or what was on the other side of it. He only felt the draught, steady, on his neck, at prayer and in his sleep.
"If I'm right, the work is resting," he said. "When the rest ends it will come back in a shape I can't describe yet."
"You want us ready."
"Yes."
"We are ready."
"You're ready for the shape the surge took. You may need to be ready for one it didn't."
"Then tell me how to train for that."
"I can't."
She nodded once and wrote nothing.
"We'll stay," Yusuf said after a while. "We'll leave the cells standing as they are. Nobody disbands. We keep training, slowly, at whatever pace the families can bear, and nobody gets taught in a hurry again. When you have something, we'll be where you can find us."
"Thank you."
That was all the instruction there was. Halima had one practical matter before they rose. A cell leader in the north wanted to go back to his trade; he was a tiler, and his brother's shop needed him. His name was Waleed. He had retiled the gymnasium showers in the second month, for nothing, between cases. Muhammad said the man should be let go with thanks, his cell should choose his replacement from among themselves, and whoever of the first circle lived nearest should train the new one. Halima wrote that down, word for word.
At the door Yusuf stopped with one hand on the frame.
"You'll pray tonight."
"Yes."
"For what?"
Muhammad thought about it before he answered.
"For clarity. I don't know what winning would look like in this. I'd know clarity if I had it. I'll ask for that."
"May Allah grant it."
"May Allah grant it."
Yusuf went out. Halima followed with the notebook under her arm, and the door clicked behind them.
He washed for prayer at the tap in the corridor, where the enamel had worn through to black iron in the shape of a thumb, and came back with his sleeves still rolled. The rug had drifted a hand's width that afternoon when the cleaner moved the table. He squared it again toward Mecca by the scratch he had made on the skirting board his first night in the room.
He did not start at once. He sat for the short stretch he always took first, calling his attention in from the day the way you call children in from a yard. Through the wall a child in the gymnasium laughed and someone hushed him. In the staff room a kettle began to tick toward the boil.
Then he stood and prayed, in the form Sheikh Bashir had taught him in al-Murawwaq, which was the form his father had prayed, and his father's father, back as far as anyone in the family had bothered to count. In it he asked for clarity and did not ask for victory. He held the fourteen through it: Saleh on the stairs, Idris at the oven, Rukhsana with her phone still recording. He held the thousands the counter had sent home to kitchens that would never feel quite safe again. He asked Allah to make the next shape plain to him when it was time for him to see it.
When he finished he stayed kneeling a while. Then he got up and went to the window.
The light had nearly gone. Across the courtyard one lamp burned in the teachers' building, and the air coming through the gap in the frame had the dry heat it always had at this hour in this season. Below him the night guard dragged the gate across on its runner and snapped the padlock shut. He meant to sleep. He had been up before dawn and would be up before dawn again.
He stayed at the window. For a week the cold had touched him from behind, at the back of the neck, wherever he stood.
Now it came through the gap in the glass, onto his face.