He woke in the dark a little before the dawn prayer, as he had woken most mornings of his life, with no alarm and nobody knocking. His body knew the hour and had long since stopped arguing with it.
Muhammad lay still for three breaths and listened. The school was silent. Somewhere in the wall a pipe ticked as it cooled. He got up, went out to the tap in the corridor and washed for prayer in water cold enough to make his wrists ache: his face, his forearms to the elbow, the wet hand over his head, his feet one after the other on the tiled step. Then he went back to the old detention room beside the gymnasium, the room the counter had been run from.
The folder with the map lay on the low table, its cord tied in the bow he had made five days ago. He left it there.
He unrolled the rug and squared it to the mark on the skirting board, a short scratch he had made with a nail on his first night here, after working out the direction of prayer the way his father had shown him in al-Qaryah, with the sun's setting and a stick. It had been right then. He raised his hands beside his ears and began.
The dawn prayer is two units, and he prayed both as Sheikh Bashir had taught him in al-Murawwaq, neither drawn out nor hurried. He recited the Opening in Arabic, then a short chapter he had loved since he was a boy, and his voice stayed small in the small room. He bowed with his palms on his knees. He stood. He went down and put his forehead to the rug, which smelled of chalk and other people's shoes, and stayed a breath longer than he needed, and sat back on his heels, and went down again. The second unit went the same way. Then he sat for the testimony and turned his face to the right and to the left, greeting whoever was there to be greeted.
It was the same prayer he had prayed in this room in the first week after Sheikh Yusuf's pledge, when no one in the world had a reason to watch a man praying in a school detention room. He had not changed it for last night. Keeping it the same was half of why he prayed it.
Outside the courtyard was still dark. One bird beyond the wall had started up, trying a phrase, stopping, trying it again. The kitchen lamp across the yard was lit, and he heard a pot set down on iron.
He went back over the window.
He had stood there last night after praying for clarity, with the light almost gone and one lamp on in the teachers' building. For a week a cold had found the back of his neck wherever he stood. Then it had come through the gap in the glass and onto his face, and with it the knowledge, whole, the way you know your own mother's step on a stair. Something had opened. He had felt it coming all week as that draught at his back, and now it was no longer coming. It had happened. Nobody could put it off.
He had seen nothing and heard no voice. He did not know what had gone through, or in what shape, or what it would do first. He knew it was out in this world, the one with a small room off a school corridor and a lamp across a courtyard and himself standing at a window with his hands at his sides.
He had asked an hour before for clarity about what was coming. He had been shown what had already come. He had stood with that until the lamp in the teachers' building went out, and then a while longer in the dark, listening to the gymnasium breathe through the wall.
His heart had beaten hard, once, and then settled. He had said one thing aloud to the empty room, in Arabic: "In the name of Allah." He began meals with it, and lessons, and journeys. Last night it had begun this.
He held the people next, one at a time, as he did after every dawn prayer.
Sheikh Yusuf was asleep three corridors away, an old man with bad knees who at sixty-eight had been the first to put his hand in Muhammad's. Muhammad had not woken him last night. He would tell him when he had words that were worth an old man's sleep, and he did not have them yet.
Halima would be needed in whatever came. He did not know its shape, but he knew hers: she taught a room of strangers in two days and remembered all their children's names. Karima was in another region with workers she had inherited when her own cell was folded into the next. She did not know he thought of her this morning. She did not need to.
Layla al-Mansour, the teacher, the first recovery with a name. Her husband, Tariq. Her son Hamza, whose name Karima had written at the top of her report and underlined. Their news had not reached him this morning. He held them open, the way he held anyone whose news had not come, and did not invent it.
Then the fourteen, by name, as he had said them last night and the night before. He kept them for last, so that when he had finished with them he had finished with the people and could turn to what lay ahead.
He could not see it. Scholars had written down the signs in long sequences and argued for centuries over their order, some more soundly than others, none of them certain. The signs would come in the order they came. He would read each as it arrived.
Men had begun using a name for him that he did not use. He let them. A name like that was for a work, and the work would make its demands without his help.
He looked for his fear the way he would check his pockets for a key, and it was not there. He turned that over, wary of it, because a man without fear can be a man who has stopped looking. He did not think that was it. He was still looking. He had found nothing in him that was afraid. At fourteen, at nineteen, at twenty-five, he had lived the ordinary life of a student in a village nobody visited, carrying water, copying lines, being corrected. Sheikh Bashir had sat across from a boy with ink on his fingers and taught him for ten years, and had not known what for. Neither had the boy. He thanked the old man in his heart, and asked Allah to have mercy on him.
The wall across the courtyard had been black. He looked away at the bird, and when he looked back it was not quite black, and he had missed the moment it changed. A little longer and it was grey, and the window frame threw a faint shadow across the floor.
He rose, rolled the rug and set it on its shelf. He went to the window and stood where he had stood last night. The glass still had a gap at the corner where the putty had dried and dropped out. No cold came through it now, only the ordinary chill of a morning.
Across the courtyard the kitchen door opened. The cook came out with a bucket, threw grey water into the drain, wiped her hands on her apron and went back in. A boy in a school jumper crossed toward the washrooms with a towel over his shoulder, yawning, and didn't look up. The bird had found its phrase and kept to it.
He would live this day as he had been taught to live every day before it, an hour at a time, starting each thing in Allah's name. Most of the hours would be ordinary. He did not know which ones would not be.
He turned from the window. The folder lay on the low table with its cord in the bow he had tied.
He pulled one end of the bow, and the cord came loose.