banged against the hot wall. A darkness came, but before it took her, she was lifted into the air by hands made of sand.
‘Who are you and what are you doing here?’ asked a voice when she awoke. There was only darkness apart from a jinn thought-form, a face made from tiny, pale flames.
What could she say? That she grew up on the Gomelez Shard, in her father’s palace. That soon after she was eight, the Cry of Wrath came and took away her mother.
That she liked to escape her jinn tutors: she had a liking for the ancient tongues and learned many secret words with which to confuse them.
That after her sister went to the entwiner to be a muhtasib, she was lonely. She craved to hear forbidden stories, wanted to see treasure hunters return from the desert: wanted to speak to the ghuls and the old jinni in the City of the Dead. That, instead, her father gave her to Veyraz.
‘I am Tawaddudd,’ she said. ‘Thank you for saving me.’
The tomb was not large, barely more than an access space between the humming machines that housed the jinn’s mind in the rough concrete building made with ghul labour. There was sand on the floor. The only light was the jinn’s face.
‘So, you are the girl the Repentants are looking for?’ the jinn said. His voice was soft, a little shy, but human. ‘You should leave.’
‘I will,’ she said, massaging her head. ‘I only need to rest. I will leave in the morning, I promise.’
‘You do not understand,’ the jinn said. ‘I am not a thing you want to spend your nights with. This is not a place for your kind.’
‘I am not afraid,’ she said. ‘You can’t be worse than the Repentants. Or my husband.’
The jinn laughed. It was a sound like a flame laughing, a staccato hiss and crackle. ‘Oh, dear child, you have no idea.’
‘Do you have a name?’ Tawaddud asked.
The face of flame fluttered.
‘Once, I was called Zaybak,’ it said. ‘You made me laugh. For that, you may rest here, and not be afraid.’
That is how the girl who loved monsters came to live in the tomb of Zaybak the jinn, in the City of the Dead. The food was meagre, and the days long, repairing tombs with ghuls and other servants of the jinni. She made Zaybak’s tomb a little more comfortable, with rugs and pillows and candles and clay pots for water.
When she asked the other jinni about Zaybak, they would only whisper.
‘He wants to die,’ said one ghul. ‘He is tired. But there is no death in the City of the Dead.’
But when they were together, Zaybak did not talk about death. Instead, he answered all the questions she had, even those her jinn tutors had never spoken about.
‘What is it like in the desert?’ she asked, one evening. ‘I always wanted to go and see, like the mutalibun.’
‘The desert of the mutalibun is not our desert. Ours is full of life, rivers of thought and forests of memory, castles made of stories and dreams. Our desert is not a desert.’
‘So why did you come here? Why do the jinni come to Sirr?’
‘You cannot imagine what it is like to be a jinn. It is always cold. No virs, no body. But we remember bodies: they itch and hurt and ache. There is the athar, of course, but it is not the same. Here, at least, there is warmth. We yearn for it.’
‘If it is so terrible, why don’t you have any ghuls, like the others? Why do you live alone?’
The jinn said nothing after that. It left the tomb, sent its mind somewhere else, and that night she fell asleep in the cold.
After several nights, Zaybak returned. She lit candles and made the tomb beautiful. She washed herself in the cooling water tank and combed her matted hair with her fingers.
‘Tell me a story,’ she said.
‘I will not,’ Zaybak said. ‘You are mad to ask me for such a thing. You should leave, go back to your family.’
‘I don’t know why you are punishing yourself. Tell me a story. I want it. I want you. I have seen it in my sister. She is never alone. You could be inside me. And you’d never need to be cold again.’
‘You don’t want to touch me. If you do, you will hate me.’
‘I don’t believe you. You are a good person, Zaybak. I don’t know what you think you have done. I only know it would make me happy to be a part of you.’
Zaybak was quiet for a long time, so long that Tawaddud thought he had gone again in anger, never to return. But then he started speaking, in a soft voice, a storyteller’s voice.
When I was young, I had a body. I lived in a city. Every morning, I would take a train. I remember it shaking. I remember what it smelled like, of people, of fast food, of coffee. I remember thinking how easy it was to imagine being someone else, like the tattooed boy in a blue sports shirt, the girl with her head bent over a play, muttering lines. All it took was the flicker of an expression, a brief eye contact.
That’s what I remember about the train. But I don’t remember where it was going.
I do remember when everything broke. Drones falling from the sky. Buildings moving on their foundations, like big animals waking up. Booms in the distance, spaceships in the sky, running away.
After that, an eternity of dark and cold.
When I woke up to my second life, it took a long time to learn to survive. To slow myself down to run in the brains of chimera, to dream lucid dreams so I would not go mad. I made myself a dream-train, where I could be other people. It took me through the years, shaking and shuddering.
One day in my train I looked up, and saw the flower prince.
He had his hand on the yellow bar in the ceiling, leaning lightly backwards. His jacket was blue velvet. He wore a flower in his lapel. His face was all grin, not really a face at all.
‘What are you doing here, Zaybak, all alone?’ he asked. I thought it a dream and laughed.
‘Should I taste the flesh of rukh or chimera beasts, like my brothers?’ I said. ‘I prefer to dream.’
‘Dreaming is good,’ he said, ‘but one day you have to wake up.’
‘To be a bodiless mind in the desert? To be captured by the mutalibun, to be put in a jar, to serve the fat lords and ladies of Sirr until they deign to set me free?’ I asked. ‘Even nightmares are better than that.’
‘What if I could tell you how to make their fat bodies yours?’ he asked, mocking eyes flashing.
‘How would I do that?’
He put an arm around my shoulders and whispered in my ear. ‘Let me tell you a secret,’ he said.
Let me tell it to you now, Tawaddud, so we may be one.
There was a time when the girl who loved monsters and Zaybak were almost like a qarin and a muhtasib – or more: she was not his master nor his slave. They looked for secret places together, walked the City of the Dead and the secret pathways of the Banu Sasan.
For a time, they became a new person. Tawaddud would look at rain falling on the tombs and the steam rising from their roofs, and it would be as if Zaybak saw it for the first time.
One day, a man called Kafur came to the City of the Dead. He had once been tall and handsome, but walked with a limp, and covered his body and head in a cloak and a scarf.
‘I have heard,’ he told the ghuls, ‘that there is a woman who has tamed the Axolotl.’ The ghuls whispered and took him to see Tawaddud.
Tawaddud offered him tea and smiled. ‘Surely, such rumours are nothing but stories,’ she said. ‘I am just a poor girl, living in the City of the Dead, serving the jinni for my keep.’
Kafur looked at her and stroked his short beard. ‘Yes, but is that all you want to be?’ he asked. ‘You are from a good family, I can tell. You are used to a better life than this. If you come with me, I will show you what a woman
