“Well,” she started. “You’ve certainly been doing more than brewing tea.”
Ali rubbed the back of his neck, looking sheepish. “Yaqub’s been so kind. I wanted to be useful.”
“Yaqub’s never going to let you leave. I didn’t even realize there was this much room in here.” She perched on the work-bench. “You must have been up all night.”
Ali poured a glass of tea from a copper pot set over the fire and handed it to her. “It’s been easier to keep busy. If I’m doing things—fixing things, working, cleaning—it keeps my mind from everything else, though that’s probably a cowardly thing to admit.”
“Not wanting to be destroyed by despair doesn’t make you a coward, Ali. It makes you a survivor.”
“I guess.”
But again, Nahri could see her words had failed to pierce the haunted expression in his gray eyes.
It made her physically ache to look at him. “Let’s go to Khan el-Khalili tomorrow,” she offered. “It’s the biggest bazaar in the city, and if trawling through human goods won’t keep your mind occupied, I don’t know what will.” She took a sip of her tea and then coughed. “Oh. Oh, that’s awful. I didn’t think you could ruin tea. You do know you’re supposed to take the leaves out, right? Not let them steep until it tastes like metal.”
The insult seemed to work better than kindness, bringing a glint of amusement to Ali’s face. “Maybe you like weak tea.”
“How dare you.” But before Nahri could expand on her offense, she heard shuffling outside the apothecary door—followed by voices.
“I am telling you she returned.” It was a woman. “The pharmacist says she’s a servant, a peasant from the south, but Umm Sara says she has the same black eyes as the girl who used to work for him.”
Nahri instantly reached for Yaqub’s paring knife.
Ali gave her a bewildered look. “What are you doing?”
“Protecting myself.” She tensed, gripping the knife. It was astonishing how quickly it all came back. The constant worry a mark would return with soldiers, accusing her of theft. The fear that one wrong move would lead to a mob calling her a witch.
There was a knock at the door, rough and insistent. “Please!” the woman called. “We need help!”
Nahri hissed a warning under her breath when Ali moved for the door. “Don’t.”
“They said they needed help.”
“People say a lot of things!”
Ali reached out and gently lowered her hand. “No one’s going to hurt you,” he assured her. “I don’t know humans well, but I’m fairly certain if I make all the liquids in here explode, they’re not going to stick around.”
Nahri glowered. “I’m not putting down the knife.” But she didn’t stop him when Ali opened the door.
An older woman in a worn black dress pushed her way inside.
“Where is she? The girl who works with the pharmacist?” Their new arrival had a markedly southern accent and, from a glimpse at her unveiled, sun-beaten face, looked like she’d lived a hard life.
“That’s me,” Nahri said coarsely, the knife still in her hand. “What do you want?”
The woman lifted her palms beseechingly. “Please, I need your help. My son, he fell from a roof last week …” She gestured behind her and two men entered, carrying an unconscious boy in a sling. “We paid a doctor to come out who said he just needed to rest, but tonight he started vomiting and now he won’t wake …” She stumbled on, sounding desperate. “There are rumors about you. People say you’re the girl from the Nile. The one who used to heal people.”
The woman’s words struck a little too close: the one who used to heal people. “I’m not a doctor,” Nahri replied, hating the admission. “Where’s the physician you originally saw?”
“He won’t come again. He says we cannot afford him.”
Nahri finally put down the knife. “There’s nothing I can do.”
“You could look at him,” the woman persisted. “Please just look at him.”
The pleading in her eyes nagged at Nahri. “I … oh, all right. Ali, clear the table. You”—she nodded at the men carrying the boy—“bring him over here.”
They laid the boy out upon his sheet. He couldn’t have been older than ten, a wiry youth with close-cropped black curls and a wide, innocent face. He was unconscious, yet his arms looked oddly extended at his sides, his hands flared outward.
Nahri took his pulse. It was thready and far too slow. “He won’t wake up?”
“No, sayyida,” the older man answered. “He’s been sleepy all week, complaining his head still hurt and speaking little.”
“And he fell from a roof?” Nahri asked, carefully unwrapping the bandage around his bruised skull. “Is that what caused this injury?”
“Yes,” the man replied urgently.
Nahri continued her examination. She lifted one eyelid.
Dread rushed over her. His pupil was widely dilated, the black nearly overtaking the brown.
And immediately Nahri was back in Daevabad, trailing Subha as she went through the tools she’d brought to the hospital. But how did you know? she’d pestered, harassing Subha into the details of the patient Nahri had spotted in her garden.
Subha had scoffed. A blow to the head a few days back and a dilated pupil? There’s blood building in the skull, no doubt about it. And it’s deadly if not released—it’s only a matter of time.
Nahri kept her voice controlled. “He needs a surgeon. Immediately.”
One of the men shook his head. “We’re Sa’idi migrants. No surgeon is going to help us. Not unless we pay upfront with money we don’t have.”
The woman looked at her again, her gaze brimming with a hope that tore Nahri to shreds. “Could you not … lay your hands on him and wish him well? My neighbors say that’s what you used to do.”
There it was again. What
