Instead, she walked. Not along the riverbank, but deeper into Cairo itself, through the crowded streets that led toward the hills and past neighborhoods of new migrants. Nahri didn’t want the quiet peace of the flooded Nile, one that invited contemplation. She wanted distraction, noisy human life and activities: children playing and neighbors gossiping. The normal life she should have been living for the last half decade instead of getting pulled into the deadly politics of a bunch of vengeful, warring djinn. She walked without paying attention to where her feet took her, part of her hoping she’d get so lost that by the time she made it back to Yaqub’s, Ali would be gone, and she’d be free of her last tie to the magical world.
Yet, despite her desire to wrench it all away, Nahri was not surprised when she ended up in the neighborhood where it had all begun.
The empty lot where she’d performed the zar was eerily untouched, though the neighborhood had grown busier, extra floors built on the surrounding tenements and huts constructed against the walls. Yaqub had said that people were hopeful things were changing in Egypt. The French occupation had been defeated, and their new foreign ruler was promising reforms. More people were moving to the city, looking for opportunities.
She wanted to tell them not to. It hurt worse to see your dreams destroyed than to never have them at all.
It didn’t seem anyone had dared hope for this lot, however. The plain square of dust was filled with rubbish, an orange cat cleaning its whiskers the only occupant.
Not for the first time, she thought of Baseema. Had they removed Dara’s arrow from her throat before bringing the girl’s body to her grieving mother, the mother who’d kissed Nahri’s cheeks and blessed her the night before? Had Baseema’s fingers started to char from the ifrit’s possession, her final moments spent in agony all because Nahri had, on an utter whim, decided to sing in Divasti?
You’re as responsible for that girl’s death as Dara and Vizaresh. It had been unspeakably arrogant of Nahri to dabble in traditions she hadn’t understood, twisting abilities that were meant to heal into a way to deceive innocent people.
The sky was darkening, maghrib prayer already called. Nahri probably should have been concerned, a young woman alone, but strangely enough, though her magic was gone, she felt little fear from the humans around her. Her time in Daevabad had changed her, setting her apart from the people she once considered her own.
They’ll be my own again. The future she’d always wanted was finally in her hands, and Nahri wasn’t going to lose it.
But that night tugged at her like a string, bringing her to El Arafa once again, the vast cemetery looking just as Nahri remembered it, the jumble of tombs and mausoleums an eerie landscape of the dead she knew didn’t always slumber peacefully. She made her way inside, following the meandering alleys of her memory, and sat upon a crumbling stone pillar, half-bathed in moonlight.
And then—and only then, in the place where he’d arrived in a storm of sand and fire—did Nahri finally and fully let Dara back into her thoughts.
You weren’t supposed to see it. You were supposed to be safe. Nahri pressed her hands against her temples, remembering the anguish on his handsome face as he stammered those words, his bright eyes begging for understanding.
How could you do that, Dara? How could you have done any of this?
For Nahri could no longer deny that Dara was guilty of the whispered crimes that clung to his name. He’d carried out the slaughter of innocent shafit at Qui-zi, a crime so brutal it still scarred their world. He’d then done something equally heinous: knowingly abetting her mother in the attempted annihilation of Daevabad’s Geziri population.
And she’d fallen for him. No, she had loved him; she might as well admit it to herself. Maybe it had been the rush of adventure and sweeping excitement, the almost embarrassingly inevitable and clearly doomed romance that resulted between dashing warriors and wide-eyed young women. Had Muntadhir not accused her of living in a fairy tale, unable to tell the difference between its hero and its monster? Nahri, who always read her mark, who’d called out a djinn king. How had she not seen the darkness lurking in Dara?
Because you were the mark, she thought bitterly. And you think to go back to Daevabad, to proclaim yourself a leader capable of outwitting Manizheh? Her mother had taken one look at Nahri and seen straight through to her weaknesses. Her shafit heritage and her stupid fondness for an idiot prince. The darker resentments about being crushed by the djinn. The twinge of pleasure when she’d burned Ghassan’s heart.
Maybe that was how it started. Nahri wondered what might have happened if the invasion had gone according to Manizheh’s plan. If she’d been kept safe and in the dark by Nisreen and then woken to a world in which Ghassan was dead, the Daevas were free, and Nahri was reunited with her family and the man she loved. Might it have been easier to believe whatever lies they spun to justify it? To quietly choose to look ahead instead of at the bodies and blood propping up their new world?
Did Dara do that? Nahri tried to imagine him as a young man, as someone brimming with adoration for the Nahids and committed to protecting his people—someone who could have been convinced the shafit of Qui-zi were an existential threat and chosen to follow an order that must have seemed shocking. How many of those choices had led to Dara bowing before Manizheh, standing at her side while she committed genocide?
I don’t want to think about this. Nahri had made her choice. She wrapped her shivering arms around her knees and squeezed her eyes shut against the tears she
