Nahri burst into laughter.
It was a wild laugh, followed by another, and then Nahri couldn’t stop, giggling so hard that tears came to her eyes and she struggled for air.
She wiped the wetness away. “I’m sorry, it’s just … I mean, it’s funny, isn’t it? Do you know how many times I’ve had to do this? Forget healing; my specialty should be having my life destroyed and then being forced to rebuild from nothing.” Nahri thought of their little boat, now on the bottom of the Nile, along with Yaqub’s precious tools and all the supplies she’d bartered and stolen. The previous days came back to her, idling in the shade of crumbling temples and the long, peaceful hours of sailing past green fields and sun-drenched villages.
She should have known it couldn’t last.
“I’m so tired,” she said, her voice cracking. “Everything I build gets broken. My life in Cairo. My dreams for Daevabad. I give everything—everything—I have only for someone to come along and smash it. It’s all for nothing. Nothing.”
The last word ripped from her in a choked sob, and then Ali was there, reaching for her hand.
“It’s not for nothing, Nahri,” he insisted. “We can still put things right.”
She yanked away. “Don’t. Don’t talk like that. Don’t look at me like that,” she said, wrapping her arms around herself and rocking back and forth. “I don’t need your pity. I don’t need anything.”
“Nahri.” Undeterred, Ali knelt closer, wiping away the tears blurring her eyes. “You pulled me from my grief when I would have stayed and died with Muntadhir. You’ve saved my life more times than I can count.” He stroked back the hair sticking to her damp cheeks, his voice gentle as he said, “There’s no one else here, my friend. You don’t need to keep up this front.”
Nahri wanted to protest. To slap his hand away and withdraw to her usual distance. To put on her mask.
Instead, it all crashed down. She wasn’t sure which of them moved first, but then Ali was hugging her, and she was clinging to him, burying her face in the warmth of his neck.
“I thought you were dead,” she wept. “I thought I was dead. I thought I’d failed everyone, and I couldn’t do anything. I couldn’t even fight back. There were too many of them.”
Ali pulled her closer. “It’s okay,” he whispered. “Qandisha is gone. Her ghouls are gone. She has no idea where we are.”
“She’ll find us. She was waiting for us.” Fresh despair swept over Nahri. “She has magic we don’t understand. They all do. The ifrit, Manizheh, Dara … and I have nothing. I don’t have my abilities. And my mother …” God, Nahri couldn’t even say the words, for what Manizheh had done was worse. It was magic without magic, and more powerful for it. She’d made Nahri feel worthless. Foolish. Her mother had looked right through her supposed cleverness and read her better than Nahri had ever read a mark, fashioning all her fears and ambitions into a blade of calculated words that knocked Nahri right off her feet.
“I can’t do this,” she choked out. “I can’t.” Nahri was strong, she was a fighter, but she did not have it in her to pick herself up yet again; to survive this new setback and fight for a future that seemed doomed either way.
Ali pulled back just enough to meet her gaze. For a moment, the warm gray of his eyes seemed to swim with a darker mist, but then it was gone.
“I’ll take you back to Egypt,” he promised. “I’ll find a way. Qandisha thinks you’re dead. That’s the story I’ll carry with me to Daevabad and Ta Ntry. You can return to Yaqub and build the life you want without a bunch of magical creatures ruining it. You deserve to.”
His words went straight to her heart. Nahri could see it, the way out, the escape from all this. She could envision herself in thirty years with her own apprentices, surrounded by the neighborhood children she’d delivered as babes, the fantastic city of Daevabad—the land of djinn and magical courts—fading to legend.
It would just mean turning her back on everyone else she loved. And then Nahri would be the one breaking what she’d built.
The sun crested the ocean’s horizon, turning the undulating sea into a wild burst of fiery color. Scorching yellow and winedark crimson, burnt orange and warm copper. It reminded her of Daevabad’s lake on the morning of the Navasatem procession. Of laughing and smiling with her people as they lit lanterns and sang verses to the Creator to celebrate the founding of their home.
How did Anahid do it? Her descendants might have gone astray—that seemed to happen to all revolutionaries—but still, how had Anahid pulled the tribes together from the ravages of Suleiman’s curse, protected them from the predations of the ifrit, and built a dazzling city? Built an entire civilization? Had she been made of greater stuff than Nahri? Or had she hidden her bone-shaking doubt, forced a confident smile, and carried on while continually praying she wasn’t making a mistake?
Nahri could feel the weight of Ali’s expectant gaze. Taking a deep breath, she curled her fingers around his and then lifted his hand to her cheek.
“Thank you,” she said softly. “But I need you to help me with something else.”
Ali had gone still, so close their breath mingled together on the warm air. “With what?”
“I want to conjure a fire.”
the sun was high on the horizon by the time they were done digging a small pool at the tide break, their clothes freshly damp with seawater. Nahri carefully floated a cinnamon-colored scalloped shell in the pool, where it glimmered in the orange light.
She did what she could in terms of ablutions, rinsing her arms and feet in the ocean’s spray, cupping her hands to let water trickle down her face and through her snarled hair. The salt and
