A sudden breeze whipped past, making her shiver—and the jinniyeh appeared on the other side of the fire, as naked as before. The donkey brayed belatedly, then resumed its breakfast.
“I thought you’d never wake,” the jinniyeh said. “Here.” She extended a hand across the fire. In her palm were three strips of dried meat. “I’ve noticed that humans eat food, in the mornings.”
Sophia raised her eyebrows. “Did you steal these?”
“Of course.”
Sophia knew she oughtn’t accept, but she was ravenous, and she suspected that the jinniyeh meant it as a sort of peace offering. The meat was tough and stringy, but it filled her belly. The jinniyeh watched her intently as she ate.
“Will you take me to him?” the jinniyeh said at last, abruptly.
Sophia swallowed the last of her breakfast. “I told you, we must discuss it first.”
The jinniyeh made an impatient noise. “What is there to discuss? Each of us needs something from the other.”
“It isn’t that simple. I can’t just spirit us across the globe—there’s a war on.”
“Yes, yes, I saw it,” muttered the jinniyeh. “But you’re always at war, just as we are.”
Sophia shook her head. “This is different. Imagine if every jinn tribe in the world went to battle, all choosing sides one after the other, like a flood sweeping the desert. My own country has managed to stay neutral, but it’s only a matter of time. And there are new weapons, too. They have ships now that can sail entirely underwater, and destroy whoever’s on the surface. No one is safe from them. And besides, I haven’t so much as spoken to Ahmad in years. I have no idea whether he’s still in New York—or for that matter, whether he’s alive at all.”
The jinniyeh’s eyes had grown wide, her expression unsure; but now she shook her head, as though to scatter Sophia’s objections. “You still have ways to find him. The money, in your belt.”
“It’s all that I have left! And I won’t spend a single cent of it until I’m certain you’ll heal me.”
“I could simply overpower you and take it myself,” the jinniyeh said.
Sophia folded her arms. “Yes, that occurred to me too. But if you want to reach him, you’ll need my money and my knowledge. You’ll even need my help just to make it through the jinn territories.” She paused, then added, “Although for that, you have my sympathies. What your tribe did to you was exceedingly cruel.”
The jinniyeh looked away. “Yes. It was. But it was better than the death I’d expected.”
Sophia sighed, rubbed her forehead with trembling fingers. She wanted to ask, Why? Why leave a place of safety, and cross a dangerous ocean, for someone she’d only heard about in a story? But in truth she knew the answer already; it was the one she would’ve given herself: for the chance to no longer be alone. “You might consider,” she said, “that if you heal me now, I’ll be in a much better condition to help you reach him.”
The jinniyeh pondered this, then said. “No, I won’t risk both the healing and the voyage when I might gain nothing from them. We find him first.”
“Then must I insist on a time limit,” Sophia said. “I refuse to be stranded on the other side of the world, with no money and no cure, obligated to help you search until you accept that he can’t be found.”
The jinniyeh looked like she would argue, but then relented. “A limit, then. How long?”
Sophia considered. “A week. Seven days, from when we reach New York. At the end of seven days, you’ll heal me, no matter what.”
The jinniyeh gaped in outrage. “Only seven days!”
“The money might not stretch that long to begin with.”
The jinniyeh paced before the fire, hands clenched in frustration. At last she huffed a sigh. “I suppose. Seven days, then.”
But Sophia distrusted her tone. “Will you swear to it?” And then, unsure: “Is that something that jinn do?”
The jinniyeh looked offended. “Yes, of course we do. We swear by Mount Qaf. And if we should break our word, then we forfeit all chances of returning there, in this life or any other.”
Mount Qaf. The name was distantly familiar to Sophia: she remembered a book of collected folklore, its tales of the idyllic emerald mountain where the jinn had once lived. “Then swear to me, by Mount Qaf, that you will heal me within seven days of our arrival in New York, whether we’ve found Ahmad or not.”
The jinniyeh mulled it over, and then said, “Upon Mount Qaf, I swear it.”
It wasn’t ideal, by any means. Sophia knew the advantage still lay with the jinniyeh—but in truth, the advantage had been hers from the beginning. Sophia had no shelter, no friends, no medicine. Coming to Palmyra had been a desperate gambit—and now the mere possibility that she might be healed seemed as certain as anything else.
“Good,” Sophia said. And then, belatedly: “Do you have a name?”
The jinniyeh looked away. “It was taken from me when I was banished. But even if it were still mine, I couldn’t speak it—not in this form.”
“Well, I can’t just call you jinniyeh.”
The jinniyeh thought a moment, and then smiled. “Dima. That shall be my name, if you must use one.”
“Dima,” Sophia repeated. It was a common name among Arab women; it meant “the cloud that brings rain.” She recalled the flashes of memory she’d seen, the mob, the taunts. Ah, yes—storm-cloud.
“Well, Dima,” she said, “how shall we get you to Homs?”
They struck the camp and set out, up the mountainside and back over the pass.
It was a deeply uncomfortable journey. Sophia’s camel spent the first few hours bucking and dancing as it tried to dislodge an old trunk, reinforced with steel at its corners, that hung in the pannier at its side. The donkey trailed well out of the way as Sophia cursed and held on, her teeth chattering. Eventually she convinced the camel that trotting might help matters, and little by little they made
