“Good enough, I suppose. But I don’t like guns.”
Fatma sympathized. Carrying the thing always felt like an extra weight about her neck. “Think of it as insurance. We won’t use it unless we absolutely have to. You ready?”
Hadia nodded. “Wait!” She pulled a hijab from her satchel. Handing it over, she began loosening her own headscarf to fit over her mouth and nose.
They stopped the carriage a short distance from the Ministry, as the vehicle threatened to tip over in the increasing winds. When they stepped out, those same winds hit them. Fatma hunched her shoulders, one hand gripping her bowler, the other clenched to her jacket. She had to walk at an angle, as the storm batted at her much as Hadia had suspected—oddly from every direction at once. Fine grains found any bit of exposed skin. Usually this was more an annoyance than anything else—but for some reason this sand actually stung!
Hadia wasn’t faring much better—her long skirts flapping wild. The two moved more on instinct than sight, and they had to be careful not to lose one another in the gloom. Reaching the front of the Ministry felt like they’d trekked a mile rather than a block. The glass doors didn’t open at their arrival, and they were forced to pry them apart before squeezing inside one at a time.
Fatma grunted with exertion as they pushed the doors closed again, shutting out the storm. She shook herself, stripping the hijab from her face and letting sand spill across the floor. Beside her Hadia unwrapped her mouth and nose, pulling in breaths. The normally well-lit foyer was dark. Partly it was the sandstorm. But there didn’t seem to be a light on anywhere.
“The power’s out,” Hadia noted.
Fatma peered into the black. Where was that stationed guard? “The building has backups. Its brain should send out repair eunuchs to fix whatever’s wrong.”
At her words a loud rumbling came, like metal creaking and grinding against itself. There was an almost mournful cadence to it, and the building shuddered with its passing.
“What was that?” Hadia asked.
“The building’s brain.” Fatma craned her neck, trying to glimpse the iron gears and orbs beneath the glass dome. “Something’s wrong. Listen. Doesn’t sound like it’s even spinning.”
“Maybe sand somehow got into the gears?”
“Maybe. Can’t make out anything. Wish I had a pair of spectral goggles right now.”
“I have mine,” Hadia said, fumbling in her pockets. “I know most agents only take them out on crime scenes and the like, but guidelines say keep them on you so … I do.”
God’s blessings for the eagerness of rookies, Fatma thought.
“I’ve got them on,” Hadia said. “And I’m looking up … but…”
“What?”
“I don’t know what I’m seeing. There’s movement up there, but it doesn’t look right.”
“Let me try.” Fatma took the goggles, fitting them on. The dark turned into a luminescent jade—bright as day but filtered through the spectral world. Everything was vivid here. Even the storm outside was a set of intricate patterns that broke apart and re-formed again. Gazing up at the domed ceiling, she adjusted the rounded green lens and focused.
Viewing the building’s mechanized brain through spectral glass was usually breathtaking—a cascade of light that made each rack and pinion glow, the many orbs awash in brilliance. But none of that was visible now. Instead, a dark accumulation obscured everything. She adjusted the lenses again. Now she could see bits of light, but buried beneath clumps of shadow. Shadows that moved and writhed. What in the many worlds? One of the shadows lifted up as if stretching, before falling back into the larger mass. In that brief moment Fatma glimpsed its shape—humanlike, long limbed with an elongated torso. The sight turned her insides to ice. Reaching for Hadia, she gripped the woman’s arm and pulled them flat against a wall, then whispered one word filled with urgency.
“Ghuls!”
Hadia’s face showed all the shock and revulsion expected at hearing that word.
“Ghuls? You’re certain?”
Fatma nodded grimly. She’d know those twisted bodies and limbs anywhere.
Hadia cast her gaze upward and shrank—as if expecting the creatures to fall down on them any moment. “There is no God but God,” she whispered. “What are ghuls doing in the Ministry?”
“Stop asking me questions I can’t answer!” Fatma snapped, frustration getting the better of her. “But they’re all over the machinery up there. No wonder the building seems out of power.” Another grinding rumble came, likely the gears struggling to move beneath that mass of undead. They sat on the mechanical brain like a disease, infecting it, draining its magic.
“First a storm,” Hadia said. “Now ghuls. Odd coincidence, don’t you think? This feels purposeful.”
“Like an attack,” Fatma finished.
“But who? You don’t think … him?”
The imposter’s words sounded in Fatma’s head. I will make you hurt. “We have to check the building. People could be injured.”
“Or worse.” Hadia swallowed.
Fatma didn’t want to think that out loud. Ghuls were ravenous, and ate anything. She’d seen one chase a butterfly once for almost a mile. People trapped in this building wouldn’t last long. “You remember your training against ghuls?”
“Sort of?”
Fatma frowned. “What does ‘sort of’ mean? Didn’t you train at the Settlement?”
The Settlement had been part of a government project to create new towns in remote places, irrigated by djinn machinery. This one was built in the western desert, east of Dakhla. No one was certain what happened exactly, but the settlers all disappeared within months, and the town was overrun with ghuls. The Ministry cleared it out, declaring it ghul-free. Yet after just a year, it was thick with them again. More tries yielded the same results. A bizarre phenomenon.
“No cadets have gone gardening at the Settlement for two years,” Hadia said. “Gardening” was
