Alif the Unseen (30 page)

Something wet and warm slid along his foot. Alif jerked away, feeling, for the first time, a sense of unease about his determination to survive. Even if he held out for some miraculous stretch
of time, the door to his cell would still be locked. He did not, strictly speaking, have a plan.

“There is another way,” whispered Farukhuaz. “I could get you out.”

Alif searched the darkness in alarm, certain the thing had read his thoughts.

“It would be easy enough,” Farukhuaz continued. “All you would have to do is tell your captors you have something they want. Give them your friend Abdullah, or any of the
dissidents you know. Give them access codes, handles, passwords. You have many things with which to bargain for your life. They are surprised that you haven’t offered already.”

Alif curled up into a ball.

“I would help you.” The voice was very close to his ear. “I would tell you how best to sway them. It would be a simple thing for me.”

He thought again of daylight. He thought of returning to Dina and lying under her starry veil and feeling safe.

“No,” he heard himself say.

“Why not?” The voice kissed the small hairs on the back of his neck. “You seem determined to live.”

“I am,” said Alif. “But if my only way out is through you, I’d rather keep starving.”

The sudden rush of anger through the room made him yelp. He felt it as a physical force, like the recoil of earth after a tremor.

“Who are you trying to impress?” The voice came from inside his head, louder than any thought. He clapped his hands over his ears and screamed.

“You really think the One who is birthing stars and eating up the bowels of dysenteric infants cares whether you live as a traitor or die as a martyr? You think any of this
matters?”

Alif fought back tears. He could not answer
yes
. His doubt was exposed in front of him, like a wet mewling thing, a diffidence that had never matured into belief or disbelief. He did
not have the wherewithal to fight.

“Poor little creature.” The voice softened. “I’m only here to keep you safe. You think we’ve just met, but I’ve been with you all your life. I have been the
little whispers in your veins, numbing you, keeping you between the walls of your room when the world seemed too big. I have been the ringing in your ears, waking you in the small hours of the
night to remind you of your wretchedness. You are alone, and I am the only real partisan you have.”

Curling into himself, Alif attempted to steady his breathing. The air in the room seemed dense, like one collective exhalation from which all sustenance had been drained.

“I don’t believe you,” he said.

“You don’t know what you believe.”

“Whatever I believe, your bullshit isn’t part of it.”

A hiss.

“Be sensible. The only way out of this room is through me.”

“Then I’ll stay in this room until I’m a disgusting smear of muck on the floor. I’m sick of listening to you.”

“A part of you still hopes there is another way. A part of you still hopes that the door will open and you will walk out of it free in body and in conscience. It is this part of yourself
that you must kill if you really want to survive.”

Alif felt his heart rate rise again, and with it, a new thrill of anger.

“No. No. That’s the only part of me I still want.”

The room grew colder.

“Suit yourself.”

He strained to listen for several more minutes, ready for the renewed sound of laughter, the soft scuffling of feet. But the room felt empty in an emphatic, unfamiliar way. He shivered in the
sudden lack of warmth. Exhaustion warred against his underfed muscles. The thing had been right: he was profoundly alone. An unpleasant kind of self-pity washed over him, bringing with it no
solace. He wanted to sleep. Closing his eyes, he spoke to the indifferent, artificial night.

“Please,” he said. “Please don’t let it be right. Please open the door.”

For a moment he actually expected something to happen. But the silence and the darkness remained complete and unyielding and, with a feeling close to despair, Alif allowed himself to drift
off.

It was the sharp sound of a metal hinge grinding against itself that woke him. Scrambling to his feet, he blinked: a flashlight bobbed in the darkness, illuminating a figure in a white robe and
headdress.

“Good God,” it said in an amused tenor. “It reeks of piss in here. I’d hate to be the janitor who comes in after they wheel out your corpse.”

“Who are you?” croaked Alif, shielding his eyes against the light.

The figure drew itself up stiffly and raised the light a little: it shone on a young, haughty face with a patrician nose and a fashionable scattering of stubble across its cheeks and chin.

“Who are you,
sir,
” it said.

Alif attempted to process this correction.

“You’re royalty?” he asked, skepticism slurring his words.

“Yes, I am,” said the bearer of the flashlight in a cool voice. “I’m Prince Abu Talib Al Mukhtar ibn Hamza.”

Deprivation made Alif bold; there was nothing they could do to him that they had not already done.

“Is that name supposed to mean something to me?” he challenged.

“No, I suppose not.” The young man smiled sheepishly. “There are twenty-six other princes in line before me for the throne. You know me as NewQuarter01.”

* * *

Alif felt like his mind had thrown a gear, leaving it to spin uselessly, without traction.

“You can’t be NewQuarter. NewQuarter is a—he’s a—”

“A peasant, like the rest of you? Oh, good. I was hoping I’d managed to fit in. I didn’t want to seem like some kind of poser. Even though I suppose that’s what I
am.” NewQuarter put one hand under Alif’s elbow and helped him sit back down.

“You really look a mess. I didn’t expect them to have taken your clothes—I’ll have to go back for some. My stuff will probably be too short for you but it’ll do
until we’ve sprung you out of here.”

“We’ve what?” Alif shifted to take the weight off his bruised buttocks.

“Don’t be dense. I’ve come to rescue you.” NewQuarter set the flashlight on its end, throwing a bluish glow across the ceiling.

Alif gasped, bit his lip, and began to bawl. NewQuarter’s mouth twisted into an expression of repressed horror. He patted Alif’s shoulder awkwardly.

“I don’t—I’m not really good with crying, I have to warn you. Especially not when the guy in question is naked and filthy.”

“I’m sorry,” sniffled Alif. “It’s only that I thought I was going to die in here.”

“If you don’t eat something, you still might.” NewQuarter produced a bar of chocolate from the pocket of his robe. “Here, take this.”

Hands shaking, Alif unwrapped the chocolate bar and bit off one corner. The substance was rich and almost too sweet to swallow.

“Thank you,” he said around a mouthful.

“I’ll bring something more substantial next time,” said NewQuarter. “I should go now before the guards come back.”

“How many are there? How’d you get them to leave?”

NewQuarter sat back on his heels with a tense smile.

“There are five stationed in this corridor. Two on either end and one in the middle. Fortunately they keep women in the cells opposite you—I told them I wanted some time alone with
one of them. They just gave me the keys and took a cigarette break.”

Alif shuddered.

“They let you do that? Just like so?”

NewQuarter looked away. The cynical set of his mouth made him seem older than he probably was.

“There are some very well-paid sheikhs who say captive women—prisoners—are like slaves, from a shariah point of view. So their liege-lords have the right to fuck them. If
you’ve got a title you can pretty much walk in and out of this place whenever you want.”

The thought of Dina being forced to submit to some aristocratic lecher made Alif nauseous. Vikram had been right to take the girls into hiding, despite the risk—and the cost. Alif
swallowed the syrupy liquid that rose in his throat. How awful that the man’s nobility was apparent only now that he was dead.

“I know,” said NewQuarter in a quiet, distracted voice, watching Alif catch his breath. “Makes you want to break things. That’s why I started hacking. I didn’t want
to be on the wrong team.” He stood and gingerly shook out his robe, looking around himself with faint disgust.

“I hope you haven’t picked up some horrible disease in here, because you’re not bringing it home with me. I’ll be back tomorrow. Your job is to stay alive until
then.”

Alif looked at him with speechless gratitude. NewQuarter smiled and touched his forehead in an old-fashioned salaam, turning toward the door. As he left, Alif remembered something.

“Sheikh Bilal!” he called. “We can’t leave without him. Please—”

NewQuarter paused, frowning.

“What’s this? Who’s Sheikh Bilal? I didn’t plan for more than one person.”

Alif rose to his feet again, swaying a little, and looked NewQuarter in the eye.

“He’s the imam of Al Basheera and very old, and they’ve been torturing him for information he doesn’t have. The Hand said he’s down the hall. The man risked his
life protecting me—I can’t possibly leave him behind.”

“Can’t possibly?”

Alif shook his head.

“Can’t possibly. Not an option.”

NewQuarter sighed in irritation.

“All right. Let me recalibrate a little. I’ll see you tomorrow.” He turned again to leave.

“What time of day is it?” Alif asked him in a rush. “What month? What’s the weather like?”

NewQuarter smiled sweetly.

“It’s about ten p.m. on a balmy winter evening in late January.”

Alif closed his eyes, face slack with relief.

“Thank you,” he said.

* * *

Alif’s perception of time returned with excruciating suddenness. If it was late January, he had been in the Hand’s custody for almost three months, a period that
seemed by turns unthinkable and blessedly short. The day that remained until NewQuarter’s return ballooned before him, longer than any of the undifferentiated periods of sleep and wakefulness
he had experienced in the dark. The sugar in his stomach made him jumpy and his pulse raced; sleep would not come to him. He paced the room, walking back and forth on sore feet.

An attempt to count seconds quickly frustrated him. He focused instead on his breathing, remembering some rubbish or other he’d seen on Rotana about relaxation techniques, and thought with
bliss that he might be very close to that life again, to the privilege of waking up to trivial nonsense on television. He made a mental list of the Egyptian daytime dramas he would watch when he
was free. All the mother-daughter cat fights, melodramatic close-ups, and plot lines so wretchedly thin you could recite whole monologues before the actors spoke them. They had disgusted him once,
convinced him of the superiority of his mind, now they were humbling reminders of a safer world.

As the day drew on, he grew tense. He imagined it was almost dawn, but still could not sleep; though he could finally guess what time it was, the vagaries of the sun had long lost their impact
on his body. He began to sing again. He sang the old Alexandrian fishing songs Dina liked, about painted boats and the safety of the ancient harbor and, beyond it, the once fruitful Mediterranean.
She would sing these to herself on the roof when she set out the laundry and thought no one was listening; Alif would hear her voice drifting down through his window, deepening and softening over
the years as she grew to womanhood. He wondered how it was that she still felt such a connection to Egypt, a place she had not lived since she was an infant. Perhaps they should spend some time
there together after they were married. They could rent an apartment overlooking the port in Alexandria, with a balcony where Dina could sit in the sun bareheaded. He would ask her. There were,
perhaps, parts of her he still did not understand, desirous of things he could not guess, though he had known her all his life.

Daydreaming about Dina and a country he had never seen, Alif drifted off. He woke again with a prescient feeling, and moments later heard a key turn in the lock. NewQuarter slipped inside.

“Thank God,” breathed Alif. “I don’t think I’ve ever been as happy to see anyone as I am to see you. I’m so—”

“Yes, yes, you’re welcome. Let’s not get carried away.” NewQuarter set a loaded backpack on the floor. “There are clothes in here. I brought an extra set for your
friend. Both
thobes
. I hope you don’t mind. We don’t wear much western clothing in my family.”

“I’m not about to complain.” Alif unzipped the backpack and pulled out a white robe similar to the one NewQuarter was wearing. It smelled dazzlingly clean.

“There’s a head cloth, too—better wear it, you look like a homeless person. If I’m going to drive you out of here in a BMW we need a certain amount of
plausibility.”

“We’re driving out of here in a BMW?”

“I thought about bringing the Lexus,” fretted NewQuarter without irony, “but a BMW is more anonymous. All the princes drive them.”

“Oh.”

“Hurry, will you? If we’re going to pick up this sheikh we need to move.”

Alif pulled the robe over his head. It felt like a bandage on his abused skin, which had gone scaly in some places and tender in others. NewQuarter briskly arranged the head cloth over Alif
’s brow and held it in place with two circlets of black braided cotton.

“Good God,” he said, “you still look a mess. Oh, well. Just keep the edges of the head cloth low around your face and don’t say anything. Your accent will give you away.
There’s a whiff of Indian menial in your Arabic.”

Alif nodded obediently. NewQuarter slipped through the open door and glanced down the hallway, holding his flashlight at shoulder height.

“Okay,” he said. “Let’s go.”

Alif followed him into the hall. A desperate euphoria rushed over him as NewQuarter quietly shut the door of his cell. The uncertainty of being free and not yet safe was too much. He steadied
himself, blinking to dispel the onset of dizziness.

“Know which cell this guy is in? Are we really going to wander up and down calling his name through the food slots on every door?” NewQuarter swung the flashlight in an arc along the
doors lining the corridor.