Alif the Unseen

by G. Willow Wilson

  “You clever little shit.”The Hand’s face was bruised. A thin line of blood ran from one side of his mouth. “You’ve kicked me off the grid. Clearly you got farther with the Alf Yeom than I thought.”

  “I didn’t use the Alf Yeom,” gasped Alif. “I used my own software. I used Tin Sari.”

  “Don’t lie to me. That amateurish keylogger? I field tested it on your friends. Thirty-two percent success rate. That’s worse than guessing.”The Hand’s grip tightened on Alif ’s arm.

  “You were impatient.” Alif dug in his heels, but the Hand’s strength was surprising for a slender man, and he prevailed. “You have to give it time to collect enough data. It takes weeks.”

  “You’re still lying. No botnet could learn to identify an individual personality, even if you gave it years.”

  Alif ’s feet slid and crunched on broken glass. The noise from the riot below boomed through the empty window. With alarm, Alif realized the Hand meant to push him out. The eyeless things slunk toward him from beneath and between the jostling limbs of the crowd, their blank faces oddly curious. Alif kicked, howled, and twisted, sending fragments of glass sliding across the tile floor, now slick with a mud of congealed spit and sweat and dust. The Hand seemed not to notice his frenzied attempts to free himself, and kept his grip on Alif ’s arm almost idly, as though imbued with a strength he did not know he possessed.

  “It shouldn’t work,” he persisted. “Your botnet. No program can probe what is unseen in human hearts.”

  “It doesn’t.” With supreme effort, Alif wrenched his arm free. He leaned against the metal beam that framed the window, panting. “It doesn’t have anything to do with the unseen. It works because it exposes the apparent. The words you use, how you use them, how you type them, when you send them. You can’t hide those things behind a new name. The unseen is unseen. The apparent is inescapable.”

  The crowd surged, pressing the Hand against Alif and Alif against the window frame. Dina was invisible among the fists that beat the air. The physical contact sent a spasm of panic and disgust through Alif, so intense that he could feel his hands shake. Though sun poured through the window, he was assaulted by memories of the dark and the man who had put him there. Flailing, he closed his hand around a jagged tooth of glass sticking up out of the windowsill, relieved, in a way that frightened him, by the pain that sliced through his palm.

  “Little worm.”The Hand wrested one arm free and seized Alif by the throat. “Little worm, gnawing and gnawing until you pulled everything down. Who are you? Who are you?”

  Struggling to breathe, Alif waved the shard of glass in a wild arc, slicing across the Hand’s shoulder and neck. The man howled as a red line bloomed on his white robe. His left arm slackened, his hand releasing Alif ’s neck to dangle uselessly at his side. He tried to rally, pushing himself up to gesture clumsily at the eyeless things, closing the fingers of his good arm into a fist. Nothing happened. The creatures stared up at the Hand with their membranous faces, mild and interested and unmoved. They were practical rather than loyal, just as he had said.

  The Hand stumbled backward into the crowd. The last thing Alif saw in his fading eyes was disappointment.

  From just out of reach, Dina was pushing toward him. She was heedless of her veil as it caught on someone’s backpack and pulled away, revealing, for a precious instant, the lower half of her face. Her mouth, the mouth Alif had not kissed, was taut with fear. In another instant she had vanished, hidden behind the bodies of men who were shoving each other and shouting. The crowd heaved in panic as one of the men threw a punch that sent another reeling. Alif found himself shoved hard against the windowsill, his feet scrambling for purchase on a floor slick with blood and muck. He saw Dina’s green eyes framed in black cloth, very close. Someone made a grab for his collar. It was too late: Alif tumbled over the window ledge. Reaching out, he touched nothing but air.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Dina’s cry, terrified and low and too old for her, reminded him to panic. Alif wheeled his arms in wild circles, fending off the roar of the crowd as he hurtled toward it. In the split second left to him, he found much to regret, and prayed the end would be quick.

  He was rewarded with a sharp jolt. Talons closed around his ankles. Momentum reversed itself, and he was jerked upward, carried aloft by incremental wingbeats.

  “Suicidal?” Sakina glared down at him, her face a hawkish blur of woman and animal.

  Alif went limp with relief. Blood rushed to his head as he craned to look up at her.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe.”

  Sakina careened around the building, gaining altitude. The air was full of half-visible figures. Alif recognized the black-horned woman who had given him the silver whistle, and the shadow whose computer he had fixed, and a hundred other faces too strange and fleeting for memory; far more than the little assembly the convert had gathered in the marid’s courtyard.

  “I thought you weren’t coming,” said Alif.

  “We weren’t,” said Sakina. “But you didn’t tell us you were under the protection of a sila. No one wants to risk offending one of those, no matter what the cost. When she told us to go, we went.”

  “I don’t know any sila,” said Alif, baffled.

  “Well, one knows you. She calls herself Azalel.”

  Alif let his head hang back, unaccountably happy. Then he remembered.

  “Dina,” he said, struggling. “NewQuarter—”

  “If you keep squirming, I’ll drop you.”

  Alif made himself still. Sakina banked left, dropping like a stone from the colorless sky, and deposited Alif on the roof of a cigarette-and-newspaper stand at the edge of the square. His legs collapsed beneath him. He lay on his back against the corrugated metal roof, exhaling long breaths through his mouth. The thrum of the crowd was growing feverish; they were tiring, the black line of State police had thinned, and the moment of decision was near.

  “Will you be all right?” Sakina hovered in front of him. Alif could see the demonstrators through her back, as though she were a curtain of gauze between him and the rest of the world.

  “No,” he said weakly. “Yes. You go. I’ll manage.”

  “As you say.” She lofted upward, veering toward the strange constellation of jinn streaming through the sky.

  Alif slid off the roof, jumping several steps to catch his balance. Wading into the crowd, he was assailed by the tart smell of sweat. He closed his eyes, overwhelmed, swaying with the pressure of overheated bodies and the drum of feet on the cracked pavement. He had not believed, not truly.To choose a new name, to sit behind a screen and harry a few elites; the Hand was right, it had felt like a game, a fiction. Yet it had been enough.

  “Up there! Look!” A teenaged girl to his right, sweating in a thick headscarf, pointed toward the white facade of NewQuarter’s building across the square. There was a commotion in one of the windows on the top floor. Alif realized with a shock that it was the very window from which he had fallen. Agitated, he pushed his way through the crowd.

  “God damn it, God damn you, let me through!” He shouldered a large mustachioed man out of the way. The man turned on him with an indignant flare of his nostrils.

  “You think we’re out here for our health, boy? If you’re not committed, you should have stayed home.”

  Alif opened and shut his mouth, at a loss as to how to respond. A few feet ahead of him, several women had begun screaming, whether from fear or elation he could not tell. Following their upturned faces, he saw a figure in a white robe bundled out the window by a score of hands. It spun in the air, dropped two stories, and halted with sickening finality as a noose snapped taut around its neck.

  “It’s a prince!” crowed a man with a thick grey mustache who stood nearby. “They’re hanging princes! God is great!”

  “No,” breathed Alif. “No, no, no, please no.” He began to shiver in the sticky human heat. His triumph fled, replaced by an awful heaviness that seemed to siphon
all the warmth from his limbs. In an instant, the demonstrators to his right and left had become howling savages stripped of any noble purpose. He could conceive of no freedom worth such an irrational sacrifice.

  The mob began to cheer.

  “What the hell is wrong with you?” cried Alif, shoving an exultant teenager who stepped on his foot. The boy gave him an astonished look.

  “What’s wrong with you, man? That’s a prince up there! We’re lining the bastards up one by one!”

  “He was my friend, you shit pile! He was on your side, you stupid sisterfucker!” Alif shoved the boy again. The boy smashed his fist into Alif ’s cheek in an almost perfunctory way and slipped back into the crowd. Alif reeled, one hand pressed to his smarting jaw. A gap opened in the throng, revealing an empty patch of sidewalk: he stumbled toward it, collapsing on the filthy ground, racked with sobs that seemed to recruit every muscle in his body. The waning sun colored the square pink, and the twilight wind, immune to revolution, carried the scent of tar and seawater over the crowd. Alif pulled it in by the lungful. Its salt tang made him imagine he was drowning. NewQuarter had been no more than a boy, yet they had strung him from his own window, these people for whom Alif had sacrificed so much. The thought of his friend meeting such a useless end, the undignified victim of his own ideals, was too much to bear.

  Alif stared sightlessly at the flushed and roiling sky. It was the scene of another battle, as though Heaven thought to reflect the upheaval below: in wave after wave, the jinn of the Empty Quarter crashed against the inky horde spilling out of NewQuarter’s window. The frontline between the two armies looked like a struggle between dawn and evening, and shivered as Alif watched, at once too bright and too indistinct to stare at for longer than a few seconds. At certain points, the conflict appeared like nothing more than ripple of dark cloud vying with the setting sun, and Alif was seized with panic, convinced the past few days were the product of his own exhausted mind. In these moments he feared he was asleep, and would presently wake up to the darkness of his cell.

  Then his sight would bloom with the shapes of the hidden people, foggy and winged and goat-headed, serpentine and feline, spilling through the air like the birth of creation. They used no weapons that Alif could name, yet there were distinct signs of war: a combatant would flare up suddenly in a burst of smokeless fire and tumble out of the sky like a meteorite, reduced to nothing by the time it reached the ground. It seemed to Alif as though the hive of dark things was shrinking. Its outline became erratic, falling back toward NewQuarter’s window and snaking down the wall of the building. Far below, the dark line of State police had broken at last, and the insurgency spilled out of the square into the streets.

  Alif ’s perimeter of sidewalk was quickly overrun. He did not move as the parade of feet raced past him. Women were ululating at top volume, as though for a wedding or a birth. Alif watched them, transported and yet unmoved. The sight of NewQuarter’s corpse dangling from the window had killed his awe. Perhaps this was all freedom was—a moment in which all things were possible, overtaken too soon by man’s fearsome instinct to punish and divide. State had fallen. What would replace it might be better or worse. The only certain thing was that it would be theirs.

  “There he is! Thank God, thank God!”

  Alif looked up reflexively at the familiar voice. Dark and wideeyed, her robe smeared with grime, Dina was struggling toward him. Behind her, rumpled but alive, was NewQuarter, holding an empty bottle of Mecca Cola over his head with both hands.

  “Look!” he cried jubilantly. “I pinched the marid!”

  Alif struggled to his feet. Lurching forward, he flung his arms around the astonished prince.

  “I thought you were dead,” he blubbered. “Up there. When they said it was a prince—I thought it was you.”

  “Oh balls, akhi, you cry more than my sister. Stop it, stop it.” NewQuarter struggled free, tucking the swirling bottle under one arm. “That’s not me, you skinny moron, that’s wretched Abbas. When I told them who he was, they thought I was much less interesting, and decided lynching him was a better use of their time.”

  Alif looked up at the hanged man with fresh eyes. He hadn’t noticed the blood staining the left side of his white robe. The body swung a little in the evening breeze, already stiff. The remnants of the Hand’s blind swarm scattered around him, scuttling down the side of the building without seeming to register his presence. Alif felt nothing. That the corpse was the Hand did not quell the horror he had felt when he believed otherwise. The Hand was right: there were demons that trooped silently in the bloodstream of man, and they were foul.

  “So it’s over,” said Alif. His voice was dull and uncomprehending even in his own ears.

  “Over my ass hairs. It’s just begun. You’re a hero, akhi, a hero twice over—once for getting arrested and becoming a national symbol, once for cleaning up the Hand’s mess and restoring the City grid. The people don’t know that second part yet, of course, but once they do, you’ll probably be elected president or something. President Alif. I’d vote for you. But wait—are we even having a democracy? I’ve got no idea what’s going on.”

  “They’ll probably nationalize all your money,” Dina muttered.

  “Good luck,” said NewQuarter cheerfully. “I’ve already spent it.” He bounced on the toes of his sandals, shaking the Mecca Cola bottle.

  “Don’t do that,” fretted Dina. “You’ll hurt him. You should just let him out.”

  “Fuck that, I want my three wishes.”

  Alif stopped listening. The incongruous sight of a bare head above a black robe had caught his eye: the spill of silky dark hair was familiar, and the set of the shoulders, and the jet beads woven into hem and cuff. Intisar was wandering through the crowd with vacant eyes, her head and face uncovered. Alif shouldered his way toward her, trembling in every limb. When he reached her, she looked up at him with a blank exhausted face, searching his eyes as though he had answers to questions she had not yet asked.

  “What are you doing here?” said Alif. “Are you all right? Are you hurt? Or—” he thought of the boys with sticks and hungry eyes. “God, something worse?”

  She shook her head.

  “I’m fine,” she said, her voice barely audible above the crowd. A knot of dancing women jostled them; Alif drew her away.

  “Abbas,” she said.

  Alif swallowed.

  “Did you love him?”

  Her eyes widened, incredulous, and the mouth he had so idolized dropped open.

  “No,” she said. “No, never. How could I? He was old and—terrible, and I loved you.”

  “You left me.”

  She shook her head, pulling a lock of night-colored hair across her face in an unconscious imitation of the veil she had discarded.

  “I wanted you. But I didn’t want Baqara District, and sneaking around, and not having nice things—I know what that makes you think of me, but I couldn’t help it. I only know how to live one way.” She tucked the lock of hair behind one ear. “It doesn’t matter now. My family is ruined. What I was means nothing.”

  Her tone was full of meaning. Over the scent of sweat and the watery breeze, Alif could smell her perfume; a moneyed admixture of flower and wood. He remembered the way it had lingered on his pillow after she slept in his bed.

  “Mohammad.”

  He turned at the sound of his name. Dina was standing behind him on the sidewalk, her phosphorescent eyes flickering between his face and Intisar’s. The bottle of Mecca Cola hung from her hand, uncapped and emptied of its stormy inmate, and in combination with the dirt on her robe rendered her slightly ridiculous. Alif looked around for the marid, but saw nothing.

  “I made Abu Talib—I mean NewQuarter—give him up,” she said. “He’s going back to the Empty Quarter with the others. He says you owe him for that copy of the Alf Layla you lost.” “I—”

  “I’m going home now.”

  Even at a distance he could see the rapid rise and fall o
f her chest. He looked at her, looked at the ground, and looked at Intisar. Intisar’s face had grown hostile. Beyond her, barely visible through the canyon of steel and glass, the Old Quarter Wall caught the fading sun and blazed up.

  “Mohammad,” Dina repeated. At some point she had lost her gloves. Her red-brown hands were visible, the nails trimmed short, toying restlessly with the empty cola bottle and cap. Without the backdrop of the Empty Quarter, she looked like such an ordinary girl: a quiet, veiled, eternally irritated daughter of Baqara District. It was if the events of the past several months had made no impression on her. Yet Alif could now recognize this as a defect of his own sight, and knew that Dina, by some unfathomable mystery, was herself occult, and had waited in her silent way for him to reach the door of understanding that had always been open to her.

  “Wait,” he said. “I’m coming with you.”

  Intisar stared at him incredulously.

  “Do you need money?” he asked her, feeling several years younger and twice as awkward. “Do you have a way to get back home? You shouldn’t stay out here, it isn’t safe.”

  Intisar shrugged. She looked haughty, like an imperious child who had been denied a treat. Alif wondered how he had failed to notice her tendency to pout.

  “Please don’t worry about me,” she said. “Go home.”

  Alif felt Dina’s fingers brush tentatively along the heel of his wrist. He closed his hand around hers.

  “Peace be upon you,” he said to Intisar.

  “And you.” She turned away, slipping through the exultant mob toward the heart of the square. Alif looked at Dina and smiled. Her eyes crinkled above the seam of her veil.

  “I wonder if it’s possible to get a cab in this mess,” he said, glancing around. The only vehicle he could see was the burnt, overturned skeleton of a police van.

  “I wouldn’t count on it,” said Dina. “Let’s just walk.”

  “It’s a long way to Baqara District on foot.”

  “That’s all right. We have lots to talk about.”