7.

In the stairwell, Kreindel covered her face with her smock and kept on climbing.

She was alone now, the last of the residents having run past her. The smoke grew thicker with each step, and by the time she reached the fourth floor she could barely breathe. The door to the hallway was closed, the knob too hot to touch. She grasped it with her skirt, and pushed.

The heat struck her bodily. She inhaled in shock and began to cough. She could see only a few feet ahead; beyond that was a reddish darkness. The sound of the flames was that of a nearby engine, or a crowd of men all muttering at once.

Father. She had to reach him.

She took a step, and then another.

Someone behind the Golem was calling her name.

She ignored it and kept on running, then threaded her way into the crowd. Men and women were staggering down the steps, rags clutched to their faces. A man at the top blocked her path, saying, “Lady, whatever’s up there ain’t—”

“Let me pass.”

She barely recognized her own voice. It was too deep, and drained of all musicality, her guise of humanity slipping away. The man drew aside in fear, and she was through.

“Chava!” the Jinni called again—but it was too late, she’d disappeared into the building. He was trying to push through the crowd after her when a police wagon arrived, its siren splitting the air. The men jumped out at once and swarmed the sidewalk, linking arms to form a cordon that herded the bystanders into the street. The crowd thickened, grew solid as a wall.

Stuck among them, the Jinni craned his neck, watching. Any moment now, the Golem would emerge from the smoking doorway, the girl coughing in her arms.

Step by step Kreindel pushed her way through the searing heat.

One door, two, three: their apartment. Locked. Her father had locked it behind her, out of habit. She hadn’t thought to bring her key.

She pounded on the door, then threw herself against it, but still it held. She began to sob, picturing her father lying just beyond her reach—or trapped in the bedroom, with the golem they’d worked so hard to build—

The golem. She knew the command to wake him, had memorized it. Would it work, with the door between them? She had to try.

She took as large a breath as she could, bent her mind to the figure lying on the bed, and shouted the command, her voice cracking.

The Golem climbed the stairwell, searching outward with her mind, ignoring the flames that had begun to lick at the treads. Was the girl on the second floor? The third? Too slow, no time for mistakes! There—the fourth floor, where the hallway door stood half open.

She walked through it, and into a roaring kiln.

Instantly her body began to dry and harden. She advanced into the hallway, pushing against a growing stiffness. The girl was ahead of her somewhere. “Hello?” the Golem called, her voice rough with smoke.

A quick flicker of red set the hallway aglow. She saw the faint outline of the girl, heard her shout something above the noise of the fire—

A strange thrill ran through the Golem. Something was waking nearby, and it felt like all of springtime arriving at once. Wood burned all around her, yet she could smell rain-drenched earth. She stepped forward, unthinking, searching for the source—

And then cried out as the floor gave way beneath her.

The Jinni watched the empty doorway, his worry growing with each passing moment. At last he pushed forward, to the cordon line. “Get back, you,” a patrolman called.

“My friend is in there,” he called back—just as, with a great groaning of wood, the staircase inside the doorway collapsed.

A plume of smoke and ash billowed down the stoop and onto the sidewalk. The crowd recoiled, nearly pushing the Jinni off his feet. The orderly cordon dissolved; policemen stumbled into each other, coughing and wiping their eyes.

Stunned, the Jinni turned around. The street was a churning bedlam. Neighbors along the block had dragged their own belongings outside in case the fire should spread, stacking the sidewalks with chairs and suitcases, bassinets and books. A fire engine swept around the corner, bell clanging, spectators jumping clear of the team. Firemen swarmed from the engine’s side, raising ladders, hauling hoses. An axe thudded into the side of the building. Flames belched from the wound.

Standing amid the chaos, the Jinni felt the first true touch of panic.

Kreindel crouched at her apartment door, straining to listen.

Had the command worked? She was growing dizzy, her vision fading at the edges. For a moment she thought she heard a woman’s voice calling out above the flames—but then there was a giant cracking noise, and the hallway shuddered as though some part of it had collapsed.

“Papa!” she screamed. And then, “Yossele!”

A thud of heavy footsteps—and the door was wrenched off its hinges.

He filled the doorway, even larger than he’d seemed on the bed. For a moment, despite everything, she could only stare at him. He gazed calmly back, mismatched eyes glinting in the firelight.

She pushed past him into the apartment, screaming for her father.

He was on the parlor floor, wheezing thinly. He’d been trying to carry the wooden suitcase to the door when the smoke and strain overcame him. The suitcase lay nearby, latches broken open, its contents spilled onto the rug: the five precious volumes and, Kreindel’s heart caught to see, the Tsene-rene.

She crouched over him, crying. He opened his eyes, saw first his daughter, and then, looming behind her, the creature she’d awakened. His eyes widened; he gasped painfully for air.

“Hide,” he whispered.

The light left his eyes. With a sigh, his breath trickled away.

Strong fingers grabbed Kreindel around her waist.

“Wait!” she cried—but for Yossele, the threat to his master was stronger than her command. He lifted her effortlessly, cradling her like a baby, and strode to the door. One last glimpse of her father—and then he was gone.

There was barely any air left in the hallway, and Kreindel struggled to breathe in thin sips. Yossele turned left, toward the front stairwell—but stopped almost at once. Kreindel peered down and saw the gigantic hole in the hallway floor, the flames in its depths. “Other way,” she whispered. “The yard.” He turned around and ran down the hallway, the floor shuddering at each step.

The back stairwell was still mercifully whole. Cinders and ash fell about them as they emerged into the yard. She could hear the sirens and shouts on the other side of the building, the spray of the water-hoses. Yossele set her down and stood, towering over her. His skin was grayish in the moonlight; she could see fingerprints, here and there, in the clay. He watched her with the eyes she’d given him, waiting for a command.

“Hide,” she croaked, echoing her father. She pointed across the yard to the alley, and the construction pit for the unfinished bridge beyond. “There, in the water. Don’t let anyone see you. I’ll call for you when it’s safe. Go.”

At once Yossele turned and ran, the deep drumbeat of his footfalls echoing behind him.

She watched until he’d disappeared, then staggered out to Chrystie and circled the burning building, heading toward the crowd. Her face felt as tight as a grape-skin; her eyes were swollen to slits.

A voice shouted: “You! Girl!”

The man was so tall that at first she thought it was Yossele, come back again. Then he knelt down and he wasn’t Yossele, only a man, his dark eyes full of worry. Bundled in his arms was what looked to be a woman’s cloak. “My friend ran in after you,” he said, his Yiddish strangely accented. “A woman, tall, like me. Did you see her?”

A woman, run in after her? The man watched her, tense and unmoving, as though his own life hung upon her answer. She remembered, then, the faint voice in the hallway. “I heard her,” she whispered.

“Where? What floor?”

“The fourth. But—she—” The cracking noise, the hole at Yossele’s feet. The flames below. She sat down on the curb and began to cry.

The man stared down at her, then drew an agonized hand over his face. Cursing, he stood and sprinted around the corner, the way that Kreindel had come.

A little while later, a policeman found Kreindel sitting alone on the curb and carried her to an ambulance, where a man pressed two fingers to her wrist and asked her questions she couldn’t understand. She shook her head, crying. He went away, and brought back another man, one who spoke Yiddish. He asked after her mother and father, but she only cried harder. At last they made her lie down, and pulled a blanket over her; and the horses tugged the ambulance away.

The Golem lay on her back, trapped beneath a weight of wood and plaster.

She squirmed, trying to find her bearings, but she could barely move at all. Where had she landed? Dust and debris covered her face; the heat had dried her hands to claws. She tried to blink, realized her eyes were fixed open. The ground beneath her had the feel of packed dirt, not wood or carpet. Was it the cellar? Had she fallen all the way through the building?

She shook her head, clearing the dust from her eyes—and looked up at four looming stories of flames and wreckage. It was as though a giant had scooped a burning hole through the center of the tenement. Smoke poured upward through exposed apartments, around sofas and lamps. A kitchen table tipped crazily into the void as she watched, the wood shattering as it landed.

She twisted, trying to drag herself free—and flinched at a sickening pull in her hip. She batted at it with a stiff, clumsy hand, and found a spar of metal, inches thick, protruding from her body. She’d landed atop it, and now it pinned her to the ground like an insect.

She looked around wildly. How long, before the entire building collapsed? Would she survive intact? Or crumble apart, a thousand sentient pieces among the debris? The thought horrified her. She tried to call for help, but could barely draw breath.

There was nothing she could do. She hadn’t even managed to rescue the young girl. She thought of the Jinni, and how they’d fought. How awful, that it should end this way. She wished she could apologize, and say good-bye.

The Jinni ran into the deserted tenement yard. The stairwell door hung open, a yawning darkness beyond. Ash floated on the air-currents.

He set her cloak on the ground, and went in after her.

The heat soaked into him at once, sharpening his senses. Within moments he felt stronger, quicker. His clothing caught fire as he ran up the staircase, but he paid no notice, only called her name.

If Arbeely were here, he thought, he’d tell me to pray.

The fourth floor hallway was a carpet of flames. He ran inside the nearest apartment, searching through the haze of smoke, but it was empty. He tried another, and another, calling her name, hearing nothing.

The walls of the next apartment he tried were already alight, and in the parlor he found the body of a man, his bearded face pale and thin. A wooden suitcase lay nearby, old books spilling from its insides. Flames crept across the rug, reaching the books as he watched, the paper combusting eagerly. Something about the sight transfixed him: ancient books, vanishing to ash . . . He shook himself and turned to go—and caught a deeply familiar scent, of earth or clay.

“Chava?” he called.

He opened the door to a small bedroom, its far wall smoldering. The scent was stronger here, but she was nowhere to be seen, neither in the bed nor beneath it. He looked around, confused.

A jolt, beneath his feet: the joists snapping, one after another. The room pitched downward, furniture sliding across the floor and through the burning wall. He tried to brace, but lost his balance—

—And the Golem watched from below as he fell through the air and landed with a crash nearby.

“Ahmad!” It came out as a rattling croak. Had he heard? What if he was hurt?

“Chava! Where are you?”

She wanted to laugh with relief. “I’m over here—” She dug her elbows into the dirt floor, tried to swivel around the metal spar.

Footsteps—and then he was lifting the wreckage away, shoving wood and plaster aside. He seemed on fire himself; the air around him shimmered with heat. He pushed away the last of the debris—and then stopped, stood staring. Something had horrified him—

Oh. It was her. He was looking at her.

“I can’t move,” she whispered.

He jolted back to himself, found the spar and broke it, pulled it free from her body. He bent to lift her—and jumped back as she shrieked at his scalding touch.

A roar came from above. The roof, giving way at last.

“I’m sorry, Chava,” he said; and he grabbed her up and ran through the flames.

The tenement yard was still deserted. He carried her out and set her down beneath the clotheslines, as gently as possible. She said nothing, only lay there, as still as wood. He could see deep burns along her arm and on her hip, where he’d touched her. He had to get her home; the yard wouldn’t stay vacant for long.

He searched around until he found a water spigot, nailed to a post in the middle of the yard. He turned it to gushing, braced himself, and ducked beneath the spray.

The water exploded into steam. Pain stabbed through him; he shouted out and backed away, staggering. A moment later, he was dry again. He shook off the last of the pain, then touched one of the shirts on a nearby clothesline. When it didn’t smolder, he grabbed it down, along with a pair of trousers, and dressed himself, briefly wishing for shoes. He found her cloak where he’d left it, and wrapped her in it gingerly.

“Chava,” he said, “we need to leave. Can you move at all?”

Her eyes flicked up at him. With slow and palsied movements she maneuvered to her knees, tried to rise, toppled over with a gasp.

He caught her and carried her from the yard, keeping to the shadows as much as possible until they reached her boardinghouse. Her landlady’s bedroom lamp was lit—no doubt she’d smelled the smoke and heard the sirens, and gone to investigate. The rest of the house was dark and quiet.

He found her keys in her cloak pocket, then quickly carried her up the stairs, unlocked the door, and laid her on the bed. She was a stiffly curled bundle, her cloak drawn across her face like a curtain. He was about to switch on the light when she stirred and spoke, her voice a painful rasp. “No, don’t. I’ll be fine, Ahmad. I’ll see you tomorrow night.”

A pause. “Chava,” he said slowly, “are you telling me to leave?”

“Ahmad. Please.”

The only chair was at her writing-desk: a bentwood rococo confection, more suited to a girlish boudoir than her spare and sober room. He placed it beside her bed and sat, folding his long legs together. The chair squeaked in protest, but held.

“I’m not moving,” he said.

She seemed about to argue, but then gave in with a slump of her cloaked shoulders.

For long minutes he watched her, a dark form on a dark bed. He could smell parched earth, fissured with heat. A scent as familiar to him as her usual one—only he’d never thought to find it in this city, in this room. If he closed his eyes, he might be flying over a summer valley on the other side of the world.

“Are you in pain?” he asked quietly.

A pause. “No. Not really. Just . . . uncomfortable.” Her voice was still a rasp.

Unnerving, to sit staring at her like this. He’d glimpsed her ruined features for only a handful of moments, but now he couldn’t drive them from his mind. Would she heal, as she said? Or was that only a lie, to calm him? He had the impulse to lie down next to her, to take her in his arms; he held himself back, afraid of hurting her—afraid, too, of learning the true extent of the damage.

He shifted in the chair, cleared his throat, looked around for a distraction. His foot nudged something next to the bed: a large rattan hamper. Her sewing basket. He picked it up and set it in his lap, but could see little detail in the nearly pitch-dark room. He found the lamp on her nightstand, snapped his fingers above the wick. Already he missed the earlier acuity of his senses, the way the barest hints of color and shape had stood out through the smoke. Was that how he’d seen the world before the flask, and he’d simply forgotten?

She stirred beneath her cloak. “What are you doing?”

“Looking through your sewing basket.”

“Why?”

“For lack of options.”

She fell silent, then gave an irritated sigh and shifted again, as though searching for a more comfortable position.

The sewing basket was like an enchanted box in a tale, full of smaller boxes that all contained boxes of their own. He lifted them out one by one, inspecting their contents. There were buttons and needles and dozens of spools of thread: black and white and ivory, various shades of gray, dark blues, a few greens and yellows and one startling fuchsia. Another box held scraps of cord and trim and ribbons, feathers and flowers meant for hat-brims. Then, a box of tools: a small metal ruler with a sliding gauge, a pincushion neatly spaced with pins, a pale wedge of tailor’s chalk, and an elegant pair of golden scissors in the shape of a stork. The stork’s feet perched upon the two finger-loops; its long neck was the shaft, the sharp blades its beak. He held them up and admired them in the lamplight, surprised to find such whimsy in anything she owned.

At the bottom of the basket were folded squares of pale muslin. The Jinni chose one of these, then a needle and a spool of dark thread. He measured a length of the thread and snipped it with the scissors.

Another movement from the bed. “Ahmad, what are you doing now?”

“I’m practicing my sewing.” He knotted the end of the thread, and, with little forethought, began a haphazard embroidery of crosses and zigzags. But the thread was too thick, and the muslin began to pucker and ripple around the stitches. Carefully he snipped out the offending thread, chose a slimmer one, and began again.

“Talk to me,” she said suddenly. “Please.”

“What shall I tell you?”

“Anything. I just want to hear your voice.”

You’ll be glad to hear that the girl escaped. He nearly said it—but at the last moment stopped himself. He didn’t trust himself to keep the bitterness from his voice. She’d nearly destroyed herself, and for what? The girl had managed to live regardless. So instead he said, “Then I shall tell you the story of Mount Qaf.”

He paused then, surprised by his own words. Why, of all things, had he thought of that? It was the scent of burnt earth, perhaps: it had taken him out of himself, and dragged him into the past.

She did not say, What is Mount Qaf? She only lay listening. Waiting. He cleared his throat. “In the legends of the jinn,” he said, “Mount Qaf is the emerald mountain that encircles our world and holds up the sky. It is a land of exceeding beauty, where all kinds of trees and flowers grow without need of rain. Only on Mount Qaf does the roc, the king of all birds, allow his claws to touch the ground. For hundreds of generations, Mount Qaf was the home to all the tribes of jinn. There was no fighting then, for we had everything we needed, and were happy and content. But then one day, the jinn were cast out—all of us, down to the very last imp and ghul. No one knows why. It simply happened.”

She hadn’t moved, but her silence was now charged with attention. He opened the box of trims and ribbons, selected a spool of golden cord. He pondered a moment, then said, “Chava, this cord is far too thick for a needle. How does one sew with it?”

A pause. “First you lay it on top of the fabric,” she said, her graveled voice betraying extreme patience, “and pin it into place. Then, sew across it with small stitches, and remove the pins.”

He found her pincushion, cut a length of the cord. “We fell from the mountain,” he said as he worked, “and landed in the desert, and had to contend with rain, and iron, and men and their magic. We searched for a cause, a fault. Brother accused sister, clan accused clan, saying, ‘It was this wrong, it was that slight.’ The first battle began, and we’ve been fighting ourselves ever since.” He threaded another needle, and began to sew neat yellow stitches across the golden cord. “It’s said that if one day we can discover the reason for our banishment, then the roc will gather us all and fly us home to Mount Qaf, where we’ll live in peace again. But until that day, we are doomed to endless conflict.”

His voice trailed away. Long moments passed; and then she said, “Ahmad, do you believe in Mount Qaf?”

He knew that she expected him to say no. It was the sort of story that, if it were told by a human, he’d dismiss as nonsense. But now he felt the need to give a better answer.

“I used to, when I was young,” he said. “But then I began to question. How could a mountain encircle the earth? Wouldn’t there be evidence of such a place, if it existed? I decided that the tale was invented—that all the stories, in fact, were invented, and I would give them no power over me. But yes. I believed, once.”

She lay there, absorbing this, as he continued to sew. Then she said, “Rabbi Meyer gave me a book that told a story like that. Except it wasn’t a mountain, but a garden, in a place called Eden. The people who lived there were Adam and Eve, the first humans. They ate the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge, the only fruit that God had forbidden them to eat.”

She paused, as though waiting for a scornful comment. What is the point of planting such fruit if one only means to forbid it? But he remained silent, sewing, listening.

“Once they gained the tree’s knowledge,” she said, “they realized that they were naked, and it made them ashamed. God saw their shame, and knew that they’d eaten the fruit. So He banished them from the garden. And the humans have never been able to find it since.”

He considered. “It’s similar,” he said, “but not the same. I’m quite certain that no jinni has ever felt ashamed of their nakedness.”

“Somehow I believe you.”

“And all men and women, they’re meant to descend from these two?”

“Yes. But it grows complicated.”

“I’d imagine so.”

Silence returned. He kept on sewing, tied off a thread, snipped the ends away. “These scissors,” he said. “They surprise me. They seem like something I’d make, not something you’d own.”

“Why not?”

“They’re too fanciful. You seem to value utility above all else.”

“They’re well made, and they were no more expensive than the others in the shop.” Did he imagine it, or was her voice improving? Perhaps it was only the added tone of indignation. She paused, and then muttered something he couldn’t quite hear.

“Pardon?”

“I said, ‘And besides, they remind me of you.’”

Surprised, he smiled in the near-darkness. “Really?”

“As you say, they’re something that you might make. I use the scissors, and I think of you. There, now you know the extent of my infatuation.” She spoke it half defensively, as though he might think less of her for it—and suddenly it pained him that even now, lying injured and immobile, she felt the need to protect herself in this way.

“May I tell you another story?” he said.

“Of course.”

He threaded the needle, began again. “Once, there was a jinni who was captured by a wizard, and bound to human form. He came by accident to a towering city, where all thought him very strange—and there he met an equally strange woman, a woman made of clay.”

The words came to him as though fed from some distant source. He pulled thread through fabric, heard it whisper like flame. “Before long,” he said, “it seemed to him that, in that city full of wonders, the woman was the most wonderful, the most worthy of his attention. For years they roamed together—and then, one night, they came upon a building in flames. Nearby was a child, panicking for her father. The child ran inside, and the woman ran in after. He shouted for her to stop—but it was too late, the woman was gone. And he was left to wonder: Had she heard him, calling after her? Or, because she couldn’t feel his wishes, did they simply not matter as much as the child’s? And more to the point, would he ever see her again?”

“Oh, Ahmad.” A whisper. “I’m so sorry.”

The stork’s beak nipped at a thread-end. “If I’d been elsewhere, would you have died tonight?”

“If you’d been elsewhere, I wouldn’t have been out at all.”

It was a diversion; he wouldn’t allow it. “If you’d heard the commotion and gone alone, then. Or if there’d been a mishap at the bakery, and someone was trapped inside. What then? Did you give any thought to your own safety?”

A hollow sigh. “No. I didn’t think at all, I only acted. She was so frightened for her father, and I was . . . vulnerable, I suppose. Please, don’t be angry. I couldn’t help it. It’s who I am.”

The anger surged afresh, as though she’d called it forth. “Allow me,” he said, “the same consideration that you demand for yourself. I can’t help it, it’s who I am. Yes, you could not help running after her, and in that moment I meant nothing to you. I know this, I try to accept it, but I cannot understand, and that is what angers me. Tonight might have been the end of you, Chava. Who would I remember you with tomorrow if you were to die tonight? Arbeely? Anna Blumberg? I couldn’t even go to your bakery and cry with the Radzins.”

“You don’t cry.” A whisper, from the depths of the cloak.

“Allow me the hyperbole, please. My point, Chava, is that if someday—”

He stopped talking. She’d moved suddenly beneath the cloak, and was now sitting up, patting herself with stiff motions. “What is it?” he asked.

“I can’t find the locket.” The cloak slipped open—and he saw the fissures that covered her body, the dark and ugly stripes where he’d held her. Remnants of her cotton shirtwaist were seared to her skin. Her hands were skeletal, the knuckles swollen. He felt dizzy, but couldn’t look away.

“It’s not there,” she said in rising fear. “No, wait—is this . . .”

Her fingers had found something inside one of the fissures. He shuddered as she prized it from her own body: an oblong of flat and blackened brass.

“Look,” she said, and held it out in one shriveled hand.

He took it gingerly and held it to the lamplight. The halves of the locket had fused together. He picked up her scissors, wedged the tip of the stork’s beak into the thin seam that remained, and twisted. The locket cracked open and fell apart. Where the folded command had once been, there was now a teaspoon’s worth of ash.

“It’s gone,” she said, her voice hollow.

Good riddance, the Jinni thought.

“Ahmad, what will I do? What if I—” She paused, then turned suddenly to face him. “But you know it,” she said. “You read it once, you must remember it.”

He wanted to tell her that he’d forgotten the command, ripped it deliberately from his memory, after that awful day when he’d come so close to destroying her. But it would be a lie. He couldn’t forget it, any more than he could forget his own true name.

“You do,” she whispered. “I know you do.”

“Chava, no. Don’t ask this of me.”

“Please, Ahmad. Please, just write it down, and I’ll buy a new locket—” She reached out a clawlike hand, giant eyes beseeching.

“No!” He recoiled, rose from the chair, upending the sewing basket.

Startled, she pulled back, then raised the hood again and turned away slightly. “May I ask why?” she said in a clipped tone.

“Haven’t you heard a word I’ve said? I have no wish to be your accomplice in your destruction!”

“And if I should lose myself, and turn violent? How many others might die without that locket to protect them?”

“Enough!”

The word rang between them. Her face was a shadow beneath the hood, her lips an angry line.

“I tell you now, Chava, I won’t give you what you ask. Find someone else to murder you. I refuse.” And with that he left her room and her boardinghouse, and walked back to Washington Street, barefoot in his stolen clothes.

On Forsyth, the fire was out at last, though the gutted tenement still steamed from the pit in its middle. The crowd dispersed, the neighbors returning to their beds, grateful that they’d been spared.

The Forsyth Street Synagogue opened its doors, despite the lateness of the hour, to take in the newly homeless. Many of the survivors were members of the synagogue—but neither Rabbi Altschul nor young Kreindel were among them. No one could remember seeing them, either in the fire or its aftermath. And so the congregants drew the only conclusion they could. Their mourning, though, was tinged with guilty relief. The death of a child could only be a tragedy—but there had been something dark and unsavory, even sinister, about their rabbi at the end.

Meanwhile, the girl they mourned lay asleep in a bed at Saint Vincent’s, dreaming that she was lost in a maze of smoke-filled hallways. At last she found the door to her father’s bedroom, and turned the knob. A body lay on the bed: not Yossele, but the tall man from the street, the one whose friend had run into the fire after her. He lay motionless, staring at her with eyes full of grief, the woman’s cloak bunched between his hands. She took it from him and shook it out, and covered him with it, like a shroud.

In the morning, kind-faced women would come to her bedside and ask questions in English. My name is Kreindel Altschul, she would tell them in Yiddish. And her age, they’d ask, holding up their fingers: Eight? Nine? Elf, she would say, eleven; but they’d mishear, and write it in her file as eight, an error that no one would ever correct. More people would come, asking questions, jotting down her answers—until at last they would bathe and dress her and take her to a nearby courthouse, where a black-robed judge would sigh in irritation at her lack of living relations and declare her a ward of the state.

The Golem lay on her bed and stared at the ceiling, wishing she could blink.

At last she sat up. Her lamp still glowed upon the desk, surrounded by the scattered boxes, the stork scissors, the spools of thread. Nearby was the hand mirror, with its newly splintered handle.

She steeled herself and picked it up.

In some ways, her face was better than she’d feared; in others, it was worse. Her hair and eyebrows were still intact—protected, it seemed, by the magic that had made her. But the dark and hollow cheeks, the parched lips and staring eyes, all gave her the look of a bewigged corpse.

She would heal. She had to. Over and over her hand stole to her ruined chest, where the locket should be. Find someone else to murder you—did he think she wished for death? Oh, he didn’t understand at all! Angrily she shook her head, trying to loosen her eyelids. A strange sensation was rising in her, a discomfort different from pain but just as compelling: an unbearable itch for something she couldn’t name, something that reminded her of hot summer days, of children playing in open fire hydrants, longings for iced lemonade . . .

Thirst. She was thirsty.

She stood from the bed, feeling rickety and unsteady. The hole in her hip puckered uncomfortably as she hitched her way down the darkened stairs to her landlady’s kitchen. She found a water-pitcher and filled it, then took it back to her room and drank glass after glass. Her body absorbed it all, then another pitcherful, and another. The cracks in her skin began to smooth together, the burnt scraps of cotton fluttering to the floor. Her eyelids loosened at last, and she blinked gratefully, over and over.

By morning her face had filled out again, losing its skull-like aspect. She examined the stripes on her arms and her sides, where the Jinni had carried her. Their edges were softening; they, too, would heal. The hole in her hip had closed enough to walk normally again. By tomorrow, with any luck, they wouldn’t notice anything wrong at the bakery—

The bakery. Selma Radzin. She hadn’t even told the Jinni about it.

Her small burst of optimism drained away. She poured another glass of water and drank it down in a single morose gulp, then roused herself to tidy away the boxes and tins he’d spilled onto her desk. She refolded the fabrics and spaced the pins evenly on their cushion, wanting to be angry, to think, How typical of him, to make a mess of things and then leave—but she felt too weary to argue even in her own thoughts. She fetched the basket, to pack everything away—and only then saw the square of muslin, lying on the floor where he’d dropped it.

She picked it up, smoothed it out. On the muslin was the figure of a woman, outlined in cord. Spreading from her back and shoulders were wings of golden flame.

If you were a jinniyeh . . . Was this what he wished for? A woman closer to himself, someone less challenging to comprehend? She folded it away at the bottom of the basket, then put everything else on top, as though to hide it from herself. She would discuss it with him, she decided, when he arrived that night. They would speak about it as rationally as they could. She would try, as always, to make him understand.

But their usual hour came and went, and the Jinni failed to appear beneath her window.