Author's Preface
Amina drew back slightly, studying Halima's tear-streaked face with growing concern.
"What hurts?" She touched her cheek, her forehead, her shoulder, trying to locate the source of the pain, speaking in a tone whose meaning read clear even without translation. "Tell me, child, where does it hurt?"
But Halima couldn't answer - not because she didn't understand the words, but because the question itself, the touch behind it, so full of genuine worry, became the final blow that broke the dam she'd spent years building.
She sobbed - not quietly, not restrained the way she'd always let herself cry, muffling it into a pillow so her father wouldn't hear, but wildly, helplessly, as if someone had finally given her permission to release it all at once: the cold of her father's house, her mother's indifference, the emptiness of her marriage, the horror of the crash, the loneliness on an alien planet. Amina's warm arms around her felt so foreign, so unlike anything she'd known before, that her body responded to the care almost painfully - like an organism that had never received what it needed suddenly overwhelmed by too much of it.
Frightened, Amina held her tighter, murmuring something soothing, and called for the healers, but when they entered and saw the storm before them, they exchanged a knowing look - the girl's body was fine. It was her soul weeping.
At that very moment, Yahya, who had spent the whole night on his knees in the mosque, lifted his head at the sound of hurried footsteps by the entrance.
"Seyyid Yahya!" A warrior burst in, breathless from running, but his face shone with joy. "She's awake! The fever's broken!"
A sharp, blinding surge of relief swept through Yahya, cutting through the exhaustion of the sleepless night. He raised his hands to the mosque's ceiling, his voice, hoarse from hours of pleading, ringing out with gratitude:
"Al-hamdu lillahi rabbi-l-'alamin! Praise be to Allah, Lord of all the worlds!"
He tore out of the mosque, feeling nothing beneath his feet, running toward the tent where, he thought, only happiness now waited for him. But he froze at the threshold the moment he stepped inside.
The joy on his face vanished instantly, replaced by confusion: Halima was sobbing, shaking in his mother's arms, and there was no relief in that weeping - only pain, old and deep, pouring out without pause.
He stepped forward, reached out a hand, not knowing what to do - this man who could stop a maddened varak with his bare hands, who could hold his ground against a dozen blades in battle, stood now utterly helpless before a woman's tears, unable to calm a storm he couldn't even see, only hear echoing in her broken sobs.
"Mother..." he whispered, lost, and Amina shook her head briefly, not looking away from Halima. "Not now, my son. Let her cry it out."
He stayed where he was, his posture frozen in helpless stillness as he watched the sobbing slowly lose its force.
Perhaps half an hour passed before Halima finally quieted, going limp in Amina's arms, clutching at her clothes the way a child clings to the one anchor in a raging sea - and, feeling something close to safety at last, fell asleep right there in the arms of a woman she'd known less than a day.
Amina looked up at her son and the healers frozen at the entrance and gestured briefly toward the exit - quiet, careful not to disturb her guest's sleep.
Yahya wanted to stay. Wanted to sit beside her, keep watch over her rest the way he had that first night. But looking at Halima's sleeping, exhausted face, he understood a bitter truth with sudden clarity: to her, he was still a stranger. A man from another world, whose name she'd only just learned to say, whose arms she couldn't yet accept as shelter.
With a quiet, hidden sorrow, he bowed his head to his mother and, suppressing every urge to remain, stepped out past the tent flap - patient, as befitted a man who had already waited five hundred years and was prepared to wait however much longer it took.
Halima opened her eyes for the second time that morning - but this waking felt different.
Her body still felt wrung out, hollow, as if the night's storm had carried away something she didn't even have a name for. But along with that emptiness came something new, something almost forgotten - lightness. The weight she'd carried for years without knowing its full measure had, for the first time in a long while, eased, if only a little.
She slowly turned her head to the right.
Amina lay beside her, cheek resting on her palm, caught in the shallow, restless sleep of someone who'd spent the whole night at a stranger's bedside. The morning light filtering through the tent fabric softly traced her face, and Halima found herself studying it - the rich, warm dark brown tone of her skin, the soft waves of chestnut-brown hair escaping her scarf, the deep brown eyes, closed now but still holding traces of last night's worry on their lids.
Something remarkable, almost tangible, radiated from this woman - not mystical, not unsettling, but simple, human, understandable. She was beautiful in a way that didn't inspire awe or shyness but, instead, calmed - a beauty in which Halima, to her surprise, recognized something familiar, almost Earthlike.
And then her mind, sharp even after the fever, caught on something strange.
She remembered Yahya's face, bent over her in the desert - deep, almost coal-dark skin, silver-ash hair as if forged from frost, eyes glowing pure amber gold. Faris looked much the same, but with golden-yellow eyes and short silver hair. Amina, however, had a rich, deep dark brown complexion, her hair was chestnut-brown, ordinary, human, her eyes warm brown - features that wouldn't have drawn a second glance on Earth.
Halima frowned, trying to organize this the way she organized any technical malfunction. On Earth, that combination - snow-white hair, glowing golden eyes, against skin that dark - didn't occur naturally. No gene she knew of produced that result without intervention - dye, contacts, genetic correction.
But scanning the tent - the dense woven rugs, the tanned hides, the clay dishware against the wall, the complete absence of a single electrical device, not one hint of technology - she understood: there was no cosmetic chemistry here, no contacts, no possible way to fake an appearance. What she'd seen in Yahya and Faris was real. Natural. An ancient mark carried in their blood - perhaps a mark of their line itself.
The thought, foreign as it was, didn't frighten her. It was simply a fact - a new variable in the equation Halima, without quite noticing, had already begun rebuilding in place of her shattered old world.
Amina stirred and opened her eyes, and seeing Halima watching her with a clear, calm gaze, immediately softened into a warm, luminous smile - the kind that warmed better than any blanket.
She sat up, reached a hand toward Halima's forehead - a motion practiced over the night - and, feeling the skin, exhaled in relief: the fever had broken completely.
Then she rose and offered Halima her hand, nodding toward the exit - a simple gesture needing no translation: come, let's wash up, you'll feel better.
Halima, fighting off weakness, leaned on the offered hand and rose slowly to her feet. For the first time since falling into this alien world, she didn't tense with fear at the thought of where she was being led.
She took a step. Then another - following Amina, toward the morning, toward a family that, it seemed, had already begun to become her own.
The morning continued unfolding before Halima in a string of small, almost unnoticeable discoveries, and the first was the sudden realization that she hadn't used the bathroom since yesterday - whether the fever had burned the need out of her body, or her system had simply been too consumed with survival to bother with such things.
Amina, as if reading the unspoken question on her face, led her to a simple hollow behind a fabric partition at the far end of the tent complex - primitive, without any hint of plumbing or modern facilities.
Halima took it in with surprising calm. Her father's house, for all its outward show of wealth, had made do with exactly such an outdoor setup for years - he'd considered it wasteful to spend money on comforts for his daughters, though he'd spared no expense on the latest technology for his own study. She'd first seen real plumbing as a university student, in the academy dormitories, and remembered the almost childlike wonder of running water. So this world's basics didn't shock or disgust her - only stirred a faint, bitter recognition.
When she returned, she found Amina in the middle of her morning ritual: the woman held a thin fibrous stick, apparently broken from some tree, methodically cleaning her teeth with it, occasionally working the frayed end against the rim of a water bowl.
Miswak, Halima remembered from somewhere deep in nearly forgotten knowledge - something she'd read once in passing, without thinking much of it. No plastic bristles, no chemical paste in a tube, just natural wood fiber that had served people for millennia. She couldn't help evaluating it with the engineer's part of her mind: efficient, sustainable, not a single gram of plastic poisoning the soil. Well done, she thought, with unexpected respect.
They sat at a low table draped in woven cloth, and Amina began piling the best pieces of flatbread onto Halima's plate, the ripest dried fruits, pushing it all closer with the same unconditional, nothing-expected-in-return care as the day before. Something warm and unfamiliar stirred in Halima's chest every time this woman handed her another offering - she'd forgotten what it felt like to be cared for simply, without cause or calculation.
The tent flap stirred, and Yahya's massive frame appeared in the opening.
Halima flinched before she could stop herself, instinctively drawing back, her shoulders tightening - her body remembering last night's fear faster than her mind could remind her that this was the man who'd carried her across the desert and given her his cloak.
Yahya froze at the threshold, and something flickered in his golden eyes - not hurt, but a quiet, restrained sorrow, the look of someone who understood the reason for that fear and had no wish to deepen it. Instead of approaching, as he clearly wanted to, he lowered himself onto the rug at a distance, took his share of the meal, and began eating slowly, quietly, betraying nothing of his feelings - content simply with the fact that she was alive, well, and safe, a few steps away from him.
Amina, noticing the awkward silence, spoke to her son - a question, judging by her tone - and Yahya, setting down his food, began recounting, judging by his gestures and the occasional glance toward Halima, the story of finding her in the sands.
And then something happened.
At the edge of Halima's awareness, the familiar chip icon flared - but this time not fractured, not blinking helplessly, but steady, solid, as if it had finally found firm ground. The sounds of the foreign speech, which had scattered meaninglessly in her ears until now, began slowly but surely arranging themselves into words, into phrases, into whole sentences taking shape before her very ears.
"...she was lying by the wreckage, unarmed, terrified - I approached slowly, so as not to frighten her..."
She recognized nearly every word now, and the chip, judging by the faint, strange tingling somewhere in her throat, was preparing not only her hearing but her vocal cords as well - micro-impulses tuning her speech apparatus to reproduce these once-unfamiliar sounds in her own voice.
Halima went still, looking between Amina and Yahya, feeling, for the first time in a long while, the last and most impenetrable wall between her and this foreign world begin to crumble.