Author's Preface
Dawn came in thin and silver over the camp, the kind of cold that bit at exposed hands before the sun had fully claimed the sky. Tents came down in practiced motion all around them, canvas folding, ropes coiling, the whole camp dismantling itself into something that could move again by first light.
Faris found Hayat standing near her mount, where her ornate palanquin was already secured atop the massive varak. Her guards were assembling around them in the pale grey morning, preparing for the long journey back.
"Thank you," Faris said, quiet and sincere. "May Allah protect you on the road."
"And you." Something softer than her usual sharpness crossed her face as she looked at him. "May He protect you as well... and bring my friend back to me soon."
Faris met her eyes and nodded with a quiet, determined smile. In that moment, seeing the genuine worry in her face, he knew without a doubt that he could trust her — she had braved the dangers of this journey solely out of true love and devotion for Latifa.
A few paces off, Yahya had found Darim standing by his own beast and clapped a hand on his shoulder with the particular weight of a man settling something important. "I'm trusting Hayat to you, Darim. See her home safely." A pause, deliberate. "And while you're at it — take some action, my friend."
Darim frowned, genuinely thrown.
"My Seyyid? What do you mean by that?"
Yahya sighed, long and theatrical. "Ah, Darim. So slow, for a man who reads an enemy's movement from a hundred paces off. At this rate your beloved is going to slip clean through your fingers while you're still working out what I mean."
Heat rushed up Darim's neck, and he found himself staring at the sand, wondering with something close to alarm exactly how transparent he'd apparently been, and to whom.
Hayat climbed up the steps into the privacy of her palanquin. Settling onto the cushioned seat, she caught, out of the corner of her eye through the draped silk, Yahya forming a small, unmistakable shape with his hands — a heart, pressed toward Darim's back, accompanied by a silent, mouthed go on. She knew the gesture instantly; Halima had taught it to her months ago, laughing, during some idle afternoon of trading Earth customs for desert ones.
Color flooded her face. "Idiot," she muttered under her breath, low enough that only the desert wind might have caught it.
Faris, watching the entire exchange unfold from a few feet away, looked between his brother and his friend with open bewilderment. "What exactly is happening right now?"
Yahya let out a long, exaggerated sigh. "Can you truly not see the sparks flying, brother?"
Faris blinked, glanced once more between Darim's reddened face — who was now mounting his own varak to lead the guard detail — and the curtained palanquin moving slowly as the beast stepped forward. He shook his head, utterly lost. Yahya sighed again and walked off toward his own men.
Faris watched him go, turning the moment over with no small confusion. Ever since Halima came into our lives, he thought, my brother has developed strange habits.
Far from that cold, hopeful morning, the sun over the camp of Muraj, father of Jahim, had already climbed into its full, punishing height by the time Latifa knelt once more at the washtub.
Her belly had grown heavy and round these past weeks, far larger than she'd have expected at seven or eight months by Earth's measure — but then, nothing about carrying Faris's child had followed Earth's measure from the start. His people ran larger in every way, and the baby inside her, she suspected, would come out built more like its father than its mother, exactly as Halima's daughter had. She braced a soap-raw hand against the small of her back and kept scrubbing, because stopping earned nothing but trouble here.
Her mind drifted, as it often did in these long, grinding hours, to the women she'd left behind — Halima's easy laugh, Hayat's sharp wit, the three of them crowded together over tea and gossip in a life that felt, from this distance, like something out of a half-remembered dream. She prayed for Hayat daily, grateful at least for the one mercy her captors had let slip early on — some careless remark suggesting Hayat herself had never been taken, only struck down and left behind. Latifa clung to that small comfort fiercely, one of the few she still had.
A guard's voice cut through her thoughts. "Seyyid Jahim summons you."
Her hands went still in the gray water. He hadn't called for her once, not in all these months. Fear closed cold around her chest as she rose and followed the guard across the camp toward the lavish pavilion.
Jahim sat sprawled across his raised seat, a heavy silver bowl in one hand, his eyes glassy with drink. Latifa's senses, heightened these past months by the pregnancy, recoiled the moment she stepped inside at the heavy, sickly-sweet stench of potent spiced date wine hanging thick in the warm air.
He leaned forward as she approached, inhaling deeply near her, a slow, deliberate violation she had no way to refuse. "Prepare yourself, beauty." His words slurred slightly at the edges. "Very soon now, I'm going to make you mine properly."
"I'm married." Her voice shook despite everything she did to steady it. "I'm pregnant — can you not see that, even drunk as you are?"
"Means nothing to me." He waved his silver bowl lazily, the sweet, heavy fumes spilling between them. "Our grandfathers bled each other in these sands, dove — the Banu Rayyan have been our blood enemies since long before you were born. Stealing you isn't just spite; it's a debt long overdue. And look at you — beautiful, soft, and clearly fertile enough to bear a strong line."
His smile curdled into something far uglier. "I'm keeping you. And once I've dishonored you properly, Faris won't want what's left, even if he ever crawls out of the desert to find you. He'll feel the shame of it like a blade in the gut for the rest of his days. That's the part I'm looking forward to most."
"You're a monster." The words came out barely above a whisper.
"Accept it." He leaned back, satisfied, surveying her like a man admiring property he'd already decided belonged to him. "Your husband isn't coming. He doesn't know where you are. Months now, and he hasn't found a single trace of you — what makes you think that changes tonight?" He gestured lazily toward the waiting guards. "Stop dreaming and get ready."
"This one's done with manual labor," he added to them, not sparing her another glance. "Make her presentable."
The guards took her by the arms, and she went half-numb with shock, the world narrowing to the sound of her own pulse as they led her away.
Night fell heavy and cold, the way it always did over this camp, and Latifa found herself alone in a separate tent — washed, dressed in fabric too fine for the fear sitting in her chest, left to wait for a fate she refused to let herself picture fully.
Panic rose fast, threatening to swallow her whole, until a memory surfaced, steady and clear: Zoraida's voice, patient as always, teaching her months ago about Tahajjud — the prayer of the last third of the night, when the whole world slept and a believer's whispered plea carried further than any daylight prayer ever could.
She made wudu with trembling hands, the water cold enough to sting, and stood alone on a borrowed mat in the dark, facing a direction she now knew by heart no matter where she stood on this strange world.
She sank into prostration and let the tears come freely, her voice breaking into a whisper only the night could hear.
"Ya Hayyu, Ya Qayyum." O Ever-Living, O Sustainer of all. "Ya Dhal-Jalali wal-Ikram." O Possessor of Majesty and Honor. "You are all-powerful, Allah. Save me from this wicked man. You alone we worship. In You alone we seek refuge."
She stayed there a long while after the words ran out, forehead pressed to the mat, and made a quiet, unshakable vow to herself in the silence that followed — that from this night forward, no matter how exhausted the day left her, she would rise in that last dark hour and pray again, and again, until either rescue came or her voice simply gave out from asking.
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