Alif the Unseen by G. Willow Wilson Read Free Book Online Page B

The woman made an irritated noise and nipped his shoulder. Urgency overwhelmed him. He covered her slender form with his, shifting his hips as she threaded
her legs around him. Delight stole over his body in waves. She cried out when his enthusiasm intensified. Bending to her ear, he whispered in the language she had spoken, telling her they had to be
quiet, quiet; obediently, she stifled her moans in his neck. The end came quickly. Alif collapsed against the warm body beneath him, and the woman laughed, speaking a word of triumph. She kissed
him with a fond smile. Alif begged her to tell him her name, but she was already receding into darkness, leaving behind a scent like warm fur.
    Alif woke to the sound of the cat batting her paw against the window. He felt sated and calm. The storm winds were no longer audible, and the City beyond had descended into a deep, restorative
silence. He rose, wincing; his calf muscles were sore. When he opened the window the cat blinked at him once and leaped down into the courtyard. He leaned out and took a breath. The air was purer
now, stripped of pollution and heat by the sand. Dawn tempered the eastern horizon. He turned at the harsh sound of a metal hinge followed by feminine coughing: Dina pushed her own window outward,
waving one hand to clear the dust that had accumulated on it in the storm. She wore a long green scarf and held it coquettishly over her face with her free hand, like a palace maiden from an old
Egyptian film. The image charmed him.
    He called her name in a soft voice. She turned to look at him, surprised.
    “Oh! What are you doing awake?”
    “I had a—” He blushed. “I just woke up, that’s all.”
    “Are you all right?”
    “Yes, but not really.” He took another long breath. “I wish it was always like this. The air and the light.”
    “Me, too.” She followed his gaze out over the City. The skyscrapers of the New Quarter looked as though they had been built out of pearl and ash. In a few hours workmen would come to
clear the dust and return them to their glassy anonymity, but for now they looked like part of the desert, a natural extension of the great interior dunes.
    “Like a story,” Dina said. “Like a djinn city.”
    Alif chuckled. “Just like a djinn city,” he agreed.
    They stood in silence for a moment.
    “I’m going to pray
fajr
on the roof,” Dina said finally. “Be well.”
    “God grant you paradise,” said Alif. Dina’s eyes crinkled in a smile. Her window swung shut. Alif lingered for a minute longer, gathering his thoughts. He would shower and have
some tea—there was no point in returning to bed with the day so limpid before him. Redoubling his defenses against the Hand would require all his skill; he might as well begin now, while he
felt confident and clear-headed. He would not think about the possibilities that lay before him: at any time a knock might come on the door and reveal a pair of State security policemen in khaki
uniforms. Or worse—they might not knock at all. They might appear in the middle of the night and drag him, bound and hooded, to one of the unnamed political prisons that lay beyond the
western edge of the City. Alif closed his eyes and banished the thought. He must not lose focus.
    Once clean and caffeinated, he sat at his desk and opened one of his code editing programs. Somewhere there must be an explanation for the swiftness with which the Hand had entered his
system—a weak or outmoded function in his firewalls, a flaw in his overall design. He wondered uneasily whether the attack had been a coincidence—the result of a roving audit—or
targeted at himself. Was his name out in the open? There had been no warning, no chatter on the City’s mainframes about any captured gray hat cracking under torture and delivering up
identities or locations. His clients were all as safe as he could make them up until the very moment the Hand appeared. No, Alif could not have been the intended