The night after the Urs (religious festival) at a revered shrine becomes the setting for three men—Usman, Madhav, and Layaq—to arrive unknowingly in the same holy place, each drawn by longing, exhaustion, or hiding. They do not speak yet, but the air between them begins to hum like strings waiting for a chord.

The Footsteps Left After Prayer

The Urs at the Khawaja Naqshband shrine had ended with the usual tide of incense and fatigue. Thousands had gathered beneath the jasmine-draped awnings—some to weep, some to whisper, many just to watch others believe. Drums had echoed beneath the arched colonnades, and qawwals had sung of the Beloved until their voices broke into wind.

By midnight, only the smoke lingered.

And the footprints.

Footprints in dust, in snow, in the softened flesh of earth—evidence of knees that had bent in longing and heels that had fled some unnamed sin. The lamps still burned low at the base of the shrine walls. The calligraphy on the inner arch glowed faintly in flickering gold. The shrine breathed now as all holy places do after crowds have left: relieved, emptied, half-listening.

Usman Chash arrived first.

Not through the front.

But from the side alley behind the cobbler’s quarters, where no lamp burned and no child sold rose petals in paper cones. His footsteps were slow—not cautious, but careful. The kind of walk one learns after outrunning too many boots and too many questions.

His right wrist still bore the red scarf, now darkened with smoke and grain dust. In his coat pocket were two apples and a list of names with arrows marked beside three—food to be delivered, debts to be burned.

But tonight, he sought no mission.

He came to sit.

Just sit.

To give his body an hour of silence not paid for by sleep.

He stepped into the inner chamber, sat cross-legged near the marble wall, and looked not at the shrine—but at the soft lamp burning beside it.

Light, unburdened by fire.

Madhav Bisht arrived next.

He came down the front steps, blending briefly with the last of the vendors packing up their incense trays. A cotton scarf covered most of his face, but his eyes flicked from tile to tile, counting cracks and shadows.

He did not come for prayer.

He came because it was the only place left in the city where no one asked where you were from or what you had stolen—so long as you left your anger at the door.

He sat near the southern pillar, knees pulled to his chest, fingers fidgeting with a hollow bamboo pipe hidden in his sleeve.

His stomach growled softly.

He ignored it.

He watched the flame.

Layaq Singh entered last.

He came with no purpose.

No disguise.

Only a worn shawl drawn tightly around him and a book of verses tucked inside the folds. His father had always forbidden shrine visits. “If God needs drumming and rose petals, then He is no god,” he used to say.

But Layaq had stopped seeking God weeks ago.

He had begun seeking breath.

And sometimes, breath lived in places where people still believed their longing was heard.

He knelt. Not to pray. But to press his forehead to the floor.

Not for God’s mercy.

But to hear the earth’s version of silence.

None of them looked at one another.

Not yet.

But the walls did.

The walls, which had heard every vow and betrayal of the last hundred years, now bore quiet witness as three threads entered the same circle, curling toward one another like smoke searching for wind.

They did not speak.

But something ancient began to shift.

A possibility older than brotherhood.
Older than revenge.
Older than names.

The shared silence between Usman, Madhav, and Layaq begins to shift—first as gesture, then as memory. A candle is lit, not for God, but for the forgotten dead. And though no names are exchanged, something unspoken passes between them—something deeper than introduction.

A Flame for the Nameless

It was Madhav who moved first.

Not with speech, but with a matchstick.

From the folds of his pheran, he pulled a half-spent matchbox. The kind sold by children outside tobacco stalls—thin, splintered sticks that broke more often than they burned. He struck one. It hissed, sputtered, then caught. The flare lit his face just long enough for the shadows to retreat, then return.

He leaned toward the row of clay lamps near the shrine wall—most extinguished now, their oil long gone—and found one that still held a mouthful of wick and ash. He touched the flame to it.

It took slowly, trembling at first, then steadying into a slender, golden tongue.

He sat back.

Not with satisfaction.

But with relief.

As though the act had eased something inside him that could not be named.

Usman watched from across the chamber.

He didn’t speak.

But he turned slightly—just enough to face the flame.

Layaq’s eyes rose from the floor.

And the three of them, for the first time, were no longer strangers in proximity.

They were men bound to the same silence.

And now, the same light.

The candle was not meant for ritual.

Not even for remembrance of a saint.

Madhav had lit it because that morning, near the southern riverbank, he had seen the body of a young porter boy, throat slit and his hands dyed with turmeric—the clear mark of a punishment killing. The authorities would call it robbery. The market would forget it in two days.

No one would say the boy had stolen nothing.

Only spoken out about the landlord who withheld flour from his mother.

Madhav had no grave to visit.

So he lit a flame in a place where no one would extinguish it.

“For the boy,” he whispered. “For the ones who don’t even reach paper.”

He didn’t know the other two men’s names.

But both turned now toward the flickering wick, the air between them softening—not like friendship, but like walls that begin to breathe again after a long winter.

Layaq finally spoke.

Not to either of them.

But to the space between them all.

“They won’t remember our names either.”

Usman replied without turning.

“Then make sure they remember what we stole.”

Madhav smiled faintly.

“And what we gave.”

No one laughed.

But for the first time in many seasons, the silence in the shrine no longer felt alone.

The falling rain becomes rhythm, memory, and invitation. The three men—Usman, Madhav, and Layaq—remain unnamed to one another still, but their stories begin to crack open in the half-light. What follows is not a formal introduction—but the slow, sacred unraveling of wounds long withheld.

Rain on the Shrine Roof

It began as a whisper.

Not voices—but rain.

The first drops touched the old tin roof above the western eaves of the shrine. The sound arrived without warning—soft, steady, and searching. Like a memory that slips beneath a door and waits to be noticed.

The men didn’t speak at first. They listened.

To the roof.
To the flame.
To one another’s breathing.

In Kashmir, rain wasn’t just weather. It was language. It remembered things the land refused to name. And when it came in the hour before dawn, it often meant someone was weeping in their sleep.

Layaq broke the silence this time—not with defiance, but with confession.

“My sisters were taken,” he said softly, gaze fixed on the dripping edge of the marble platform. “Not by men with swords. But with paper. Scrolls. Ink. The kind that pretends to be law.”

Neither of the others asked for more.

He went on, not because he wanted to—but because the rain had given him permission.

“One was fourteen. The other, seventeen. The tax came due. We had no rupees. No goats. No grain. The malik smiled. Said he’d accept ‘other forms of value.’ We never saw them again.”

He swallowed something thick.

“Now I weave shawls with names sewn in. Small. Hidden. But there. I send them to the same men who bought the silence.”

Usman leaned his head back against the wall. His eyes remained closed.

“Mine wasn’t scrolls,” he said. “Mine was oil.”

Madhav turned toward him slightly.

“Oil?”

Usman’s jaw tightened.

“They caught my father with beef. A quarter of a leg, wrapped in old cloth. They stripped him in the market square, poured oil in the vat used for lamp-making, and—” He paused, his voice suddenly fragile beneath its own weight. “They didn’t fry him. Not fully. Just enough that the rest of him knew it was happening. Then they hung what remained on a pole in the river. For birds. For lesson.”

No one responded.

Because there was no right word for a man turned into an example.

The rain grew louder, beating against the lattice screens like tiny fists.

Madhav let out a slow breath.

He took the bamboo pipe from his sleeve and rolled it between his palms like a rosary.

“I didn’t lose family,” he said. “I lost… voice.”

He pointed to his chest.

“They told me I didn’t belong. Said I was too low to sit with other Brahmins. So I made noise. Tricks. Ants. Pipes. Then, one day, I stole the Inspector’s uniform and hung it over the river. Not for vengeance. Just so he’d know what it felt like to be naked in front of the city.”

Layaq stared at the pipe.

“That was you?”

Madhav didn’t answer. But his smile said enough.

The rain paused.

As if listening.

The flame flickered once.

Then steadied again.

Three men.
Three stories.
One silence, now softer.

Not healed.

But no longer alone.

The solemn convergence of Usman, Madhav, and Layaq—not through declarations or ceremony, but through a quiet pact made beneath a leaking shrine roof. Not brotherhood by blood, but by burden.

A Pact Without Fire

The rain had softened into a steady patter, like the rhythm of a loom left running in an empty workshop. Outside, the stone courtyard puddled, mirroring the lanterns like halos broken in water. Inside the shrine, the three men remained—bodies still, hearts stirred, time briefly untethered.

Usman cracked his knuckles once. The sound was sharp but unintentional. He looked at his fingers afterward with a strange tenderness, as though surprised that they still moved after so many nights clenched in fists.

“I’ve always worked alone,” he said. “It’s easier. No names. No debts.”

Layaq traced a knot in the floor with his toe.

“I’ve always worked quietly. No slogans. Just thread.”

Madhav shrugged.

“I never worked at all. I just made them listen. Not to pain. To their own fear.”

Their voices did not compete.

They folded into each other like fibers in a shawl—not always aligned, but stronger together.

No one said what they all now knew.

That alone, they were myth.
Together, they might become memory.

The lamp near the mihrab hissed once, its wick drawing the last of the oil. Shadows danced against the script etched in marble—verses about light, guidance, justice. Verses so often quoted and so rarely lived.

Usman stood slowly. His knees cracked as he rose, years of crouched escapes embedded in the joints. He reached into his coat, pulled out a small jute pouch, and unwrapped it to reveal three flat stones—each etched crudely with a name.

He placed them before the lamp.

“Not saints,” he said. “Just people who deserved to outlive their hunger.”

Layaq reached into his satchel and unfolded a square of cloth. It bore a stitched vine pattern interrupted midway by a break—unfinished.

“This belonged to a girl named Simran. I’ve rewritten it thirty times. Still haven’t gotten it right.”

He placed it beside the stones.

Madhav hesitated. Then took his bamboo pipe and set it down gently between them.

“I once filled this with red ants to punish a man who stole with laws. Now I want to fill it with names. With echoes. With stories they’ll choke on.”

The three offerings sat between them—stone, thread, wood.

None of them religious.

But all of them sacred.

They did not clasp hands.

They did not swear oaths.

But in that moment, something bound them.

Not promise.

Not vengeance.

But a quiet, shared vow—

We will not let the forgotten remain so.

The rain outside lightened to a hush.

And the candle, against every rule of nature, burned a little longer.

The shrine exhales the last of its warmth, and the three men—Usman, Madhav, and Layaq—step into the waking city. They do not part with strategy, but with something weightier: a recognition that they are no longer alone with their rage.

The City They Stepped Back Into

By the time they stepped outside, the sky had surrendered fully to the grey-blue of daybreak. Not the golden kind that poets write of, but the bruised dawn of a city that never truly sleeps—only sighs and changes guards. The rain had ceased, but the air still smelled of rusted iron, drenched wool, and that strange mixture of old smoke and damp stone that Kashmir wore like a second skin.

The streets were not empty.

A cart creaked past on wooden wheels. A boy chased a chicken down an alley. Somewhere behind the shrine, a constable coughed and spat, then called for tea. Life was returning—stubborn, soft-footed, unaware that within the same city, something else had awakened too.

Usman walked with his hands behind his back, the red scarf now exposed again, frayed slightly at the ends. He said nothing to the others. But he slowed when they did, looked when they looked. There was no leader here, no follower. Just three men, bound by what had not yet been named.

They stopped at the end of the shrine’s stone steps, where the street split three ways—east to the spice quarter, south toward Lal Chowk, and west to the bridge.

Madhav turned to them.

Not with finality.

But with something like invitation.

“We’ll meet again.”

He didn’t need to ask.

It wasn’t a question.

Layaq nodded once.

“But next time, we don’t bring stories. We bring rope.”

Usman’s jaw moved, as if to speak, then paused. He looked toward the slope of houses along the riverbank, where the laundry lines were already flapping in the wind. He seemed to see something the others couldn’t.

“There’s a girl I need to check on first,” he said softly.

They didn’t ask.

He didn’t explain.

But in his voice was a tension that lingered like a bruise.

As they began to part, a woman passed with a basket of mint and marigold. Her daughter walked beside her, no more than nine, her eyes ringed with winter rash. The woman looked down quickly, not out of shame—but memory. She had seen men hanged for less than the way these three stood—unafraid, untitled, unhidden.

Zooni’s notebook would one day mention this moment.

Not by names.

But by posture.

“They stood like thresholds,” she would write.
“As if behind them was everything the regime tried to erase—
and before them, everything it feared might be reborn.”

None of them noticed the old poster on the wall—half torn, rain-drenched. It had once read:

“Be loyal. Pay your dues. The Maharaja is mercy.”

But the ink had run.

And the paper curled like skin over flame.

Usman Chash, walking alone after departing the shrine, passes a place along the river where the memory of an unspeakable atrocity surfaces—a memory tied not just to cruelty, but to a kind of evil that seeks to erase not only the body, but the soul. This is his reckoning with what was done to a girl who never even made it to a grave.

Beneath the Burning Willow

Usman walked along the bank of the Jhelum, his boots soft in the mud, the river swollen and heavy from the week’s rains. The sky had begun to clear, its cloud-veil lifting slowly, but the light remained sullen—as if the sun itself did not want to look too closely at what lay below.

He knew this part of the river.

Not because of beauty.

But because of what it had once revealed.

The willow tree still stood, blackened at the tips, its lowest branch twisted as if recoiling from some memory of flame. In the spring, boys came here to fish. In the autumn, women came to wash lentils in copper pots. But in winter, it stood mostly alone.

Except for memory.

That, Usman knew, was a season that never thawed.

It had happened when he was seventeen. The girl’s name was Salma. No one remembered her father’s name. No one remembered her caste or whether she knew how to read. She had been taken during a routine “revenue inspection”—a term Dogra soldiers used when they entered homes without warrants and left without daughters.

Her mother had run barefoot through six lanes, crying beneath windows that refused to open.

Three days later, a shepherd’s boy found her body under this very tree. Not buried. Not hidden.

Left.
As warning.

As waste.

Usman hadn’t seen it himself.

But he had helped carry what remained.

What they didn’t say aloud was what the hakīm whispered that night behind a curtain of jasmine:

“Burned wood. They used burned wood. And iron. They inserted it… there. Her limbs were already stiff. But it was not death that froze her.”

No one spoke during her washing.

Even the old women, who had prepared dozens of bodies, refused to look at each other.

One fainted.

The imam, when asked to lead the janaza, said only:

“If you believe she died with modesty, then we may proceed.”

Usman never forgot that line.

He also never forgot the silence of the river that night.

A silence not of peace.

But of complicity.

He stood beneath the willow now, older, heavier, red thread coiled tight at his wrist.

The ground here still refused to grow grass.

He knelt, not to pray, but to place something down: a shard of green glass, shaped by fire and river into a soft curve. He had found it days ago and kept it in his pocket—not knowing why.

Now he did.

He pressed it into the mud.

“For Salma,” he whispered.

He didn’t ask for forgiveness.

He asked for vengeance that remembered mercy.

Then he stood.

Walked back toward the city.

And behind him, the river moved.

As if it, too, had waited long enough.

Usman Chash returns to the shrine-house not to speak, but to witness. There, he finds Zooni, hunched over her notebook—not weeping for Salma, but writing her into a line of memory that will never be erased. And in that moment, he sees that what he burns, she preserves, and together, truth survives both fire and ink.

The Girl Who Already Knew

By the time Usman returned to the inner lane of the shrine quarter, the day had fully arrived. Morning’s pale blue was giving way to a stronger hue, and the sun, low and cold, touched the rooftops with a tired hand. Vendors had begun to set up their wares again—candle wax, dried dates, scarves that shimmered falsely under dust.

Usman moved without sound.

His boots left no print on the stone. His breath was shallow. The red thread on his wrist, now damp with sweat, clung to his skin like a vow.

He pushed open the wooden gate, its rusted hinges whining softly. Inside, the courtyard smelled of warm lentils and ash, of clove oil and sleep. He expected quiet.

Instead, he found Zooni awake.

She was seated cross-legged near the hearth, her head bent over her notebook, the morning light spilling across the floor in a slow, golden hush. A candle burned low beside her, not for ritual, but for company. Her pen scratched rhythmically, like a needle pulling thread through fabric long worn and weeping.

She didn’t flinch when he entered.

She didn’t greet him.

She simply turned the page and continued.

He watched her for a while, unsure whether to interrupt the storm of memory she was shaping.

Finally, he stepped closer.

“You’re awake early,” he said.

She nodded, eyes still on the page.

“So are you.”

A silence settled.

But it was not awkward.

It was the kind of silence that exists between two people who have survived different fires but recognize the smoke in each other’s lungs.

Usman glanced at the open page.

There, in ink still wet, was a list.

Not alphabetical. Not chronological.

Ordered, perhaps, by wound.

And on the line between “Gul Amina” and “Parveena of the rice stalls,” he saw it:

Salma (Willow Tree – Riverbank)
Burned inside. Still named.

He stepped back.

“Who told you?”

Zooni finally looked up.

Her eyes were not angry.

They were steady.

“No one has to tell me. Some stories live in the air. You just have to know where to breathe.”

He sat across from her, lowering himself slowly, as if ashamed to take up the same ground.

“I was there. Not when it happened. But after.”

“You carried her,” Zooni said, not asking, but stating.

Usman blinked.

Then nodded.

“She didn’t weigh enough. Not for death.”

Zooni returned to her writing, dipped the nib in ink, and wrote beneath the name:

Not forgotten. Not forgiven. Not unnamed.

Then closed the notebook.

Not abruptly.

But reverently.

Dei’d stepped into the doorway just then, her shawl wrapped high, her eyes watching without judgment.

“When you write them down,” she said, “you give them a second breath.”

Zooni replied without looking.

“When he burns the records, he gives them a voice.”

Usman didn’t respond.

He didn’t need to.

Because something had formed between them all.

A triangle of memory.

One hand ink.
One hand flame.
One hand that held them both steady.

Within the worn walls of Dei’d’s shrine-home, a silence turns into a conversation, and a conversation begins to drift into strategy. But unlike the whisperings of soldiers or the declarations of rebels, what takes root here is quieter, slower, more dangerous: a shift in imagination—from survival to disruption.

The Boil Beneath the Pot

The kitchen of the shrine-house was built from uneven stone and patched mud, its ceiling bowed low from decades of steam and smoke. The single window was half-covered in burlap, the winter light filtered into soft amber. Against the wall stood a blackened earthen stove, its clay belly warm with the fire of damp willow logs. Above it, a small pot of lentils boiled, the foam rising and settling like breath.

Zooni stirred the pot with a wooden spoon, slow and deliberate, as if time itself could be coaxed into pausing if one moved gently enough. The smell of turmeric and crushed garlic filled the room—dense, comforting, almost medicinal.

Usman sat near the door, his legs stretched out, back straight, the red scarf now tucked under his sleeve. Across from him, Dei’d sat on a low stool, her shawl drawn over her shoulders like a second skin, eyes watching both of them without urgency. It was not a room of generals. It was a room of the tired, the ready, and the undeniably awake.

Zooni broke the silence first.

“I wrote thirty-one names last night. All women. Six of them never reached eighteen.” She didn’t look up. Her voice was neither hard nor soft—just bare. “But they keep saying there’s no famine, no slavery. That what we have is order.”

Usman nodded slowly. “Order is what the boot says when the face beneath it tries to breathe.”

Dei’d stirred a cup of tea with crushed cardamom, her spoon clicking softly against the brass. “They don’t fear riots,” she said. “They fear reordering. A new grammar. A new map.”

Zooni poured water into the pot, diluting the lentils to stretch them further.

“What if we stop stealing food,” she said, “and start stealing the claim to decide who owns it?”

Usman’s eyes met hers.

Not wide with surprise.

Narrowed—with thought.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean…” she hesitated, then looked up, her face lit from below by firelight, “what if we stop taking things to feed the hungry—and start feeding the hungry so they take things themselves?”

Dei’d exhaled softly through her nose.

Not a sigh. A laugh, almost.

“Then we’ve moved from mercy to disruption,” she said. “And they kill for less.”

Zooni didn’t flinch.

“Let them try,” she said.

“They’ve already taken everything else.”

Usman leaned forward, arms on knees, shoulders suddenly heavier—not from defeat, but from intention.

“I have scrolls,” he said. “Eviction lists. Title deeds. Ledgers that record who owes what to whom. They’re kept in the back hall of the Collector’s office near the copper bazaar.”

Dei’d sipped her tea slowly.

“Stealing those would be noise,” she said. “But burning them—burning them in front of the hungry, that would be prophecy.”

Zooni nodded.

“Then let’s write prophecy in smoke.”

The lentils began to boil harder, spilling foam over the rim.

Zooni lowered the flame.

The room fell quiet again, but it wasn’t the silence of uncertainty. It was the silence that follows the moment when breath becomes decision.

The warmth of lentils and the weight of stolen scrolls. Here, in a room scented with turmeric and smoke, rebellion begins not with noise, but with deliberation—through stories that refuse to vanish and maps redrawn by the hands of the wounded.

The Map Drawn by Steam

The steam from the pot had begun to fog the low glass pane above the stove. Zooni reached across with the sleeve of her pheran and wiped it clean with a single, slow sweep, revealing the courtyard just beyond—its stone still wet from the earlier rain, pigeons pecking quietly at leftover millet. The courtyard was silent now, but it would not stay that way for long.

In that brief act of clearing the fog, something shifted. Not just the windowpane. Not just the view.

The silence in the room tightened—thicker now, almost tactile.

Usman stood, knees cracking slightly as he rose. He crossed the room to the patch of mud-caked floor near the hearth and pulled from his satchel a folded cloth packet. With care, he unwrapped it on the floor between them. Inside were five folded slips of paper—creased, stained, marked with faint ink and the thumbprints of those who had never been taught to write their names.

“These are copies,” he said. “I took them from the back registry two weeks ago, before the inspection day. They list the land holdings in Rainawari, Bota Kadal, and parts of Eidgah. Each slip carries the name of the landlord, the tax outstanding, and the price of eviction enforcement.”

Zooni leaned forward.

She studied the creases, the worn edges.

The paper smelled faintly of smoke, and something sharper—resin, perhaps, or an old ledger drawer opened after too many years.

“This one,” Usman said, pointing to the top slip, “says that nine hundred families in Rainawari are scheduled to be removed from their homes. Most of them weavers. A few shawl-washers. Three widow-headed households are listed as ‘delinquent’ and marked for early expulsion.”

Dei’d didn’t speak.

But her tea sat untouched now.

The room listened.

Zooni took the slip in her hand. She read the name at the top aloud. “Malik Rajan Pandit.” Her voice did not tremble. “This name has appeared before.”

Usman nodded. “He owns more fields than he can count. He has never planted one seed himself.”

Madhav had entered without sound. He now sat by the door, his scarf damp with rain, his pipe resting loosely in his hand. He looked not at the papers, but at Zooni.

“Are you going to write them down too?” he asked.

“No,” Zooni said, gently placing the slip down.

“I am going to burn them.”

Usman looked up sharply, but not in protest.

Not in surprise either.

Instead, a small, tired smile crossed his face—one that belonged to a man who had once burned a scroll alone in a back alley, but now saw what it meant to burn with company.

“We’ll take them during the Friday prayers,” he said. “The Collector’s office empties for half an hour. The back door is unguarded—most of the watchmen head to the mosque.”

Dei’d stood then, steady and slow. She crossed to the wall where her old wool shawl hung, worn thin in places, and wrapped it over her shoulders.

“No masks,” she said. “If you burn them, burn them as who you are. Let the poor see your faces. Let them know who carried their names out of fire.”

Zooni folded the slip once more. She pressed it to her lips—not to kiss it, but to feel the dry scratch of the paper against her skin.

Then she held it to the flame.

It caught quickly.

A curl of smoke. A whisper of ink lifting into air.

The window fogged again.

And this time, no one wiped it clean.

The shrine becomes not a sanctuary, but a war room for the forgotten. They do not shout. They do not pray. But by torchlight and memory, they build a map of rebellion stitched together from cloth, ash, and old breath.

A Map Stitched in Silence

Night fell again, but the shrine did not sleep.

The prayer hall, once hushed by chants and footsteps, had been emptied of its ritual furnishings. The rugs were rolled back, the low tables pushed aside. In the center of the stone floor, a rice sack had been laid flat, its jute threads splayed like tired nerves. Upon it, Layaq dipped a reed into black dye and began to draw—not pictures, not symbols—but a cartography of resistance.

The alleys of Rainawari, the water lanes behind Zaina Kadal, the back wall of the Collector’s Office, the escape tunnels once used by smugglers along the embankment—each was marked not by name, but by muscle memory.

“This route floods after sunset,” he said, pointing to a curved lane behind the copper market. “So we move before dusk. Here,” he tapped again, “there’s a baker who leaves his crates stacked. If we turn them sideways, they’ll block the east watch.”

Zooni crouched beside him, listening, her hand pressed against the notebook that never left her side. She didn’t write now. She memorized.

Madhav sat opposite, cutting tiny slivers from the border of a woolen shawl and etching faint glyphs onto them using a sharpened twig and lampblack. “If the message is compromised, they won’t understand it. But we will. The shawl will carry the time and route sewn into the hem. Delivered to the widow who boils rice in the saffron lane.”

No one asked if she would understand.

She was already waiting.

Usman was at the far end, measuring rope. Not for climbing. For burning. Each knot marked a file room. Each length calculated for the distance from shelf to exit. His eyes flicked between shadow and lantern, already rehearsing the rhythm of entry: right hand opens the bolt, left hand catches the flame, breath once before the blaze.

He spoke low.

“There’s a stone basin near the eastern column. If things turn… we drop the scrolls there and light, it. Don’t scatter. Don’t shout. Burn, then run.”

Dei’d stood behind them, not giving orders, but watching. Her presence was less guidance and more gravity.

At one point, she stepped forward, holding a folded scrap of cloth. It was once part of a girl’s veil. Torn, charred at one corner. She placed it atop the rice sack.

“Take it with you,” she said.

Zooni unfolded it gently. Stitched into its center, faint but unmistakable, was a name.

Salma.

The others looked down. Not with pity.

With vow.

Not just for her.

For all the girls who were never named, only priced.

The room fell still.

No one dared disturb the hush that settled over her name.

Then, Layaq whispered—

“When we burn the scrolls, may the smoke carry these names higher than any flag ever flown.”

And so, in the heart of a shrine meant for prayer, a new liturgy was written—without scriptures, without saints.

Only maps, memory, and fire.

Next Chapter: Chapter Seven: A Meal for the Starving