where Khatun, having carried names longer than a body is meant to, begins to weaken—and Zooni, sitting by her side, hears for the first time the true story of how she survived the brothel, and why she never left the mountains again?

She had not left the cave in three days.

Khatun’s body, which once moved through mountain paths as if they had been stitched into her bones, now stayed folded inside the inner chamber, wrapped in two shawls and a silence that grew heavier with each breath. Her feet no longer touched the floor. She sat propped on cushions of folded quilts, the kind villagers left behind after each hiding season—wool flattened by years of waiting.

The lamp near her had burned low. Its flame curled in on itself, a golden spiral holding the last of the oil.

Zooni knelt beside her, grinding dried pomegranate peel in a stone mortar. She did not ask Khatun if she was cold. She had already placed warm cloths near her ankles, set broth beside her shoulder, swept the floor beneath her bedroll without stirring dust. But she could see it now—the difference in the skin around her mouth. It had grown pale. Not empty. Just translucent, as if her voice had pulled away from the edges of her face.

Outside, the wind scratched at the hillside.

The potter’s daughter passed through once at noon, bringing a sprig of mountain thyme and a bundle of flatbread. She had not asked any questions. Only left the offering and nodded once toward the woman in the quilts, eyes lowered.

Usman, Madhav, and Layaq kept to the outer chamber. They took turns tending the fire. They spoke little. Even laughter, which had returned to them in brief flickers since the firing of the clay, had gone quiet again. Not out of mourning. But because the stillness had changed.

Zooni placed the pomegranate bowl down and shifted closer.

Khatun’s eyes were closed, but her breath told her she had not yet left.

The breath came shallow, paused between each inhale, then returned with a faint tremor—as though her lungs had learned to ask permission before taking anything in.

Zooni touched her shoulder lightly.

“Khatun…”

The old woman stirred, her fingers twitching beneath the shawl.

“I’m here.”

“I know,” Zooni said.

There was a long pause.

Then the voice came.

It was not cracked.

It was not faint.

It was slow—and precise. As if each word had waited decades to be spoken.

“They told us we were lucky.”

Zooni said nothing.

“Luck,” Khatun repeated, as though tasting a word she didn’t recognize.

“We were the ones too plain. Too old. Or too frightened to make profit fast.”

Zooni looked at her, eyes widening.

Khatun’s lips did not tremble.

“They sent us west. Kept the younger ones for Lahore, some for Banaras. One of them—Bano, she could sing like riverwater over bone—was taken by a Punjabi man who promised to make her a dancer. She was returned three months later. No voice left. No knees.”

She paused. Her breath wheezed once.

“I was handed to a caravan leader. He had four horses and a mouth that never closed. He spoke in numbers. I became a number.”

Zooni reached for her hand.

Khatun didn’t move away.

“He tried to sell me in Murree. I spat at the buyer.”

Zooni held her breath.

“He beat me with a strap of oiled leather and dumped me near the market steps. Thought I’d die there.”

She opened her eyes.

Looked directly at the girl beside her.

“I crawled for half a night. A woman selling earthen pots took me in. She didn’t speak my language. I stayed quiet. She gave me food. I gave her silence.”

Zooni felt something sharp rise in her throat. She swallowed it.

“When I healed, I walked for twelve days. Found a caravan north. Took names off trees as I passed, wore them like shawls. Halima. Aziza. Farida. None of them fit. But when I reached the mountains, and the potters gave me tea without asking who I was…”

She smiled.

And in that smile, there was something unbreakable.

“They called me Dei’d. And for the first time, I didn’t flinch.”

The oil in the lamp hissed once.

Then died.

But the warmth in the room remained.

Zooni placed both her hands over Khatun’s.

The skin beneath them was still warm.

Still breathing.

But the woman had gone quiet again.

Not lost.

Just farther.

As though she had returned for one last name.

And now… was resting in its shape.

where the others, gathered around her in silence, begin to prepare the burial—not as a ritual, but as a weaving of earth, salt, and cloth, and where Zooni presses her hand into fresh clay one last time, not to write a name, but to hold the space where Khatun had once sat breathing?

The breath left Khatun sometime between the soft hush of lamp smoke and the breaking of the second thread in the quilt hem. No one marked the exact moment. No cry pierced the air. No hand checked her pulse. It wasn’t necessary. When Zooni leaned in again, she knew.

Not from the cold—because the body was still warm.

Not from the stillness—because Khatun had been still before.

But from the absence of listening. The kind of silence that followed not sleep, but release.

Zooni sat beside her for a long while. She did not weep. Her hands remained where they were, gently covering Khatun’s—still folded, still familiar. She didn’t call for the others. She didn’t speak her name. She sat, and the world adjusted around her.

When the sun climbed high enough to spill a pale blade of light across the chamber floor, Usman appeared in the doorway. He did not ask. He looked once—at the shawl drawn up to Khatun’s chin, at Zooni’s back curved over the sleeping form—and then stepped away.

By midmorning, the men had cleared the center of the cave.

They rolled back the pots and stored the tablets. They swept the floor with soft branches. They stoked a small fire with cedar, not for heat, but for the scent. The smoke filled the air gently, clinging to the stones, curling through the silence with a kind of reverence that made every motion feel earned.

The potter’s daughter came again.

This time, she carried no thyme. No lentils. Only two lengths of white cotton, folded into squares the size of an infant’s bedding.

She placed them beside the fire and stepped back.

No one asked her to stay.

She stayed anyway.

Zooni did not speak until she stood.

Her knees cracked as she rose. Her hands trembled not from grief, but from the weight of keeping still for too long.

She crossed to the clay slab they had prepared two days earlier, the one meant for winter storage. She knelt beside it and pressed her right hand flat against the surface.

The clay had been drying slowly, its texture now firm but malleable.

She did not draw.

She did not write.

She pressed.

Palm first.

Then her fingers—each one separately, slowly.

When she lifted her hand, the print remained.

She turned her palm over and looked at it.

Ash.

Clay dust.

A faint outline of lines now left behind.

She stood, returned to the center, and helped wrap the body.

Khatun’s face was not pale. Her skin had taken on the tone of baked earth, the kind that glows just after harvest. Her eyes had stayed closed, her lips neither smiling nor collapsed. Just… quiet. As if she had spoken her last sentence completely.

They washed her hands with rose water brought by the potter’s daughter.

They folded the cotton once over her face, once beneath her feet, once around her body.

Usman carried her out.

Not with grandeur.

Not with the strength of a man lifting something heavy.

But with the humility of a son lifting something sacred.

Zooni followed.

She carried nothing.

Only her breath.

Only her memory.

The walk to the burial place took half an hour.

Past the last bent pine, across a slope softened by years of snowfall and footless seasons. The earth here gave easily. The soil was dark, as if made from the breath of hidden springs.

They did not speak as they lowered her.

They did not chant.

They did not read.

They placed her in the womb of the earth as gently as a pot returned to the kiln.

Covered her slowly.

Pressed the soil flat.

And walked back in silence.

Behind them, the mountain held her.

Not as a grave.

But as a place where something once breathed.

And still listened.

where that evening, Zooni sits alone in the cave, sorting through the remaining pieces of fabric, and finds one last scrap she does not recognize—stitched not by her, not by Khatun, but perhaps left long ago—and as she holds it to the firelight, she realizes it bears the faintest impression of a name that had never been spoken aloud?

Evening returned with a dull hush. The cave did not mourn aloud. It accepted. It gathered. The fire was left low, fed just enough to keep the cold from seeping too deep into the stone. The men had gone quiet, each retreating to their corners with the quiet choreography of shared fatigue. They did not speak of Khatun. Not because there was nothing to say—but because everything had already been said in the way she was carried, laid, and covered. What remained was listening.

Zooni remained seated near the hearth.

Her hands moved through the old box of cloth scraps—one piece at a time, slow as prayer. She unfolded each square, smoothed it across her thigh, and stared, not looking for anything in particular. Her fingertips felt for texture. Her eyes drifted with the worn patterns—lines of embroidery faded by time, knots barely holding, some edges still marked by thread that had never been pulled through.

One square made her stop.

It was smaller than the others—only the size of a palm. The fabric was darker than the rest, dyed once in indigo perhaps, now faded to a storm-colored grey. It had frayed at the corners but was soft in the center, as though it had been held often, folded tightly, or clutched in sleep. The thread across the middle was uneven—hand-sewn, not practiced. She turned it toward the fire.

A shape.

Not a word.

No letters. Not in full.

Just the hint of one.

Maybe two.

A line. A curve. A break.

Her breath slowed.

She traced her thumb across the raised stitches. They had been done in rush, perhaps without light. Not for display. Not to be worn. But to be remembered by fingers only. A child’s name? A mother’s first letter? A refusal?

She lifted it to her cheek.

The cloth smelled of earth and old sandalwood. Not fresh. Not strong. Just enough to suggest it had lived in a box for years without forgetting what skin had once touched it.

She closed her eyes.

Pressed the cloth against her lips.

And sat there.

Still.

The fire cracked.

A small spark rose and fell.

She whispered something into the fabric.

Not a name.

Just a breath.

A vowel without shape.

And in the hush that followed, something inside her chest softened—not as release, but as recognition.

She folded the scrap.

Tucked it into her satchel.

And sat a while longer beside the fire, no longer sorting anything, no longer touching the other pieces.

The air around her felt different now.

Less like mourning.

More like something had finally been returned to the world, even if no one else would ever know its shape.

where that night, Zooni returns to the small alcove where she had once etched Khatun’s name in wet clay—and presses the new, unknown cloth into the softest edge of the wall, leaving behind not a name, but a pressed impression, a secret only the cave would keep?

The fire was low again. Its glow barely reached the walls, and even the embers had dimmed to a red that pulsed more like memory than flame. The others had long since gone to sleep. Their shapes lay folded in corners beneath wool and cotton, each of them curled not from cold, but from the way silence wraps itself around a body too tired to dream.

Zooni stood.

She moved without shawl or sandals, her feet bare against the cool stone. The chill grounded her. Each step a reminder that she was awake, still present, still shaped by breath. In her hand she carried the small square of cloth—the nameless piece stitched by someone long forgotten, folded now with the weight of a new promise.

She did not walk through the main chamber.

She turned toward the narrow alcove near the back, where years ago she had pressed her first imprint into wet clay. That wall had never been finished. It had never been polished or fired. It remained soft enough to hold gestures, but quiet enough to keep them hidden. No one looked there. Not even the potter.

She lit a small taper and shielded its flame with her palm, casting just enough light to see where the old lines began.

There was Khatun’s name.

Etched by her own hand, shaky at first, but resolute in curve.

Beside it, smaller impressions—half-moons, print edges, finger trails that meant nothing to those who didn’t know their story, but meant everything to the ones who had placed them.

Zooni reached out.

Not with the reed.

Not with her fingers.

But with the cloth.

She unfolded it carefully, held it between both palms, and leaned forward.

Then pressed.

Not hard.

Just enough.

Enough for the thread to meet clay.

For the outline of a letter—or what might have once been a letter—to pass softly from fabric into earth.

The imprint left behind was faint.

Fainter than any name carved with intent.

Just a depression in the surface.

A breath that had stopped midway through a syllable.

She leaned in close.

Exhaled over it.

Then gently smoothed the edges—not to erase, but to seal.

She held her palm against the wall for a moment longer.

No prayer passed her lips.

No final sentence.

Only stillness.

And that, here, was enough.

She turned back.

The flame flickered with her movement.

She walked back to her mat, folded the remaining pieces of fabric into their basket, and sat in the dark.

The cloth remained in the wall now.

Unseen.

Unnamed.

But pressed.

Like memory that does not demand to be remembered—only to be placed somewhere, safely, where forgetting is no longer possible.

where the men rise with the next dawn to find Zooni already awake, seated by the fire—not crying, not hollow—but different, and where Usman, looking at her face, finally understands why Khatun had never left the cave… because she had stayed long enough to become part of it?

When the fire breathed again, it did so not with hunger but with recognition. The first crackle came just after the birds stirred in the hollows above the cave. Not the loud call of daybreak—just the rustle of feathers rearranged in the dark, the sound of claws adjusting on damp stone.

Usman was the first to rise.

He didn’t sit up abruptly or stretch like a man leaving sleep behind. He lifted his body the way a man might lift his foot from a riverbed—not wanting to disturb what rested beneath. The shawl slipped from his shoulder. His eyes adjusted quickly. The room had not changed. The warmth remained, the fire flickering softly. But something in the air was different.

Zooni sat beside the hearth.

Not curled.

Not cloaked in grief.

She sat upright, legs folded neatly beneath her, hands placed on either knee, her gaze steady on the flame. She did not look tired, though she had not slept. She did not look forlorn, though her body bore the stillness of someone who had buried more than one person in her lifetime. She looked whole—not as in healed, but as in unfractured. As if the night had stitched her into something that no longer needed to be gathered.

Usman stood and moved toward the fire.

She did not acknowledge him with a nod or word.

She did not need to.

He sat across from her and warmed his palms over the low flame.

The silence between them was not a barrier. It was the breath between verses.

When Madhav woke, he saw them already sitting and joined them without question.

Layaq followed, rubbing the sleep from his eyes, then settling beside them in a quiet arc. None of them asked about the burial. None of them asked what came next. The morning had arrived without agenda, and they received it with the reverence of men who had learned that answers come too late to be useful.

Only when the fire grew hotter, and a curl of smoke touched the roof of the cave, did Usman glance again at Zooni’s face.

And what he saw there was not grief.

It was presence.

He didn’t have a word for it.

Not endurance. Not peace. Something else.

He watched her for a long moment, and in the faint shadow under her cheekbone, in the shape of her eyes that no longer searched, in the way her shoulders had settled as if braced not by strength but by purpose, he understood what Khatun had done.

She had not died to be mourned.

She had waited long enough to be replaced.

Not forgotten.

Replaced.

The way earth replaces seed with shoot.

The way silence replaces prayer when the words no longer matter.

The way a girl who was once rolled from a cart becomes the woman others gather around at dawn.

Zooni shifted slightly and reached for the clay pot hanging above the fire.

She poured water into three copper cups, each motion exact, steady, without hesitation.

She handed them out without looking up.

They took them without thanks.

None was needed.

And when they drank, it was not to begin the day.

It was to mark what had already begun.

where Zooni, after the others leave the cave for the market below, remains behind and begins sweeping the hearth floor—not to clean, but to prepare the space for the next name that might arrive unspoken, unformed, and waiting to be kept?

When the men left for the market, they did so without ritual. There was no circle drawn around their departure. No farewell uttered between mouthfuls of lentil. They stepped into the day like smoke slips from wood—slow, unforced, and without promise of return. Usman carried a sack of grain over one shoulder, the strap digging into the crease where neck meets bone. Madhav had tucked a folded list into his sleeve, though he would not use it. Layaq whistled once, quietly, beneath his breath, but stopped halfway through the tune, as if remembering it did not belong here.

Zooni remained.

She had swept the cave before, but not like this. Before, her hands had moved to order space—to restore the daily dignity of clean corners and folded cloth. This was different. This was preparation, not restoration. She swept now to clear not dust, but shadow—the kind that gathers after someone has stopped breathing and begun becoming.

She used the same branch broom that Khatun had once used.

Three long twigs lashed together with a cotton cord dyed with pomegranate skin. The knots had dried unevenly. The handle still carried the faintest smell of rose water and ash.

She began at the hearth.

The fire had gone to sleep again, leaving behind a soft circle of white-grey dust. She did not sweep it out. She moved it gently toward the back wall, forming a low crescent along the stone where the fire’s breath might rest until the next lighting. She left a single ember in the center. Not burning. But not cold. A coal remembering its name.

She moved next to the shelf.

There, she straightened the jars: crushed mint, dried fig peels, the oil-stained cloth used to wrap the potter’s daughter’s bread. Each placed not where it had always been, but where it now needed to be. The space no longer echoed with Khatun’s movements. But Zooni did not imitate them. She moved as herself. As the hands that would now carry the room’s shape forward.

At the threshold, where the wind sometimes blew ash in through the cracks, she placed a stone—flat, round, smooth at the top. Khatun had once used it to weigh down scrolls of cloth, to keep the lamp from tipping during storms. Zooni used it now not to hold something down, but to mark a beginning. The stone became a threshold of its own: a pause, a breath, a warning to dust that this place was no longer empty.

She returned to the hearth at last.

Kneeling, she opened the small clay box tucked beneath the lowest shelf. It held the remaining scraps. Cloth pieces not yet sewn. A length of undyed wool. A bit of thread still wound around the bone needle Khatun had last used. She unwrapped the wool and folded it once across her lap.

Then she reached for a single strand of hair caught in the shawl Khatun had worn the night she passed.

She pressed it into the wool.

Not sewn.

Not hidden.

Just… placed.

The way a seed is pressed into damp soil by a fingertip too careful to crush it.

She folded the wool over itself, twice, three times, then tucked it into the clay box again.

Closed the lid.

And sat back.

She did not cry.

She did not speak.

But the cave around her seemed to lean closer, as if recognizing the way she had named the silence with gesture alone.

Outside, the birds returned.

One perched near the crevice above the kiln and shook its wings once, sending down a faint drift of feathers and dust.

Zooni watched it.

Then rose.

Swept the feathers into her palm.

And placed them beside the ember.

Not to burn.

To wait.

where, in the stillness of midday, a knock echoes faintly from the mouth of the cave—a sound that hasn’t been heard in weeks—and when Zooni opens the curtain, a barefoot girl, no older than nine, stands with eyes wide, shawl torn, and no name on her lips—just the presence of one who has come to be kept?

The knock was not loud. It did not echo like a call for help or a fist desperate to be answered. It was softer. One tap. A pause. Then another. Not made with urgency—but with uncertainty, as though the one knocking wasn’t sure the door was real, or if doors even opened in places like this.

Zooni heard it from where she sat near the hearth. She didn’t rise immediately. She closed the clay box first. Brushed a thumb across its lid. Then stood, wrapping her shawl tightly across her shoulders.

Outside, the wind had shifted. The cave mouth held the scent of warmed pine, distant rain, and something faintly metallic—like the tang of rust from an old lock turned open after years of stillness. The birds had gone quiet.

She crossed the chamber slowly, the brush of her footfalls softer than the fire’s breath.

When she pulled back the muslin curtain at the entrance, the light from outside spread across the stone floor behind her, casting her shadow long and thin. In its glow stood a girl.

Barefoot.

Hair unbraided, clumped with twigs and dried mud.

Her salwar hung unevenly from her frame, one side of the drawstring loose, the cloth falling too low on one hip. The shawl wrapped around her shoulders was torn—not just frayed, but ripped, as if someone had yanked it in two directions and left her holding the lesser half.

She could not have been more than nine.

She did not cry.

Her eyes were too wide for that.

And too dry.

Zooni stepped forward.

Not to touch.

Just to see more clearly.

The girl blinked once, but did not lower her gaze. Her eyes met Zooni’s with the stillness of someone who had walked for hours not in fear, but in the silence that follows it.

“Did someone send you?” Zooni asked.

No answer.

“Were you told to come here?”

Still nothing.

Zooni stepped aside and opened the curtain fully.

The girl did not move.

Only her toes shifted slightly in the dust, curling into it like roots testing soil.

Then, after a long breath, she stepped forward—just once.

And stopped again.

Zooni did not press.

She crouched down to the girl’s level.

Not close.

Just enough that their eyes aligned.

“What’s your name?”

The girl’s lips parted slightly.

They moved.

But no sound came.

Only breath.

Zooni waited.

Then, quietly, without question, she said:

“You don’t have to say it now.”

The girl’s mouth closed again.

Zooni stood.

Stepped back.

And motioned inside.

The girl looked past her, into the half-dark, where fire painted slow orange light across the stone.

She stepped forward.

One foot.

Then the other.

Then all of her.

She passed into the room like a thread pulled through old cloth—not tugged, not forced—drawn.

Zooni let the curtain fall behind her.

The girl stood still, watching the flame.

She did not speak.

She did not sit.

But something in her body eased.

Zooni moved to the shelf.

Drew a folded square of clean cotton from the box.

She walked over and handed it to her without a word.

The girl held it in both hands.

Not like a gift.

But like something she’d seen before—long ago, in another place.

And as she stood there, holding it, her mouth moved again.

Not loud.

Not fully.

Just one word.

Spoken like a leaf falling.

“Ameena.”

Zooni did not nod.

She did not smile.

She reached out.

Placed one hand lightly on the girl’s shoulder.

And said nothing.

The fire crackled once behind them.

The air inside the cave did not shift.

But something had entered.

And it would be kept.

where Zooni prepares a basin of warm water, brushes twigs from Ameena’s hair, and begins teaching her not through language, but through the rhythm of hands—the way Dei’d once taught her—not to speak, but to belong?

The water in the basin had cooled by the time Zooni returned from the side chamber. She didn’t reheat it. The chill in the cave was not enough to sting, and sometimes, the skin needed to remember that tenderness did not always arrive warm. She laid a cotton cloth beside the basin, smoothed it flat with her palm, and then knelt.

Ameena sat where Zooni had left her—on the flat stone closest to the hearth, her knees drawn to her chest, the cotton square still held in both hands. She hadn’t unfolded it. She hadn’t spoken again. But the tension had begun to leave her shoulders, slowly, like steam curling out of an unsealed kettle.

Zooni motioned softly.

Ameena watched her hand, then rose.

She came forward carefully, each step placed like she was testing a riverbank after flood. Her eyes flicked to the basin. Then to Zooni. Then back.

Zooni reached for a clay jug of water and poured a little more into the basin. The sound of it—low, round, slow—filled the space between them like a bell rung beneath the ground.

She dipped her hand in first, splashed once to stir the warmth into motion, then gently reached forward.

Ameena did not flinch.

Zooni touched her wrist lightly, not to pull, but to ask.

Ameena lowered herself to her knees and placed both hands into the basin.

Zooni lifted her shawl’s edge, tucked it around her waist, and moved behind her.

She began with the hair.

It was matted in places.

Knotted in others.

Some of the twigs pulled free easily. Others clung to strands like burrs.

Zooni didn’t tear.

She loosened slowly, using her fingers first, then a fine wooden comb wrapped in string.

Each motion was quiet. Careful. The way you might handle something delicate that doesn’t know it’s delicate.

She had done this before.

Years ago.

When her own hair was filled with grit and ash, and Khatun’s hands had moved with the same patience.

Not just untangling.

Unshaming.

Ameena didn’t speak. But her breathing slowed. Her shoulders sank lower. When Zooni dipped the cloth in the basin and brought it gently to her cheeks, Ameena didn’t turn away. Her skin was dry. Salt from tears not wept. Dust from roads that had no name.

Zooni cleaned without scrubbing.

She moved as if restoring something sacred long buried.

Over the forehead. Down the neck. Behind the ears.

When she reached the girl’s feet, she found blisters.

Raw.

One had opened and begun to darken.

She did not cry out.

Zooni only paused for a moment. Then wrapped each foot in a damp cloth and held them, palms pressed gently on either side, until the trembling stopped.

No salve. No chant.

Just hands.

Hands that remembered what it meant to be held without demand.

When she finished, she laid a fresh length of cotton over Ameena’s shoulders and tucked it gently beneath her arms.

Ameena looked down at herself.

Not because she was surprised.

But because she had not seen herself covered in anything whole for some time.

Zooni poured out the basin water into the side gutter, rinsed the cloths, and returned them to dry by the fire.

Then sat.

Not beside Ameena.

Not across.

But just close enough.

Enough that when the girl’s fingers reached slowly outward, they found Zooni’s without needing to search.

Zooni didn’t close her hand around them.

She let them stay there.

Resting.

As if two coals, still warm from separate burnings, had found the same place to sleep.

where Zooni begins to show Ameena the tasks of the hearth—how to stir, how to fold, how to listen—and in the flicker of lamp and lentil steam, the cave does not feel haunted, but inhabited again: not by memory, but by continuity?

The fire was awake again, not roaring, not reaching, but fed just enough to glow—its light spreading outward in slow circles that licked the undersides of pots and the soles of feet. Zooni crouched by the hearth, her sleeves pushed to her elbows, her hair bound in a loose knot that had been tied not for beauty, but to stay out of the way. She stirred the pot slowly, one hand on the long-handled ladle, the other resting against the stone lip. The sound of the wooden spoon against the iron vessel was dull, rounded. Familiar. The kind of sound that says: here, the day begins.

Ameena sat beside her.

Not directly beside her. A little behind. Close enough to feel the heat, far enough not to intrude.

Zooni didn’t look at her. She tilted the spoon forward slightly and let a little steam drift toward the girl. Lentil and clove. A hint of dried turnip.

She reached for a second ladle and offered it without speaking.

Ameena looked at it for a moment, then took it.

It was heavier than she expected.

Her small wrist dipped under its weight.

Zooni adjusted her grip gently—fingers guiding fingers until the balance shifted.

Then she pointed to the edge of the pot and nodded.

Ameena mimicked the motion.

Slow.

Clockwise.

The lentils turned in soft rhythm.

Zooni shifted back and began sorting dried leaves behind her. Basil. Mint. A pinch of wild mountain thyme. Her hands worked quickly now, confidently. She crushed each between her fingers and let them fall in slow arcs into the pot.

The scent changed.

Ameena noticed.

She looked up, just for a moment, and let the steam touch her cheek.

She didn’t speak.

But her shoulders lifted slightly.

Zooni reached behind her and passed a cloth—a folded square used for drying the rim of the ladle. Ameena took it with both hands. She placed it across her lap.

She hadn’t been told what to do with it.

But she understood: things had places.

She held it carefully.

When Zooni reached for the flatbread dough, she didn’t say a word.

She pinched a small piece, rolled it between her palms, and flattened it against the clay board.

Ameena watched.

Zooni held the motion just long enough.

Then slid the board toward her.

Ameena reached out.

Her fingers moved slowly at first, uncertain how much pressure to apply.

The dough resisted.

Then yielded.

Her thumbs curved in. The ball flattened.

It wasn’t round.

It wasn’t even.

But it was hers.

Zooni didn’t correct her.

She placed her own roti next to it and brushed her fingers with flour.

Ameena followed.

Soon, two shapes sizzled on the flat stone.

The fire hissed.

The air thickened with the scent of grain and smoke.

Zooni tore one of the breads in half, dipped it in the lentils, and placed it on a clay dish between them.

She didn’t speak.

She simply waited.

Ameena looked at the bread. Then at Zooni.

Then down at her lap.

And for the first time since entering the cave, she reached forward, took the piece, and brought it to her mouth with both hands.

Zooni watched her chew slowly.

Ameena swallowed.

Then looked up.

And said nothing.

But something passed between them.

Not gratitude.

Not belonging.

Recognition.

The kind of look that says: I know this now. This heat. This hush. This rhythm.

And in that moment, the cave felt inhabited.

Not by the ghosts of those who had passed.

But by two bodies moving quietly in the breath of something returned—not as memory, but as continuity.

where Zooni, while sweeping near the rear wall later that evening, finds a forgotten pouch—stitched in old muslin, buried behind a stone—and as she opens it, something left by Khatun, something never spoken of, begins to unfold?

The broom moved softly across the stone, its twigs worn thin from weeks of quiet sweeping. Zooni had returned to her rhythm just before dusk, when the cave filled again with the long shadows of a fading sun. Ameena sat in the corner threading strands of old cotton into a pattern no one had taught her, only felt. The air smelled of lentil, smoke, and pine dust.

Zooni moved slowly along the rear wall—her favorite wall, though she’d never said so. It was the one with the faintest marks. Not the palms or lines pressed in ceremony, but the forgotten brushes of cloth, of fingertips testing dryness, of breath warming damp clay in passing. The places no one noticed, but she always did.

When her broom struck something that resisted, it made only the faintest sound—like breath caught in cloth. Not a jar. Not a rock. Something soft and weighted.

She stopped.

Lowered the broom.

And crouched.

A stone the size of a child’s palm was slightly raised from the floor, its edge tilted just enough to suggest it had been placed, not fallen. Beneath it, tucked in the crack where stone met earth, was the corner of a muslin pouch—creased, dust-worn, but intact. She reached for it gently, as though retrieving something that still remembered pain.

It came free easily.

She turned it in her hand.

The cloth was thick, discolored near the top from oil or skin or time. The knot at the mouth had been tied with a single loop—not the kind made for safekeeping, but for being found.

She did not open it immediately.

She sat down cross-legged on the floor, let the broom rest beside her, and placed the pouch on her lap.

She waited.

Then, slowly, undid the knot.

Inside were folded pieces of thick paper—old, the kind used by scribes or petitioners in city courts. Not brittle, but soft from having been touched too many times. She unfolded the first.

No ink.

No words.

Just a faint reddish mark.

Pressed by thumb, then pressed again lower—like a repetition done not to remember, but to affirm.

The second paper held writing.

Kashmiri.

Not the slanted Naskh script of prayer books, but bold, upright strokes—the kind taught in old madrasas or scratched into schoolroom walls. The hand was firm. Familiar.

Zooni recognized it.

Khatun’s.

She read slowly, mouthing each word with reverence.

“If anyone finds this, know I lived.
Not well. But long.
I was taken when I was fourteen.
I was sold once. Twice. Then forgotten.
I escaped by refusing to die.
I stayed by choosing not to leave.
I taught because it gave my body back to me.
I kept no name because no name kept me.”

Zooni’s fingers trembled slightly.

She turned to the third slip.

It was smaller.

Just one line, written with softer ink, almost blurred into the paper.

“Tell her—she was never mine, but I chose her.”

She folded the pages again.

Carefully.

Without creasing.

And held them to her chest.

No tears came.

Only stillness.

The kind that expands from within, like light warming stone from the inside.

Across the cave, Ameena looked up.

She didn’t speak.

But she watched.

And Zooni, without turning, knew she had been seen.

Not for what she found.

But for who she now was.

Next Chapter: Chapter Fourteen: Hakeem’s Shadow