The rain was writing a message on his face. Samir couldn't read it.
He stood atop the northern wall, sleeves rolled, oil lamp swinging in the wind like a hanged man dancing. Below him, the city of Ur did not sleep—it surrendered to sleep, its stone houses pressed together like prisoners in a crowded cell. Above, lightning carved temporary rivers across the sky, illuminating things better left in darkness.
It was his twentieth night guarding the wall. Twenty nights of silence, boredom, and the particular loneliness of men who stand between the sleeping and the unknown. But this night was different.
This night, his head became a crowded room.
The hum started first. Not in his ears—under them. Behind his jaw. At the roots of his teeth. A vibration that belonged more to bone than to sound. He'd felt something like it once, as a child, pressing his ear to the railway tracks to hear the approaching train before anyone else could.
But no train was coming.
"I can't anymore..."
The words arrived not as sound, but as texture. Like someone dragging fingernails across the inside of his skull. Samir spun around, lamp held high. The wall stretched empty in both directions. The other guards were five hundred steps away, sharing cheap wine in the guardroom, their laughter a distant, muffled thunder.
"I can't bear it anymore..."
A woman's voice. Not speaking—leaking. As if her pain had found a crack in the world and was seeping through.
Samir pressed his palms to his temples. His fingers were ice, but the skin beneath his nails... it burned. And then the burning opened into seeing:
A room too small for its shadows. A baby crying with lungs that remembered nothing but hunger. A woman staring at a wall that had stopped answering her prayers. A man—no, not a man, a shape of a man—bringing his fist down on a table that had done nothing to deserve it.
Then nothing.
Samir staggered. His heel found nothing but air and the drop beyond the wall. For one perfect, terrible second, he was already falling. Then his body remembered its duty and threw him forward. He hit the stones on his knees, lamp clattering, oil spilling, flame dying.
He knelt in the darkness, rain washing over him, and understood that something had just been born inside him. Or something had just died. He couldn't tell which.
Five years ago. The war. The camp of the broken.
There was a man who walked among the wounded, touching their foreheads with fingers that left no prints. The others said he was a healer, a saint, a man who "cast out evil spirits." But Samir, fifteen years old and already too acquainted with the shape of evil, watched differently.
He watched the way the touched men wept. Not from relief. From remembering. They spoke afterward of dreams they'd never had, of lives they'd never lived, of pains that belonged to strangers now living inside them like squatters.
When the man approached, Samir closed his eyes and built a wall. Not imagined—built. Stone by stone, mortar by mortar, around his entire head. He could feel the weight of it, the coolness of it, the absolute silence of it.
The man paused. Samir felt the pause like a change in air pressure.
Then the man walked on.
For five years, Samir maintained that wall. He never let anyone touch his head. He never spoke of what he'd sensed. He became a man of surfaces, of shallows, of conversations that never dipped below the chin.
Tonight, the wall had cracked.
"Why is he doing this to me?"
A man's voice. Not leaking—pouring. And with it, images that arrived like blows: an iron shackle grinding wrist-bone, darkness so complete it had weight, a smell that was less odor and more the ghost of odor—mold, urine, the particular sweetness of rotting straw.
Samir knew this place. The lower prison. Beneath the governor's citadel. Three hundred and forty-seven steps underground. He'd spent three days there two years ago, arrested for a theft he didn't commit (they needed a body; his was available). He still dreamed of those stairs.
The man whose thoughts now filled Samir's skull—was he down there? At this moment? How?
Samir covered his ears. Pressed until cartilage cried. The voices multiplied.
"My son... where is my son..."
"I won't confess. I won't. I won't."
"The cold. God, the cold has teeth."
"A leak. In the northern channel. Tomorrow. I'll do it tomorrow."
Everything stopped.
Samir's eyes opened to the rain. His breath came in gasps that tasted of copper. The last voice was different. Not a voice of suffering. A voice of intention. A voice wrapped around a secret like fingers around a knife.
The northern channel. Where the palace bled its waste into the river. Where a man could become a shadow and a shadow could become a weapon.
Someone was going to breach the palace tomorrow. From below. From the filth. From where no one ever looked because no one wanted to see.
Samir's body chose that moment to betray him completely. A weakness flooded through him, not gradual but instant, as if a plug had been pulled from the bottom of his soul. He looked at his hands. They trembled like leaves in a storm they couldn't escape. Beneath his nails, the skin had gone white.
Prana.
The word arrived from childhood, carried on his grandfather's voice. The old man had been a reader of forbidden books, a keeper of forgotten words. He spoke of "life energy" flowing through channels invisible to ordinary eyes. He said: "When the astral body is pierced, the prana leaks out. The body weakens. The mind opens. Some people are born with holes, boy. Some people hear what should not be heard."
Samir had thought it was poetry. Old men's poetry, the kind that rhymes with death.
Now, kneeling in the rain, feeling his strength drain into the darkness, he understood: it was not poetry. It was anatomy.
He descended the spiral staircase like a man fleeing a fire that only he could feel. In the guardroom, Ziyad sat by the hearth, wine cup steaming in his hands, firelight painting his face in shades of gold and shadow.
"Samir? You're down early. Two hours left."
"Sick."
Samir didn't meet his eyes. He collapsed onto the wooden bench, stretched toward the fire like a plant seeking light it couldn't reach. His body shook. His teeth chattered. But the shaking was not from cold.
Ziyad studied him for a moment. Samir felt the study like a weight—not because Ziyad was dangerous, but because Samir could suddenly feel the texture of attention. Then Ziyad shrugged and returned to his wine. He was not a curious man. This was why Samir had chosen him, years ago, as the closest thing he had to a companion.
The fire warmed Samir's skin. It did not warm the cold that lived in his bones now, the cold that had rushed in to fill the space where his prana used to be.
He knew something had changed. Not just in him. In the world. The veil between himself and others had thinned. He could feel them now—not their thoughts, not yet, but their presence. Like a blind man who suddenly perceives the heat of bodies near him in the dark.
And then Ziyad's thoughts arrived.
They came not as words but as weather: a low-pressure system of petty grievances and small ambitions. Tomorrow I'll request transfer to the southern barracks. These night shifts are killing me. Samir looks bad. If he dies, I'll have to cover his shifts until they find a replacement. Inconsiderate, really.
Samir turned. Ziyad was drinking, eyes on the fire. His lips had not moved.
Samir closed his eyes. He reached for the wall—the stone wall he had built five years ago, the wall that had kept him safe. He found it.
Cracked. Weakened. But still standing.
He poured everything he had into repairing it, into stacking stones, into sealing gaps. The whispers faded. Not entirely—they became what they had been before: a distant hum, like conversation in a room he was not permitted to enter.
When he opened his eyes, the fire had burned lower. Ziyad slept in his chair, mouth open, dreams flickering behind his eyelids like bad cinema. The rain still attacked the window.
Samir looked at the ceiling. Tomorrow. The northern channel. A leak.
He should not go. He knew this with the certainty of a man who has spent his entire life learning not to be seen. Not to be noticed. Not to be involved. His mother's final lesson, delivered as she bled to death from wounds that were not her own: "The eyes in this city see too much, my son. Be invisible. Be nothing. Survive."
But the last voice had not been suffering. It had been planning. And planning in the northern channel meant only one thing: the palace. The governor. The heart of the city that had killed his mother and called it collateral damage.
Someone was going to strike at that heart tomorrow.
Samir stood. His legs held. The weakness remained, but it was no longer increasing. Perhaps the leak had found its own level. Perhaps he was simply learning to live with less.
He walked to the window. Wiped the condensation. Looked north, where the channel lay beyond the palace walls, beyond the lights that never went out, beyond the lives of people who would never know his name.
The rain fell. The darkness pressed against the glass like something hungry.
Samir spoke to his reflection, to the pale face and wide eyes that stared back at him from the wet glass:
"I don't know what I've become. I don't know why I hear what I hear. But tomorrow—"
He stopped.
Because in the glass, behind his own reflection, he saw another face.
It was there for only a moment—a fraction of a moment, less than a heartbeat. A man's face, gaunt and hollow-eyed, lips moving in silent speech. The face from his vision. The face from the cell. The face of the man who had whispered about the leak.
Then it was gone.
Samir spun. The room was empty. Ziyad still slept. The door was closed. No one was there.
But the glass. The glass had shown him.
He turned back slowly, dread pooling in his stomach like swallowed ice. He looked at his reflection again. His own face. Only his own face.
Except—
He looked closer. At his eyes. At something moving behind them, deep within them, like a fish swimming in the dark water of a well.
They're in me now.
The thought arrived not from his own mind but from somewhere deeper, somewhere that was becoming less his with each passing moment. The voices. The thoughts. They're not outside anymore. They're inside. They're becoming mine.
He remembered his grandfather's words: "When the astral body is pierced, the prana leaks out. But leaks work both ways, boy. Things can leak in as well."
Outside, lightning split the sky. In that instant of perfect white light, Samir saw his reflection clearly.
It smiled at him.
He did not smile back.
The dawn was still hours away. But inside him, something had already broken open, something that could never be sealed again.
And in the northern channel, a man who might have been a ghost or might have been a weapon was preparing to move.
Samir pressed his hand to the cold glass.
"I'll come," he whispered. "I don't know why. I don't know how. But I'll come."
The hum in his head rose slightly, like an acknowledgment. Or a hunger.
Or both.