Her name was Patricia, and she lengthened Alaraf by existing.

I was frustrated. I’d had only two or three chapters left.

The first was supposed to be the case review. Suki and Hunter the Canadian arrive at Alaraf to meet Bird, Volos, Fernando, and Antony, and read every file aloud. Volos cannot correctly identify the new Muslim leader of Asatru, so he is recused, permitted only to listen while Suki watches his face for the tell. Antony is bound by the NDA and says only what he is allowed to say. And Professor Robin Bird, who was burnt in Chicago, explains how the region he was once assigned to surveil became the last and only place willing to give him a home, naming each character in turn, a few documented lines apiece, before every cat is shipped to Tahlequah in a non-lethal Schrödinger sleeping box.

The last was supposed to be the mansion. Atticus and Garrett arrive at Murderface Mansion and find a hall of mirrors that doubles as a transit point. They meet the other survivors of Alaraf, the ones from the old business school, and there is a bonfire, and Garrett is finally given a new mentor out of Australian activism and politics, so that for once his name might mean something other than wetwork.

That was the ending I had planned.

Then the Threads began to whisper it, the psychics and the mercenaries and the creatives and the OSINT people all moving like wind through the same stand of trees.

Patricia is coming, and she will find you.

She will change everything.

You can’t spell Patricia without CIA.

She’s coming. Her. The great one.

And on the path before us, rendered in metaphor and a soft bathrobe, we beheld Saint Patricia.

She addressed me as though I were still a young operator.

“So if you’re not ready to give up your own to prosecute child molesters and killers, why are you even talking?”

The guy in the tie, which is me, said: “I already have.”

Patricia crossed her arms. Stern as steel.

“You can only choose one.”

“John. Garrett. Whatever his name is. I don’t know his sins, and he’s never known freedom. He’s been a slave his whole life, and he’s the only one I can cleanly defend.” I said as the extraction guy.  “How can I justify those who choose the company of those that willingly seek to harm me.  Garrett has never had such freedoms to choose from.  He’s had no example of moral cleanliness that wasn’t facade.  At least I had Dan.”

“What is unknown, you desire more,” Patricia replied, sage.

“It isn’t desire. It’s duty.”

“Sometimes letting somebody else go ahead of you will save your life. Remember, I can’t help you.”

And with that the whole world dissolved, and as it went I heard her say:

“A lot of people around you will be passing away.”

I could not argue. This is wartime, and most of my teammates are far older and less healthy than I am.

And I remembered the message that had come into my SIGINT box that morning:

Don’t die before I do. Love from Ops.

So I recited the Shahada into the void, La ilaha illa Allah, Muhammadan Rasul Allah, and out of it I built the world new.

A room of black and white marble. Pillars several stories tall holding a ceiling arched like the great mosque of Córdoba, but in a better palette, white and black and cerulean, with endless yards of metallic and translucent iridescent satin twisted around the stone and falling like waterfall spray from the capitals.

The center of the floor was black labradorite and gold-threaded white marble, laid into a many-pointed star, a koi stream running the length of each side. The streams braided in beneath select panels of clear quartz set flush into the walkway, so the fish moved visibly under your feet as you crossed.

Above, framed in a long rectangular window, the unobstructed Milky Way, and a glass moonroof still waiting to open.

Turn left, and you are within sight of a warm beach. Palm trees. White surf. And just offshore, an ancient oil tanker, rusted and broken, half-beached and going nowhere.

Surah Yunus, ayah nine, was the first verse I read as I wrote this.

إِنَّ ٱلَّذِينَ ءَامَنُوا وَعَمِلُوا ٱلصَّـٰلِحَـٰتِ يَهْدِيهِمْ رَبُّهُم بِإِيمَـٰنِهِمْ ۖ تَجْرِى مِن تَحْتِهِمُ ٱلْأَنْهَـٰرُ فِى جَنَّـٰتِ ٱلنَّعِيمِ

Surely those who believe and do good, their Lord will guide them to Paradise through their faith; rivers will flow beneath their feet in the Gardens of Bliss. (Yunus 10:9)

I had built the rivers before I read the verse. The fish were already under the floor.

What would you do if I took your hand from the right and told you that you were finally safe?

I met a friend here once. Not here. The place this place echoes.

She was the kind who finally meets you after years of reading your files and watching from a distance. A nice Asian lady, ageless, maybe a little older than us. And all she did was cry. No Punta Cana debrief. No badge flashed, no secret handshake.

“I always wanted to meet you,” she said. “Can I just… hug you?”

I let her.

The tanker was rusted that night too. She felt like warmth, and like the silk of a long vacation dress. Just a few hours of one night. The Watcher holding the Watched.

I was only twenty-five.

I shake my head like a feral canid and show you the fountains running down either side of the walkway, toward the spa.

Except this isn’t a resort anymore. It’s an empty, pretentious zawiya. It’s just me and Garrett.

And I explain, as a Tyrsman, that all I can offer you is a hand.

Patricia’s voice, from somewhere back in the marble: “A year. Maybe less.”

Let me tell you what I actually am in this room.

I am the guy using a fictional register to talk to a prisoner of war. A man whose own accounts of his own enslavement, the one happening now and the ones that came before, get read by strangers and consumed like marrow and mead.

A whole life of exquisite training, eaten by everyone else, forever, in a role you did not choose so much as get shoehorned into.

Same, love. Same.

I hardly know you. But that’s all right. You have been rewritten so many times that no one else knows you either.

I only have a bayat to keep. And neither of us can follow the Munafiq. And if any of the students between us grow too dependent on either of us, they likely won’t survive it.

So I keep my hands where you can see them.

The warmth here is somehow also cool.

No one before you, Garrett, has ever seen these halls of black and white and cerulean. No one before you has walked the many-pointed star. You came too late to see the hall when it was full, when it held a ball of women dressed in the colors of their own names, each in a top hat, each holding a sword, performing a ceremony not one of them ever actually got to enjoy, while the rest of us stood masked in fine white and black suits, dressed up only to be found.

There was a woman in teal and red with a peacock-feather fan she could open to silence an entire court.

The Mistress of the Court never existed here.

You just have me instead.

I hand you the keys to your own room. I do not follow.

It is on the first floor and it smells of lily of the valley. A sink of green marble. A European multi-shower.

Then you turn on the lights, and it is the same jazz-era wallpaper as the Lisbon. The same fixtures. The same hasty chaos of notes and articles and old photographs pinned to the wall.

Turn on the television, and you will only see your own reflection.

There is a Quran on the nightstand.

And if you look out the window, you will see me, sitting alone at the edge of the surf, and as the sun comes up in the east the whole sky goes Caribbean blue.

The rest of the files can wait. 

Maybe in our sabr more will save themselves.