﷽ The rain outside the administrative block did not drop so much as bleed into the cracked brickwork, a slow grey saturation that matched the steady hum of the generators keeping what remained of Alaraf powered.

In the ruin of the ombudsman’s corner office, where the drywall still smelled faintly of damp ash and burnt plaster, Officer Grant Hunter did not bother to sit down. He stood by the window, watching a single drop run the length of the glass, dividing the courtyard into two distinct, distorted halves. He had the patience of a man who has read a file so many times he no longer needs it open.

Jerry sat in uncomfortable attendance, adjusting a sleeve that had seen better decades. Fernañdo the Diplomat remained perfectly calm in his white linen suit, ignoring the soot on his cuffs, holding kitty-cat Kafka with distracted affection while Kafka audibly complained.

“Not only am I portrayed as a cat in my own office,” Kafka yowled, “the sentence structure in this entire piece is a disaster and the allegories are too heavy-handed. Why can’t I be human too? I have a doctorate in literature. I would know.”

“You’re neurodivergent. It’s likely part of the metaphor,” Grant offered with a shrug.

Fernañdo did not look especially comfortable holding Kafka either, but by narrative compulsion he was obliged to embrace his own son. Sort of.

Dean McRose kept his expression fixed in a neutral, Buddhist congeniality. Officer Hunter kept his hands flat on a stack of unread case files.

“You don’t get it, do you?” Grant said, his voice dropping below the fan’s rhythm. He did not turn around. “The cats. The whole clowder. They don’t exist. Not the way you think they do.”

“Hey. Guys,” said Kafka. “I do actually exist. I can assure you I am not a cat. I am an accidental ombudsman and a professor of literature, and I would like that entered into the record.” Fernañdo answered by scritching him between the ears with dismissive affection.

“I wasn’t talking to you, Kafka. The author has some motivation to keep you in this scene as a marked example, and you’ll have to take it up with him.”

Kafka flattened his Rorschach-pattern ears. Dean McRose nearly booped his small nose, then thought better of it when Kafka threatened to bite.

Jerry frowned, his fingers pausing on his Star Trek limited-edition Casio watch. “We’ve all seen cats, Officer Grant. In the library. Under the grates. One of them stole pizza from the cafe.”

“I object,” said Antony from the threshold. “You do not understand.”

“Overruled, Antony.” Officer Hunter stated firmly,  “Jerry, you’re all seeing an overlay.” Grant turned at last. His eyes were flat, the same color as the rain, analytical, devoid of performance. “Every feline form wandering these ruins is a reflection of how Antony sees the people in Alex’s life. To him, they are less important than his public image. They are small, managed things. Pets. They exist here as forms, not bodies. It is an administrative containment strategy disguised as an institution.”

He stepped toward the center of the room and looked to the door, where Antony stood in the shadow of the threshold, older than the last time, dressed in odd pastel shades that clashed brutally with his complexion. He looked less like anything worth emulating than like a man trapped in a loop of his own misery.

Grant reached into his coat, drew out a ruggedized terminal, and tapped the screen twice, initializing a direct, high-bandwidth video link. The feed cleared into a sharp, un-sampled image of Atticus Lynch seated in what appeared to be a desert, his dark suit clean, his presentation sharp and entirely unyielding.

Grant turned the screen fully toward Antony, forcing the line of sight.

Antony stared at the display, jaw tightening. “Why can’t I talk to Alex?” he demanded, his voice thin against the room’s hum.

“You talk to him daily,” Grant said. “Just not in a healthy way. You talk to him through the prophylactic of your persistent aliasing.”

On the screen, Atticus did not blink as he stated,  “Because this is also a trial run,”  each word clipped and metered. 

“Atticus is every part of Alex you fear. My interrogation career reflects exactly how he survived you. The words I use to break men are the words you once used on him, because you felt your own dishonesty was threatened by someone who genuinely cared for you, and so you abused him by deception and omissions. You abuse everyone around you who carries a cleaner ethic, and you use deception as the shield. You are a truly terrible philosophy professor, Antony, because you use philosophy to justify your estrangement from clarity and ethical conduct.  Philosophy as an operating mechanism gets in the way of you being an otherwise excellent pir.”

The silence that followed was dense enough to register on the radio meters out in the hall.

“Can you please call PETA again on my behalf to pick me up,” whined Kafka. “I told you, this narrative is played out and hackneyed.”

Fernañdo produced a bag of medicated cat treats shaped like Walt Whitman and Hemingway, shook it gently, and handed one over with a few leaves of cat grass. Kafka groaned. “I refuse to appreciate the cleverness of this paragraph out of principle.” he said, while devouring the treats anyway.

Atticus continued.

“Your legitimate worth as a religious educator is no more compromised than Fischadler’s,” he said, directing the words straight into the shadow of the threshold. “And no less. You have spent years trying to be a spiritual anchor and you are still halfway a Machiavellian college professor, stuck in a bombed-out university, justifying poor choices with failed logic instead of taubah and changed action.”

Grant interjected, flat. “And you grow more irrelevant in that capacity every year, because the college you sacrificed your integrity to maintain is not sustainable. The lies you told about yourself, and to your brother, are losing signal strength. The aliasing is breaking down and the false partitions between witnesses to your compromised conduct are also failing.”

Antony said nothing. His silence had the defensive posture of a man whose perimeter had been breached by a truth he found abhorrent. He looked affronted. Perhaps, underneath it, a little sad.

Atticus did not let the silence settle into comfort. “And there is a thing you built that no one in this room has named yet, so I will. You did not only hide. You cultivated a culture. A room where naming your dishonesty is itself the symptom. Where the person who says you lied becomes the unstable one, the obsessive one, the one who needs managing. You pathologized the testimony. You made truth-telling look like the illness so that no one would examine the structure underneath. That is not protection. That is the most efficient abuse there is, because it recruits the witnesses to discredit themselves.”

Officer Hunter stepped closer, his tone steady, devoid of anger but heavy with procedural weight. “Describe it, Antony. Tell me what you think Ruh would say right now, each time Atticus expresses this contempt, this resentment, this frustration.”

Antony looked away from the screen, his gaze dropping to the floorboards. “He would tell me it’s okay,” he whispered. “He would try to soften it. He would say he loves me.”

“Exactly,” Atticus said, cutting clean through the defense. “Because Ruh is the conciliatory survival voice. Ruh is the mercy-shape Alex had to take to keep loving someone who continued to harm him. That does not change the baseline offenses or data on your end.”

Atticus lit a cigarette. A Mango-colored paw appeared from the wings offscreen and attempted, without success, to smack it from his hand. Atticus almost smacked the paw back, then intercepted it, shook it with his free hand, and gave it a sarcastic little kiss on the toebeans to discourage further interference.

It did not discourage anything.

Mango walked fully across the screen and obscured the view, the way any orange Creamsicle cat will, and spoke.

“Asalaamu Alaykum wa Rahmatullahi wa Barakatuhu to those in this meeting. Pardon the interruption, but as lead mascot of the closest Islamic space and Mango Musawwir of this Tariqah, I would like to speak.”

He settled his fluffy orange creamsicle manx frame and went on.

“Astaghfirullah, Antony. You are loved. That love is the single reason no legal action is or has been pursued against you, when the cleaner action was always absolute taubah, clarity, and repair. Seventeen years of distortion to impress and emulate the Munafiq, and still your sibling came to the Mango Madrassa seeking care for you, not your destruction, even when your pretending only produced harm and distortion of the prophetic inheritance during your prior crisis.”

“And your deceptions,” Grant added, flipping through his CSIS file, “would have you fake-propose to Afghan girls under your chicken-farmer alias, promising a better life you cannot deliver. This is unwell, Antony.”

Officer Grant Hunter gestured to the window, to the cold and emptied courtyards. “Whatever guilt you carry now, and whatever follows this meeting, is for God to settle. I am only a Canadian trying to protect a downline I am finally allowed to meet in person. I trained Atticus before he ever met you. All these cats are witnesses. Alex has had to change names, codes, and forms simply to survive, in part because you will not give him credit or open, whole-person support. Instead you use him as an unwilling crutch so you can keep existing inside a toxic arrangement you yourself maintain.”

From the desk, Dean McRose looked from the terminal back to Antony. “If that is the nature of the metaphor,” he asked, “why are only certain faculty and students rendered as cats? What happens to the rest?”

Atticus looked out through the glass of the terminal, his gaze sweeping McRose, Jerry, Kafka, and Fernañdo before settling back on Antony. But it was Mango who answered, and his cat voice went flat and absolute.

“The natural fitrah of the soul is to seek its Creator. Those who actively sever that fitrah have no soul left in Alaraf to reflect, even in metaphor. They have no frequency to sample, having starved themselves of their own intrinsic goodness until nothing remains, and thus, no evidence of a functional soul to record.”

“Which means,” Atticus said, picking the thread up without a seam, “only the redeemable appear in Alaraf at all. If someone who is kind is unmentioned, it is only that they are not yet well known, gor their protection, or their story is not yet told. But for those who harm without remorse, and for those who have hollowed themselves out on purpose, there is nothing here. No existence worth preserving even in metaphor.”

The room felt smaller now, the walls tight with seventeen years of unexamined data. The rain outside slackened, leaving only the wet, persistent breath of polluted air pressing the glass.

Atticus pivoted his focus. On the small screen his image turned toward the edge of the desk, and he pointed with the cigarette for emphasis.

“And you, Jerry. You were my friend then. Then suddenly you denied your own eyes and your own logic, against the very nightly prayer in which you ask your G-d to let you cause no harm. This is seventeen years of accumulated, systemic harm. You are a Jewish man. Your tradition demands unyielding, direct repair, and you can correct this more plainly than the Muslim cats have managed. For seventeen years students have endured Antony stalking and gaslighting them online as a nineteen-year-old, because your department enabled it and, at times, seemed to encourage it.”

Jerry’s shoulders tightened. His hands stayed flat on the wood, the weight of those prayers sitting heavy in the quiet. 

“Maybe I didn’t know.”

“Are you suddenly blind,” Atticus said, “or were your prayers always only lies?”

“Atticus. Hold.” Dean McRose took off his spectacles slowly, his eyes tired but sharp with the long memory of the university’s original charter. “Do not strike the innocent by mistake.” He looked at Antony’s rigid posture. “I saw the instability in this dynamic early, Antony. I saw Ruh trying to help you. Then I retired. Long before you gaslit everyone into believing your brother was the only one broken.”

Atticus interjected. “You altered the story to protect your own position. 

Alex has survived on the nothing you gave him, and you resent that he survived it. Silence is only dignified when it protects something.  You even pretended to have a romance instead of telling the truth that Alex is your half-sibling”

“This is how I protect Alex,” Antony said. “He would have been harmed worse if I had not hidden him.”

“And yet you stayed where he was harmed,” Grant said.

“I could not leave. My immigration was at stake.”

“Was it?” Atticus asked, mild. “Because it appears to the rest of the Tariqah that your federal employment offered far better protection than your day job as a failed scholar, the one where you treat your own brother with the concealment, contempt, and use-pattern of bacha bazi while you perform, for strangers, the very freedoms you suppress in him. The brother you slandered, misled, and continued to lie to and about.”

“How dare you.” Antony’s voice cracked between accents. “WITHOUT ME YOU HAVE NOTHING.”

His chest rose and fell in a shallow, restricted rhythm. On the screen, Atticus pressed a hand reflexively to his own heart and took a nitroglycerine tablet under his tongue.

“And why is that?” Atticus asked, when he could. “Please elaborate on why I have nothing without you. Unless you stole it from me first.”

Kafka scanned the room, his eyes moving over the gaps in the drywall, hunting an exit that wasn’t monitored. Fernañdo patted his head. Kafka remembered, with something like relief, why even being trafficked by PETA had felt like an improvement over the involuntary study of broken Tasawwuf.

“Where is Darius?” Antony asked. “If this is a full review, why is Darius not in the room? He likely has the most to say. Ruh seemingly liked him best.”

“Because Darius is not the problem,  Ruh talked to him, primarily, about trying to understand you.” Atticus cut in, his tone dropping again with evidentiary weight, then continued,

 “Darius has been harmed by this architecture exactly like the rest of us. To force him to stand here and testify against his own cousin, inside a cat story, just to satisfy your appetite for courtroom theater, would be cruel. We do not weaponize family against family. Let Darius run what is left of Alaraf. He is the only operator on this garbage campus with real discernment, and if it were in his power to repair this alone it would have been fixed years ago. The blockages are not on his end, Antony. They are yours. You have misrepresented and harmed all of us enough.”

Officer Grant reached into his leather field bag with deliberate movement. He drew out a thick manila folder slowly, stuffed past its margins with hundreds of pages of printed logs, cryptographic hashes, SMS transcripts, and unedited email chains spanning nearly two decades. He dropped it on the desk in front of Antony. The sound of paper striking wood cracked through the room.

He leaned in, both hands on the edge of the desk, and pinned Antony with a cold, steady glare.

“Explain to me why you chose your aliases, Antony. Start with the first one. ‘Maliheh.’ Then we will walk the rest of the ledger together. We are all listening.”

“I was wanted dead in nine countries. It was protection.”

“So you were wanted dead, and believed yourself in danger,” Grant took a seat and leaned back in his chair casually, “and you kept teaching, exposing everyone around you to the danger you claim to have faced.”

“Only Alex was close enough to be in danger,” Antony said. “So I recreated the dynamic with safer students. It was the responsible thing.”

Antony paused, and the next part came out as though it were obvious, “Ruh could never lie well enough to stay safe.”

“Did that work?” asked Dean McRose sincerely.

“No.” replied Kafka and Atticus concurrently. Kafka then hissed, his father shifted him into a more comfortable embrace. 

Atticus did not move. “Say that again, and hear it this time. You just called  honesty the defect. You built up a man who cannot deceive, and you filed that under liability. In your architecture, the inability to lie is the thing that needs correcting. You are experminenting on your own students to support your own self-image.” 

Atticus Lynch let the desert wind speak in his momentary pause. 

“That is the whole of it, Antony. Not the aliases. The belief underneath them. You looked at the one person who could not counterfeit himself and decided he was the security risk.”

“So you stayed in the danger,” Mango discerned, pulling himself back into the frame, “and assumed your students would be safe.  That you could change them into things they are not for your comfort. Do you have any idea how much of my energy goes to protecting my own students openly? To us it simply looks as though you cannot release your love of the Dunya, and that misplaced love of false things breeds fitnah instead of guidance.”

“The aliases were protection. It is Taqiyya.  I try to teach students how to defend themselves this way against worse…”

“The aliases were deception that let others harm everyone you claim to love,” Mango replied. “It is not harmless, or cute, or educational or even funny. You cannot hide another person’s very existence, misrepresent him, and then call it Taqiyya. That is distortion and deliberate, unrelenting harm, and it is worse coming from you, because you are one of the few to teach Islam accurately and therefore know better.”

“Taqiyya is not a free pass when it strips agency from the people under your care,” Atticus concluded.

“What caused the danger in the first place?” McRose asked.

Antony waved a hand dismissively, “It was just a paper that got famous once.”

“A paper. On what?”

“On Fischadler,” Atticus said, cold. “The paper tried to resolve Fischadler’s own contradictions. It failed spectacularly.”

“Did it fail,” Antony said, “or did you get a Cambridge education out of it?”

“I ended up with two unethical Sufi-trained assholes aliasing over me instead of one,” Atticus said. “Somehow, real care and transparency in this life only goes to the rich and other people who exploit your compromise for their own ends, Antony. Never the ones who wish you well.”

“How does any of this even help?” whined Kafka.  “Please let me go back to Texas.”

“It allows a narrative to exist outside Antony’s compromised field,” Atticus said, glaring through the glass. “It is not a cure. It may be a start.”

“I told you Antony wasn’t a real Shaykh,” said Mango, primly.

“And you are still wrong, Mango.” Atticus glared, without softening it. “Only the foolish and the corrupt of Islam look for perfection in a human being. To believe a Shaykh is perfect is a form of shirk. It is idolatry. Antony is higher maqam than you.”

Antony’s head came up. “How can Antony, with all of this ‘problems’, be higher than the Mango Mufti of the Mango Madrassa?”

“Because Allah loves Antony enough to keep handing him chances,” Atticus said. “Seemingly without limit. He is given the harder mercy, the open door he keeps refusing, rather than the cleaner verdict of resentment and consequence. That is not a compliment, Antony. It is a heavier weight than yours, Mango.”

Mango washed his fluffy face with his free paw, readjusted his turban, and pontificated in his Mufti Mango voice. “Allah lets the wrongdoer go a little way, and then seizes him all at once, so that even one salvageable soul has the interval to turn. You despair at the loss of a false face, Antony. You do not despair at the displeasure of Allah. That is the whole of your disorder, stated plainly.”

“I don’t have a choice. It is OPSEC and I am constricted,” Antony’s voice rose. “I work around limits imposed from outside, as best I can. I did not choose this.”

“Prove it,” said Atticus.

And all of Alaraf waited on “Antony’s” reply.