“Ah,” Sax said. There had been mustached men among the group. “Possibly.”

He felt sick. He had frozen, he had done nothing. The images on the screen flickered, flashes in darkness, and Zeyk’s cortex was alive with microscopic colored lightning.

“So it was not Selim,” Zeyk said to Nazik. “Not Selim, and so not Frank Chalmers.”

“We should tell Maya,” Nazik said. “We must tell her.”

Zeyk shrugged. “She won’t care. If Frank did set Selim on John, and yet someone else actually did the deed, does that matter?”

“But you think it was someone else?” Smadar said.

“Yes. Yussuf and Nejm. The Fetah. Or whoever it was setting people on each other. Nejm, perhaps. . . .”

“Who is dead.”

“And Yussuf as well,” Zeyk said grimly. “And whoever started the rioting that night. . . .” He shook his head, and the image overhead quivered slightly.

“Tell me what happened next,” Smadar said, looking down at her screen.

“Unsi al-Khan came running into the hajr to tell us Boone had been attacked. Unsi . . . well, anyway, I went with some others to the Syrian Gate, to see if it had been used. The Arab method of execution at that time was to throw you out onto the surface. And we found that the gate had been used once and no one had come back in by it.”

“Do you remember the lock code?” Smadar asked.

Zeyk frowned, his lips moved, his eyes clamped shut. “They were part of the Fibonacci sequence, I remember noticing that. Five-eight-one-three-two-one.”

Sax gaped. Smadar nodded. “Go on.”

“Then a woman I didn’t know ran by and told us Boone had been found in the farm. We followed her to the medical clinic in the medina. It was new, everything was clean and shiny, no pictures on the walls yet. Sax, you were there, and the rest of the First Hundred in the town: Chalmers and Toitovna, and Samantha Hoyle.”

Sax found he had no memory of the clinic at all. Wait . . . an image of Frank, his face flushed, and Maya, wearing a white domino, her mouth a bloodless line. But that had been outside, on the glass-scattered boulevard. He had told them of the attack on Boone, and Maya had cried instantly Didn’t you stop them? Didn’t you stop them? and he had realized all of a sudden that he hadn’t stopped them— that he had failed to help his friend— that he had stood there frozen in shock, and watched while his friend had been assaulted and dragged off. We tried, he had said to Maya. I tried. Though he hadn’t.