The day was hot and the coffee was finished. Mukhtar was uneasy with the conversation. He heard Sharif. But in his heart he longed to see the golden man and what it did. For terror and awe went together, and people still came to gawk at Sandoval’s Earthrise, or the time-frozen destruction of Rohini’s Jakarta bomb on Java.

“Who made it?” he asked then.

“Excuse me?”

“The golden man. Was it attributed to any . . . artist in particular?”

He didn’t like calling them artists. Making mass death and destruction into art seemed to Mukhtar to be serving falsehood; a contamination of both the living and the dead. An artist, it seemed to Mukhtar, should follow truth. The terrorartists sowed chaos. Their art was an act of polluting the world.

And yet he could not deny the terrible beauty in their work.

“She called herself Nasu,” Sharif said.

9. The Sybil

When the Green Caravanserai arrived in the town of El Quesir it was late afternoon. The sun dipped low in the sky and the boats on the Red Sea cast long jagged reflections over the water.

Elephants trumpeted; goats bleated; children ran laughing at the sight of the ocean.

The great khans of the caravan reconfigured and settled themselves beyond the city’s demarcation line. Saleh and Elias climbed down and stood on the dusty earth.

“I want to go into the town,” Saleh said.

“We are not supposed to go into the town,” Elias said.

Saleh shrugged. “Then don’t come,” he said.

Elias looked hurt.

“It is an old place,” he said. “An old city. The pharaohs held it and it was old even then. The old expeditions to Punt went out from here.”

“What was Punt?” Saleh said.

“A kingdom of gold,” Elias said. “But it is lost now.”

Saleh thought of lost things. He thought of his father, still dying in that temporal bomb in Dahab.

Forever dying. Forever out of reach.

But he had cried his tears. He kept trying to tell himself that.

He wanted to sell his one thing of value and be done with it all. Start new.

Be new.

Elias, reading his expression, said, “El Quesir is not a good place to find a buyer.”

“Why not?”

“It is a buyer’s place on the way to other destinations.” Elias hesitated. “They sell black-market things here, too.”

“All the more reason to go,” Saleh said. “Are you coming, or what?”

“I can’t let you go on your own,” Elias said, “they’ll eat you up in El Quesir. So, yes.”

“I’ve been to a city before,” Saleh said.

“I’m sure you have,” Elias said kindly.