The two boys crossed the road. It wasn’t long before the city swallowed them. The narrow alleyways twisted and turned. Washing hung on lines overhead. A cat yawned in a doorway. They stopped at a falafel stand and had a half each, then wandered down to the beach and Saleh saw the sea.

The sun was low in the sky. Slow airships glided over the water, travelling from Cairo to Mecca or back from Djibouti to Aqaba or Eilat. Three floating islands hovered in the distance. Beyond the sea, on the distant shore, he thought he could just make out the outline of mountains and a glittering sprawl of lights along the coast.

“What’s there?” he said, pointing.

“That’s Neom,” Elias said, and the sudden name filled Saleh with a longing he could not articulate.

They wandered along the beach. El Quesir felt strangely deserted at that hour, perhaps always. Dusk settled and the mosques called the faithful to prayer, and the sound had a scratchy, echoey quality to it. They went past the port and here the streets grew busier, and neon lights lit doorways set into old stone walls, where food cooked on open coals and smoke poured out of metal braziers.

Familiar Arabic mingled here with Chinese and Asteroid Malay, some Russian. The figures sitting in the street were hooded in shadows. They drank coffee and spoke in low voices. Saleh and Elias went deeper into the alleys until the space opened into one large open-air market. Elias was hailed a few times and he acknowledged politely: the Green Caravanserai were known and familiar here.

Saleh felt lost again, out of his depth. This was not like the Ghost Coast. A bar with an aquatic theme held an aquarium of tentacle junkies who pressed their faces to the glass and stared out at him, their suckered arms beating rhythmically to underwater music.

“You want Drift Tar?” someone said, materialising out of the shadows. He was small and stooped.

“We don’t want Tar,” Elias said politely.

They passed tables covered in old guns. Elderly men sat on low chairs watching camel racing on an ancient screen. The whole place felt old, semi-abandoned. El Quesir seemed to Saleh like a sunken ship crusted in salt, still tilting impossibly half out of the water. In the next street they sold bio-relics: this Saleh knew better. He stopped at the exhibits, recognising Leviathan blubber, hardened in death into an amber-like substance. It was near impossible to cut. Then he saw roc’s eggs, two of them. He looked more closely.

“This one’s a fake,” he said. He nearly smiled. The Abu-Ala were not above passing forgeries when they were low on the real thing. Stealing a roc’s egg was dangerous work. But making a good fake was art.

“Who asked you?” the seller said.

Elias took Saleh’s arm and pulled him away before he got into a fight.