Saleh blinked and found himself standing alone in a small stone courtyard. It was dawn. He stared around him in confusion. A faded sign above a doorway said Fortune Teller, but the entrance was littered with junk and it was clear no one had used the place for years.

What was he doing there? He remembered the caravan, and deciding to go. He remembered holding Elias.

Then a conviction: he had decided already he wasn’t going back to the Green Caravanserai.

He lifted his bag. It felt heavier somehow. A jackal watched Saleh from the courtyard’s archway.

“I tried to . . . warn you,” it said.

“Warn me about what?” Saleh said distractedly. Then, “You’re Anubis.”

“You . . . remember.”

“What are you doing here?” Saleh said.

“I grew tired with . . . the desert,” Anubis said.

“Yeah,” Saleh said with feeling. “Me too.”

He started to walk, and Anubis trotted beside him. They went through the narrow alleyways of El Quesir and came to the port, where gulls cried and the sea spray rose over the breakers in the clear early morning air. The horizon shimmered.

“Where to, then?” Anubis said.

Saleh stared across the water.

“Neom,” he said quietly.

10. The Jackal

Anubis could scent the ghosts and the fragments of souls in the air all throughout El Quesir. He trotted alongside Saleh. The Bedouin boy was a strange one, he had ghosts all over him and didn’t even know it. Jackals were good at smelling revenants. Back in the war they were used as trackers for the dead, sniffing out soldiers who could still be repurposed.

Anubis remembered with scent-memory passed to him by his ancestors: going through sand and storms, pulling out corpses half-buried, ripping out the soul-catchers in the bases of their skulls. Digital memory intertwined with gooey biological matter. The human brain stopped at death but the data in the node lingered. It gave out a smell all its own.

“How get . . . Neom?” he asked Saleh.

The boy chewed on an apple.

“Ship,” he said.

“Anubis don’t like . . . sea.”

Anubis didn’t like a lot of things. A small vocabulary and an insufficient speaking apparatus that did not allow him to express himself properly with humans. They lacked the elegance of jackal speech. He did better communicating with the Others in the Conversation, but the digitals seldom paid attention to the brief lives of biological creatures, and when they spoke, the high-density screech of their voices made his ears bleed.

“It’s not a long crossing,” Saleh said, not unkindly. “It’s only a narrow sea.”

Anubis was noded but the desert didn’t offer much feed. Here in the city it was denser, richer. He’d decided a while back that he was bored with the Sinai, and certainly with the company of the Webster, who was as mad as any of that clan, and besides he had a feeling a jackal with his particular skill set might make his fortune out in the world.