I felt my shoulders tense. I wanted to be back on the sidewalk. The next card she pulled out was the Knight of the Earth.

You will embark on a mission that will change your life.

My pulse quickened.

And the Six of Air, she said, withdrawing a third card. You’re struggling to climb out from under negativity. You’re digging yourself out of a hole. You feel buried—

I was on the sidewalk in a flash, Dayo following me and apologizing profusely. The buzz of the cocktails had dissipated.

I inhaled deeply, drinking in the gritty smells of exhaust and steel and anything else that lived aboveground. I managed to crack a joke.

I had to leave. She saw another six weeks of overnight shifts in my future.

Dayo didn’t laugh. Instead, she squared her shoulders and fixed her glistening eyes on me.

I’m so sorry, Aryana. I didn’t think . . . I’m so sorry, she whispered.

I wrap my scarf around my mouth, both to warm and conceal my face. I stand at one end of a long tree-lined road that leads to Arg, impassable to cars. I feel the uptick in my pulse, the adrenaline signaling my fight-or-flight response, and remind myself that I am an adult, an American, and that decades have passed since the day of the coup.

And yet.

The palace entrance, with its crenelated towers, does not reach as far into the sky as I remember. Objects in a child’s rearview mirror are smaller than they appear, especially after that child has stood under the Eiffel Tower, walked through the Hagia Sofia in Turkey, and passed through the halls of the Vatican. I live in a city with a skyline to humble the world.

And yet.

Arg retains her stately grandeur, the lovely symmetry of her gates. I move the scarf away from my mouth and take long, refreshing breaths of cold air. The street is empty but for soldiers in their olive uniforms with red-and-gold trim. Rifles hang at their sides. Two of them step toward me, speaking to each other out of the corner of their mouths as they approach. A tank is parked meters away, just as it was on that day. In two hours, it will be noon, the very hour at which the tanks and guards of the citadel turned their guns on us all those years ago.

“Miss, where are you going?” one asks in English. I look foreign to him. He has a short beard. The skin around his eyes crinkles like he’s spent his lifetime squinting against the sun. He and his partner assess me, hands on their rifles.

“I am passing by,” I say calmly. “It is cold, and I wanted to take the shortest way.”