The box between Winnie’s hands clattered to the ground and she gasped, backing away. The lid swung open and folds of utter blackness began to unfurl, like rich dark cloth, over the ground.

“Ironic, isn’t it?” the voice that wasn’t Madame Nasirah’s continued. She began to grow large, towering over them. “One player toppled my world, and now another has restored it to me.”

The MasterMind shrank away in terror, looking very much her age for once. Ahmad stared at the Architect.

“I warned you!” the other boy shrieked over the rising wind. “I warned you! Now you have him to reckon with!”

“Him?” Winnie echoed, her face growing pale, but Ahmad—watching as the ribbons of black began to curl over what was left of Madame Nasirah, the woman they thought was their friend—already knew who it was.

How could they have been so foolish?

How could they have let the fleeting promise of home allow them to willingly forget one of the key figures in Paheli? The one who created it to begin with?

“The monkeys were right. We forgot to keep an eye on every player,” Ahmad croaked. “And now we have to reckon with him.”

“I don’t understand. Who is him?” Winnie demanded. “Why do you look so pale, Ahmad? What is going on?”

“The him he is speaking about,” the voice came again, and this time it boomed all around them, as if the voice of space and time itself, “is me!”

There before them, floating in the air with a horrendous, leering grin, was the jinn, all clouds of black smoke billowing out of the shell of Madame Nasirah’s skin. It had shed that skin like a butterfly flying out of its cocoon.

“Surprised?” the jinn crooned. It was bizarre and downright horrifying to hear that voice coming from behind Madame Nasirah’s remaining shreds of cloth.

“I’m not,” Winnie said firmly. “Something was wrong. I could feel it.”

“Well, congratulations to you for having your wits about you. Now—” The jinn stretched out Madame Nasirah’s disintegrating arms. “Time for you to see all that I really am.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

AHMAD’S HEART LODGED SOMEWHERE beneath his throat—just beyond his esophagus, just enough that his tongue felt smothered and the words he tried to get out were suffocated. There were prayers you could make, he knew, prayers of protection and deliverance. But he was frozen.

He hadn’t expected this.

He knew about jinns. Since he was little, he had been spoon-fed a lot of cautionary tales that happened to some hypothetical brother, nephew, or cousin. And always boiled down to it being their fault: “because he didn’t pray,” “because he didn’t listen to his mother,” or “because he talked too much about jinns where they could hear.”