Mama and Baba are dead. The words kept cycling through her mind. Every time Layla buried them, they resurfaced, a reality she could not escape.

Had the jinn not been dragging her through the desert, she would have succumbed to the weight of her sorrow days ago. But even when her body grew heavy with fatigue, he pressed forward. At first, she despised him for this—even feared him.

But the fear eventually faded. First into reluctance, then defeat. Why did it matter where the jinn was taking her? He’d told her that the compass her father had given her would lead them to a city, but she did not care about the city.

She did not care about anything.

Many sunrises later, she collapsed. She wanted to cry, but her chest was too heavy and her eyes too dry. The jinn waited patiently. When she did not rise, he picked her up and set her atop his shoulders. She was forced to hold on to him as he scaled a cliff.

That night, after the jinn had started a fire with nothing but a snap of his fingers, he took a coin from his pocket and set it on his palm.

“Watch.” He curled his fingers over the coin. When he next uncurled them, his palm was empty. Layla was intrigued despite herself. When she asked if it was magic, the jinn clenched and unclenched his fingers, and the coin was again on his palm.

“A trick,” he said.

Layla looked closely at the coin. It appeared to be a foreign currency, with the face of a human sultan on one side and a jinn wreathed in fire on the other. “There are two lands in this world,” Qadir said. “Human and jinn. And so there are two sides to this coin.”

He made the coin vanish and reappear between his fingers, moving so quickly she could not track the movement. “This may be a trick, but the coin itself is magic. It will tell you the real or moral truth of any situation.”

He set the coin down on Layla’s palm. “See for yourself. Flip it, and if it comes up on the human side, the answer is yes. If it comes up on the other, the answer is no.”

Layla would not have believed it was truly magic had the coin been given to her a few days ago. But things had changed. She was no longer so naive.

“My family is dead,” she whispered as she flipped the coin.

It came up on the human side.

She breathed out and tried again. “A jinn saved my life.”

Human.

Tears sprang to her eyes as the coin continued to come up on the human side, confirming her new reality. Truth. Truth. Truth.