“I am alone.” Her shoulders shook with sobs as she threw the coin into the air. It bounced off her knee and rolled away, back to the jinn. For a few moments, Qadir said nothing. Then he silently reached for her hand and set the coin on her palm.

Jinn.

He curled her fingers around it. “Not alone,” he said. “Not anymore.”

Loulie was lost in her memories and absently making the two-faced coin vanish between her fingers when she returned to the Aysham’s deck the next morning. The crowds from the previous night had dispersed, and the sailors paid her no mind as she wandered past them in her plain brown robes. She had traded the scarves obscuring her face for a light shawl, which she wrapped loosely around her head and shoulders to better feel the sun on her cheeks. It was a relief, as always, to doff her merchant apparel and bask in anonymity the day after a sale.

Also a relief: the familiar, hazy shape of Madinne in the distance. Loulie smiled at the sight of the city. “Qadir, do you see that?”

The jinn, now in his lizard form and humming softly in her ear, shifted on her shoulder. He made a sound of confirmation.

She drew closer to the ship’s railings. Even through an orange veil of sand, the sun was bright enough she could make out the tiers of the great desert city of Madinne. At the top was the sultan’s palace, made up of beautiful white domed towers and minarets that reached for the sun. It was surrounded on all sides by colorful buildings—stone and wooden constructions both domed and flat, tall and squat. And somewhere in the midst of those buildings, nestled in a nexus of crooked, winding alleyways, was home. Their home.

“I wonder how Dahlia is doing.” Qadir’s voice, made much softer by his smaller form, was directly in her ear.

“However she’s doing, she’ll be much better when we drop by with our rent.”

Qadir made a clicking sound—she still wasn’t sure whether he did it with his teeth or tongue—and said, “Yes, because our rent is equivalent to all the coin in our bag.”

“I won’t give her all of our earnings.”

“That last exchange was for my blood, you know.”

Loulie suppressed a smile as she looked over her shoulder at the sailors. Though the men were far from graceful, she could not help but think they resembled dancers in the easy way they went about their docking preparations.

“Would you like me to keep your blood money, then?”

Qadir hissed. “I do not need your human gold.”

“Ah, what a shame. And here I thought you’d enjoy spending it on wine or women. You know the dealers won’t take your commemorative coins.” She glanced at the two-faced coin between her fingers.

“Loulie?”

“Mm?” She slid the coin into her pocket.