As long as he was working, it stayed away; but he was not able to work all the time, and whenever he took a break—for a meal, a shower, a walk to clear his head—it was there. There, like a wave crashing in from the walls around him or rising from the cobblestones of the street, soaking him to the bone. The Gray.

Between his long hours of work, he sometimes found himself standing, again, at the window of Aynur’s room while she lay naked on the bed. Found himself explaining it to her. It was as clear as recalling a conversation from yesterday. Telling her how now the map of the city was easier to navigate.

“It is as if the city had been described to me by someone who lived there. You know—how someone will lead you through the city they live in more by landmarks than by street names. There is a yellow house, with a boarded-up window, at this corner. You turn left there. If you see a billboard with an advertisement for private dronecopter trips to the Canaries, you’ve gone too far. It’s a bit like that: The map has been accented by these signposts, these recognitions of place and pattern. And now I’ve left the outskirts behind. Now I am drawing close to the center.”

Aynur exhaled a ring of vapor. “How nice for you. Too bad you got me killed.”

He tried telling himself it was her death that had him feeling this way—but that wasn’t it. Whatever they’d had—a few nights together—hadn’t been love. She was, quite simply, just someone he’d liked sleeping with. And liked talking to.

And he had gotten her killed.

The tea appeared before him. Two aspirin in a paper cup. Water in another.

If he could be dead without having been born at all—if it were as easy as never having existed—he would do it. But he feared death above all things. There isn’t anything a coward can’t live with. No amount of pain and suffering is too much.

The tea glowed, pulling lamplight into itself and holding it there like a flame in the pear-shaped glass. Everything else in the room was colorless in comparison.

“Sometimes,” the man across the table said, “I think tea is enough.”

“Enough?” Rustem looked up at him.

“Enough to live for. The next glass of tea. Sometimes I think it’s all that is worth living for. There are days.”

Rustem reached for the glass. It was still too hot to drink, but touching it with his fingertips at least sent a bit of warmth through him.

“Now I ask you again: Do you know why you are here? A clue: It isn’t because you were drunk.”

“I think—I assume all my papers are in order.”

“Oh yes. All your papers are in order. Which is a suspicious thing.”