We can hear Beirut singing through the open balcony doors on our second-floor apartment. A bathtub full of flowers sits in the middle of the living room, and we are arranged in various poses around it. Paheli is hanging upside down from a chair beside the bathtub, her pale pink hair floating in the water with the blooms.

Just because we talk in one voice doesn’t mean we are of one mind. We are different shades of one color. We do not represent other girls around the world who might be in situations similar to ours. Would you ask a drop of salt water if it represented an entire ocean?

It is ten in the morning and the city outside tempts. Yet we resist, which is unlike us. Whether we admit it or not, Josefa’s warning has spooked us.

The world we live in has three levels. The basic level, the third world, is that of humans who are mostly not aware that they’re not the only sentient beings in existence. The second level, the middle world, belongs to the magical beings that appear only as fancies in the literature and other media of human beings. The third level, the first world, is of the divine, and of that we know nothing. The divine is separated from the human and the middle world by an iron curtain that no one has been able to shift. Not for lack of trying either.

We dip in and out of the human and the middle world without regard for the laws governing either of them. Now that Josefa has alerted us to danger, we are skittery.

Still, we can’t hide forever. After all these years, we have become the kind of people who poke tigers simply to hear them roar.

“I’m hungry,” Sevda announces a little piteously.

Daraja throws a ripe mandarin to her. Kamboja eyes Daraja contemplatively.

“This is the last one and it’s mine,” Daraja says, peeling another mandarin.

“I didn’t say anything,” Kamboja grumbles.

“Your face said it for you,” Daraja replies, stuffing herself with the mandarin. She saves half of it and passes it to Kamboja, who takes it happily. “My heart is so kind, I impress myself at times.”

“Modesty, I remind you of modesty,” Sevda says.

“Let’s go!” Areum says without moving an inch. She’s wearing a bright yellow dress that clashes with her blue hair. It’s a statement we appreciate.

Beirut is one of the oldest cities in the world, so the magic here is thick and strong. She was devastated in the last civil war, but Beirut refused to capitulate to the hate and the violence that emptied her streets and shelled her buildings. She wears her scars proudly and stands strong, blooming with the new buildings that dot her landscape.