“Okay, let’s go. We’ll bring him to you once our conversation is done,” I tell the glowering Assi, and ignore the other middle worlders.

Areum places her right palm on the wall we were leaning against, and a second later, the lines of a rectangular door dissect the wall. She opens it and we follow her into the Between.

Besieged in the Between

We breathe easier in the Between. We are safer here than anywhere else in any of the worlds.

Widad suddenly hisses. “Look at the boy!”

As we turn to him, the golden light of the Between flickers and the hum of it grows louder, warmer. Taraana is enveloped in this golden light; it enters his skin and seems to flow through it so he looks like he’s going supernova.

Taraana looks back at us, the stars in his eyes so bright that we wonder if they will spill over. His face has a pained expression, which strangely enough is reflected on Paheli’s face. Then we see that he is squeezing her hand tight.

“Oi.” Paheli pulls her hand out of his grasp. “Are you having a moment?”

Daraja gives Paheli a look and asks Taraana kindly, “Are you okay? Is this the way the Between always reacts to you?”

He nods jerkily. “It sort of feels as if someone has called you on the phone, and though you can hear their voice, you can’t understand a word they are saying, even though they are speaking your native language.”

“We cannot stay here,” Valentina says, ignoring the other two. “That fish-scaled middle worlder concerns me. It felt like their motive was more than casual observation.”

“Where do we go?” Talei turns to Paheli.

Before Paheli can speak, however, a voice we haven’t heard in a long while says, “I’d like to go to Jiufen.” It is our Ghufran. Her voice is a wisp.

“Then we’ll go to Jiufen,” Paheli replies. “Let’s move.”

Taraana doesn’t seem to have much of an opinion on our destination. Even if he does, he keeps it to himself. He looks like he is ill at ease in the Between; his shoulders are drawn together as if he is suffering some kind of pain. Paheli, in a rare act of mercy, allows him to hold her hand again.

Sometimes the Between splits off into different passages leading to different places in the world. While the distance we walk is not comparable to the distance the cities are from each other in the physical world, there is a relative distance between a door leading to Jbeil compared to a door leading to Jiufen. The magic directs us to the door we want to go to. Sort of like a GPS system without the annoying voice.