Talei snorts. “Do you think it’s so easy to find a burning door? That we can turn a corner and it will spring up in front of us? The Between stretches on in all directions forever. We need time to look for a burning door.”

“Plus, the Between isn’t exactly safe for us right now,” Sevda adds. “While we have been able to defend ourselves thus far, there is no guarantee Baarish won’t send forces who will be able to overpower us. Can we confidently take risks with our safety? With Taraana’s?” Sevda has been gradually distancing herself from us recently, so we are surprised by her comment. Not at the content of her comment, but at the fact that she made it.

“Let’s look for human conjury,” Kamboja says. She glances at Paheli. “Wasn’t that what you were trying to do in the voodoo store? Did Qasim read you Yasmine’s handkerchief earlier?”

“Did you already know that human conjury might help us fight Baarish?” Daraja asks Paheli. “How exactly will it help? What does it do to middle worlders?”

Paheli’s tendency to keep things from us has, on more occasions than one, provoked us into arguments.

She looks at us without speaking for a moment. Her eyes are dark and her face devoid of the smile that we almost take for granted. “The first thing we will do is go to Istanbul and look for Baarish’s errant granddaughter, Tabassum Naaz. When we find her, we will try to persuade her to ally with us. She has already helped Taraana twice, so it’s not a stretch of the imagination to believe she will do so again. There were a few stores in Istanbul that carried authentic conjury when we last visited them. We will visit them again. If we are unsuccessful in locating human conjury in Istanbul, we will travel to Chefchaouen, to that store we found conjury in three years ago. If that store too doesn’t have any, we will go to Marrakech. I seem to remember coming across a store selling authentic conjury in the souks there some years ago.” She pauses to let her words sink in. “I’m not sure if we can really use human conjury against middle worlders. But it can’t hurt to find out for certain. Does anyone have any other questions?”

“Do I give up trying to bond with the Between?” Taraana asks.

“Of course you don’t,” Paheli replies. “Lalie is still looking for that middle worlder who worked in the Library of Alexandria. She might have some concrete answers for us. If you want, we can look for a burning door for you to bleed on, but I fear Baarish is going to intensify his search for you.”

“It would be better for us to have a plan of action, a way of countering him, before Taraana spends more time in the Between,” Talei says.