The city had stopped blinking.
It lay in an uneasy half-sleep, the neon lights humming like nervous ghosts, the towers leaning a little closer together, whispering rumors. In the dream-hours, Gibreel Farishta roamed again — but now not in dreams alone. His feet touched the real, dirty asphalt of the city's lower quarter, each step shaking something loose inside him.
Saladin Chamcha, meanwhile, was elsewhere.
Where?
Inside a labyrinth of white corridors, antiseptic and endless, inside a hospital — or was it a prison? — trying to remember the right spelling of his own name. S, A, L, A... he murmured, over and over, and the walls laughed in low, mechanical voices.
Far above, beyond even the clouds, the invisible wars continued. The Archangel's mask was slipping: now Gibreel wondered, deeply, what difference there was between the face of a god and the face of a man who had simply been broken in all the right places.
"Why have you brought me here?" he asked the mist one night.
The mist answered with fire.
Out of a derelict church (abandoned since the Troubles), flames erupted in slow-motion glory. The angels had tired of subtlety.
A new revelation: Destruction as Mercy.
---
Meanwhile, in a forgotten corner of town, a woman in a green sari lit a single oil lamp in her window. Her name was Rekha Merchant, and though her body was ash now, her memory was all knife-edges and unfinished laughter. She watched from beyond: Gibreel could feel it, the pressure of her gaze pushing down on his soul.
They are watching. They never leave you alone.
And yet, the world spun indifferently on.
The newspapers spoke of a minister's scandal, a pop singer's fall from grace, the latest plague moving up the coastal towns — but no headlines read:
> "Man Becoming Angel.
City Becoming Dream."
No. They noticed nothing.
Or pretended not to.
---
Saladin's situation was worse.
Days slipped into one another. Sometimes the white-cloaked figures brought him food, sometimes not. He shrank inside his skin. Kafka, he thought once, and laughed a terrible broken laugh.
When he slept, the dreams grew fangs:
He dreamed of goats' hooves thudding against the hospital floor.
Of rooms where the ceiling slowly descended, pressing down until he woke screaming.
Of doors that led to nowhere.
At last, a woman came.
A nurse, or maybe an angel in disguise.
"You must remember," she said, adjusting the drip attached to his arm.
"Remember what?"
"Who you are," she whispered, "before the city finishes eating you."
---
On the streets, the fires grew bolder.
A cinema caught blaze. Then a taxi rank.
Then, one night, the old market square where Gibreel had once, long ago, bought mangoes for a woman he loved — though now he could not remember her name.
He stood before the flames, dizzy, eyes wet not with tears but with something sharper, cleaner: awe.
"Let it burn," he thought.
"Let the old gods burn away."
But even as he thought it, he knew he was lying to himself.
He did not want death.
He wanted escape.
---
By the end of the week, the city was divided in two:
Those who followed the fires, believing they were signs from heaven.
And those who locked their doors and waited for the flames to find them.
Gibreel had to choose.
He was no longer a bystander.
The voice returned, richer now, clothed in thunder:
> "Be thou the sword or be thou the flame."
No third choice.
He closed his eyes.
Sword or flame.
Man or angel.
Sinner or messenger.
The fire answered for him.