The knife hadn’t meant to stay shallow.
The shakedown artist near the tannery had panicked when Daniel landed the finding against him, and the panic had put steel through his coat sleeve and across the meat of his upper arm.
Not deep.
Deep enough.
Bassem had pressed a rag to it and muttered the address of a clinic two streets over, the kind that kept its light on past midnight and didn’t ask how.
One fluorescent tube buzzed over the door, throwing everything the same flat white two plastic chairs, a counter stacked with gauze and unmarked bottles, a single exam table bolted to the floor.
Under the iodine and old adhesive, the alley’s reek was still on his clothes, the one smell in the room he’d brought in with him.
The paramedic looked up from a logbook, took one look at the bloodied rag, and pointed at the table.
“Sit.
Shirt off.” He sat.
Peeled the coat.
The shirt stuck where the blood had dried.
She crossed the room in three strides, snapped on gloves, and unwrapped the rag without asking him to hold still.
Her hands were fast and sure, the kind of sure that came from stitching men who lied about what cut them.
“Graze,” she said.
Flat.
“You’ll live to be stupid again.” “Comforting.” “I don’t do comfort.
I do stitches.
Hold this.” She pressed gauze to the wound, harder than she needed to, and he held it.
She turned to the counter, pulling thread, a curved needle, a bottle of something clear.
The fluorescent buzzed.
He glanced at the window.
Full dark outside.
The moon had been up an hour.
The window was open, had been open since he’d walked in here instead of toward a cause he’d felt gathering two streets south a girl accusing her brother of theft, half the souk watching, belief stacking like kindling.
The cold crept in under his sternum.
Faint.
Insistent.
The leak.
“You’re twitchy,” the paramedic said.
She was back at his side, threading the needle with the efficiency of a woman who’d done this in worse light.
“Don’t be twitchy.
Twitchy makes my stitches crooked.” “Not twitchy.
In a hurry.” “Everyone’s in a hurry.” She swabbed the wound, and the sting went white.
“Nobody bleeds slower for it.” She started the first stitch.
He watched her hands.
Tired hands, burn-scar shine across the knuckles of the right, but they didn’t shake.
They’d decided not to shake a long time ago.
“You have a name?” she asked.
“Do you need one?” “No.” She pulled the thread through, started the second stitch.
“Names are how you end up a witness.
But people call me Nadia, and you’re going to bleed on my floor again, so we may as well skip the part where you pretend this is the last time.” He almost smiled.
“That obvious?” “You walked in like a man who knows where the door is.
That’s the tell.” She finished the second stitch, started a third.
Her frown deepened.
“You’re cold.” “It’s November.” “It’s Cairo.
And you’re cold the way a fever runs cold, except you don’t have a fever.” She glanced up at him, and for half a breath her hands paused.
“Your eyes do something when the light catches them.
Grey.
Like the lamp’s dying.” The moon-tell.
He looked away.
“Trick of the bulb.” “I’ve worked under this bulb for two years.
It doesn’t do that.” She tied off the third stitch, cut the thread, pressed a pad of gauze over the line and taped it flat.
“I’m not asking what you are.
I’m telling you I noticed.
Difference.” The cold under his sternum sharpened.
A cause, somewhere, tipping toward a verdict without him.
The girl and her brother.
The theft that wasn’t.
The crowd’s weight bending the night toward the louder voice.
“I need to go,” he said.
“You need to sit still for five minutes so the anaesthetic wears off and you don’t fall on my floor.” “I don’t have five minutes.” Nadia stepped back, stripped the gloves, dropped them in a bin.
Looked at him the way she’d look at a wound she couldn’t explain.
Tired.
Wary.
Already counting the cost of the next time.
“Fine,” she said.
“Go be stupid.
But when you come back and you will, men like you always do don’t tell me how it happened.
I’ve heard every version.
None of them are true, and I’m too tired to care which lie you pick.” He pulled his shirt back on, shrugged into the coat.
The stitches pulled.
The cold pulled harder.
“What do I owe you?” “You owe me not making this place part of whatever you’re part of.” She crossed her arms.
“This is a clinic.
People come here to not be in a fight.
You keep it that way, we’re square.” He nodded.
Turned for the door.
“Vigilante.” He stopped.
Nadia was leaning against the counter, backlit by the fluorescent’s ugly buzz, her face half in shadow.
She didn’t look angry.
She looked like a woman who’d just made a decision she’d regret and chosen to make it anyway.
“The eyes.
The cold.
The hurry.” She shook her head.
“I’m going to figure out what’s wrong with you.
Not because I want to.
Because I’m going to keep stitching you, and I don’t stitch what I can’t read.” He met her gaze.
Hazel, ringed with fatigue and something sharper.
“I’m not asking you to.” “I know,” she said.
“That’s why I’m telling you I will.” He left.
The night air hit him like a drink of water after a day in the sun, and the reed-smell rolled in underneath it cut green stalks, river-silt, the map of the moon’s reach drawn across three streets.
The cold receded.
Not gone.
Quieter.
Two streets south, the argument was still live.
He could feel it, the way he’d learned to feel a room heating, a lie bending, a finding trying to force itself into the wrong shape.
He walked toward it.
Through the clinic’s single window, Nadia Wahba watched him go, a frown settling into place like it meant to stay through the morning, through the night after, through every night he’d bleed on her floor and leave too fast to be an ordinary man in ordinary trouble.
She’d told him not to come back.
She said it again, quietly, to the empty doorway the kind of warning you give once you’ve already stopped believing it.
The eyes.
The cold.
The specific way he’d looked at the window like a man reading a clock she couldn’t see.
Something about him was wrong.
She would keep stitching him until she worked out what.