Alif the Unseen (45 page)

The Tale of Alif the Unseen
.

A muffled cacophony of feet and shouts drifted up from the flat directly beneath them. Alif read the title over and over, attempting to make sense of what had occurred. A buoyant, illicit feeling
stole over him and he felt drunk on something much headier than wine.

“That’s not what it says when I read it,” he murmured at last, at a loss for anything more eloquent.

“What the hell do you mean that’s not what it says? Are you illiterate?” One of the eyeless things jumped for the Hand’s sleeve with a congested snarl, tearing off a
length of white cotton between its teeth. The Hand seemed not to notice, staring instead at Alif with an expression that frightened him.

“I warned you,” said Alif, his voice cracking. “I told you this book is tricky.”

“Tricky?” The Hand spat on the floor, suddenly vulgar. “So it’s a trick, is it? Shall we see how it ends?”

Alif read the title once more. He discovered he did not need to know.

“I think it’s too late for that,” he said, handing back the book. “You can read it if you want. I won’t.”

The Hand snatched the manuscript, scanning its final pages at a frantic pace. His face drained of blood.

“‘If he had left the room that instant, he might have lived,’” he read. “‘But he lingered to read the last chapter of the book, which was full of sly silences
and half-truths, revealing nothing.’ ”

An alarm chimed out from the innards of Dina’s messenger bag. The fan inside the netbook began to whir gently. It was echoed, several seconds later, by the hum of electricity in the walls
of the building. The lightbulbs in an unmolested chandelier hanging from the ceiling flickered on, filling the room with sudden luminescence.

“The utility grid is coming back online,” whispered NewQuarter. “Whatever you did—”

“Shh.” Alif cast a furtive glance at the Hand, hoping he had not heard. But the man’s eyes were vacant. He stood very still, staring at the broken door and the hall beyond. He
made no movement when one of the eyeless things nipped at his fingers and drew blood.

The hum of electricity increased, becoming an almost palpable vibration. Alif imagined he could hear the physical transfer of information as the City’s ISPs booted up: the packets of ones
and zeroes traveling outward from data hubs, crossing oceans, recruiting allies for the revolution across a thousand social networks, from a million LCD screens, behind which, though unseen, were
people who were ferociously alive. The hum in the walls was answered by a roar from the square below as demonstrators discovered their smartphones and tablets were online once more. The
Hand’s digital grip on the City had slackened. The world would look into the square through the eyes of a thousand news feeds and posts and uploaded videos, and witness the cost of change.
For a moment Alif was no longer afraid, savoring the mingled uproar of man and machine.

“What is that sound?” howled the Hand. Shaken from his reverie, he clapped his palms over his ears.

Alif smiled.

“The delusion of freedom,” he said.

Voices echoed from the hall outside. The shadows of the ascending crowd dappled the walls, spoiling the pristine expanse of white before NewQuarter’s threshold. A vanguard of boys armed
with sticks burst into the room, shouting in three languages.

“You’re dead!” screamed the Hand. “You are all dead men!” He turned on Alif, mouth twisted into a grimace from which sanity was absent, and made an arcane gesture
with his left hand. The eyeless things turned as one. Alif backed toward the window as they scuttled after him. He was half-aware of Dina struggling toward him through the crowd and of NewQuarter
cursing, his pale robe swallowed in the dusty press of flesh.

The mob that filled the room did not seem to see the dozens of fanged mouths that howled at Alif as he stumbled over broken glass and slammed into a metal guard rail outside NewQuarter’s
window. The square reeled a hundred feet below, one unified wall of noise and jostling bodies. It rose up at him in a rush of vertigo. He pressed his back against the guard rail, steadied by the
unyielding warmth of the metal. The Hand was bellowing in some awful language. He raised his left arm, fingers snapping shut into a fist. The eyeless things jerked, squealed, and leaped at Alif
’s throat.

Alif dodged. Momentum carried the two creatures nearest him through the window, howling as they vanished into the overheated air. The others fell back and warily pressed their bellies to the
floor. The crush of human protesters did not alarm them. Somehow they avoided being trampled underfoot, bending and twisting like shadows on water. No one looked at them.

With a cry of frustration, the Hand shouldered his way across the room, toppling a fat man armed with a cooking skewer in his haste. Alif tensed, preparing himself. He had never thrown a
punch—not a real one—but he made a fist anyway, then made it anew when he realized his thumb was on the inside. As the Hand reached out, Alif raised his arm to swing. But the Hand did
not reach for Alif.

He reached for Dina.

She had made her way through the crowd toward Alif, calling something he could not hear over the din. The Hand grabbed her robe at the neck and yanked her head back. One edge of her veil slid
away, revealing dark curls damp with sweat. Her eyes went wide and round. Alif screamed at the top of his voice but the sound was lost amid the shouts and chanting of the mob, and a wall of flesh
and cloth and pasteboard signs closed in and cut off his view. He struck the person nearest him—a woman, a middle-aged woman, wearing a beige plaid head scarf—feeling only momentary
remorse as she screamed and stumbled back. Alif rushed through the opening she had created, searching for the Hand’s white robe or Dina’s black one. The eyeless things peered at him
from between the legs and elbows of the crowd, silent and obscene.

Finally he saw familiar slim brown fingers reaching out, and caught them. They closed on his. Over some anonymous shoulder, Alif saw the Hand grit his teeth and twist the fabric of Dina’s
veil behind her head, pulling the material flat against her nose and mouth. Her fingers jerked out of his grasp to claw at her face as she fought for air. Alif threw himself at the Hand, knocking
the taller man backward into a group of teenage boys. The Hand cried out in surprise. Releasing Dina, he pinwheeled his arms, but it was no use: he slid inelegantly between two pimpled, roaring
youths, one of whom gave him a look of half-interested disgust before elbowing him in the throat. With a sputter, the Hand went down, disappearing beneath the throng.

“Are you all right?” Alif could barely hear himself speak. Dina’s chest heaved beneath her robe; there was a red smear in her left eye where a blood vessel had burst. She
leaned against Alif without answering. He lifted her in his arms, pushing sideways through a circle of men shouting recriminations at one another: one wore the red armband of the City Communist
Bloc, the other the woolly beard of an Islamist. The room was choked with the rank butchery smell of perspiration and blood. Alif made his way toward the broken window, following a whisper of hot
but breathable air, shielding Dina’s head from flailing fists and banners. When he reached the window he set Dina down on her feet and leaned against the adjoining wall with a gasp.

“Your eye,” he said. “Did he hurt you?”

“Not much.” Her voice was hoarse and barely audible. She straightened her veil with hands that shook. “We have to get out of here before the crowd blows up. Where is Abu
Talib?”

Alif stood on his toes and craned his neck, scanning the room. He thought he saw NewQuarter’s white head cloth bobbing in the midst of the crowd, but it was eclipsed by the looming face of
a man with gelled hair, reeking of cigarette smoke and punching his smartphone in the air like a weapon.

“The Internet is back!” he bellowed. “Mobile service is up! Electricity is online! Get everyone into the square!”

Bluish light vied with the declining sun as half a hundred phones and tablets emerged from pockets and bags. The dark things skittered around the room, suddenly agitated, snapping as they
blundered into one another.

“Is this you?” Dina tugged at the sleeve of Alif’s shirt. “Is this because of what you did?”

“Yes,” said Alif in a faint voice. The messenger bag where his netbook lay churning out algorithms was invisible beneath the crush of bodies that filled the room, yet his work was a
tangible presence. If he closed his eyes, he could see his commands scrolling up the screen and imagine every step of the silent mathematical siege that had taken place as Tin Sari exposed what
digital hiding places remained to the Hand. Alif felt no triumph, merely a physical sense of relief. It was only when Dina touched his fingers that he realized they were trembling.

“Are you going to tell them it was you?” Dina cupped her left eye with one hand and regarded him solemnly with the right. “Everyone knows what happened at Basheera.
You’ll be a hero.”

Alif flexed his shaking hands. The energy of the crowd was shifting as people babbled into cell phones and punched out text messages, rallying unseen others for the final push. Alif heard one
man say the emir was in hiding; another claimed State security forces had been authorized to shoot to kill.

“Being a hero was never the point,” said Alif, and realized it was true. “The point was what’s happening right now. The point was to win.”

Dina’s good eye regarded him with admiration. High on the energy of the crowd, Alif was struck by an urge to kiss her, right there in the sweaty miasma of revolution, like the hero of an
American film. He might have forgotten himself and tried had he not heard a terrified scream—male, but only just—issue from across the room. Jostling ensued, and a chorus of raised
voices began calling for rope.

“What’s going on?” Alif asked the man with the gelled hair, who was shouting orders over the crowd. He turned and smiled, revealing tobacco-stained teeth.

“Looks like we’ve caught a prince,” he said. “The little bastard who owns this flat.”

Alif felt the blood drain from his face.

“Abu Talib,” said Dina in a horrified voice.

Alif did not respond. He began shoving people out of the way, forcing himself toward the center of the room. Answering fists and elbows pushed against his ribs but he ignored them, intent on the
white head cloth that flashed between the unfamiliar dark heads of the protesters. He had not gotten far when someone seized his wrist and curled blunt nails into his flesh. Alif yelped, wriggling,
and found himself being hauled back toward the window.

“You clever little shit.” The Hand’s face was bruised. A thin line of blood ran from one side of his mouth. “You’ve kicked me off the grid. Clearly you got farther
with the
Alf Yeom
than I thought.”

“I didn’t use the
Alf Yeom,
” gasped Alif. “I used my own software. I used Tin Sari.”

“Don’t lie to me. That amateurish key-logger? I field-tested it on your friends. Thirty-two percent success rate. That’s worse than guessing.” The Hand’s grip
tightened on Alif’s arm.

“You were impatient.” Alif dug in his heels but the Hand’s strength was surprising for a slender man, and he prevailed. “You have to give it time to collect enough data.
It takes weeks.”

“You’re still lying. No botnet could learn to identify an individual personality, even if you gave it years.”

Alif’s feet slid and crunched on broken glass. The noise from the riot below boomed through the empty window. With alarm, Alif realized the Hand meant to push him out. The eyeless things
slunk toward him from beneath and between the jostling limbs of the crowd, their blank faces oddly curious. Alif kicked, howled, and twisted, sending fragments of glass sliding across the tile
floor, now slick with a mud of congealed spit and sweat and dust. The Hand seemed not to notice his frenzied attempts to free himself and kept his grip on Alif’s arm almost idly, as though
imbued with a strength he did not know he possessed.

“It shouldn’t work,” he persisted. “Your botnet. No program can probe what is unseen in human hearts.”

“It doesn’t.” With supreme effort, Alif wrenched his arm free. He leaned against the metal beam that framed the window, panting. “It doesn’t have anything to do
with the unseen. It works because it exposes the apparent. The words you use, how you use them, how you type them, when you send them. You can’t hide those things behind a new name. The
unseen is unseen. The apparent is inescapable.”

The crowd surged, pressing the Hand against Alif and Alif against the window frame. Dina was invisible among the fists that beat the air. The physical contact sent a spasm of panic and disgust
through Alif, so intense that he could feel his hands shake. Though sun poured through the window, he was assaulted by memories of the dark and the man who had put him there. Flailing, he closed
his hand around a jagged tooth of glass sticking up out of the windowsill, relieved, in a way that frightened him, by the pain that sliced through his palm.

“Little worm.” The Hand wrested one arm free and seized Alif by the throat. “Little worm, gnawing and gnawing until you pulled everything down. Who are you? Who
are
you?”

Struggling to breathe, Alif waved the shard of glass in a wild arc, slicing across the Hand’s shoulder and neck. The man howled as a red line bloomed on his white robe. His left arm
slackened, his hand releasing Alif’s neck to dangle uselessly at his side. He tried to rally, pushing himself up to gesture clumsily at the eyeless things, closing the fingers of his good
arm into a fist. Nothing happened. The creatures stared up at the Hand with their membranous faces, mild and interested and unmoved. They were practical rather than loyal, just as he had said.

The Hand stumbled backward into the crowd. The last thing Alif saw in his fading eyes was disappointment.

* * *

From just out of reach, Dina was pushing toward him. She was heedless of her veil as it caught on someone’s backpack and pulled away, revealing, for a precious instant,
the lower half of her face. Her mouth, the mouth Alif had not kissed, was taut with fear. In another instant she had vanished, hidden behind the bodies of men who were shoving each other and
shouting. The crowd heaved in panic as one of the men threw a punch that sent another reeling. Alif found himself shoved hard against the windowsill, his feet scrambling for purchase on the floor.
He saw Dina’s green eyes framed in black cloth, very close. Someone made a grab for his collar. It was too late: Alif tumbled over the window ledge. Reaching out, he touched nothing but
air.