For a few moments, I let myself think of Kasim. Not of the danger he’s become. Of the one who raised me. Three thousand years ago, he’d place his hand on the back of my neck and call meLittle Fool. He read me the stars until I could read them back. He taught me to hold my shape when I was still small enough to fray at the edges.
Djinn do not have families like humans or even krakens do. We are entities, born from pure energy. The fact that our bond even exists at all, that the Earth decided to create us as siblings… It’s nothing short of a miracle.
It doesn’t matter in the slightest. Not with Iris’s life at stake.
“I’ll do what I have to do,” I tell Sigurd. “What he is now is my responsibility.”
Sigurd doesn’t answer that. There’s nothing in my words for him to argue against. He’s stood by me through worse hours, and every single time, it was about Kasim.
We travel for at least ten more minutes before the yacht finally stops. We must have reached the location Sigurd identified during his search. I can’t feel anything nearby, but the ocean isn’t my domain. It’s his. “You’re sure this is safe?” I ask him. “For you and your family?”
He glances at me sideways, more amused than I’d like. “Last I heard, the leviathan is licking his wounds north of here. He won’t come out of his lair as long as I don’t completely shift. And the merfolk won’t be a threat.”
“That wasn’t really what I was asking.” I turn at last to look at him fully. “I can’t imagine they’ll be thrilled to learn they’ve had a djinn lamp sitting in their territory for three centuries.”
“What they don’t know won’t hurt them,” he says, shrugging. Three centuries of moving through territories that weren’t hishave made him careful with other people’s water. “And nobody’s going to know, Rakan. The lamp’s deep enough that even the merfolk patrols don’t reach that far down. I picked the place for a reason. Just like you picked me to bury it.”
There was never any other option except him. We both know that very well. Kasim might be my brother by creation, but Sigurd is the one I chose.
Now that everything’s settled, Sigurd is quick to prepare. He discards his shirt on the floor, his tentacles already flexing and twitching. He may be doing this particular dive for me, but he’s always enjoyed the water.
Once he’s completely naked, he turns toward me one last time. “For what it’s worth, I always knew this day would come. That we’d have to find the lamp again. I just thought it’d be you needing it back. Not the world needing you to use it.”
And then, he steps to the rail and goes over, sinking into the deep.
I count seconds. Twenty. Thirty. Forty-two. Then, I start counting the minutes. It’s not a bad thing that he’s taking his time, but it still makes me anxious enough to pace.
Finally, the dark water breaks, and he surfaces.
Moonlight catches the spray as he breaks through, throwing a fan of silver around his head. The lamp is cradled between hispalms. It’s both smaller and larger than I remember, rimmed with the crust of a place no light has reached in centuries.
He climbs back aboard slowly. Water drips off the tips of his tentacles in fat beads. One of them curls forward over his shoulder and steadies the lamp as he brings it across the deck.
I pick it up without a word. The metal is cold, just like I expected it to be. I’ve held him a thousand times across three thousand years. He has always been there when I reached for him. He is not there now. I shouldn’t be as relieved as I am.
“It hasn’t aged,” Sigurd muses. “Not a day.”
“Djinn lamps never do. And Kasim’s not exactly aging, either. He’s out there burning harpies. Not here, in my hands.”
Sigurd looks at the lamp I’m holding, then at my face. “It isn’t your hands that can chain your brother’s soul, Rakan.”
“I know,” I murmur. It’s part of what makes this so hard. This is my responsibility, my burden. Yet no matter how I look at it, I can’t truly solve the problem on my own.
“Will you ask Iris to help?”
A part of me wants to tell him no. The same part is already inventing solutions, alternatives, ways to spare her this. None of it would be true. The first thing she asked me would break it apart.
“Yes,” I say. “I’ll have to. Knowing her, she’ll leap at the chance.”
“Maybe.” Sigurd bends to retrieve his shirt from the rail. “But you’re still going to have to use your words for this one. And you’d better find good ones, Rakan. Better than you’ve ever found for anything.”
Coming from Sigurd, who is so notoriously taciturn, that’s almost ironic. But that doesn’t make it any less true. “I know that too.”
He pulls the shirt over his head without buttoning it. The tentacles easily slide over the fabric, a small economical movement I have always envied. He steps past me toward the wheelhouse. A moment later the engines turn over beneath us, and the yacht begins its slow swing back toward the city.
I stay at the rail with the lamp.
The lights of the city are still where they were — close enough to see, far enough to feel separate. My house is in there, and Iris is inside it, in my bed. She is angry with me, and alive because of me. By morning, she’ll know what else I’ve brought home, and what I plan to ask of her.
