The red-eyed thing with teeth like broken cliffs dissolved into the night after its warning, but the warning did not stop the pull in Zaid's chest. Whatever slept inside that house tugged at him like a loose stitch in a garment; he would not leave it there to fray.
He stepped toward the door anyway. The house sat squat at the edge of the settlement, its windows like closed eyes. The air grew thin and cold as he moved closer, as if the world were inhaling around him. Then, as if from the roof of the world itself, Ifrit materialized — the dark presence Zaid had named. He had always been a messenger; tonight he walked beside him.
"Ifrit," Zaid said quietly. "Why are you here? You told me to come alone."
The thing's voice rolled like distant thunder. "I did. But I thought I would walk with you a little."
Zaid registered the oddity and kept walking. Ifrit had never interfered like this. He had always been the voice, not the shadow at the shoulder. A warning loosened itself into him: something was changing.
Something moved at the window. Zaid's first thought was Alina — the scarred girl — but what leaned to the glass had no human ease. It came forward suddenly, a face made of hunger: red eyes, teeth, a shadow-body that seemed to drink the pane's light. It lunged.
Ifrit's hand closed around the thing's arm with iron force. "Ghoul," he said. "They are drawn to dead children's bodies, especially girls."
The word fell like a cold stone in Zaid's gut. For a second — only one — a nameless possibility touched him and he did not let it be believed.
"Ifrit, hold it," he commanded. "Maybe she can still be saved."
Ifrit held. It was the kind of duty that showed in his chest — he kept things fastened there, pieces of time and memory like jagged coins. Zaid pushed the door.
The room was a ruin of crimson light and ruined quiet. He had expected horror; reality outpaced expectation. Alina sat bound to a chair. The world around her had been rearranged into cruelty: wounds, broken bone-sounds in the air, the smell of iron and old ruin. Her face was a map of pain. Zaid froze with a hole in his chest that was half grief and half terrible clarity.
Something inside him answered — not feeling but a furnace. The small boy's chest hollowed, then became a well. His pupils swallowed the light; his eyes turned black as if a night had risen where his sight had been. Darkness poured from him like a tide.
In an instant the ghoul Ifrit held dissolved as if bitten by frost. Zaid's hands became instruments of a power he had never borrowed before. He took Ifrit in a grip that was not gentle and demanded, voice not his own, "Who did this?"
Ifrit reeled, shocked by the voice pulling from Zaid. He did not know the boy could do this; he did not know the boy could speak thunder. In panic he said the only thing that leapt to his mind. "You — it was you!"
Zaid flung Ifrit away like a pebble. "Lies," he spat.
"No —" Ifrit screamed, then shifted to pleading. "You must take control. Fight it. Don't let whatever it is take you completely."
Zaid's hands went to his head. He clawed at himself, thrashing and throwing him down in a fury of noise and motion. The ground quivered under the assault of his will. Ifrit's eyes widened. "The ground will break," he cried. "Stop! I have to — "
He reached into the seam of his own chest and pulled out a small, bright thing — a shard of time wrapped in some old magic. He pressed it like a plug and the world hiccupped. Sound stilled. Motion froze. Then a flare, and the house unmade itself backward.
He woke in bed.
Morning poured through his window as if nothing had happened. His mother called him; the fights downstairs resumed their ordinary choreography: grandfather and uncle, aunt and grandmother—old grievances on loop. The funeral, the rickshaw, the bullies — they all droned on like a record played twice. Only the afterimage of a terrible thing lingered: Alina tied and ruined; Ifrit wrenching time.
Zaid knew, with a child's bluntness and an adult's terror, what had happened. He had cracked something. Ifrit had used the shard to rewind the night — to unmake some of the destruction. But why? And why had Zaid not remained where he had been? Why had he not been the one to return?
At school the memory arrived like a blow. The scarred girl was bullied, but this time the violence stayed in its place; the scene where she was bound did not unfold. Some details altered—the masked man did not appear, the ghoul not quite so close—but the pattern of the day folded over itself in an uneasy way that made Zaid's head swim. He climbed to the roof after class and called for Ifrit. Nothing answered.
That night he went again. He walked with the small torch on his mother's phone and the hoodie pulled up. When the red-eyed man came at the window, Zaid moved first — faster than any child should have been. He grabbed the creature's arm and held the face close enough to read the sorrow in it.
"Show me what you've been through," he ordered.
The man moaned. Images slid through Zaid: a life pinned to pain — taunts, blundering men, nights of hunger, the slow rotting of a man who had lost his way. Those memories filled him with something that felt like mercy. Zaid understood then — seeing past the monster's teeth was seeing an old man's ruin. He named the shape in the dark.
"You are her father," he said, soft as a vow. "I know now. I will protect your daughter. I will release you."
He hugged the thing that had been a horror and the thing folded into light and gone, leaving only a small warmth where it had been. The world, for a moment, made sense: pain, name, release.
Bolstered by that strange clarity, he strode into the house for real. The lights were on. The room reformed in a way memory could not predict. The intruder stood tall over Alina, hands doing what hands of cruelty do. The man's voice twisted into the kind of casual cruelty that grew from habit: "Oh, just a small boy. I thought I'd have to kill another adult like I killed your mother."
Alina's mother lay still; it was a picture of someone who had been cut out of the story. The intruder laughed and reached for the child. Zaid's eyes blackened and he felt the dark that had once overwhelmed him now answer to him. This time the dark waited on his command like a coiled animal.
He moved without hesitation. In one blink he unmade the intruder's arm. The man howled like a thing surprised by sunrise. "What are you?" he shrieked.
"Your death," Zaid said, and darkness folded into a blade without steel. The intruder fell apart where he stood. Zaid did not savor the moment; he was a boy who had taken on a price he did not yet understand. He moved to Alina, freed her, whispered something in her ear — a soft thing like a lullaby and a lock. She closed her eyes and fainted into fragile sleep. When he left the house, the night felt hollowed, as if he had cut one thread from a tapestry and the pattern had shifted.
He had changed something fundamental: the timeline of that night, the ledger of the world. But Ifrit was nowhere. The shard had been used; the man with the mask had not appeared to greet him. A small worry blurred into a larger one: if he had reset a thing, something else ought to have rebalanced it. He should not have been alone with the consequences.
Morning's sirens and police lights stitched the settlement into a new pattern. When the family arrived at Alina's home, the same officers who had interviewed Zaid before stood in tight faces. Zaid's mother asked, voice thin with worry, "What happened? Is Alina okay?"
"She's alive," the officer said, shoulders tight. "But she'll be damaged with memory and fear for a long time. Her mother was killed. The intruder… was cut in half right in front of her. She's repeating one name." He looked at Zaid with a weight that felt like accusation. "Zaid. Z-a-i-d."
Zaid's mother glanced at him, lightning quick. He stepped forward and told the man he could ask anything. The officer led him a little away and spoke low.
"First your uncle, now this girl," he said. "Things follow you. Do you know anything?"
Zaid's reply was as blunt as the boy he was. "Bad things happen in the world. I'm not everywhere. If I knew, I'd tell you."
The officer studied him like a man looking at a small instrument he could not name. "How old are you?"
"Don't know. Maybe five," Zaid said.
Five, the officer muttered, and then smiled, half-sad. "You talk like a detective. Don't carry all of this alone. You're too young. I can help."
"I will tell you everything when I know everything," Zaid said.
The officer softened and let him go. "What will happen to Alina?" Zaid asked.
"We've done background checks on her relatives," the officer said briskly, perhaps too brisk. "Her grandmother will take her in. They look fine. She'll be safe with them."
Saeed and Irsa hovered at his shoulder. They asked questions quietly on the walk home—how was Alina, would she come back to school, what had the police said. Saeed's voice trembled between bravado and fear. Irsa's eyes were bright.
"Do you think she'll come back?" Irsa asked.
Saeed shrugged, not wanting to be wrong. "Maybe she will. Maybe she won't. Kids like this… they need time."
Zaid answered in the small flat way that had become his habit. "She won't come for some time. She needs to heal."
They walked in a small circle of ordinary things, and Alina caught his eye across the crowd. For one breath they held each other's look—a strange, compass-point glance that made his chest click like a lock. Her face softened into a small, almost shy smile. She blushed as if remembering warmth.
Something did not sit right. He had placed a forgetting on her at the house — a small, tender cipher meant to shelter her from the worst images. Why had the spell not taken? Why did her eyes hold a recognition he had not expected?
That night the roof watched him with a weight he could not see. He pretended to sleep because sleep was a costume he could put on when he needed others to think him whole. But his mind churned a single, relentless question: Ifrit was gone. The timeline had been cut and stitched back, but the thread still frayed. He had fixed one thing, but the ledger's ink had not dried.
Something in the dark watched from the neighbor's roof. It made no sound, only a presence like a held breath, and Zaid did not notice because he was thinking too loud. He had saved a life and still felt the quiet, hungry ache of not-yet. The world, it seemed, was patient — it would wait for him to learn everything the hard way.
He had changed Alina's fate. He had altered the night. He had not, however, solved the ledger.
And somewhere, far up among the tiles and satellite dishes, two eyes glinted.