Sandi

Elena stands beside Mitra at the check-in counter, passports in hand. The Vienna leg will get them out clean, and Boswell’s promised London air is the next breath waiting. She doesn’t look back up to the mezzanine—not at me, not at Tarmo.

A few paces away, Karim signs his own boarding forms. Malta first, then Marrakesh. He’s already said his goodbyes in private, brief enough to leave no room for argument. His smile is thin, his eyes somewhere else—maybe on the sunlit courtyards of Tangier, maybe on a life before any of this.

I linger by the stairs, watching without bothering to hide it. I already know I’m not moving—not because Tarmo decided, but because I have. Mikael stands a step behind me, as neutral and unreadable as ever, the wingman who never picks a side except Tarmo’s, although lately he’s been positioning himself as something more.

No one mentions Asdar. The wolf who vanished once we crossed from Kandovan to Yerevan stays a ghost—with all the reasons why I got kidnapped and rescued in the first place. Just an absence pressing at the edges of my thoughts. Not gone, only waiting.

The boarding calls begin to roll through the hall speakers, polite but insistent, and lines form for the shuttles. Elena glances at me once across the marble expanse—nothing dramatic, just a look that lodges like a pebble in the side of the day.

By the time the last of the luggage cases slides into the vans, the splits are set:

West through Vienna.
South through Malta.
And the rest of the game stays here in Yerevan, under Tarmo’s eye.

Outside, the city keeps moving as if none of the players shifted at all. Somewhere beyond these streets, the wolf still doesn’t appear.

---

Back in the suite, Tarmo slides a sealed packet across the table to me. No explanation, no discussion. On the envelope, a single word: Hargeisa.

“You’ll read it alone,” he says.

Mikael stands by the window, silent, his eyes on my face, searching for the slightest crack.

I know better than to ask. Africa’s been on the horizon since before Kandovan. Now it isn’t if—only how soon.

Asdar

I pad the edge of a desert night—unseen, silent as the shadows that follow me. Wolves don’t take orders, but we know how to keep pace, even at a distance.

The worn leather pouch rests in my jaws, faint tang of sweat and cedar. Its weight, the promise folded inside, waiting for its turn to surface.

Preparing for what’s coming.

Karim

Yerevan falls behind under slate skies. In the pre-dawn calm, lines of departure split us apart.

I disembark for Marrakesh with one bag and a plan—Tangier calling me like an old lover. In my head, the route is already set: north by train, a coffee in the medina, the return to the noise of tour buses and the chaos of a life I understand. Whether the game will truly let me go is another matter entirely.

My connection comes in low-band and scratchy somewhere past the exit gate. The voice on the other end needs no introduction: Hasna.

---

“Last call for passengers on flight—” The announcement blurs into white noise. I watch the slow shuffle toward the gate, boarding pass already warm in my hand, mind three steps ahead, as always—routes, contingencies, who will be waiting on the other side.

My phone vibrates once, insistently. Hasna.

I almost let it ring out. Almost. Then I step out of the line, thumb sliding to accept.

“Madame Bilal.”

“Karim.” Her voice is steady, not hurried. That’s my first warning. Hasna only sounds like that when the real message is not in the logistics. “You’ve heard by now that Elena has severed cooperation between CYcrds, the university, and Mr. Amellal.”

A muscle in my jaw tightens. “That is news to me.”

“Good. Then we can skip the part where you pretend this is just an operational detail.” A pause, small but deliberate. “Do you remember why we asked you to be our sentinel at UNESCO for her?”

I almost answer with the usual: hmm my natural charm, competence, languages, field record. She doesn’t leave enough silence for that.

“It wasn’t your CV,” Hasna continues. “It was Youssef.”

The name hits like a chord plucked under the breastbone. The boarding line inches forward without me.

“Your cousin in Tangier. The one who can walk the Medina with his eyes closed and still point to every door that used to belong to someone else. The one who knows which tiles were laid by whose grandfather, which courtyards lost their shade trees when ‘restoration’ came.”

The airport smell—disinfectant, stale coffee, recycled air—falls away for a second. I can almost taste dust and orange peel, hear Youssef’s voice bouncing off whitewashed walls.

“You told me once,” Hasna says, “that Youssef remembers so the city cannot be rewritten by people with better printers. That is why you became sentinel, Karim. Not to protect a man’s ambitions, not to offer cover to foundations with pretty names. To stand between memory and those who turn it into collateral.”

The gate agent calls my flight again. I don’t move.

“Elena was your file because she listened,” Hasna adds, softer now. “She walked those alleys with Youssef. She understood that heritage is not neutral. If Tarmo has chosen to make it a weapon, your duty is not to stand at his shoulder. It is to decide which side of the door you guard.”

I watch a family hurry past, children dragging small suitcases like mismatched satellites.

“You’re telling me to abandon my calling,” I say.

“I’m telling you to remember why you took that call,” Hasna answers. “Youssef would call it abandonment to step away from a man who builds his houses on other people’s graves.”

Silence stretches, thin and taut. On the other end of the line, Hasna waits. She never begs.

I exhale slowly. In my mind’s eye, the Medina narrows around me: carved doors, flaking blue paint, Youssef’s hand resting on a wall as if on a shoulder. Sentinel of UNESCO, sentinel of my cousin’s stubborn memory—it has always been the same job. I just let other people rename it.

“Understood,” I say at last. “When I land, I will not report to my tourists. I’ll report to you. And to the file that started in Tangier, not in Geneva.”

Hasna’s answer is simple. “That will be enough, Karim. For now.”

Her voice drops, not command but something closer to appeal. “You’re not just a guide. You’re a guardian. You told me once you’d never be a piece on someone else’s board. Now is the time to prove it.”

When the line clicks off, her words still hang there: not just a guide, a guardian.

If this is a board, I’m done pretending to be a pawn.

The scent of Tangier’s markets seems to rise from memory, but it isn’t nostalgia. It’s the first step back into someone else’s war—and this time, if I go back in, it will be on my own terms.

I.Ph.