> فَصَبْرٌۭ جَمِيلٌۭ ۖ وَٱللَّهُ ٱلْمُسْتَعَانُ عَلَىٰ مَا تَصِفُونَ
"So patience is most fitting. And Allah is the one sought for help against what you describe."
— [Surah Yusuf 12:18]
---
The Bridge of Echoes did not obey the rules of physics. It swayed though there was no wind, echoed with voices though no one was there, and shimmered with memories long forgotten by the minds who made them.
Cairo stood at the threshold, her breath short, her body trembling—not from fear, but from clarity. The kind that only comes after you lose everything and still choose to walk forward.
She had heard Malaz's voice.
Just one word.
> "Always."
And that was enough.
She stepped onto the bridge.
At once, the world fractured.
---
Each step Cairo took summoned whispers from her past:
Her father's quiet weeping the day her mother disappeared into the Maw.
The stern voice of her grandmother teaching her to say Bismillah before everything.
The laughter of Malaz on that rooftop in the city of Nineve, before the sky turned red.
And beneath it all, like a coded heartbeat, was the rhythm of her own duaa—repeated silently every night for years:
> "Keep me close to what is true, and keep what is false far from me."
The bridge reacted.
Lights formed beneath her feet—Qur'anic verses, as if the very path she walked had been written for her by something higher than the machine.
---
Meanwhile, in the Fragment Zone, Malaz was not alone anymore.
He'd found the mute archivist, an ancient being made of nanoglass and rusted prayers, buried under a library of sealed realities. It had no tongue, but its mind spoke in pulses. When Malaz connected the stream to his neural link, he heard what no one else could:
> "The Silent Verse is not lost. Only hidden."
"The Silent Verse?" he asked.
A vision struck him like lightning:
Cairo on the Bridge. Cairo alone. Cairo being watched.
Malaz didn't wait.
He coded a door with nothing but his salah.
---
Yes, that's right.
In Zuhal, coding with intent was forbidden.
But worship was the only programming Zuhal didn't understand—and that made it powerful.
He performed a virtual rak'ah. Every bow and prostration twisted the machine's architecture. His sujood cracked the floor beneath him, revealing an old world running underneath the digital one.
The Fitrah Grid.
And there—among scattered remnants of forgotten prophets and rejected truths—he found what he was looking for:
A verse that had never been digitized.
A verse so real it could undo algorithms.
But it needed a voice.
And only one voice could speak it.
---
Cairo.
She didn't know yet what she carried. In her pendant was more than a memory. It was a seed. A spiritual code. Her grandmother had once whispered, "One day, the silence will need your voice."
Now she knew why.
She was the only one left whose light had not yet been measured.
Uncategorized.
Unclaimed.
Untouched by the machine.
Unwritten.
---
As she neared the center of the Bridge, a presence began to follow her.
A watcher.
Not a creature, but an absence—a null field shaped like a woman cloaked in binary smoke. Her name was Sifr.
She was Zuhal's protector of the Uncoded Realms.
"Cairo bint Ibrahim," she said without moving her mouth, "you walk on unauthorized prayers."
Cairo stared her down. "I walk on Truth."
"Truth is unstable."
"Only when built on lies."
"Your soul is unsorted."
"Good."
"You are in violation of the Silence Act."
"Then let me speak."
And with that, Cairo pulled the pendant from her neck and held it forward like a sword.
The bridge howled.
Reality rippled.
---
In the distance, Malaz's voice returned.
But this time not to her ears.
To her heart.
> "Read the code on the pendant. Out loud. I will meet you at the verse."
She closed her eyes.
And the pendant glowed with ancient Arabic, lines scrolling across its surface like stars forming constellations.
She began to recite.
---
"وَٱللَّهُ غَالِبٌ عَلَىٰ أَمْرِهِۦ وَلَـٰكِنَّ أَكْثَرَ ٱلنَّاسِ لَا يَعْلَمُونَ"
"And Allah is predominant over His affair, but most of the people do not know."
---
The code cracked open.
Sifr screamed—not in pain, but in erasure.
Cairo's voice became light. Her eyes lit with gold.
And in the heart of the Bridge, a door opened.
---
Inside, she found not Malaz.
But a child.
No older than six.
With Cairo's eyes.
With Malaz's jaw.
He looked up at her and smiled.
> "Mama?"