She stayed pressed against the wall, barely daring to breathe as the soldiers came. The prisoners in the cells beyond that she had thrown the rocks at were making a loud enough noise to distract them, but she hoped against hope that their eyes were not sharp enough in the dark to make her out where she was clinging to the wall.
They didn't. Loretta breathed, and doubled back in the opposite direction.
She had two golden hairpins still embedded in the curls on her head, and the heavy old lock gave way to the bent end of one with ease. She wasn't sure what she had expected on the other side of the door, but it definitely wasn't another darkened passage. When she reached the end of the passage, she laid into the second lock with even greater urgency, soon discovering that Akil's prison lay within a maze of locked doors and underground tunnels. She was thankful that she'd had a moment of brilliance and locked each of the doors from the inside once she had broken in, and she could only hope that she'd be thankful in hindsight, because she had no idea at the time how she was going to get out.
Nine doors later, and she knew that Akil was on the other side of the tenth door. She knew it, just as well as she knew he had to have known she was there too.
"All your fighting to get home, all your fretting and anguish and suffering, and you finally got what you wanted."
Loretta's hand froze on the lock at the sound of the voice behind the door. His voice.
"Yet why am I not surprised to see that it was not enough for you, Loretta? What strange circumstance moves heaven and hell to bring you back into these cursed lands? You should have left us to our damnation."
She felt joy and pain in explicit measures at the sound of his barely audible sentences as she unlocked the door. She pushed it open slowly, unsure of what she would find on the other side. "Akil," she whispered into the darkness, as she slipped into the tiny cell and pushed the door shut quietly behind her.
"Loretta," he whispered back in a hoarse voice, "the girl who tricked me all along, has now returned."
"Akil, please," she searched for him in the dark. In the roof of the cell there was an opening, a long and narrow shaft that somewhere far above them broke into day. The pitiful light that fell down the shaft wallowed in confusion when it hit the open space of the cell, barely able to reach the floor with its hazy patterns of daylight. It was enough light to just make out the edge of Akil's form, leaning against the far wall.
"Go away Loretta," he said in a low and threatening voice. She could hear the clink of chains. Even locked within this complex prison, he was still deemed dangerous enough to be chained to the wall.
"I'm not leaving you here," Loretta told him in an even voice. All her hope in their reunion was fading fast. She had become caught up in the excitement of seeing him again, and now that she did, she realised she was too late, her crimes against him were too great. She took a step closer to him, and he shifted himself fluidly into a standing position. They had not hurt his body it seemed.
"Get out," he said.
"Akil, please! I cannot change what I did. I cannot change that it happened, though I have wished I could every moment that I am still breathing, from the moment I realised I loved you through to this moment right now." The profile of his face was silhouetted perfectly in the diffracted light from the narrow shaft above them. His jaw tightened at her confession of love.
Akil made her feel senseless things that no one else had ever invoked in her, like the strange sensation that despite his anger, all she wanted to do in that moment was touch his face and kiss along the line of his jaw. It was unbelievably irrational. They stood in the darkness, with only the dull patch of light between them for the longest moment, before Akil dropped back to the ground.
"I never thought I would see you again," she dropped the tone of her voice as she crouched down to the ground across from him.
"And yet, never again somehow seems too soon," he hissed.
"If you would listen to me, I could explain."
Akil jerked his wrists against the manacles, clenching them into tight balls and looking purposefully away from her toward the wall. It was the only way he could protest. "I have no desire to listen to another word from your lying mouth," he spat the words out, and his eyes flashed a dark shade that seemed almost red.
"I'm going to release you," she told him, taking a step closer. He turned to face her again now, and she felt as though the hate in his glare could have drilled a hole right through her.
"I don't need you," he said defiantly.
She took another step closer, and he pushed himself up off the ground again. With horror she noticed the tiny beads of blood that shaped themselves along the edges of the marks where the blackened manacles contacted his skin. Anger was a powerful painkiller.
But anger burned in Loretta's heart too, anger for everything she had fought through, every moment she had lived, surviving the lamp and then all the horrors that had awaited her return, only for this to be where their journey ended. She knew she had never done anything out of cruel intention, but it was far too late for that to be justified, except by her own anger at the unfairness of it all, and the self pity for the forsaken creature she had become in Morocco. Perhaps she was destined to end up just like Akil, living out a bitter, twisted and pointless existence. It was with a jolt she realised that perhaps she already was.
"Sit down!" she growled at him, her own anger now bordering on reckless, "You think I don't know what I have become?" she asked him, her eyes a little wild, "I know exactly what I am, and I have a fair understanding of what I am capable of, so despite your anger and what may or may not be felt between us, I would recommend that you sit the hell down and let me do this."
He sat, questioning nothing that she said, and she slid the hairpin into the first of the locks that held him and set to work.
So close to her own fingers, Akil's trembled. She wasn't sure if it was for his anger, for his muscle strain from being bound in that position too long, or for how it felt for him to be in this proximity to her. The latter she certainly felt herself, and it took all of her concentration and focus not to fumble over her work.
Her grip on the pin slipped and her fingertips brushed against his wrist as she moved to catch it. The feeling was ten times worse than the very first time they had touched in Rama. Her arm was flung back by the force of it, and the pin went skittering across the floor into darkness.
She didn't wait to see how Akil would react, instead she turned away and shifted the new and reckless energy inside her body, the energy she had been working to control ever since she arrived on the top of the mountain and set the gate house on fire, she moved it out into her fingertips, and beyond. The room burst into light for a mere second as the flame and smoke peeled out of her skin and through her palms to dance captive in the air over her fingertips.
The initial light was blinding, and she saw Akil move his hands to shield his face. She located the pin and the flames burst like bubbles back into darkness as she crouched to pick it up and then walked back to Akil in the dark.
"I'm sure you'll get better at controlling that," he noted sourly.
"Do you want me to use this hairpin to poke out your eyeballs or to release you, Akil Te Ahi? You have to choose one or the other." She crossed her arm over her chest and with the other held the pin out under his nose.
"You're serious," he said with a sudden, daring grin. "While I am curious to know how powerful you really are, I'm not so curious to learn it by fighting with you right here and now while I am still in chains," he said calmly, holding his wrists out for her this time.
Her heart shuddered, and she robotically returned to the lock on his manacles. The way he had mentioned fighting with her 'right here and now' sounded like something that was for certain but only delayed, not something that was hypothetical.
To pick both locks took much longer than it would have normally taken her, but Loretta didn't care, her mind was interred in her own thoughts. The truth was that she had committed an unforgivable crime against him, and she knew it. Her desperate desire to make right what wrong she had done, and rescue him because she loved him was the fuel she had needed to keep her going and give her strength to overcome her experience back on Earth.
But now that intense passion had served its purpose. She was back in the lamp and Akil was alive, and she would pay back her debt and free him.
So a new plan began to form in her mind. The one thing the last few weeks of her life had given her was a desire to do something more with her existence than just survive. It was a feeling that hadn't been there since her father had passed away.
Her plan in its infancy was two-fold. Even if she could never return to her own timeline and life as she had known it, she could still live out her existence in some kind of peace. She would head toward the north of the Lamp, to the lands farthest away from Misbah and all that reminded her of the man who stood before her now.
But to do that she would need the connection between her and Akil severed. A life bound to someone who hated you was not a way to live. However awful the Djin king no doubt was, this was where the first fold of her plan came into action.
She intended to face the Djin king with or without Akil, and if he could not show her how to return home to her own timeline, then she would force him to help her severe the connection between her and Akil. Failing all of the above, her wildest and darkest thought was to help Hess to kill the Djin king, irrespective of the fear for her own life – for what was her own life really worth now, without family and without friends? If they succeeded in assassinating the Djin king, they would free the Jinni from being forced to sacrifice their children to feed the Lamp. Hess had sound reasoning. The Djin King was no god, and if he was no longer alive then perhaps some other way could be found. Because no matter what way she flipped the information in her mind, she couldn't believe that such a beautifully created world could only ever be in existence because it survived on the sacrifice of its children.
Of that much Loretta was certain.
When her grandmother had taught her how to knit, she'd taught her several important lessons. If a mistake was made somewhere early on in the weaving, a mistake that caused the entire appearance of the creation to be ugly, unbalanced and unusable, then the only answer was to unravel from the thread that you currently held in your hand, all the way back to the original mistake. The Djin king was her thread, the thread that once unravelled would lead her to the root of the problem.
The second lock sprang open, and fell from Akil's wrist. She took a wary step back, balancing her weight lightly between her feet, planted and ready to flee like Sameh had taught her. Out of the corner of her eye she checked the door was still ajar for her to make a quick exit.
She had expected some kind of baleful wrath from Akil as soon as he was freed, but all he did was rub his wrists gingerly and relax his head back against the rough stone wall with an audible sigh of relief. He stayed silent for a long time, the knowledge of freedom clearly too pleasurable for him not to savour it.
Finally she grew impatient, she knew time was short. It would only be so long before her arrival was discovered and known, and she personally preferred the idea of finding the Djin king before he found her.
"Look, Akil, I am sorry I destroyed life as you knew it. Perhaps now you can consider the debt paid," the words sounded harsher than she intended, even as they left her lips. She couldn't bring herself to apologise for destroying his life because he'd never had a life anyway. Half horrified at what she had said, and yet still intent on following through with her thoughts, she turned her heels and left him there.