Violence alone, she knew, would accomplish nothing.

Anger without direction was only

hot air, there and gone. She'd seen this happen over and over to her own people. Jinn
had tried to flout the rules, to exercise their natural abilities despite the restrictions of
Clay law, and they'd all
suffered. Daily, dozens of Jinn bodies had been strung up in the square like bunting,
more charred at the stake, still others beheaded, disemboweled.
Their divided efforts were no good.
Only the unification of Jinn might hope to affect real change, but such a feat was hard to
hope for in an age where Jinn had fled their ancestral homes, scattering across the
globe in search of work and shelter and anonymity. Their numbers had always been
small, and their physical advantages had offered them much protection, but they'd lost
hundreds of thousands of people over the last centuries. What was left of them could
hardly be cobbled together overnight.
The fire snapped in its brick cove, flames flickering urgently. Alizeh wiped her eyes.
It was rare that she allowed herself to think on these cruelties. It did not comfort her to
speak aloud her agonies the way it did for some; she did not enjoy reanimating the
string of corpses she dragged with her everywhere. No, Alizeh was the kind of person
who could not dwell on her own sorrows for fear of drowning in their bottomless depths;
it was her physical pain and exhaustion tonight that'd weakened her defenses against
these darker meditations—which, once torn free from their graves, were not easily
returned to the earth.
Her tears fell now with abandon.
Alizeh knew she could survive long hours of hard labor, knew she could persevere
through any physical hardship. It was not the burden of her work or the pain in her
hands that broke her—it was the loneliness. It was the friendlessness of her
existence; the days on end she spent without the comfort
that might be derived from a single sympathetic heart.
It was grief.
The price she still paid with her soul for the loss of her parents' lives. It was the fear she
was forced to live with every day, the torment that was born from an inability to trust
even a friendly merchant to spare her the noose.
Alizeh had never felt more alone.
She scrubbed at her eyes again and then, for the umpteenth time that day, searched
her pockets for her handkerchief. Its disappearance had not bothered her so much the
first few times she searched for it, but the loss was beginning to worry her now that she
considered it might not be misplaced—but well and truly lost.
The handkerchief had been her mother's.
It was the only personal possession Alizeh had salvaged intact from the ashes of her
family home. Her memories of the dreadful night she lost her mother were strange and
horrible. Strange that she remembered feeling warm⠀”truly warm⠀”for the first time
in her life. Horrible that the roaring flames that engulfed her mother had only made
Alizeh want to sleep. She still remembered her mother's screams that night, the wet
handkerchief she'd used to cover her daughter's face.
There'd been so little time to flee.