Elara
The plane descended into Istanbul at six in the morning, when the city was still mostly dark except for the minarets.
I'd been awake since somewhere over the Atlantic. I'd spent four hours reading the consortium documentation and watching the darkness outside the window.
Then, suddenly, lights.
Istanbul from the air at dawn looked like someone had scattered a jar of amber and gold across both sides of a black channel. The Bosphorus was visible even from altitude.
I pressed my face close to the cold oval window.
The Hagia Sophia was somewhere down there in the thinning dark. The streets where the Byzantine empire had been a living thing before the city was taken, before the minarets were added, before nine hundred years of hands had moved objects from place to place until no one
