The camp's terror was a thick mist, and in the center of it was Ziad, a small, quietly suffering epicenter of the new world. Dawud watched him from the doorway of his clinic. The boy was not jaywalking anymore. He was standing apart, his body unnaturally still, his eyes watching a desert hawk overhead with a focus more than human. The other children avoided him, their play flowing around the territory he held as water flowing around a rock.
The camp's reaction was a thing of bits and pieces. Some, the very religious, tried to fit this new twist into what they already knew. "He is touched by the jinn," one old woman whispered, though not disapprovingly. "A protector spirit watches over him." Others, the practical and the frightened, perceived only a deviation. A thing that was not right. N
