It began not with one ember, but a thousand. Dawud's broadcast coals, stoked by the clerics' condemnations and the militias' vows, smoldering white-hot in the very heart of every Cairene. Then, they blazed.
From his new hideout—a crumbling Nasser-era apartment complex on the periphery of Tahrir Square—Dawud watched the city twist. It was not one riot, but a fractal explosion of a hundred thousand one-man wars, all waged in his name. The scope was biblical. Tens of thousands poured into the city's veins. They didn't march in columns; they surged, a human tsunami with two dueling tides. Out of the sprawling northern suburbs and the labyrinthine backstreets of Bulaq and Imbaba, they came. The destitute, the sick, the desperate, the ones who had known the Dawud Effect as a tangible possibilit
