Marketplace

The cold comes through the morning in Algiers, and with it the salt air - thin, cutting, the kind that stays in your throat. I've met it before, fifty-six days ago in a room with four people I hold close: Idris, Zyevaer, Orady, and Syaryn, the circle I keep returning to in this city. We'd gathered to check on work we share, and found ourselves talking about things beyond our own power to fix - cosmic weather, as we called it, only half joking. Zyevaer offered something quiet then. Now the air brings it back to me, and I remember what it felt like to be among them, the shape of that conversation.