Femi and Babu
Bastet drags Siru and Marcus through the collapse that once unmade them, and they wake as Femi and Babu into Salugi's raid on the Marrakech safehouse — four cats and three people with minutes to get out, and a radio DJ already counting in her last song.
The Lisbon tram-vision does not let go: Bastet, first god either lead has ever seen, hauls Siru Agar and Marcus Gray through the dying Giza listening chamber and makes them wear the names they failed under, Femi and Babu, because the dark that took them once is taking them again. They wake into a riad already coming down. Salugi timed the strike to the waking, Sahara Shadows cut the beams, and Vivek, Nuru, Koba, Senjo and Bassie barely reach the alley — three people, four cats, map case already gone. Nuru runs a night-frequency to Radio Atlas, where Amelia is live; she plays out with a last in-studio number that is a goodbye to the red city and a coded all-clear to every cat on the band, then throws in as cat five while the transmitter mast comes down on the street they used. Five together is a force you can feel in the body. Salugi still wins the round: Lisbon was never about Bassie, four in one box was to wake the old souls where he could watch, and at the shuttered spice stall he opens the book he has been saving since 1851 as the seekers, mapless, turn toward a Geneva lot number.