Tiziri.

She was trained by Ammi Bakir, who'd spent twenty-odd years walking Ghardaïa's network and didn't talk much. Before he left, he gave her a squared-paper sheet, written by hand, with the order the sectors get walked in. It starts at the corner by the old reservoir. The reservoir has been out of service for years, and the sector is much easier to enter from the other side; people have told her more than once, and she shrugs and goes in the way she goes in. The sheet is still folded in four in the van's glovebox.

Her reflective vest is a size too big, and she's never asked for another. On her boots she swapped the laces for plastic zip ties: you cut them, put on new ones, and they don't work loose halfway through the night. None of it was chosen for how it looks. And it's still what you can spot on her from a hundred meters down an empty street. If you know someone who dresses exactly like that — for what it holds up under, not for what it says — this youth t-shirt suits them. The rest of her nights are told in her biography. Zip ties, by the way, are sold in any hardware store, and they hold up quite a bit longer than a lace.