Zahra has the alert, sleepless beauty of someone who has spent too many nights watching doors. Her face is narrow and expressive, with a small scar cutting through her left eyebrow and a faint network of sun freckles across her nose. Her hands are ink-stained at the fingertips, but the rest of her skin is meticulously scrubbed, as though cleanliness could erase the transactions she records. She moves with a restless, riverlike economy, never quite standing still, always shifting her weight as if feeling an unseen current beneath the floor. Her smile is quick, bright, and usually one second too late. The unexpected contradiction is that her polished professional appearance is paired with bare, mud-stained feet whenever she is working near the canals, because she claims shoes make it harder to feel a weak plank or a hidden drop beneath the water.