Leila woke before her alarm, the way she always woke in the picking season. Some part of her had been tracking the hours through the night and knew when enough of them had passed. She lay still for a moment on her side with the window dark and the room dark and listened to the house. Her mother was not yet up. The street outside was silent.
She had set the alarm as a backup, not as the primary waking mechanism. The alarm had not woken her once in the past seven seasons. Each morning she woke between five and twenty minutes before it and lay in the dark for the interval, completing whatever remained of sleep, and then rose before the alarm could sound and turned it off. She had begun to wonder whether she needed the alarm at all. But she kept it set. The habit of setting it was the habit of not relying entirely on the body's unreliable internal clock — a practical precaution against a day when she might oversleep, the session reduced, the buds past their picking moment by the time she reached the field. The alarm was there for the morning she might need it. She had not needed it yet.
She dressed in the dark by habit. The picking clothes were on the chair where she had put them the night before — the long-sleeved shirt, the thick cotton trousers, the older cardigan she kept specifically for the early mornings in the field. The jasmine season ran through the summer and into September, and in July and August the pre-dawn air outside Nabeul was warm enough that she needed nothing heavy. But in late September the nights had a cold edge to them and the fields held the chill well past sunrise, and she dressed now with the cardigan over the shirt and was glad of it.