Speed of Light (16 page)

“Howie’s cremains are ready for me to pick up. Since we aren’t sure who he is, no one can find his relatives. Should we hold a funeral for him?”

“Something official?” The idea of standing in for a family that loved him and would remember him pleased me. “We could do it ourselves in Auntie’s plot.”

“That’s not technically legal.”

“Not like she’s there. Who’s going to know?” I asked. I glanced at the clock as Tens drove down the
driveway. “Nelli, try not to worry so much, okay? We’re going to do right by the kids—we will, but it might take us a while.”

She hugged me goodbye, already on the phone with Tony to see if he could officiate Howie’s burial.

W
ith the portfolio safely stashed in my closet and Fara sleeping in the hall, I spent the predawn hours tossing and turning. I relived my reunion with Kirian over and over again, then watched him die at Ms. Asura’s hands, unable to save him. When we’d returned to the glen from rescuing the littlies, his body was gone.
Could she be telling the truth? Was he not really dead? Can he be alive and still appear at the window?
Logic told me no, but my heart wanted to insist on the impossible.

The aromas of frying dough and percolating coffee
drifted through the cracks of my window and up through the floor. I stretched, my injured foot pinned down by a warm furry stomach, with Custos draped across the foot of my bed. Mini curled over the top of my head like a crown.

I gingerly placed my feet on the carpet and realized the cut was much better. Custos whined.
Magic?

“Thanks, guys, it doesn’t hurt so much.” I petted her head and moved toward the window to inhale the fresh scents of early morning.

I checked out the street below. We were in the dawn time when the earth is lit with layers of maroon light like a red onion. I turned and saw the shadow of a man, a baseball cap pulled low over his eyes, his arms and legs crossed as he leaned against the brick building across the street.
Watching. Looking up at me
. It seemed as though he stared up at me for a moment before disappearing out of my sight. I hurried toward my bedroom door and flung it open.

Fara tumbled in. Wide awake, she bounced up, reaching inside her boot to pull a knife free while speaking a torrent. When I didn’t understand her, she repeated her question in English. “What happening?”

“What are you doing?” I glanced down and saw the pallet she’d made with her bags and a knitted blanket.

“You okay? Where you going?” She moved around my bedroom, checking the corners, behind things.

Without thinking, I answered honestly, “There was a man across the street. He was staring up here.”

She didn’t wait for me to finish my thoughts; instead
she raced downstairs and outside the house, the chains off her neck and in her other hand. Custos bounded after her. I ran back to my window in time to see her run down the alley and into the shadows.

Don’t get hurt. Please come back. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said anything
.

I don’t know how long I waited for her to return, but Tony kept snoring in his bedroom. I hadn’t heard his five a.m. alarm go off yet.

“Anything?” I asked as she came back inside.
Thank goodness you’re okay. If anything happened to you because of me—

She shook her head. “Tell me what you saw.”

“A man, athletic frame, taller than me maybe. He had a baseball cap on, pulled low.”

“Any writing, symbols, or anything?”

He leaned like he’d been there awhile. I squinted, trying to remember. “Maybe white squiggles, the letter z or something. I don’t know.” I blew out a frustrated breath. “Was it Nocti?”

“Maybe, but they don’t usually watch; they kill. Unless there’s a plan we don’t know about. I’ll have to think about it, speak with Tens.”

My stomach flipped. “Do you have to talk to Tens? I really don’t want Meridian to know I overreacted. Again.”

“He’ll keep quiet.” She pursed her lips.

I scanned the pile by my door. “What were you doing sleeping in the hall?”

“My job.”

I stared at her quizzically. “How is that?”

“They have to get past me to get to you. How are you going to sleep well wondering if you’re … What’s the word for
weakened
?”

“Vulnerable?”

“Yes, that’s it.” She nodded, repeating the word several more times.

“Oh.” I’d never had anyone sleep between me and danger before. I was always the one sleeping at the dragon’s mouth to protect the littlies from punishment at DG. I protected, not the other way around.

“You think you can go back to sleep now?”

“No.” I shook my head.
I need to bake
. “You can tell me more about Iran and your family.”

She shrugged and followed me into the kitchen. We spoke of everything and nothing and long minutes stretched when we didn’t need to talk at all.

Several hours later, Tony joked, “I’m living with a couple of mice—you two are so quiet.”

Fara and I didn’t mention he’d slept through the excitement as he dug into his four-cheese omelet, cinnamon rolls, and hash browns.

“Sorry.” I knew he wanted me to chatter incessantly like the girls I watched shopping in the streets below us, but keeping to myself was more than habit; it saved me beatings.
Hard to break that reinforcement
. I nibbled on sourdough toast and marmalade preserves.

“My English is no good.” Fara smiled at him with a
teasing glint and popped a piece of melon into her mouth.

Tony kissed us both on our foreheads and held up the cell phone. “You call me anytime with anything, okay? Anything at all.”

“We’ll be fine. We’re going to Nelli’s to sort files.”
And maybe find out more about my parents
. “Then we’ll see you at the cemetery for the boy’s funeral,” I said.

“Still. Call,” Tony said as he slipped out the door.

“He is very worry about you.”

I didn’t know how to reply, so I evaded with a question of my own. I ran soapy water in the sink. “What do you usually eat for breakfast?” I asked Fara. Whether someone picked leftover pizza, ice cream, or fruit, these choices told me everything. I knew people by what they put in their mouths. I needed to know her.

She shrugged. “What-even.”

“Whatever?” I asked.

She dipped her hands into the water to wash with a noncommittal shrug.

Frustrated, I accused Fara. “I don’t think your English is as bad as you want me to think it is. It’s a convenient excuse so you can listen to me and not have to answer my questions or so you can change the conversation easily.”

“Uh, maybe,” she said, her eyes cast down.

“See. How can we be friends if you lie to me?”
Let alone have the intimate partnership Fenestra and Protectors need. That I watch Meridian and Tens have every single day
.

“I’m not lying. You speak fast and use words I don’t always know.” Fara blanched.

“All the time?” I wanted to splash water at her.

“No?” She stopped.

“How. Slow. Do. I. Need. To. Talk?” I asked sarcastically.

She glared at me, her skin shades of cinnamon and cocoa powder, her eyes bittersweet chocolate drops.

“That’s a universal expression.” I wiped the omelet pan until the towel grew hot in my hands under the friction.

“You’re being silly,” she said. “What I eat? How important is that?”

“You’re being arrogant.” Food was one way I knew how to categorize people.

“Why?” She stopped, frowning.

“Because you waltzed in like I was having a party and you’re a few minutes late.” My life was hell on earth and where was she?

She tossed a dish into the sink, throwing soapsuds up. “I don’t—”

“Don’t. Don’t say you don’t understand.” I smacked the counter.

“I was going to say that I don’t intend to be arrogant. Do you think I wanted to wait? Don’t you think I asked about you? I knew where you lived, and I knew every lash of the belt and every casually thrown insult. I knew the moment they took you from the church, from Tony, the minute you were alone and scared. I came as fast as I could. No lie.”

I stopped. The fire in her eyes drained the anger in mine. “So tell me. Please?” I asked, deflated.

Fara gazed out the window as if she saw something very different than the streets of Carmel. “My
baba
, he didn’t care that I was a girl. I was supposed to be a boy. They think only boys can be one of them. But he believed my destiny was with you, with an Amordad. He knew to train me. To teach me. To be what I needed to be. His family hated this. They wouldn’t speak to him. They wanted him to apologize to Ahura Mazda. He wouldn’t. He said the Creators make no mistakes. And then he disappeared into the car of the secret police. Into the walls of a prison far from Qom.”

“What happened?” My heart beat in my chest so loud I thought she might hear it.
Where is Qom and who is Ahura Mazda?
Sometimes it wasn’t the wording Fara used; it was also the content that tripped me up.

She shivered. “They dumped his body in the dirt outside the prison. Called us traitors. Labeled our family unless we paid up and did what we were told. It wasn’t always this way in Iran.

“My mother remarried my uncle. He didn’t believe I could be one of the few. No
girl
is special! There was much discussion, negotiations behind closed doors. Everyone talked about me like I killed my father, like I brought this unholy upon us.”

“Why?”

She shrugged. “I’m a girl. That was reason enough. I talked to my baba about you before my tenth birthday. But no one else. They wouldn’t let me come to you. They wanted me to marry in my people. The boys … the boys
are the Protectors, not the girls. We take care of them. We have more little babies to train. We do not go out and make war on Dark.” She set a clean plate in the drainer so hard it broke, but she didn’t notice.

“My soon-husband was twenty years older than me. He wasn’t a Protector, but my family had strong bloodlines and he was willing to teach me how to be a proper wife. Plus he had friends in the police. He wanted many sons. I was the third wife. The first two died in childbirth. There was no place for me in my uncle’s house. I had to marry at fourteen. Or …”

“Or?”

“Or run away and come to you myself.” She paused, drawing a deep breath.

“You ran away across the world? From Iran to Indiana?” My eyes closed at her words. So often I’d thought of running but was never strong enough.
She did. For me
.

“I knew your name. I felt your pain. Your humiliation. Your terror. And I could do nothing for you but pray. I prayed and I prayed. All the times I was supposed to be kneeling to learn how to be a good girl, I prayed the Creators would send you an angel, to help you until I was strong enough to get away.”

“How did you?”
Oh, Fara, I know this pain too
.

“I hid in a caravan of medical supplies. I walked across the sand and hid. I worked, doing bad things, until I could pay for the container space on a ship to Canada. I snuck here to New York. I thought you were there. I
thought New York was all there was of this country. Two cities—New York and Los Angeles. I was wrong.” She managed a smile.

I couldn’t let her stop.
We’re more alike than I realized
. I pressed, “And then what?”

“I found a homeless teen center. I stayed there. I walked streets. I learned there were other ways to make money than do what I did. I listened.” The look on her face told me Fara’s apparent arrogance was more a defensive façade than truth.
I know that too
.

“How old were you?” I asked, afraid to hear her answer.
Too young. We’re always too young
.

“I was fourteen when I left home. It took me five years to get here.” She whispered as if even saying the words broke her again.

“Five years?” So many days and hours of uncertainty, pain, and exploitation.

She’d arrived in a country alone and with nothing.
Like me, only she didn’t have Tony looking for her
.

“Too much time in the city of New York.” She shuddered. “It took many months to walk here. When I crossed into Indiana, I felt the presence of my father. I prayed for his help. I realized it wasn’t him, but another like us. Tens. I knew his name and Meridian’s as their van passed me on the road. I didn’t know he knew me, until he came back. He feels of family, like Baba.”

“Oh … I wondered how you’d known to come here.” I began to understand Fara’s journey and why it took her so long. My anger faded completely.

“In my dreams, I saw you near the sign of glass … Rumi’s? With a little boy.”

Bodie?

“I used the computer to see where this is. I tried to be here faster. I know you needed me.” There was an apology in her tone.

I nodded. “Just don’t act like you don’t understand what I’m saying, unless you really don’t, okay?”

“I’m sorry. I listen. Sometimes it’s easier to let people think I do not understand. It gave me a way to defend myself. It’s a habit. My English isn’t perfect, but it’s okay.”

Her English was in many ways better than mine.
At least she speaks her truth
.

T
wilight dusted Riverside Cemetery in mauve. We gathered at Auntie’s plot with the air humid and fragrant with early summer lushness. While we waited for Nelli, Tens dug a small hole at the base of the plain headstone.

“We have about half an hour until the gates close.” Tony glanced at his watch.

Juliet stood apart from us, staring down at her mother’s new headstone. I started toward her as Fara walked over and started whispering. I watched Juliet’s shoulders relax.

Tens noticed and motioned me to stay put.
What did Fara say that made Juliet sigh away a little of her tension?

Nelli drove up. In the car next to her sat a Kirian look-alike. All-American, wholesomely handsome with a nice-guy air, he unfolded from the car holding a gallon ziplock bag filled with ashes.

“They left Howie’s cremains dropped on my desk.” Nelli shook her head ruefully.

“It’s really disrespectful. Hi, I’m Sergio Rafa.” He nodded at us, but his hands were full and he made no move to relinquish the ashes.