“You see, he had a wife and a little girl,” she went on quietly, drawing shapes in the sand with the stick. “He lost them both in the fire that burned our house down. He lost them, he lost everything.”
Leila’s chest tightened. Abdullah was carrying a weight much heavier than she imagined. His anger was a pain that ran deeper than a general dislike of her.
“That’s terrible.”
“Yasmine. His daughter. She was smart, adventurous, and sweet-natured. I miss her little laugh so much. But he won’t talk about it. He hardly talks about anything. Except to tell me when I do something stupid.”
The fire crackled merrily, completely harmless within its wall of sand. Leila watched the flames, almost able to feel the unbearable heat against her skin and the smoke burning in her lungs, the roar of an uncontrollable inferno in her ears. She swallowed back her own awful memories.
“How did it happen? The fire?”
Amina stared into the distance. “Someone threw a petrol bomb through a window.”
“Who would do that?” Leila gasped. “Why?”
“Those are the questions we’ve been asking the last year. The police couldn’t trace it, and neither of us could think of anyone who would have done it. It seems to have been completely random.”
An unsolved arson. A murderer still running free. Leila had to agree that the injustice of it all would drive anyone crazy. Crazy enough to blow away the three men who attacked his sister.
Amina let out a long sigh. “We should try and get some sleep.” She pushed herself up and broke the stick into several smaller pieces, then tossed them onto the fire.
A shower of sparks flew into the air. Leila stared into the flames, not feeling particularly tired. Her pulse was still racing. But it would be best if she at least closed her eyes. She lay on a blanket a few feet away from their only source of warmth and stared up at the canopy of stars instead. Sleep could not be found among visions of fire and of the three dead men, now buried beneath the sand.
• • •
The three-camel caravan trotted straight for the jagged peaks about five miles in the distance. Swaying on top of her desert ship, Leila held up her water bottle and examined the lightly-clouded brown tint and flakes of leaves or who-knew-what swirling in the cloudy liquid. She frowned.
Dirt in general wouldn’t make her sick, but there was no way to test what sort of bacteria might be lurking in the water they’d retrieved from the oasis. She might regret it later.
But she wasn’t going to find herself in a situation without any again. Not if she could help it. With a shrug, she put the bottle to her lips. A few days ago, she would have drunk it without hesitation. The water splashed down her chin, unable to hold it steady as she bounced in the saddle.
“But why can’t we go around the mountains?” Amina asked her brother. Leila slipped her bottle back into her bag, also curious to know why Abdullah was leading them this way. “Do we really have to go through them?”
“Shortcut,” he grunted. “I want to reach El-Misbah tonight. There’s a lesser-traveled road from there to Saint Catherine. So we’ll rest in El-Misbah for one night, then get to Saint Catherine by tomorrow evening.”
“El-Misbah,” Amina said excitedly. “The old mining town? I hear it’s completely abandoned now.”
Abdullah merely scowled and shook his head, then kicked his mount into a trot.
Leila wrapped her scarf over her nose and mouth and scrunched down on top of Fatma as minuscule grains of sand pelted them. The wind was picking up. Within minutes, raging howls drowned out any attempts at conversation. On her left, Amina huddled beneath her wrappings, gripping the reins until her knuckles turned white.
Leila shifted in her seat. It did nothing to ease the ache in her backside.
How was Abdullah able to stand this? He rode ahead of them, tightly wrapped in scarves, sitting straight on top of his ride while swaying gently with each sweeping gait.
He must be part camel.
An hour passed, and the sharp mountains still loomed another mile before them. The terrain was harder to navigate, with bus-sized boulders and deep ravines to go around.
Finally Amina demanded that her brother stop. He led them along the bottom of a ravine until they were underneath an outcrop. Although still windy, it wasn’t nearly as bad as out in the open. They all jumped down and stretched their stiff limbs.
Despite the feeling the trip was dragging on, they were making good progress. Abdullah confirmed they would reach El-Misbah by nightfall. Then, as usual, he wandered away. His clothing whipped in the wind, hands on hips, eagle eyes searching the cloudless sky.
Leila lingered beside her camel and slowly took another sip from her bottle, trying to keep her movements as smooth as possible. She didn’t want to stir up the residue that had settled on the bottom again. Grit scraped over her tongue as she swallowed.
“Of all the times I’ve crossed the desert,” Amina growled, “I’ve never run into such bad luck. First the smugglers, now the wind.”
Leila gave her a sideways glance. They weren’t even halfway to Saint Catherine yet. Anything could still happen. That was the last thing she wanted to think about. She closed her bottle and put it back in her bag.
“How many times have you crossed?” she asked, trying to keep their minds off the rotten weather.
“Oh, I haven’t counted.” Amina shrugged, then took a bite of bread. “We visited family in Cairo once a year, maybe,” she went on after forcing down her morsel. “But less often as the years went on. I went to a distant cousin’s wedding five years ago, and that was the last time I saw them.”
“They wouldn’t have forgotten you, though. Life gets busy. We all move in different directions.” Leila looked at her own piece of bread from that morning and rubbed it against her sleeve to rid it of stubborn grains of sand. “But family stays family.”
“If you’re lucky to have a good one,” Amina said with a wry smile.
Leila nodded slowly. A good family was worth as much as a lake in the desert. She was fortunate to have a home to go to, where her grandmother would wrap her in a tight hug and stuff cookies in her face. A home she was always welcome to, no matter how long she’d been away.
Her Aunt Nur and Uncle Hani had also been super-supportive since she came to live in Egypt. They met for tea at least once a month. When Xander was in town, her aunt and uncle invited them over for dinner. Her aunt’s home was always full of warm laughter and too much food. If only Leila could feel the same way about her mother. Aisha seemed to care. But only at a distance. Ever since they’d reunited, Leila thought it would be easy to become a family again. It was anything but.
Did that stem from spending twenty years away from each other? Or the fact that her mother was still married to that ogre, Faris? Leila couldn’t make sense of it. She was too tired for the mental gymnastics, anyway.
“Well, you won’t have to worry about that much longer,” Leila said, eager to get her mind off her mother. “Not after you collect your inheritance. Then they’ll be flocking to visit you.”
“If I can get that journal back,” Amina grumbled.
Footsteps pounded toward them and Abdullah appeared around the side of the outcrop.
