Zakai glanced at me and then away. “I believe I’m older than Karys. I have . . . more memories of . . . the time before Sundara.”
The time before Sundara. My brow dipped. He’d never told me of more memories, only of the gutter and the hunger and the cold. My heart constricted and I felt suddenly lost, though my location had not changed. I still sat beside Zakai, my arm looped tightly through his. But something I couldn’t identify was falling away, and I didn’t know where or how to grasp it to make it stay.
“Karys’s father did a three-year service tour, I believe. But again, a test can confirm or deny a blood relation.” Cody Rutland’s eyes were worried as he glanced between the two of us. He knew the nature of our relationship. He’d seen it up close and personal. After a moment of silence, Cody Rutland picked up the folder and stood. “I’m going to make a few phone calls and then grab some lunch for you two. Oh, and a globe. Stay put and I’ll be back as soon as possible.”
He turned and left the room and only then did I let go of Zakai. “Karys,” he said softly. “There’s a life waiting for you in New York City.”
I blinked at him, my blood cooling several more degrees, the feeling of being lost expanding inside of me. “My life is with you.”
He put his hand on my cheek and leaned his forehead on mine. “I know. And my life is with you. But . . . there’s more . . . out there. I should have told you.” He sighed.
“You should have told me what?”
“How big the world is, Karys.”
My eyes searched his. Was it bad that the world was big? He looked so sad, so incredibly desolate. Yes, the world had always seemed a scary place beyond the borders of Sundara, and it was true that I’d never pondered its size. I’d never thought about places past oceans and things called globes. But . . . if the world—the place Bertha had once called Forastan but I now knew was nothing but a made-up name—was far, far bigger than I imagined, maybe that meant it wasn’t all hunger and suffering, pain and strife.
Something dropped inside me. Something I was too scared to name. Something dark and black and ugly.
I kissed him harshly, suddenly desperate for the familiarity of his mouth, his taste, his flesh on me, in me, consuming me so that I couldn’t think anymore.
But Zakai pulled back, a wet pop sounding as our mouths came apart, gripping the sides of my face. A small sob escaped my throat and Zakai’s battered expression fell. “Karys,” he whispered. “It’s going to be okay. I’ve dreamed things for you.”
“What dreams?” I demanded. “You’re my dream.”
He pressed his lips to my forehead and I felt the warm exhale of his breath against my skin. Somehow I had the sense that he was crying, though there were no tears.
The sudden sound of the door opening made us pull apart, as a woman with short dark hair poked her head in the room. “I’m just checking to see if either of you would like some water.”
We both shook our heads but she continued to stand there, her curious gaze moving between the two of us as though trying to memorize our faces. “All right. Pop your head out if you change your mind,” she said.
The woman closed the door, but it didn’t click all the way and after a moment it moved open slightly, creating a gap.
Zakai sighed and took my hand in his, kissing my knuckle. “Let’s wait to see what Cody Rutland says and then we’ll talk more, okay?”
I nodded. I felt exhausted suddenly, as though I could lay right down on the floor and sleep for days and days and days.
From somewhere outside the door, two male voices drifted our way.
“Rutland found the girl’s uncle. I guess he’s willing to take her in, God bless him.”
“No kidding. Who knows the amount of therapy that kid will need.” My grip on Zakai tightened as we listened to their conversation, realizing that they were discussing us.
“Fuck,” the same man went on, “you should have seen what was going on there. You couldn’t make it up if you tried. It was a sexual freak show for sickos who got their rocks off watching the grotesque and unnatural.”
I sat frozen next to Zakai who was equally still.
Grotesque?
Unnatural?
Us.
“I didn’t even realize there was a market for that sort of perversion.”
“I’ve found that when it comes to human sexuality, there’s a market for everything under the sun, even human oddities wandering an oasis, fucking each other and anyone else who wants them.”
“Jesus. A boiling cauldron of foulness.”
Pain tightened my chest, a faraway buzzing sounding in my ears. My mind worked to keep up with the whispered conversation and all the words I didn’t know, even while my heart sunk lower and lower in my chest.
The other man chuckled, but it ended in a groan of disgust. “An apt description of the disgusting place called Sundara.”
Disgusting, we were disgusting? Freaks? Human oddities? What about me? What about Zakai? Grotesque perversions? I held back a sob. Was it true that what felt like love to me was nothing more than sickness?
It suddenly seemed that my world was collapsing and I was being dragged into a sinkhole, clawing for anything familiar that might save me, but finding nothing but handfuls of sand that ran through my fingers, leaving me grasping at air.
“Sadly, they have places like that all over the region,” the man went on, “catering to different sexual appetites, including the obscene and the horrifying. To his credit, if he deserves any at all, Haziq Hadid didn’t offer up children.”
“Except to each other.”
A pause. “Yes,” the other man confirmed quietly. “Except to each other.”
I didn’t realize Zakai had dropped my hand until my fingers closed and found that there was nothing to hold.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
“Your uncle’s name is Braxton Grant,” Cody Rutland told me, crossing one ankle over his knee as he leaned back in the upholstered chair. His sand-colored hair was shorter. It no longer curled over his ears.
I bent my legs beneath me on the couch in the hotel room where Zakai and I had been moved as we waited for . . . for what? For answers to come. For arrangements to be made. For our lives to be decided by people we’d never met. I didn’t know. All I knew was the heavy fear that sat in my belly, the uncertainty and emptiness making me want to sleep the day away. I resembled one of the beetles I sometimes found in the courtyard, I thought. One that had been dead a long time and was nothing but an empty shell, easily blown away by the slightest breeze.
I longed for Bertha. I longed for Ahmad. I longed for the rest of my family who had also been torn so suddenly from me, even if not by death. My only solace was that I still had Zakai. But inside, I felt a distance forming between us, and I did not know if it was he or I who was drawing away.
I’d written notes to my family, telling them I loved and missed them, and Cody Rutland had promised they’d be delivered. But I wondered who could read my words as they didn’t know letters the way that I did. At least my knowledge was increasing by the day as I read book after book that Cody Rutland had brought me to help pass the time.
“So Grant is her surname then?” Zakai asked, entering the room, running a towel through his hair, still wet from the shower. “Grant?”