Suddenly, I was upright and stumbling, dashing toward Lori. She was sitting, messy legs splayed underneath her and pulling out her hair. One long torn lock was already hanging from her clenched fist.
Tommy was just ahead of me, but he slowed down and hovered over Lori, unsure what to do. It was Minh who acted—she appeared from the thick growth and rushed at Lori, half tackling, half hugging her. But Minh was lighter and weaker than Lori. Lori pushed her away and stood up.
With her hair sticking out and eyes red-rimmed, Lori was a twisted version of her usual well-put-together self. The oasis was driving us all to the brink of our personal collapse.
“Calm down, Lori…”
“Please stop it…”
“You had a nightmare…”
“You’re awake now…”
We all talked at Lori at once, while, up on her wobbly legs and fidgeting like a panicked animal, she slowly backed away from Minh.
“Where is it?” Lori asked, eyes flitting between our faces.
She meant the tablet. I moved to the front of the group and took another step toward Lori. “It’s on the ground over there. I think it was making you hallucinate, so we took it away.”
She deflated and gave me a slow nod, actually meeting my eyes. I hoped this meant she was coming back to her senses. She unclenched the fist that was still holding a lock of her hair, letting it fall to the ground. Absently, she went on to pat the right side of her head. I watched her wince. The pain must’ve been kicking in right about now.
With our combined silence pressing on her like a heavy, dark cloud, Lori marched toward the spot I indicated. She steered clear of us, walking in a wide circle before dropping to her knees to pick up the tablet off the ground. As she pressed it tightly to her chest, Lori’s mouth spread in a blissful half smile.
The rest of us, tied together by a common thread, started to approach Lori, encircling her slowly. She must’ve been in that in-between state, about to give in to the tablet’s influence but still partly present in the now, because she looked up at us, sensing danger. Right then Lori was a trapped animal, and we were a pack of encroaching hyenas. But whatever half-hatched intervention we had in mind was interrupted by a distant roar.
Thunder? Wind?
Luke must’ve been thinking the same thing. His voice shook. “If another sandstorm is coming, we need to hide! Now!”
“It’s not thunder,” Tommy said.
We all became silent, listening and staring in the direction the sound was coming from—where the oasis ended and the sand began. Whatever it was, it was coming, and it was coming fast.
We stood in a semicircle around Lori, tense but reluctant to move. It was like we had more important things to do than run and greet the cars—I could swear they were the same ones we saw yesterday—speeding toward us. I’m sure all of us were expecting the first car to pass right through us.
But this time the cars didn’t turn into ghosts. Their drivers hit the brakes just in time, the vehicles coming to a full stop amid rising clouds of dust. All doors on either side of each car opened, spilling out a bunch of people. Most of them were wearing the familiar khakis and white shirts from Dad’s dig, but there was also a man and a woman dressed in blue scrubs, the latter also sporting a matching head scarf.
There was something staged about the cars’ arrival, and I couldn’t stop my uncontrollable grinning as I watched all these people running at us. I recognized Dad in the group, but I couldn’t move, frozen in shock and disbelief.
The five of us stood still, staring at our rescuers. My eyes were misted with sweat or tears. I didn’t know anymore what was real and what was a desert-generated dream.
Lori was first to react to our changing reality. Nervously eyeing the rescue team approach, she stuffed the tablet underneath her tank top and shorts. It bulged out, even when she covered it with her hands, hugging herself and bending over slightly, like she was about to hurl.
“Alif!”
Dad’s shout carried in the desert air, reaching the very insides of my soul and teasing silent tears out of me. Dad was close now. There was some dirty piece of fabric in his hand that he was waving like a flag. The colors of that rag seemed familiar. Dad was smiling.
“We found the towel you kids left behind!”
We were packed into the cars. I ended up riding with Tommy and Lori while Luke and Minh were taken into another car. We were given a bottle of water each and instructed to drink it slowly. Dad, who was in my car in the front next to a driver I didn’t recognize, kept turning to look at me. He was saying something, but I could hear only bits and pieces, my mind unable to put the whole picture together. One word stuck out from Dad’s monologue: Rowen. A flicker of recognition raised its foul head in my mind. I strained to listen closely to Dad’s stream of words, and it hit me he was repeating the question I’d been dreading: Where is Rowen?
I didn’t answer. I couldn’t. Instead, I hung my head low, resisting the urge to stuff it between my knees and sob. It was Lori who replied, her voice cool, composed. “Rowen didn’t make it out of the camp with us. We got separated during the sandstorm, and the last time I remember seeing him was when something heavy landed on top of our tent. Rowen was running away from the tent, and we never saw him after that.”
I looked at Lori sideways and caught Tommy staring at her too. I tried to catch her eyes to communicate my confusion without openly questioning her, but Lori’s face betrayed no signs of her lie.
Then something else took my mind completely away from her and her alternative reality: In the car’s rearview mirror there was no sign of our oasis. Only the desert, flat and endless, stretched behind. I gasped.
That got Lori’s attention. She faced me, suddenly angry. She shook her head once and gave me a cold stare.
Don’t, she was telling me.
I was thinking about the oasis as we drove to safety—how it sprang out of nowhere and how none of us were aware of any patches of life in the desert for miles and miles surrounding the camp. And how odd everything was about those fruit and berries and the temple … that horrible place with its drawings and the killing pit. Could any of that have been real? And if it wasn’t real, then what happened to Rowen?
Exhaustion crept into my body. I struggled to keep my eyes open. I was drowsing when I heard Dad talking with someone on his satellite phone. His voice was soothing, affectionate. It was a tone of voice he used only with me and, long ago, with one other person: my mother. Like that distant memory of my parents being happy together that the tablet showed me, hearing Dad’s voice now made me nearly delirious with contentment.
Before I gave in to a fretful sleep full of shadowy presences and illuminated by the fire of a hexagonal tablet falling from the sky, I overheard Dad say into the phone, “Yes, Dahlia, I agree. I think she needs us both. And I need you too.”
My mind zeroed in on my mother’s name, and I let my eyes close at last.