Morning was a shock.
“You have to get up,” Rachel said in my ear, and I swam back to the surface of sleep. I had the fuzzy feeling that this wasn’t the first time she’d tried to wake me.
“Too early,” I said, and curled into the sheets. The next time her hand came to shake my shoulder, I snarled at her—lips pulled back to display my teeth, narrowed eyes, hissing, the whole shebang. I got a brief glimpse of her shocked face, and Sharron behind her, looking more impressed than scared. Then I was back in the black depths.
What eventually woke me was water, cold and poured on the back of my neck. My eyes popped open as I jerked upright, hit my head on the bunk above, and swore.
There was a collection of gasps from the girls gathered around me.
I glared at them all. “What time is it?” From the pale light, I had an awful feeling.
“Dawn,” Rachel said, confirming my suspicions. “We must prepare breakfast.”
My immediate response was to tell her to go screw herself. I didn’t fancy my captors getting free work out of me—passive resistance was much more my style. Even the army hadn’t made me do chores.
But the army had wanted me alive. These people would probably be thrilled if I starved myself to death.
Kitchens meant access to food. Food meant enabling our escape. And I might see Abdi at breakfast.
“Are you coming, or do I have to fetch Mrs. McClung?” Rachel asked. Her voice was even, but I recognized a threat when I heard it.
“I’m coming,” I said, and climbed out of bed. I followed Rachel to the bathroom section at the back of the dormitory. There was a proper shower, thank goodness. I washed fast and rubbed vigorously at my hair with a well-worn towel. My clothes had been replaced with jeans and a long, baggy T-shirt, as well as a cotton hat with a wide brim. And sturdy, rubber-soled sandals to replace the too-big sneakers I’d borrowed from Joph.
My feet were grateful, even if the rest of me was dubious.
Rachel waited for me. “Before we go to the kitchen, I will guide you around our home,” she said. “You will see our way of life is righteous, and it may encourage you to embrace God’s truth.”
I was pretty sure that it was going to take more than cow patties and communal living to make me kill myself, but she was offering me a perfect opportunity to scope things out. And indeed, Rachel showed me nearly everything: the school, the boys’ dormitory, the houses where married couples and small children lived, the place for the elderly, the chicken run, and the Father’s office. I wasn’t allowed to go in, of course, and when I suggested a stroll by the dock, she shook her head. “That is not permitted.”
“Where’s the church?” I asked. We were making our way down from the school, which was high on a slope.
“The whole world is our church,” Rachel said. “God is with us always.”
“Huh. Seriously, no computers?”
“They are filled with the wickedness of the outside.”
“Or, it’s hard to keep your brainwashed, isolated kids both brainwashed and isolated if they have access to entertainment in the real world.”
Rachel laughed. “This world is very real, and we don’t lack entertainment. We play soccer. We play music. And there are handcrafts and games.” She smiled, shy and secret and beautiful. “I like chess,” she confessed. “Do you play?”
“Music, not chess,” I said. “Why do you care? You want me dead.”
Her eyes widened as if she’d forgotten that for a moment, and then she continued the tour without any more personal talk. Me and my big mouth. I might have made the first steps toward making her an ally if I’d been able to keep silent. After that, it was all, “This is where we wash clothes” and “This is where we grow vegetables.” The last stop was the milking sheds, or rather, the bunker underneath the concrete slab floor. “This is where we shelter during bad storms,” she said.
I eyed the cramped quarters, with camp beds stacked up on one side and cans of food on the other. “Cozy.”
“The children do not enjoy their time here,” she said. “But it keeps us safe.”
“Safety is important,” I agreed. I sympathized with the kids. Spending a day in there waiting for the weather to clear would not be fun times.
We went back into the fresh air—well, as fresh as you get near milking sheds. The boys were just sending the cows out again.
Abdi was with them, right in front of me.
We stared at each other for a split second, and then my arms went around him without me even willing it. He was squeezing me just as tight. I might have been shaking a little bit—it was only when I saw him that I’d let myself think about all the things I’d been worried about.
“I’m glad you’re all right,” he said in my ear.
“Me too,” I told him. “Can you sail?”
“Yes. Can you get us food and water?”
“Maybe. Tonight?”
“Tonight.”
That was all we had time for before Rachel tapped my back. “That is not appropriate,” she said firmly. I squeezed again and let him go. He was more muscular than I’d thought. The flowing fashions of the future really obscure a lot of body detail. He looked different in jeans.
I helped the girls serve breakfast—toast and bacon and scrambled eggs. Real bacon, too. The soy stuff just doesn’t taste the same—sorry if that shocks you.
“You have pigs?” I asked Rachel. I hadn’t smelled them.
“We trade with others.”
Mrs. McClung handed me an overflowing plate when service was done. “Eat.”
“Can I help cook lunch?” I asked.
Her eyebrow popped. “Yes.”
Great, I could try to grab some food for our escape. I went with Rachel into the big mess hall just as the boys came in from the milking. She sat beside me and ate with a neat efficiency I tried to copy. Something about the bacon started to disagree with my stomach about halfway through breakfast, and I remembered that going from a vegetarian diet to one with meat could mess with your digestion. I found out later that Abdi had passed an uncomfortable night after that beef stew. He stuck to toast and butter that morning, but I wasn’t that smart. I moved to the eggs instead, but since they’d been cooked in the bacon grease, it wasn’t much better.
After breakfast, everyone stood up, and a man in a linen robe led them in prayer. Abdi and I stayed sitting, which either was the right thing to do or no one cared. Then Rachel beckoned to me.
“We have school now,” she said. “But you’re to study scripture and consider God’s will for you.”
“That sounds very exciting,” I said.
“It probably won’t be,” she said, looking puzzled. I wasn’t sure she had much of a sense of sarcasm.
Abdi and I followed Rachel up the hill to the school. Conrad was waiting in a small room. There were a couple of desks there, with a Bible and a notebook and a real ink pen on each one. That they were putting us together was the first good surprise. The second was that the school also had a real bathroom, with a toilet that flushed. That was such a pleasure that it almost made up for my upset stomach.
We spent the rest of the morning in that classroom—except for the periods I spent in the bathroom, really regretting the bacon. We couldn’t talk much, because one of the adults was always with us, but they didn’t seem to care if we were really studying scripture. We scribbled notes to each other and managed to work out a time and a place to meet that night, and Abdi confirmed that the boys’ dormitory had the same security precautions as the girls’ (as in, none at all).
After that, Abdi put his head down on the desk and went to sleep. He looked much, much younger with his face relaxed from that blank expression he wore in public. I actually did read some of the Bible, flicking through for bits I remembered, in case I needed to support an argument later. They probably wanted me to realize that I was an abomination, since raising the dead was strictly up to God, but instead I was reassured that I was loved and treasured.
Then I napped a bit, too. I woke up quite suddenly at one point, drool pasting my cheek to the desk, and caught Abdi looking at me with an odd expression, as if he was making some complex calculation that involved me. It annoyed me because I thought he’d already worked out we had to get along if we could, and I couldn’t think what other calculations he had to make.
“What?” I said.
“Nothing,” he told me. “Go back to sleep.”
Well, I wasn’t responsible for whatever weird things he was thinking. I turned ostentatiously onto the other side of my face.
When it was time to prepare lunch, Rachel came for me. I spent a long time peeling vegetables and stirring stock and incidentally listening to a lot of gossip. When the soup was simmering, Mrs. McClung put her big fists on her hips and looked me over.
“It’s good to see you embracing God’s role for you,” she said, but her tone said I’m watching you, missy. She hadn’t let me anywhere near the knives, even when I’d offered to chop the onions, but I’d managed to stuff two ends of bread and a couple of unpeeled carrots into my pockets, covered by the long T-shirt.
“God’s role for me is treating others as I would like to be treated and not judging others lest I be judged,” I said, looking as humble as I could, which wasn’t very.
She looked suspicious, but she couldn’t exactly argue with scripture. I waited until her attention was diverted. Then I told Rachel I needed to use the bathroom and went back to the girls’ dormitory to do it, hiding the food in my pillowcase.
That mattress was so soft. I lay down for a few minutes and woke up when I heard shouting outside.
It was late afternoon, the sun about three-quarters of the way through the sky, and I had very obviously missed lunch.
The older boys were playing soccer, shirts versus skins, using their sun hats weighed down with rocks to mark the goals. A few of the girls were clustered on the sidelines. At first I thought they were watching in admiration, and then I saw Sharron bouncing a ball from knee to knee and realized that they were waiting for their turn.
“I looked for you,” she said. “Mrs. McClung said to let you sleep.”
“Oh,” I said. “Thanks.” She nodded, and turned her attention back to the ball.
Abdi was playing on the skins team.
He really was much more muscular than I’d thought. His biceps were nothing to scoff at, and the hard, lean planes of his stomach made something bounce around a little in mine.
His team wasn’t doing very well. The goalie let two through in short succession, and he was replaced by an older boy with better hands. He was a better strategist, too; he called the players into a huddle around the goal and then sent them on their way. There was some complicated passing, and then a knot of boys opened to reveal one in its midst, one foot poised on the ball. The shirts team pounded toward him, but he took his time, gauged the distance, and kicked.
The ball flew true between the other team’s sun hats. Abdi joined in the cheering of his teammates.
I cheered, too, and at the sound of my voice, he turned to me.
He was smiling, bright and triumphant. Not that little curled-up wary smile, but a full grin that made his eyes crinkle and dimples crease in his cheeks.
At the sight of that smile, I felt something click in my head.
Do that again, I thought.
And okay, you’ve been watching me talk about this all along and you’ve been going, When exactly is Tegan going to realize she really likes Abdi Taalib? Honestly, I’m not even sure it was then. I might have worked it out on some level when I shot Zaneisha to save him, or when he sang to me in the boat. But when he smiled at me and his whole face lit up with joy, that was the point I couldn’t ignore that I was head over heels for him.
I wanted him to smile again. I wanted him to smile always.
And then I thought, Oh no.
Because even if, by some extraordinary chance, he liked me back, it was pretty much the worst timing in the world.
So I went back to the kitchen to help Mrs. McClung with dinner. She told me off for missing lunch and made me eat a sandwich, then, apparently appeased by my apologies, put me to work slicing vegetables. I stole more carrots and a small, sharp knife, and thought about Abdi the whole evening.
Before dinner, everyone watched a DVD in the mess hall.
The movie was Lilo & Stitch, which is a movie about an alien who finds a family in Hawaii. Apparently, part of the Disney revival a few years ago was that some people really got into vintage methods of consumption, like DVDs, and the Inheritors of the Earth grabbed as many of them as they could during this period. Without computers, their choices for entertainment were kind of limited.
Abdi’s face during the whole thing was amazing, by the way. He says that when the French soldiers were pushed out of Djibouti, they left a lot of stuff behind. So some people in Djibouti still have DVD players and he’d seen DVDs for sale in the central market, but he’d never actually watched one.
I slipped out of the hall before the ending, where the alien talks about how he’s found his little, broken, good family, and stood in the evening air, watching the moon rise over the sea. Abdi came out after a few minutes. I felt his presence prickle along my skin, and I tried to look normal as I turned around.
“Hi,” he said. He was shivering. “Aren’t you cold?”
“No.”
“It’s freezing.” He started rubbing his arms. He wasn’t faking it; he had goose bumps.
“It’s got to be seventy, seventy-two degrees.”
He smiled, looking a little wistful. “In Djibouti City, it’s over ninety every day. Melbourne summer is like Djibouti winter.”
“Wow. That’s really hot,” I said. Were we honestly talking about the weather? “Listen. If you get a chance to escape without me, you should take it.”
He nodded. “You too.”
“I can’t sail,” I said. “If it comes right down to it, it has to be you.”
He gazed down at me, and I thought he was going to say something else. I couldn’t stop watching his mouth.
“It is a nice evening, God be praised,” Rachel said behind us.
Abdi let out a noise that might have been a groan.
“It’s okay,” I said, and seized the opportunity to test something I’d been curious about. “Hey, Rachel, you believe in the sanctity of life, right?”
“Of course.”
“So what would you think, hypothetically, if someone were killing lots of children?”
Rachel looked shocked. “I would think they were a very wicked person, far from God’s grace.”
“You’d want to stop them from killing more children?” I pressed.
Abdi didn’t say anything, but his face was very expressive on the subject of me shutting the hell up right away. I ignored him and focused on the Inheritor girl.
“Well, if I could,” Rachel said cautiously. “Aiding the weak is an act of charity, but ultimate judgment lies in God’s hands.”
“And if you couldn’t stop them yourself, you’d want to make sure other people who could were in a position to know about the murders?” Abdi made an abrupt motion, which I evaded by stepping away.
“I suppose so. I don’t understand, Tegan. Why are you asking these questions?” She obviously didn’t have a clue about the Ark Project. It was probably only the higher-ups who knew. The man who had died, and maybe Joseph and Conrad. Definitely the Father would know. I was itching to have a serious talk with that guy.
“Oh, no reason,” I said blithely. “Abdi and I were just having a philosophical discussion.”
“It seems a brutal topic of conversation,” she said disapprovingly. “Do you not wish to simply enjoy God’s bounty this evening? Why must you consider these awful things and destroy your peace of mind?”
For a moment, I experienced a point of double vision, looking at her and seeing myself. I’d never been quite as oblivious as Rachel was, but I didn’t have her excuse of being raised in isolation. Given my own way, I’d have happily ignored everything that was going on around me and pursued my own goals, both in the past and in the future. But Alex had dragged me with her to protests, and Dalmar had talked passionately about justice and change. Bethari wanted to destroy the No Migrant policy, and Abdi and Joph had taken real risks to fight murderous pharmaceutical practices.
Thinking about and fighting some of the world’s multiple horrors had made my life more painful. But it was a much larger life than I would have lived otherwise.
“I’m really glad I know you,” I told Abdi.
He looked puzzled, but I turned to Rachel before he could make any reply. “I’d better go back and help serve,” I said, and smiled. Her frown cleared, and she smiled back.
The Inheritors of the Earth were divorced from reality, perhaps even more than people like Soren, who had wrapped himself in a blanket of willful ignorance so he wouldn’t have to deal with the truth. Most of the people in this community were deliberately kept away from even being able to investigate for themselves.
But some of them knew that refugees were being stuffed into cryocontainers and frozen in huge warehouses all over the country and, for whatever reason, had chosen not to make that horror public.
Abdi and I needed to escape for bigger reasons than either of us.
So what did it hurt if Rachel spent the night thinking I was being obedient and submissive? We’d be gone in the morning.
The first part of the escape went off without a hitch. I stayed awake very easily after my afternoon nap, singing the Revolver album to myself three times after lights-out. It was hard to coordinate an escape without any way to tell the time, but during our “study session” Abdi and I had decided on that as a reasonable method that would give the Inheritors plenty of time to go to sleep. When it was time, I dressed by feel and climbed down one-handed from my bunk, with the stolen food crammed into my pillowcase and the knife tucked into my pocket. I held my breath, but Rachel didn’t even turn over, and no one woke up as I wafted out the door. They worked hard, those girls.
It was beautiful outside, the half-moon making everything shades of silver and gray. I went down the slope very carefully—I’d wrapped the knife in a strip of sheet so it wouldn’t cut my leg, but falling over a loose rock with it in my pocket was probably still not a great idea. Abdi was waiting by the entrance to the underground bunker. He must have sung faster than I did. He was shivering again, and I thrust my nightie at him.
“Here,” I whispered.
He took it, but didn’t put it on. “It’s white,” he whispered back. “Later.”
I could see his point. A moving white figure would stand out on that moonlit night.
But no one was watching. There wasn’t a single light in a single window.
We went toward the dock, and, glory of glories, there were two boats there. Abdi pointed to the farther one, and we crept toward it, lowering ourselves down the side of the pier. My shortness proved a problem, and Abdi had to help me, his long hands cool at my hips.
I picked the lock on the cabin door with my last hairpins and some swearing. Abdi looked at the banks of navigation equipment and nodded in satisfaction. “I can work this,” he said.
In retrospect, our biggest mistake was thinking that because the Inheritors were mostly trusting and nice and religiously minded, they were also stupid.
The second Abdi put his hands on the equipment, all hell broke loose.
It was even worse than the time my computer had blared advertising at me. The advertisers had been after my attention, after all. It had been noisy and disorienting, but they hadn’t wanted to hurt me. The burglar alarm was a blast of sound so loud, I thought someone had shot me with a sonic gun. But where a sonic gun would have deafened me immediately, this noise went on and on.
Abdi grabbed my arm and yelled something, but I couldn’t make it out. I yanked away from him, cringing down with my palms pressed to my ears. He bent down, hands outstretched, eyes intent on mine.
And then the light bombs went off.
We were both blind after that, me because I hadn’t known to close my eyes, and Abdi because he’d tried to cover my eyes instead of protecting himself. Sobbing with the pain of it, I curled in on myself. Nothing had ever hurt like that before.
And that was how they found us, crunched in tight balls of misery in the cabin of their boat. I was so grateful that the noise had stopped that I was almost happy about the strange hands that picked me up and hoisted me over a shoulder like a sack of potatoes.
My vision returned quickly, though my head still throbbed. Abdi was being dragged behind me, an Inheritor holding each arm as he stumbled along. I nodded, trying to convey the message that I was okay.
But I wasn’t so sure. My hearing still hadn’t come back.
The man carrying me stopped and swung me down, taking my arm in a firm grip. We were near the milking sheds, and I had a nasty suspicion that was quickly confirmed, as we were marched down the stairs into the storm bunker.
Conrad was one of the men with Abdi. He said something to Abdi, who shook his head and motioned at his ears. Conrad sighed and spoke to the other men, who set up two camp beds on opposite sides of the room. Conrad pointed Abdi to one and me to the other. Apparently the gender-separation rules could be bent but not broken for abductees who tried to run away.
Then they left. The heavy door closed behind them; I felt it more than heard it, the vibrations moving through the concrete floor. I stared at Abdi from across the room, seeing my own uncertainty reflected in his face.
The lights went out.
I shot to my feet, moving in Abdi’s direction. I was locked up in the silent darkness; we’d lost our best and probably final chance to escape, and I couldn’t stand it alone.
I was barely halfway there when I bumped into a warm body and flung my arms around him. He hugged me back, tight and strong, and I clung to him, almost grateful for the dark that hid my weakness. I couldn’t see or hear, but I could feel and smell. Abdi smelled like dirt and cheap soap and something that might have been the garlic from the pasta at dinner. His hands trembled as he smoothed them down my back. He rested his chin against my forehead and said something; I couldn’t hear it, but I felt his lips move against my hair.
I reached up to stroke his face and felt light stubble prick my fingers. He stilled, and I felt him shudder against me.
When he kissed me, it was desperate and hungry and very, very sweet.
I clutched at his back with fierce fingers, thrilling at the way he held me so tight. Abdi Taalib didn’t think of me as the Living Dead Girl, or a lost soul, or some sort of figurehead to be pitied, celebrated, or despised. He wanted Tegan Oglietti; he wanted her to kiss him.
A cynical part of me said that it was just because we were sense-deprived and scared. I told that part to shut up, and concentrated on the rest of me, which was very happy indeed.
Sometime later, as we sat on the bare stone floor, Abdi kissing a line of little explosions down the back of my neck, I realized that sound had come back to me. He was murmuring my name between each kiss.
“Abdi?” I said.
I could feel his response even before he answered. “Yes?”
“Oh, thank god, I thought the hearing loss might be permanent.”
“No. The burglar alarms are designed for temporary sense deprivation.” He hesitated. “I’m so sorry, Tegan. I didn’t think.”
“Neither did I,” I said reasonably. “We were both stupid to think it’d be that easy.”
“I should have checked for an alarm. I knew better.”
“Really?”
He laughed. “Of course. It’s common tech. What, did you think I grew up rubbing sticks together to make fire?”
“No. I didn’t really think about it,” I said half truthfully.
“Hm,” he said, exploring down my sides. His hands hesitated. “What’s this?”
“My knife!” I’d completely forgotten about it, too miserable during the alarm assault, and then too thrilled in the dark. “Lucky they didn’t search us.”
“They searched me,” Abdi said. “I think they don’t take you seriously.”
“Idiots,” I grumbled.
He laughed softly. “Well, look at you. You’re short and delicate. You’ve got pale skin that looks like it might tear in a strong wind and big, dark, innocent eyes. I bet they think you’re breakable.”
“Hey, I have muscles!”
“Oh, I know,” he said, and I felt the heat rise in my cheeks. “But these are people who are so certain of how things must be that they don’t pay any attention to how they really are.”
It was a good point. “I keep thinking about it,” I said softly. “It’s hard to believe that people this nice can’t see that it’s wrong to want me to kill myself.”
I felt his shrug. “Religious fanatics.”
“It’s not the religious part that worries me. The God I believe in wouldn’t want me dead, but I don’t know if I can convince them of that. I wish I could figure out how they even knew about the Ark Project.”
Abdi’s voice was genuinely horrified, and not for the reason I would have suspected. “You really believe in God?” he said.
“Well, yeah. I don’t know why you’re so surprised. Most people believe in a higher power of some sort.”
“Fifty-four percent is hardly most.”
“Of course it is. More than fifty percent. Most. And anyway, I read it was more like seventy percent.”
“It doesn’t count if you don’t attend services,” he said.
I poked him in the ribs, hard. “It definitely counts. Anyway, wait, you saw my interview. I said I was Roman Catholic right there!”
“I thought that was for the audience,” he said.
“I thought most people in Djibouti were Sunni.”
“Well, I’m an atheist, like my father,” he said, looking stubborn. “And I thought you were smarter.”
“Um, gross,” I said, and then had to explain the meaning of gross, though I’d thought it was pretty clear from context.
The rest of the argument went as these arguments tend to go, from “You can’t prove that something doesn’t exist” to “If there’s no positive proof, there’s no reason behind faith” to “Religion is an amazing force for good in the world” to “Do you know what forced Islamic and Christian conversion did to Africa?”
Once you start talking about gay people being executed, and female genital mutilation—not an actual Islamic practice, I’m just saying—and missionaries deliberately impeding measures to prevent the spread of HIV, there aren’t many ways for the conversation to get good again, especially when neither of you can finish it by walking away. We edged away from each other, sulking silently, and occasionally saying, “If you’d just—” or “If you’d think about—” and then stopping before we finished the sentence.
It was lonely, there in the dark.
“Hey,” I said finally. “Are you awake?”
“Yes,” he said guardedly.
“How did you grow up?”
There was a pause and some shuffling sounds, and then a long body lowered itself beside mine. “I’m the third of four children,” he began.
We talked for a long time, sitting on that bare floor, wrapped in each other’s arms. We talked about our families, our home lives, what we’d done in the past and dreamed of for the future.
And, of course, we talked about the Beatles. Abdi had become a fan when he’d heard a sample from “Blackbird” on an ad for shoes. He’d chased down the reference and discovered it was from a song over a hundred and fifty years old. There were more songs, by the same people. He’d streamed pirated versions, then paid for the legal downloads. He made his younger sister listen, and she became a fan, too.
“They always meant hope to me,” I confessed. “It’s stupid but—”
His fingers were tracing a pattern down my arms. “I think I see. I feel that way about La Belle Nuit—do you know them?”
“No.”
“They live in Scotland. Their singer is Djiboutian. She sings mostly in French, but some Arabic, some Somali. Very beautiful songs, and she’s a wonderful vocalist.”
“I don’t understand any of those languages,” I said, embarrassed. “Well, a few words of Somali.”
“From your boyfriend.” It wasn’t a question, and his hands went still on my arms.
“My ex-boyfriend,” I said, and twisted around to face him. Not that I could see him any better that way, but it seemed appropriate. “I loved Dalmar. But I’m here, with you.” It was true, I realized as I said it. My love for Dalmar had been real, and beautiful. And it was still there, partly. I didn’t think it would ever completely disappear. But it had diminished under the stresses of the last weeks and months, like a shore eroding under the constant pressure of the waves.
I wasn’t ready to put words to my feelings for Abdi yet, but they were there, warm and bright, like a new flame. Only time could tell if the fire would burn too hot and fast, or die for lack of fuel, or be steady and strong. But I wanted to have the time to find out.
“You’re here with me because we got kidnapped by cultists while running from the army with footage that could blow open a government conspiracy,” he pointed out, but the tension in his body had eased.
“Details,” I said.
Abdi laughed. “Well, I can teach you some French and Arabic, if you would like.”
“I would like. What’s Arabic for ‘nose’?”
“It might depend on the dialect. I would say anf.”
I touched his nose with my fingertips. “And what’s the word for ‘mouth’?”
“Fam.”
I traced the outline of his lips, feeling the corners stretch and curl as he smiled. “And what’s the translation for ‘kiss me’?”
“Boseeni,” he replied, his breath warm against my skin. It seemed a shame not to close that gap.
After that, I discovered that language lessons held less interest than the other things Abdi could teach me.