Burn (Story of CI #3) (23 page)

He didn’t really seem very safe.

The stress of it all was making the wine affect her more than usual. She felt like a glow-in-the-dark jellyfish, limbs floating limply out to the sides like tentacles on the water.

She was slumped in the chair, but it felt like everything around her was salty, roiling waves.

She was transparent, open to the world, like every barrier including her skin had just disappeared.

There was nothing between her heart and Lázaro.

She was breathing really fast.

"Are you alright?" Lázaro raised an eyebrow at her. "Something I said?"

"I think I shouldn't be drinking. So soon after whatever you gave me in Timbuktu." The words bubbled out of her, and Wara felt herself grin.

"Why, you're feeling bad?"

"I feel great. Actually." Wara forced herself to finish the rest of the burgundy liquid sloshing around in the bottom of the jeweled glass. "I've felt horrible the whole day. I can hardly stand thinking about what I did to Alejo. You could have killed him, and I didn't even think about it. I just knocked him out." Wara felt her cheeks burn like coals. The rest of her started to shiver.

"You know what?" she continued blabbering. "Could we go inside? It's feeling really cold out here. I didn't know Mali could get this cold. Or maybe I’ll just move my chair over by you."

Wara felt she should frown, but she was still invertebrate, back-floating on a sea that was suddenly turning icy. Lázaro was moving around the table towards her. "Must be the stress. And residual stuff from when I drugged you. Let's go downstairs. Keep talking down there."

"Yeah, let's go to my room. That'd be great." Lázaro wrapped his arm around her shoulders and Wara fell into his side, hooked her arms around his ribcage, one cheek plastered against his shoulder. Part of the Skorpion bumped against her arm through Lázaro’s black sweater and she thought that maybe she should just go for the weapon, right now while she had Lázaro distracted. But there just didn’t seem to be any reason.

"Thanks for getting me drunk,” she said instead as they made their way down the narrow stairs. “I needed that." Wara felt herself blink. Why was she talking so much? She shouldn't be acting like this from the wine, right? But then again, who knew what crap Lázaro had put in her system in Timbuktu, to knock her out and then keep her asleep on the trip to Bamako?

The thought occurred to her that he could have drugged her again, right now during dinner. But she wasn't passing out. She just really felt like talking.

She was still hanging on him as they rounded the corner and she pulled Lázaro into the room he’d given her. The red Converse tennis shoes squeaked on the tile as she took some downright unsteady steps.

"You don't want to go to the parlor?" Lázaro asked her. "More light in there. I'm just gonna ask you some questions."

"No, I don't want to go in the parlor."

The words were just shooting out of her, and the things she said were a little surprising. If she remembered correctly, two minutes ago, up on the roof, she'd told Lázaro Marquez they should go into her bedroom. Yeah, the idea of the red-carpeted parlor was freaky. It reminded her of waking up, finding Lázaro sitting there drinking wine and holding her captive. But why wasn't it much worse to be leaning against his chest and letting him lead her into her bedroom?

Wara heard her voice echo inside her head. She wasn't exactly positive, but she might have just said all of that about the parlor and leaning against Lázaro out loud. Lázaro smiled into her eyes and sat her down on the bed, started talking about Alejo and who Wara worked for and who was working in Timbuktu.

There was no way Wara was going to tell Lázaro any of that. But when Lázaro asked her, the answers forced their way into her mouth and it was all she could do to just shut up.

"You gave me something to make me talk," she blurted in the middle of something about Cail's lack of a love life. "Didn't you?" She was so mad, but at the same time, still the transparent sea creature, floating, no barriers, unable to stop her heart from leaving her chest. "Just leave me alone!” she said. “Don't you know you used to be in love with me?"

She already had her fingers on his cheek when she said this.

Despite being the bad guy, Lázaro Marquez tasted really good.

From there on, everything got a little blurry.

THAT NIGHT LALO GOT TO TAKE A shift of guard duty with Alejo. Caspian was a little freaked out by the guy’s moodiness after what Wara did, and was probably secretly happy to be with Cail out front. Friends going through hard times didn’t really faze Lalo. He just shifted positions in the wire-rimmed garden chair and calmly scanned the street to the rear of the hospital, enjoying the view from the second-story hospital porch.

The tiled porch was shielded from the moonlight by an old roof of clay shingles. Shadows clustered around potted plants and tattered cardboard boxes the hospital staff piled out here. Alejo was in a chair next to Lalo, vigilant but still half-dazed, jaw set so hard it looked like he might break teeth. Alejo had brought one of those dorodango balls, the new hobby that turned mud into some very pretty colored orbs.

The dorodango ball Alejo held tonight was basically polished into oblivion. The past few days had not been nice for Lalo’s friend.

The afternoon heat was still trapped in the ancient tiles, and Lalo could feel it soaking through the rubber soles of boots, warming his feet all the way through his socks. The air floating in from the Sahara was actually chilly tonight. Mario Brothers was covered up with a ratty gray sweater that Lalo had a hard time getting on under his vest.

The nurses on duty inside the hospital had their soap opera turned up a little too loud tonight. Lalo was sure the kids were sleeping through it, anyway.

He glanced over at Alejo, sitting there polishing his mud ball with a rag, fixated on the empty street, yet lost in another world. It had been over forty-eight hours now since she’d done what she’d done, and Alejo was not looking too good.

Lalo wished he were angrier.

Hollow, hopeless eyes were never good.

Alejo’s eyes appeared even darker than they had the day the school burned, even more soulless, if that was possible.

But soulless wasn’t really a good word for it, because if your heart could break it meant you felt, that your heart was working fine, alive and hurting like hell.

If you didn’t have a soul, it didn’t hurt.

“Amadou seems to be doing better,” Lalo said into the night. It was all relative, but Amadou was eating, speaking in coherent sentences, not holding a gun to his head. Amadou had gone to visit the kids a couple times now.

Alejo grunted. Talking about Amadou reminded him.

“It was them.” Lalo crossed his arms in front of his chest and looked out at the stars. “They killed her. They killed the kids. Not you. Even if it’s little by little, you’re gonna have to transfer the blame over to them. It’s normal for you to feel like you do, but it’s not right. They did it.”

Lalo felt Alejo’s mind racing next to him. He supposed getting over what happened to Amy would go a lot quicker than figuring out how to deal with what Wara had done. Amy was a friend and Alejo had liked her, but the AQIM guys were responsible for what happened that day.

It wasn’t so easy to forget the person you loved and trusted more than anyone stabbing you in the back. Or in the neck with a poison arrow.

Alejo crossed and uncrossed his legs in the chair. His breathing seemed pained. He was probably remembering how he ran to Amadou and Amy’s room at the school after they got the kids out of the burning building last week. The room where Amadou and his wife slept some nights hadn’t been in flames, but Alejo had burst in to find a couple AQIM fighters in the middle of torturing Amadou.

They had shaped wire into verses from the Koran, and they’d heated it in the flames and were branding Amadou all over his chest. He was tied to a chair, screaming.

Aisha was bound to another chair across the room.

Alejo had the advantage of surprise and a M4 carbine. He could have shot both of the AQIM guys before they even turned around from their torture session.

He’d been beating himself up ever since that day for waiting too long.

“You know why I didn’t shoot him?” Alejo said in the darkness, proving his thoughts had been running through the same jungles as Lalo’s. “Tsarnev turned around, and all I saw was this kid, this guy who looked so innocent and young and should be studying in some library for a computer science degree, wearing geeky t-shirts and still waiting for his first date. Not carrying weapons in Mali.” Alejo ran a hand across his eyes. “I saw Gabriel. My friend from Bolivia. I think he was one of the best friends I ever had. We worked together in the Prism. He was really young, had that same look of wide-eyed wonder. Idealism.” Alejo swallowed hard. “Gabriel strapped a bomb to his chest last year and blew himself up to take out some Israeli government officials. I saw Tsarnev and I thought about Gabriel. And I waited too long.”

Alejo had never told Lalo what happened. Even though Alejo took them by surprise, somehow Tsarnev and the other AQIM lackey brought Alejo down to the floor and immobilized him in a chair with rope, back to back with a shirtless Amadou, skin still steaming from the Koranic brands.

They set Amy on fire with no warning.

Tsarnev locked the three of them in there and left them all to burn.

Lalo knew Alejo got out of the ropes and tried to save Amy, but it was too late. By the time the room was choked with smoke, Lalo and Caspian had found them and broken open the door.

Amadou had sat on the burned floor of that room and wailed for hours straight, after the fire went out.

Before that day, Alejo was all excited to finish up in Timbuktu and see Wara again. But what was he supposed to feel after he watched Amy die and felt like it was his fault?

Bad stuff happened working with their organization. Wara could die in front of him, too. In fact, that’d come much too close to happening when Lázaro drugged the two of them back in Fez. That’s why Alejo had been going crazy, obsessed with getting rid of Lázaro.

He’d also been acting scared to be close to Wara. Which Lalo totally, totally understood.

When you loved somebody, you opened yourself up to watching that person suffer. And that was infinitely worse than death.

“I don’t want to do this anymore,” Alejo told Lalo now on the porch, eyes lowered, polishing his mud ball til it shone like a flawless alien moon. “But I thought she was gonna come with me. To start over. What am I supposed to do now?”

There wasn’t a lot to say to that.

So Lalo just thought about Romina.

WHEN WARA OPENED HER EYES, SHE threw up all over the floor. She pried her eyes open and saw she was hanging over the edge of the brocade comforter, gagging all over the threadbare Persian rug. Her eyes focused and saw plastic, a big sheet of it, neatly covering the entire carpet.

Darn it.

She wiped her mouth on the sleeve of the gray pea coat. All of her skin felt hot. The hand gripping the edge of the comforter was shaking, hard and fast.

"I really, really wanted to ruin your rug," she choked out.

Lázaro was still here, leaning back in the velvet armchair in the corner of the room. He'd lost the hat, and his hair was sticking up all over the place in bleached curls.

"Everyone throws up after it wears off,” he shrugged. “Better to be prepared." His gaze flickered to the plastic, then back to her. "Feeling better?"

Wara curled up in a little ball, wrapped her arms around her head. The skin of her cheek practically sizzled against the cool sheet, tangled all around the blankets.

How could Lázaro do this to her?

She could feel his eyes on her from across the room.

"I'm sorry,” he said rather flippantly. “There were some things I had to know. So yeah, I gave you something that makes you talk against your will. The thing is, you can't lie when you take it. Even if you don't want to talk or act, the truth always comes out. You don't say or do anything you didn't really want to. It just all comes out."

This was awful.

"I hate you,” she hissed at him, face still smashed into the sheets. What did he give her, some truth serum? Date rape drug?

"The
truth
is, I hate you," she repeated in a hiss.

Lázaro snorted and rolled his eyes. "Look," he said. "I needed to interrogate you. And while you were under the influence, I found out our former relationship is much more…interesting than I had realized. You came on to me. And told me about how we used to be not just friends. You seemed to know your way around me pretty well."

Wara thought that now would be the time to dissolve into the sheets and just die.

"But I managed to extract myself from your clutches," Lázaro went on dryly. "No worries. No clothing was removed in the process of this interrogation."

She peeked around the sheets and her arms far enough to see that Lázaro was watching her. What she could remember was pretty fragmented, but the memories she had made sense with what Lázaro said.

“Honey, I’m flattered, but all I want to do is talk,”
she remembered him saying, right here in this room. And he got off the bed and went to sit over on that chair in the corner.

Slowly, Wara started to believe that it seemed to be true, what Lázaro said, that nothing happened.

She really, really wanted to believe him.

Moving on.

Wara forced herself to breathe, still fighting the heat across the bridge of her nose. Lázaro was just sitting over there, apparently not about to go anywhere. "I needed to know who you are,” Lázaro said. “Tsarnev is playing with me. And obviously you're part of the experiment. I had to understand why he cares if I kill you. And what you had told me so far wasn't extremely helpful. Until the drugs." He raised an eyebrow. "I think I get it now. I think Tsarnev wants to create henchmen who have no emotional attachments, who'll do whatever he wants without moral problem. Because we just don't care."

"Well, it seems to be working.” Wara raised her head out of the sheets. Apparently she'd hurled everything onto the carpet already, because the nausea had mostly passed. The queasiness still churning around inside her was from remembering kissing Lázaro right in this room. She knew that memory was real.

She dragged herself up to sitting against a pillow, pulled the comforter up over her and hugged her knees into her chest. She was still wearing the same clothes from dinner, thank God.

"Whatever Tsarnev did to you,” she repeated, glowering at Lázaro, “it worked. You don’t care."

"Congrats to him," Lázaro clipped. "And sucks to be you, since the next part of his experiment is to have me kill you. Apparently he knew about our former attachment." The corner of Lázaro's mouth curled into a smile. "You didn't want to tell me I used to care about you. That's part of why I had to give you the drugs. The truth will always come out." He crossed one leg over the other and rested an arm on each side of the chair. The sleeves of his black shirt were rolled up to the elbow and the scars looked as awful as ever on the right side. "I had to know," he continued. "And now I get it. This is just another part of the experiment."

He didn’t seem to really remember. Apparently they’d been kissing, but it hadn’t brought back any more memories. Lázaro had realized he and Wara used to date, but because she told him.

If he had really remembered, he wouldn’t be sitting over there with that smirk on his face.

Lázaro would be furious.

“So what are you going to do now?” she asked him flatly.

Lázaro pushed the hat up out of his eye. "Whatever the hell I want,” he said. “With you, maybe there’s no limit to what I can remember. Whatever Tsarnev has planned for me in the future, I don’t want to be a part of it without my own damn free will. And that means I need to keep remembering who I am. You and me together, babe.”

That so did not sound good. Wara felt her shoulder blades tense and begin to burn.

“What about the kids?” she asked. “The hospital?”

Lázaro hauled himself out of the chair and limped a few steps towards her. “That depends on you. Thanks to all you’ve helped me learn tonight, let’s just say I’m not in a huge hurry to do anything that Tsarnev wants. You keep helping me remember, I have options besides just being his Frankenstein’s monster. Now,” Lázaro snapped his fingers, “time for me to leave you. Be a smart girl and sleep instead of spending the night plotting how to get out of here. Remember, I'm counting on you to keep the atrocities at bay. Tomorrow, we have to go back to Timbuktu. It's a helluva trip."

He scooped up the plastic and folded it into a little ball, then lurched towards the door and closed it on his way out. Wara felt her shoulders slump, muscles still on fire.

They were going back to Timbuktu? Where Alejo was?

She staggered out of bed and buried her feet in the cottony carpet. She hadn't noticed the incense burning on the black bedside table until now. The little cone sat smack dab in the center of a blue china plate with windmills and smiling Dutch people stabbing at hay with pitchforks. A nearly invisible wisp of exotic-smelling smoke had pretty much obliterated the smell of vomit.

It creeped her out that Lázaro, at some point, had brought incense in here while questioning her with truth serum.

And then he said she came on to him.

It was time for a long, hot shower.

Wara dug through the drawers, desperate to change into something else. She wouldn’t wear what she had on right now again.

Ever.

She found gray yoga pants and a pretty jade-colored knit shirt with long sleeves and a knit hood. After five minutes of fiddling, she was able to make the ancient-looking shower in the bathroom off her room spit out hot water.

Time all warped together as Wara stood in the shower.

Finally, the hot water started to chill. No towels, so she dried off with the black clothes she'd had on before, then shuddered and tossed them into a heap in the corner. A spindly iridescent spider lost its footing on the web under the sink and disappeared into the black fabric.

She hated this place. She hated everything about this.

And there was no one to blame but herself.

Ok, it wouldn't be too hard to blame Lázaro, too.

She was still so angry at him, at what he had made her do.

"The drugs make you tell the truth," Lázaro had insisted. "You don't say or do anything you didn't want to."

She'd used up all the hot water in the house, and still felt filthy.

Oh God, she missed Alejo so much.

Wara stepped out of the bathroom and fell onto her knees on the carpet, shoulders curved over onto the bed.

She was never going to see him again. She could never face him again.

She wanted to cry and scream and weep into the blanket, but nothing happened. The only thing she could hear was her loud breathing, fast and shallow against the bed.

It was the stupidest, stupidest cliché, but this felt like a freaking dream that she just couldn’t wake up from.

It was impossible that any of this had happened.

In the space of thirty seconds, in a room that buzzed with mosquitos in Timbuktu, Wara had flipped her entire universe on its axis.

She had told Alejo she wanted to be with him, leave CI and start over, that she didn’t want anything but him. They hid together that night and Alejo held her in his arms and she let him write verses about love on her foot with henna.

And then she stabbed Alejo with poison so Lázaro could live.

She threw herself at Lázaro, right here on this bed. When she was drugged with something that supposedly made her tell the truth about what she really wanted.

How could she want something that was so messed up?

There was something corrupted in her, deep at the core, and it had all just burst right out into the light.

Wara riveted her head to one side to see the old fashioned, tin alarm clock on the dresser, ticking away into the night. Lázaro had said to sleep before the trip across the Sahara, and it was nearly two o'clock. But she knew if she got under the covers she was only going to have nightmares. She pushed herself up and staggered to the little door that led to the porch.

Outside, it felt a good ten degrees warmer than the bedroom. Bamako was still cooling from the raging furnace it was during the day. There were no stars, and the sky was a graying purple, dim with dust and pollution. Random cars honked on some avenue close by.

Wara walked to the railing of the tiny porch and the rough concrete scratched at her bare feet. When she leaned over the metal rail, Wara gasped. The porch actually stuck out over a ravine, jagged and carpeted in tuffs of spiky black grass. The bottom melded with the darkness of the night. The other buildings that surrounded the drop-off here in the center of the city were crumbling, colonial-period houses and a couple cement block apartment buildings.

Somewhere below, a rooster crowed and someone screamed at a child that was fussing

Wara sucked in her breath and stepped back from the railing. She sank down along the wall til her butt touched the concrete, drew her knees up to her chin and closed her eyes. Everything smelled like exhaust and coriander and rotting fruit.

Wara muffled a sob and dug her face into her knees, let her hair cover her, tangled and wild.

What have I done?

What in the world have I done?

When everything happened with Lázaro six years ago in Bolivia, Wara had thought the two of them were so messed up. Lázaro was a recovering bad boy, just starting to go to church and turn his life around. That hadn't gone very well for him the night of the coffee shop date.

Wara always knew she had even less excuse: she was working as a missionary, for goodness sake. Sleeping with your boyfriend was a one-way ticket to being fired from the mission, but she never told anyone. And then she was too embarrassed to speak to Lázaro and had just disappeared with things that belonged to him.

She'd thought they were messed up then.

Wara lifted her head and let it fall back against the rough wall, staring up at the stars through strands of damp hair.

If she and Lázaro were messed up then, what were they now?

Before I wanted to be a missionary, and I did something that was against what I believed in. Now I've seen so much crap I don't even know what I believe.

I just betrayed Alejo, my best friend, who wanted me to marry him.

All to save the man I messed up with in the past, who is supposed to kill me.

And Lázaro. Whatever hate I have unleashed….

Wara winced and cut that thought off right there.

Lázaro was definitely more messed up than before. More than a little bit.

Wara let her eyes drift to her foot: Many waters cannot quench love. Alejo’s Arabic letters were still imprinted on her skin.

He had been so cold since working in Mali. Wara had been so afraid he was disappointed about her questioning faith and God. When Alejo came back so distant, she'd honestly wondered if he cared about her.

She had been terrified that he didn't actually care about her.

It had been amazing that night in the mosque when he said what he really felt.

Something hit Wara then, staring up at the Bamako sky, imagining Alejo under the same sky across the Mali sand.

She knew he must be furious, and ever since she woke up here with Lázaro, she’d been imagining Alejo pacing that mission compound, talking on the phone with Rupert about what to do now.

But now, on the porch, the picture of Alejo that slammed into her heart was of tears, and it hurt so bad she could hardly breathe.