Once We Were Starlight

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?”

Cody nodded. “The records from the orphanage indicate that Karys is her given name, chosen by her mother. And yes, Grant is her paternal surname.”

Karys Grant.

It sounded foreign. A name I didn’t recognize. A girl I did not know and had no idea how to be.