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“I thought I’d find you here,” I said, climbing onto the wall and sitting beside him. Zakai’s lips tipped, but it was one of his distant smiles, the sort that made me feel lonely, as though his body was present but his mind was far across the sand in some remote place he’d never allow me to travel. He held up a pomegranate, offering me some with a raise of his dark brow. I shook my head, looking out over the desert, the vast sea of gilded swells rippling under the tranquil moon. As I adjusted myself on the ledge, the corner of a rock crumbled, the handful of sediment falling to the earth below. Carefully, I peered over, barely able to see the ground in the shadow of the high wall that surrounded our home. The rock wall was uneven, offering footholds. Climbing down would be no major feat, but if I fell . . .
Zakai put a handful of seeds he’d been collecting from the fruit into his mouth and then spit them into the air so they flew in every direction and dropped out of sight. I laughed and he grinned over at me but his eyes held something other than amusement. Challenge perhaps. That gloomy corner that resided only in his half of our star. “Do you ever want that to be us?” he asked, nodding to the place where the small, sweet seeds he’d had to work to dig out of the inner rind of the shell had disappeared over the wall. Away.
“I’d much rather be a grape. Sweeter. And far less complicated,” I said, trying to make him laugh.
“No,” he murmured, his head still tilted forward. “I mean do you ever want to fly over this wall, and fall to the earth below? Consequences be damned?”
I didn’t like it when he got in moods like this one. Inexplicably angry. Sullen. Asking questions I wasn’t sure how to answer. Immune to my attempts of humor. I wondered why I still tried to see beyond all the sand, as though if I squinted in just the right way, something might appear beyond the wall. But what? There was nothing, not even a mirage. We were the mirage. A lush paradise surrounded by scorpion nests, viper pits, and a thousand lonely footsteps of emptiness. Still, I could never lie, not to the other half of me. “Once in a while,” I admitted. “I don’t want to fall. But sometimes I think about how, when we were younger, we used to sneak down the stairs and run out into the desert. I think about going farther . . .” I pictured us as children, laughing as we pretended to run from Sundara. I’d always turned back first, unwilling to sacrifice safety for the unknown, and though perhaps disappointed, Zakai had always followed me home.
“Would you? Would you dare?” There was interest in Zakai’s voice, but there was also something more. Something incredibly melancholy. Was he picturing the two of us wandering endlessly? Would I dare? Run into the unforgiving desert that offered neither shelter nor a place to hide, now that I was no longer a child prone to the momentary excitement of rebellion?
“No,” I said. “There would be no reason.”
His lips set. “What if it’s not as empty or dangerous as he says?”
He. Haziq. I turned to Zakai, my gaze moving over his features, the face that was the male version of my own. The twins, that’s what we were called on Sundara. In truth, I didn’t believe we were siblings, but that’s what the men came to see, and sometimes women too, but not as often. No, I didn’t believe we were related. His memories were only of gutters and doorways, while I recalled a house with green shutters and a woman with a smile like the sunshine. What if. What if. “But what if it is? What if we have everything we need right here? And walking out into the desert is only a death march, like Haziq has told us?”
Zakai frowned, gazing to the horizon again. “The men come from across the sand,” he murmured. “If only I remembered . . .” He let out a sigh before finishing the sentence. If only I remembered how far it was, I was sure he’d been about to say. But neither of us did. We’d both been so young when we’d arrived. Others had told us of the plane ride, describing it in various ways. But we didn’t know what the journey meant in steps. For the plane zipped across the sky like a large metal bird. Our feet would not do the same.
“It doesn’t matter,” I reminded him. “The men come from squalid towns and villages. Ones filled with hunger and war and violence. Haziq has told us it’s why they pay so much money to fly here. To enjoy the paradise of Sundara, to live the temporary life we get to enjoy all—”
“Haziq,” he grumbled, “is a bastard and a fool. And you sound like his pet parrot.”
Stung, I drew back. A parrot was a bird that repeated all its master’s words, regardless of their worth. Tal sang a funny song about one sometimes, entertaining us in the courtyard.
At my hurt reaction, Zakai flinched. “I’m sorry, little star.”
“It’s okay,” I said, sighing. I knew that despite his own memories of starvation and despair, Zakai still longed for . . . some form of freedom I seldom desired. I had a home I loved. I had the eagle owl with eyes as orange as the setting sun, the playful goats that gifted us their milk, the date palms heavy with crimson fruit, and the delicate desert roses heady with perfume. I had the dragonflies with their iridescent wings, and the moon that grew so large in the star-laden night sky that sometimes I reached up to see if I could touch it, it seemed so close. And I had him, the other half of me.
I didn’t like the eyes that watched. But they didn’t harm me. Zakai had taught me to laugh at them. To call them names. And I had learned to listen to their secrets.
“The demented frog,” I mused, remembering his protruding eyes and the tongue that continually darted out to lick his thick lips. “I heard someone say his name. It’s Rami Erdagar. I drew it in my book.” I didn’t know letters, but I had my own language, a set of pictures that I used to sound out words and names.
“I don’t know why you bother.”
I shrugged. I wasn’t sure why I drew their names when I picked them up through snatches of conversation that drifted across the room. It had become habit. I had a list three pages long now contained in the small notebook with the yellow cover that I hid under my bedding.
I drew stories too, collected from those who came to repay a debt on Sundara, some of whom had left, and some who still remained. I sketched the things they told me about from the imaginings of my own mind, like the great blue whale that blew water from its spout, and the buildings that cut through the clouds.
“What word caught your attention tonight?” he asked.
I sighed, dragging my fingers over the stone, rubbing a few grains of sand between my fingertips. “Tantalizing,” I said. “Bertha says it means very good.” My brow flickered. I loved Bertha. She was older than I was, so she knew more things, but she’d never gone to school.
Zakai breathed out a laugh. “They must have been describing you.”
My brow smoothed as I shot him a smile. “Or you. I wrote it down.”
“Someday maybe you’ll string all those words together and they’ll tell a story.”
“What kind of story?”
“Something good, little star. Something that inspires hope.”
Hope. What was hope? I looked toward the sand-filled emptiness beyond our wall. Why wish for things you could not see? It was better to love the things in front of you, to appreciate what you’d been given, no matter how small.