She stared at the seals. The dark red ink became viscous as it dried, like congealing blood. She did feel she’d just signed a blood pact. A binding, unbreakable one.
He rolled up both documents, tied each with a ribbon, placed them in the larger box. “Those papers aren’t considered legitimate without two witnesses. As soon as we land in Judar, Shehab and Kamal, my brothers, will add their seals and signatures to ours.” He rose, extended a hand to her. “Now we’ll check on Mennah.”
Everything in Carmen squeezed. Fists, guts, lungs, heart.
Mennah. The reason he’d just taken her on.
The reason she’d just signed her life away.
Seven
A gentle nudge jogged Carmen out of the twilight between exhausted sleep and strung wakefulness.
It took her a second to realize they were touching down.
Her sandpaper-lined eyes scraped open. And there he was.
Farooq sprawled opposite her, an indulgent lion letting his overzealous cub crawl all over him. He was still watching her.
He scooped Mennah up with kisses and gentleness, rose, came to stand over her. They both looked down on her from what felt like ten feet, his face opaque, Mennah’s ablaze with glee.
“Do you need a few minutes to wake up, or shall we go?”
She shook her head, sprang to her feet. Her sight darkened, disappeared. His arm came around her, would have released her the moment she steadied if not for Mennah. Their daughter threw an arm over Carmen’s neck, bringing the three of them into an embrace.
Carmen went limp with the blow of longing at feeling him imprinting her in such tenderness, even if borrowed, at Mennah mashing herself against them as if seeking their protection, their union. At the hopelessness of it all.
She lurched away before her eyes leaked, held out her arms for Mennah. Mennah reached back.
Farooq only walked on. “I’ll carry her.”
She scampered, kept up with him. “But she wants me now.”
“Do you want your mother, ya gummuri?” he cooed to Mennah, who looked back on Carmen with dimples at full-blast, as if she thought her father was playing catch-me-if-you-can. Carmen gave him a glare from an angle Mennah wouldn’t witness. His Mennah-smile remained on his lips but his eyes frosted over. “She will see her land for the first time, be seen in it in my arms, a princess held up by her father the crown prince for all to see.”
Carmen’s legs gnarled with the power of image he projected, the poignancy. She rasped, “Put that way, you go right ahead.”
Not that he was awaiting her approval. His strides ate up a path to the exit, leaving it up to her to keep up or not.
She scrambled in his wake, looked at the multitime zone clock on the way out: 9 a.m. in New York, 5 p.m. here. It had been sixteen hours since she’d found Farooq standing on her doorstep.
Sixteen hours. They felt like sixteen days. Sixty. Far more. It felt as if her life before those hours had been someone else’s, her memories sloughing off to be replaced by another reality that had unfolded with his reappearance.
Then she stepped outside and into another world.
And it was. Though her life had taken her all over the world, Judar felt … unprecedented, hyperreal. The azure of its spring skies was clearer, more vibrant, the reds and vermilions starting to infuse the horizon as the sun descended were richer in range and depth, its breeze, even in the airport where jet exhaust should have masked everything, felt crisper, more fragrant, its very ambiance permeated by the echoes of history, the lure of roots that tugged at her through her connection with Mennah, whose blood ran thick with this kingdom’s legacy.
Mennah, who seemed to recognize the place, too.
Secure in her father’s power and love, she looked around, eyes wide, face rapt as she inhaled deep, as if to breathe in the new place, fathom it, make it a part of her.
Carmen knew how she felt. With her first lungful of Judarian air, she felt she’d breathed in fate.
Then she heard his voice, the voice that had steered her fate since she’d first heard it, that seemed would steer it forever, permeated with intensity and elation.
“Ahlann beeki fi darek, ya sagheerati.”
He was welcoming Mennah home. And only her.
Carmen groped for the railing of the stairway, feeling as if a wrecking ball had swung into her.
How stupid could she get? She wanted him to welcome her home, too? When it wasn’t her home, only Mennah’s? When the only reason he’d brought her here, where he didn’t want her, was Mennah? How could he welcome her where she wasn’t welcome?
She nearly gagged on the toxicity of her feelings of alienation. She had breathed in fate, could feel it all around her. Mennah’s. She was just its vehicle. Her fate was not even a consideration here.
Farooq’s arm came around her shoulder.
She couldn’t bear him to act the supportive husband, lurched away, continued her descent, blurted out, “I thought you were taking us to Judar, not to some space colony on another planet.”
A look of satisfaction chased away the watchfulness in his eyes as he glanced around. “The airport meets your approval?”
“Approval?” Her gaze swept the spread of structures extending as far as her vision reached into the horizon in all directions. “Try stupefaction. This place looks as if it covers all of Judar.”
“What you see is the rest of Judar Global Central, Judar’s latest and largest project, a Free Zone residential, commercial and manufacturing complex, the biggest and most advanced in the world. The airport is but part of this new community and is the world’s largest passenger and cargo hub.”
“Tell me about it. This is the first airport I’ve ever seen with …” She counted. “Ten parallel nonintersecting runways.”
“It is built for the future, designed to handle all next-generation aircraft. The parallel runways allow up to eight air-crafts to land simultaneously, minimizing in-air queuing. Last year it handled twenty-six million passengers. This year we plan on exceeding the thirty million mark.” He tickled Mennah, who was waving around, demanding his attention. “You want me to explain to you, too, ya sagheerati? You see those huge glass and steel buildings? Those are four passenger terminals, twelve hotels and I can’t remember how many malls. It’s lucky we have over two hundred thousand parking spaces, eh? And you see these signs? Each color leads to a transportation linking the airport to Durgham, Judar’s capital and your new home, a high-speed freeway, the rail system and the metro.”
He turned to Carmen, catching her elbow as her feet wobbled with her first step onto Judarian soil, on a red carpet, no less.
She averted her eyes to the black stretch limo parked at the end of the carpet as his entourage flitted in and out of her field of vision. “It’s amazing how everything feels—I don’t how to say this—steeped in the stuff of Arabian Nights fables. I don’t know how, when everything is so modern, futuristic even. It must be those subtle cultural touches to the designs.” She stopped because he did, shifted her feet on the ground, suppressed a shudder. “No, scratch that. It’s the land itself.”
He looked down at her, the declining sun infusing the gold of his irises with fire, or probably just revealing it. “You feel the land, don’t you? It’s calling to you. What is it saying?”
It’s saying, run now, or you’ll never leave. In life or death.
Before she confessed her thoughts out loud, a rumbling separated itself from the