15
pale
SHE FELT HERSELF GENTLY SWAYING back and forth, face hugging something scratchy and warm. For several minutes she drifted blissfully between semi-awake and half-asleep, trying to pry her eyes open but at the same time being quite sure she did not want to wake up. She remembered passing out, and that Alejo had hit her, and yeah, the pain was definitely still there.
Wara gasped and jerked wide awake, rolling into a sitting position and looking over her shoulder.
He was still here, sitting with arms propped on his knees.
Wara grabbed her head as black and silver flashed across her eyes in a violent parade. The sunlight was blinding. They were in the back of a truck, surrounded by high wooden slats. Alejo was staring off to one side, watching the road through gaps between the rough boards. He turned towards her when he heard her groan, but Wara could only close her eyes and take deep breaths, trying to keep the world from spinning around backwards.
Freakily, Alejo’s expression had completely changed from the way he had looked at her with remorse in the jungle for those few minutes after he had thrown the knife away into the wild. Now, his face had settled into such a serious mask that Wara was glad she was too dizzy to look at him. Those intense hazel eyes were just plain scary. She moaned again and weakly flopped back into a fetal position in the straw of the floor of the truck, her back to Nazaret’s brother.
He had given her a concussion; she was sure of it. Against her closed eyes, she saw again the scene in the clearing of the camp, Alejo’s face as he swung at her in rage.
The rest of the blank faces as they simply stared.
“Why didn’t you kill me?” Wara barely recognized the croaking voice that came out of her own mouth. She cleared her throat slowly and curled up tighter in her corner of the truck bed, too weak to do anything else but wait for his answer.
After a long pause, Alejo answered her, voice detached but non-threatening. “I never wanted to kill you. I just couldn’t let you know that, or you would have given away the escape plan.”
“What?” Wara squeaked.
“My friends are very smart. They would have been able to tell if you trusted me. I never meant to have to hit you”-- his voice faltered for a second there—“but it was the only way to get you out of there with what I had to work with. I was in charge of the rest there at the camp. But that man who showed up with Lázaro is Ishmael Khan, our handler. He’s our boss, and as soon as he arrived, I knew that you were as good as dead.”
Wara frowned as Alejo went on. “Ishmael was already coming at you with the knife, because Lázaro wouldn’t do it. I had to stop him cold in his tracks, and hitting you was the only way I could think of. Two more seconds and he would have cut your throat. Gabriel was robbed and had his throat slit in Pakistan a month ago, and Lázaro was involved with you, so I had a good excuse to take you out of their sight and eliminate you. They couldn’t have handled it. And because you were…incapacitated, Benjamin and the Khan assumed they didn’t need to come with me to keep you from escaping. Thank God they didn’t.”
There was a long pause as Wara tried to focus on the details of what Alejo had just said. He had to break her nose to save her life? “You broke my nose!” she blurted out, then gasped at the nausea waves produced by the effort of shouting.
“I won’t be able to tell if your nose if broken until the swelling goes down,” Alejo said, still maddeningly calm. “If it’s broken, I can set it. I’ve set a lot of broken noses, including mine.”
There was no way she was letting Alejo touch her swollen nose. She dared to raise a hand to her face and realized that there wasn’t nearly as much dried blood as she remembered. Had Alejo cleaned blood from her face while she was sleeping? The thought made her frown. She just lay there, slumped into the straw, not knowing what exactly she was allowed to ask in the presence of a terrorist who was also the brother of her best friend. How did she address the man who had broken her nose and then saved her life? Wara found she didn’t care anymore; everything had become much too confusing.
“So, who are you?” she finally asked, slowly working her way over onto her back. A painful blush spread across her face as the memory of Alejo kissing her in the tent played across her mind. She supposed it was part of his lovely escape plan, but she still didn’t like thinking about it at all. “You have a handler? Are you, like, a hit man?”
Sitting cross-legged next to her, Alejo snorted, a frustrated, annoyed kind of sound. “No, I’m not a ‘hit man’! I work for a Muslim organization that works for justice by fighting against the bad guys, Wara.”
“But you have a Bible. A really big one. Do you even read that thing?”
Of course he didn’t read it. He was a Muslim. And a murderer.
We fight against the bad guys, Wara, Alejo had said.
Well, Wara was pretty sure Nazaret’s brother was confused about the definition of “bad guy.”
Alejo sighed and pressed his lips together. “I’m not a Muslim anymore,” he finally said. Wara glanced at him, blinking away the confusion. Alejo looked away at the wooden truck slats. “I was, but now I’ve decided to follow Jesus”
Wara didn’t think she could have been more shocked if he had proposed marriage right then and there. This guy was a nutcase!
“How can you follow Jesus and…go around killing people?” she demanded. She tried to scoff, but the effort just hurt her nose. She settled for scowling at him.
Alejo turned towards her sharply. “We don’t just go around killing people. I have high-level training from Hezbollah’s militant wing, and I take advantage of that to get rid of the guys who hurt the poor and oppressed. I do things that I know are wrong, but it’s worse, Wara, to just sit around and do nothing while you watch innocent people suffer. We’re not terrorists.”
Wara wasn’t convinced. “So you follow Jesus by killing people.”
Alejo cut her off. “A couple weeks ago, my good friend Gabriel was robbed and they slit his throat. A few seconds later, a Pakistani man came along and found him lying there. He could have just left him alone—it was really inconvenient for him to help. But he did help him and he saved Gabriel’s life, like in the story Jesus told about the Samaritan.” Alejo played absently with the fringe on a canvas bag of oranges that was part of the truck’s cargo. “What if that Pakistani guy had come along while Gabriel was still being attacked? Should he, or the Good Samaritan, have just politely stepped aside and waited until the thieves finished, before stepping up to see if the victim was still alive and they could help? Or if they were stronger than the thieves and had a gun, should they have saved the man from being robbed and nearly killed in the first place?”
Wara frowned, remembering Gabriel with the friendly green eyes who had taken her down to the creek and how he had one hand to his throat as he watched them about to kill Wara.
“Jesus said to love your enemies,” she finally managed. No matter how much using violence seemed to be justified, the results could never be worth it, could they? What about Noah?
“I know.” Alejo was still frowning darkly. “But he also said he came to set the captives free, and to show love to everyone. As horrible as it is, sometimes those two commands just can’t both happen at the same time.”
Alejo was morosely silent for a moment, and Wara squinted up into the streaked sky. They were driving under the leafy branches of clustered palm trees now, and the sunlight flashed onto her face, then disappeared behind the temporary shade of their latticed leaves.
He could have killed me, but instead he saved my life, Wara realized. She would like to think Alejo was just insane, but some of what he said made sense. She just lay there, squinting against the bright sky, trying not to think about how much everything hurt.
“What about you?” she finally asked to break the unpleasant silence. “You were in charge. Aren’t you going to get in big trouble for this?” She tried to meet his eyes, hoping he would see that she was grateful, despite the possible broken nose, several unwanted kisses, and the fact that he was the one who had nearly killed her on the bus in the first place. But Wara found Alejo staring off at the pile of blue canvas orange sacks, looking much more serious than she had hoped.
“Actually we are in big trouble,” he answered a little mechanically, eyes not meeting hers. “I’m going to keep you safe, I swear it. But first there’s something I have to do. I think that…I’m pretty sure that…”Alejo stopped and swallowed hard. “In punishment for me betraying the group, I think they’re going to try to kill my family.”
Wara suddenly couldn’t breathe. “What?” she croaked. A wave of ice engulfed her.
His family.
The Martirs.
“I know they’re going to look for them.” Alejo shook his head bitterly. “I was a leader; I know everything. There’s no way the Khan isn’t going to be furious. He saw me as family and I betrayed him.”
“Nazaret?” Wara whispered. A shiver ran from her toes to her scalp. “They would hurt them? What are we going to do?”
“If we can warn them first, they can run.” Alejo’s voice was flat and a sheen of sweat painted his forehead. Wara was horrified.
“But…how much time do we have?”
“When you heard us talking in Pashto, Ishmael was telling us to kill you right away and throw your body in the waterfall that’s about a half-hour walk into the forest. The body would have drifted down into the main river, which runs through the canyon near the bus…accident. I told them I’d meet them down in Coroico. I say we have two more hours before they start to wonder, three before they realize what I’ve done.”
Alejo rested his arms on his knees and hid his face. “Oh God,” Wara heard him whisper raggedly, shoulders slumped with despair. “What have I done?”