Prism - By Rachel Moschell Page 0,45

minutes ago when he did it.

And what was with the puking?

Everything is spinning around so fast.

Wara vaguely realized that she had been scooped up and was moving through the trees. Alejo must be carrying her.

She slumped against his shoulder, and the sounds of crickets singing among the banana trees and grass crunching underfoot slowly faded away.

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