I Own the Dawn: The Night Stalkers (9 page)

Dilya looked up to see where his attention had strayed. Her sharp eyes picked Kee out of the shadow. She left the string hanging between his hands, halfway between two figures, grabbed up the stuffed cat he’d given her, and sprinted across the burning sand toward Kee.

The string game they had been playing for almost an hour now hung lifeless and snarled about his fingers.

The girl launched herself at Kee, who caught her in a fierce hug.

And as Kee spun Dilya about until her feet lifted from the ground, she moved from shadow to sunlight. And in the direct light he could see a look on Kee’s face, not of joy, though that was present, but of sadness. Almost terror. She was holding the girl so tight, he half feared Kee would hurt her. Then Kee plopped her down and, with a friendly slap on her butt, sent the girl scooting off for the chow line.

Archie watched himself, with more than a little surprise, rise to his feet and move to stand beside Kee. They both looked into the tent’s shadows where the little girl dodged around Big John’s bulk to grab a sandwich.

“She loves you.”

Kee jumped as if he’d electrocuted her. Why did he never do anything right?

Kee looked up at him, her eyes wide. The terror back tenfold in those deep, dark eyes. A terror so deep he could imagine no method powerful enough to wash it away.

Kee’s voice was a whisper. “You’re good with her. You’re a good man, Professor.”

Now it was his turn to be surprised. It was an assessment that few had offered outside his sister and Major Emily Beale.

“Thank you for Dilya’s sake.” She hooked a finger in the collar of his T-shirt and pulled him down.

“This,” she kissed one cheek, “is for your kindness. This,” she kissed the other, “is for saving me when I blanked at that awful refugee camp.” And “This,” she kissed him softly on the lips.

This.

Archie had never tasted anything like Kee Smith’s kiss. She was the scent of a dusky sunset and the taste of abandon. He didn’t know what to do. As all the devils and gods were his witnesses, he didn’t know. He stood riveted in place by the lips of a woman who barely stood to his shoulder.

When she moved back, just an inch, he almost stumbled forward onto her. Her almond eyes were wide, as wide as they had been moments before, but there was no terror.

No. If he had to define that particular expression, he’d be forced to identify it as wonder. And then, impossibly, a deep blush roared up her face.

Had he a mirror handy, he would define his own expression as shock. This pint-sized warrior, more beautiful than the most perfect windup doll, had decided to turn his entire world on its ear.

When he blinked and shook his head to clear his thoughts, to clear the mesmerizing trace of warmth that lingered on his lips, Kee no longer stood before him. How long had he been standing in the sun?

Crazy Tim slapped him on the shoulder with a resounding buffet that sent him staggering into the tent. “You’re daydreaming again, Arch.”

His fingers were still tangled up in string.

***

Dilyana sat at the table and ate her food. Bit into the two pieces of hot bread filled with cheese, crisp cooked meat, and a thick slice of a red fruit she’d never seen before. She still found it hard to eat slowly, but it was so important to The Kee, she pretended to trust her meal would not be taken from her before she had finished. Made believe they wouldn’t all be dead in minutes. And for days now it had been true. She could feel her defenses relaxing. She hadn’t stolen food in two days, though she had some hidden beneath The Kee’s bed that she checked each night as soon as they all flew away into the stars.

She pretended to be amused when the big man with a voice as big as thunder pretended to throw up on someone else. She could see it was expected, that he’d done it for her. So she smiled then rolled her eyes. He looked pleased.

But what she watched was The Kee and the String Man. He was as long and thin as the string they played with. Clearly, he too had been teasing her with pretending to not know the game. He had made it fun, so she let him believe that she didn’t see what he was doing. Her mother would have liked him for being kind to her child.

Dilyana liked him too. Trusted him. He hadn’t hit her when she was sick on him. And hadn’t treated her like a baby either. He treated her as a friend might, even though he was so old. She hadn’t had a friend in a long time.

Now he and The Kee stood talking in the shadows. Dilya could still feel where The Kee had wrapped her arms around Dilya so tightly and swung her about. Held her as if she were important. As if she mattered.

She watched The Kee reach up to the String Man and kiss him on each cheek and once on the lips. At that moment, they both changed.

Dilyana could remember her parents kissing. Sometimes quickly, and sometimes, when they thought Dilya wasn’t watching, much longer. In the dark of the night, Dilya had watched them through the slitted eyes of pretended sleep as they had done even more. Removing each other’s clothes beneath the blanket and moving silently together in the night. Dilya loved the memory, because they always looked so happy. Even when they’d been frightened and lost, they had held each other close.

She had to blink hard to clear her eyes so that she could watch them change.

Would The Kee and the String Man do this?

Now the String Man stood like a statue, not touching The Kee. And The Kee moved from him, slow at first, then very quickly to the food line.

She sat silently across from Dilyana and ate her food quietly. Ate as if she were alone at the table and no one else sat near.

The man with a horse painted into the skin of his arm slapped the String Man, waking him from his standing sleep. He turned, looking into the tent straight at The Kee’s back. Stood and watched for a handful of heartbeats, then turned and disappeared into the glaring sun.

Maybe they were going to become a mother and father.

Dilyana bit into her sandwich. The question was, would that be good for her or bad? After making sure no one watched, she slid a round orange-colored fruit into her sleeve. Better to have something set aside in case she had to run again.

Archie waited with John and Tim near the exit from the soccer stadium. He noted the couple of Rangers behind sandbag emplacements, appearing relaxed but keeping an eye out. A double line of very new concrete pilings fifty feet from the entrance made sure no truck bombs could enter this way. The original line at twenty-five feet made sure that a second truck following wouldn’t get through either.

Crazy Tim was doing what he always did, describing a trivial event in such a way that you were fascinated despite yourself. Today he was telling how Major Henderson had been tracking some baddies last night and spooked a six-point buck instead. They’d chased it over the hills, and Henderson had put a single shot from the 30 mm M230 cannon through its head at two thousand yards. The fact that the shot was completely impossible didn’t really matter when the headless deer, cleaned and dressed by the Major, had been unloaded from the chopper and carried to the chow tent for the cooks to play with. The animal had certainly felt no pain.

Archie offered a scoffing laugh when expected. An easy laugh that choked in his suddenly dry throat. A vision walked toward them. The girl and the woman.

The girl, a slip of wind, wrapped in a plain white
hijab.
Skirt, overdress, and head scarf, leaving her merry face and bright eyes to shine forth.

And the woman. A long skirt of the palest blue. A long-sleeved blouse of flowing black cotton. A gray scarf the color of a winter sky slipping off her hair and onto her shoulders. Sergeant Kee Smith glared at him, her eyes narrowed and her mouth in a grim line.

John and Tim, finally catching his distraction, turned to see.

Catcalls and whistles. “Smith, you are hot!”

“Like to see you wearin’ that when we fly.”

“This is so unfair!” Kee brushed her hands down the skirts as if she were brushing mud off a tank.

“Oh, it’s working for us!”

“Damn, girl, we’re gonna make that your new required camp uniform.”

Archie couldn’t speak, couldn’t face her, but couldn’t take his eyes from the vision. He’d known the woman was there. Couldn’t miss that about Kee Smith. She radiated female from every pore of her being. But the clothing, far more modest than anything she wore in camp, revealed a feminine side she never showed.

He bowed to her. He didn’t know what else to do.

Her eyes, narrowed even further, then a small crinkle at the corners gave her away. She almost smiled before she caught herself, but she looked a little lighter when she turned to face her hecklers.

“Just don’t mess with me, boys.” She lifted her blouse from her side to reveal her M9. A tweak of her skirt revealed a backup piece in an ankle holster and the lower part of a calf-sheath for her knife.

They applauded. Archie couldn’t even offer that. The woman and the warrior mixed before him. Neither elf nor fairy as he’d first thought her. She was absolutely and uniquely herself, which was the headiest tonic of all.

To cover his confusion, he bent down before Dilya and offered a perch on his back. The girl scrambled up and threw her arms around his neck in a choke hold as he hooked his arms under her knees.

Together, they turned and headed out of the stadium and into the town.

***

Kee pulled at her scarf for the thirtieth time, it simply wouldn’t stay put. And when it fell to her shoulders, the looks she received from the locals shifted from sour to actively hostile.

Dilya pulled on her hand, indicating she should bend down. The girl did something that with a fold, a tug, and a quick slip of her hands, cool on Kee’s skin, tucked the ends in neatly.

Kee stood and it felt different. Felt right for the first time. She turned her head right and left. Slightly limited her peripheral vision, but not badly. She smoothed her hand down Dilya’s hair, only to realize the girl’s head was uncovered. Scanning the street calmed her. While the women all had their hair covered, half the girls racing about the market had lost control of their scarves. She pulled Dilya’s back up anyway.

She searched for the guys. Even in the few moments they’d knelt together, the market had shifted, flowed, changed shape. Bati was a small enough town to only have one market that everyone could reach easily on foot. And it was big enough for that market to be packed and teeming.

She stood by the nut vendor. A twist of paper in her hand warm with roasted nuts. Toasted cinnamon teased at her nose. Dilya fished another from the wrapper and led them forward. The men, who had been staring at a line of skinned and hung sheep covered with flies while she made her purchase, were nowhere to be seen.

The crowd was close, the open aisles narrowed by carts and tables shoved farther to the center than they should be. Yet, people flowed back and forth without contact or jostling. Not even the little that occurred in any American city when the sidewalks were busy. A man here would never think of taking advantage of the crowd to brush against a woman not his wife. There was no blast of male cologne offering a knockout punch. Even the wealthier women of the town understood the most feminine perfume was a fresh-bathed female.

She’d expected to be overpowered by the stench of unwashed bodies. Instead it was the bite of sizzling spices from a Biryani stall serving mutton over rice, the cool wash of sun-warmed eggplant at a vegetable merchant, the tickle in her nose as they passed the pepper merchant.

The noise was constant, steady, and wholly unlike any she’d experienced before. Everyone talked at once and at length. Voices echoed off the tall mud-brick walls, bright, cheerful, laughing. Apparently only bargaining was done quietly; all other conversations were boisterous and sounded full of humor. And over it all, the cries of merchants, announcing their wares, who could easily be heard on the far side of the river.

Despite the briefings, she felt safer here than in most American city crowds. Her nerves were on alert, but no panic signals slid down them. They revealed a personal politeness not spoiled by the tourist-as-target mentality so many more-visited cities suffered. Here the social dynamics were easier, simpler.

There also wasn’t that second layer that most Americans couldn’t or didn’t choose to see. The layer where Kee and those like her had lived their childhoods. There were no rich in Bati, but neither did the poorest live in that thin world of desperation.

The crowd divided itself in only one way, and it did that instantly. Both sexes might be wearing the ubiquitous
hijab
of loose pants and a knee-length overshirt. But men either revealed their black, black hair or wore small circular caps. Women wore shawls over their hair. Most were solid colored, spreading down over their shoulders. But occasionally a head stood out in a beautiful piece of weaving. She’d have to find a stall that sold those.

The crowd shifted and parted and remerged.

Now she stood past the butcher, past the packed sweet stall. A bright orange twist of sugared bread in Dilya’s hand. Had she paid? Even as the market shifted again, Kee remembered handing over a brass two-rupee coin. The sweets vendor nowhere in sight, she once again stood with the guys. Hard to miss them: Big John and Archie towered above most in the crowd, Tim was wide-shouldered enough to command his own space. But the native men, while slight, were also taller than Kee, the cause of her frequent immersion, though the guys had never been more than ten feet away.

The guys were… she laughed.

Archie turned to flash her a smile. He reached out, grabbed her hand, and pulled her into the group. His hand, warm and strong and so damn sure of itself, made her feel more a woman than the dress and blouse.

An elderly man, fifty or maybe ninety, she didn’t know how to tell. His face lined, his hair gray, his smile lacked several teeth. But his eyes were clear and his grin bright with amusement as he spoke.

“This camel,” he snagged a blue-harnessed snout and pulled it close for them to inspect, “she is my sweetheart.” His English was heavily accented, but clear.

“She will cross a thousand miles with no complaint… and bite me in behind when I turn my back for one beat of heart. See her teeth. Very strong.”

He pinched the animal’s nostrils, and her upper lip curled upward revealing wide, yellow teeth, each the size of Kee’s thumb.

“My behind. Many marks.” He patted her muzzle affectionately.

She let herself drift past the brilliant colors of the dye merchant’s piled bowls. Powders of red, blue, magenta, and yellow, painfully bright in the sun, seemed to fill that whole area of the market with color. The walls brighter, the air fresher. A tiny scale, a scoop, and plastic bags the merchant carefully filled with the colors of the rainbow once the price had been agreed on. People still dyed their own cloth here.

The market shifted again in its slow-fast way, and Kee spotted a shawl merchant. She dug in her heels against the gentle but irresistible flow of humanity and managed to stop. Dilya remained by her left side as effortlessly as she had the whole time. She’d clearly grown up navigating these markets. But Kee felt a pull on her right hand.

It was only as he emerged from the flow to stop beside her that she realized the Professor hadn’t released her hand since the camel vendor. It felt as natural as if it had always been there. She glanced up at him.

“You had a following of young men. My pretending that you are claimed has caused them to disperse.”

“Maybe I didn’t want them to disperse. I could use a young man or two. Rub them together and start a fire or something.” She glanced around and spotted a few still watching her from farther back into the crowd. Nothing inspiring.

She turned back to the stall, leaving her hand in the Professor’s protection. As amused with herself as with him. She’d never in her life walked hand in hand with a boy. A bit late in life to discover she liked the feeling, even if it was just for pretend.

The shawl merchant displayed a wide variety. Mostly the solid colors for everyday wear, but from small hooks up the trimmed tree branches that supported his awning dangled scarves of ornate handwork. Several attracted her attention, but as she reached out, Dilyana stopped her.

She looked down and the girl shook her head. Were they religious scarves, or was it forbidden to touch something you hadn’t purchased?

Dilya pointed.

The merchant followed her finger even as Kee’s eyes tracked across. A pack rested against the wall behind the merchant. A dozen scarves peeked from the open top. She knew what Dilya had spotted the moment she saw it, so did the merchant. He reached over and selected the third one down, a midnight-blue cloth. Upon the surface of the night sky were scattered stars of silver and gold. A thin moon shone from a corner. He laid the cloth over Kee’s raised arm so that she could see the colors against the back of her exposed hand.

A trim of palest green brought her skin to light.

It was nighttime. Mystical and dark, yet alive with light. The very vaults of Heaven had been brought to life. Trimmed in the green of hope, of new life.

No mere cloth, it was artistry. And the colors hadn’t been painted, the piece had somehow been woven from many-colored threads. It should be in a museum, not worn on the head.

Once again, Dilyana pulled her down.

As Kee knelt on one knee, Dilya pushed her current scarf down to her shoulders. In moments, she had the new one in place.

The merchant held up a hand mirror little bigger than a postcard. Kee could barely see where the scarf crossed her forehead, but it was right. A Night Stalker. Dilya had found the perfect Night Stalker scarf for her. And, Kee didn’t mind admitting to herself, she looked pretty damn cute in it.

“What do you think, Professor?”

She turned her head left and right for him to see.

“Professor?” She snapped her fingers to get him to stop that weird, focused thing he did.

“It, uh, looks great on you.”

She turned away, then glanced back sidelong. He’d slid back into that staring mode of his. She almost wanted to sashay her hips. Her breasts had stopped men in their tracks before, but never loose-fitting colorful clothes and a head scarf.

“I’ll take it.” She reached for her money. Dilya stopped her.

With all the practice of a wise crone, she faced the merchant and raised an eyebrow.

He said something.

Kee was grinding away at the words when Archie leaned in.

“A thousand lira, about ten dollars.”

It would cost a hundred in the states. Minimum. A real deal.

Dilya shook her head and indicated Kee should kneel once more. Dilya started untucking it.

“No, Dilya,” Kee whispered. “I want it—”

The girl squinched her face up, clearly telling Kee to shut up and let a professional do her job.

The merchant cleared his throat.

Dilya left the scarf half-tied and turned slowly to look up at the man.

He spoke.

“Eight hundred,” the Professor whispered.

Dilya glanced up at him.

He flashed her ten fingers, then folded down two of them.

Dilya looked up to the heavens in exasperation and held up two fingers as if it were an order being issued by a general.

The merchant glanced at Kee and Archie, then folded his arms and squarely faced Dilya. He knew who he was dealing with and that she didn’t speak his language.

Kee had done her share and more of wheeling and dealing in her youth and since, but Dilya was a pro. Raised to it by her mother and her culture.

She began fingering other scarves of obviously lower quality, as if searching for a more affordable bargain.

The merchant held up five fingers.

Dilya cocked her head thoughtfully before indicating Kee should kneel again. This time, the girl didn’t remove her scarf, but pulled at it back into place, fussing as if checking the fit of a formless piece of cloth. Then rubbed it between her fingers to test the fabric’s quality. With a small turn, Dilya blocked her own right hand from the merchant’s view. She held up three fingers then pointed at the pocket she knew Kee kept her spending money in. Kee slid three hundred-rupee notes into Dilya’s hand.