It was toying with me. Distracting me while it gathered strength.
A shadow slinks across the grass, gliding over the lawn chairs.
“You don’t belong here, little one,” Nadine says. “Bad things happen to little ones here.”
Ignoring the shouts, I break into a run. A crunch draws my gaze to the ground, and bile sticks in my throat at the sight of stark white bones protruding from the grass. Small, bloated gray hands jut from the dirt, scratching at my ankles.
The other shadow. It caught me.
Before I can reach the attendant’s booth, the ground disappears under me. I plunge into the duck pond, water rushing into my mouth as I gasp.
Black sludge bubbles to the surface of the pond, bursting like pus from an open sore. I roll out of the pond, crying out when one of the small gray hands snags a lock of my hair.
“Yasmina, little Mina.” Nadine’s taunting voice follows me as I run, a childlike singsong ringing in the night. “Mama’s waiting for you to run back home.”
There was a child growing inside Nadine.
Hatem’s child. Hatem didn’t understand why she wouldn’t leave El Agamy to live with him in his quaint loft by the University of Cairo. “I have plenty of space for you and baby,” he had pleaded. “You won’t need to go back to the villa again.”
Nadine could never risk him learning the truth about her. About the Haikal family.
About the debts they owed.
Nadine turned in her bed, laying a palm over her flat belly. Soon, she’d begin to show. Her mother would be thrilled. A pregnant woman doesn’t raise suspicion when she enters a daycare or school grounds. They could fulfill their quota early this year.
The only appealing part of using her pregnancy to bring home more offerings was how angry Safa would be. Safa was too lazy, too vicious. She didn’t take the time to win the children’s trust the way Nadine always did.
Nadine knew what would happen when this child entered the world. Her mother would lay the baby at the door. They would watch it wriggle in its blanket, waiting to see if the orange light would leak under the door’s lip. If the light would spread over the infant, sending the Haikal women to the ground, or if it would leave the baby alone.
“It rejected your brother,” Nadine’s mother had shared one afternoon. Nonchalant. “We sent him off to live with my cousin in El Mansoura. The ones it rejects will never be strong enough to fulfill the debt. They only exist because ofourstrength. Their lives, their wealth, their comfort—it begins and ends here.”
For the longest time, Nadine hadn’t understood what that meant. She’d always known she had relatives all around Masr and the rest of the world. She’d been jealous of her brother, this mysterious sibling who had grown up without bloodying his hands in the Haikal family debt, but who unknowingly reaped all the benefits throughout his halcyon life.
It wasn’t until Safa turned sixteen and failed to bring any children to the door for a full year that the truth had exploded out of Mama.
“If we fail, it isn’t just us who pays the price. Every single member of Bamba’s bloodline—people you’ve never even met, their children and grandchildren—will die.”
Nadine studied the ceiling. This child would be half Hatem. Half the man with smudged glasses and perpetual ink stains under his nails. The man she thought she might love. But it would also be Nadine’s offspring. A child born from the woman responsible for a third of the disappearances in western Alexandria.
Would it be worse for the child to be chosen and live out their life in the Haikal villa, wrapped in the luxury Bamba had secured with their lives? Or worse for them to be rejected and have their fate tossed into the hands of Haikals like Nadine and Safa?
Whatever happened, this child would not bear their burdens alone.
Nadine closed her eyes and dreamt about a curly-haired little girl with brown eyes and her father’s wide, open smile.
“The last four years we have spent at Canyon High have set the foundation for who we will become,” I read. Jesse watches me pace from his perch on the train’s platform, idly playing with the zipper on his jacket.
“Too passive,” he calls out. “Also, corny.”
I stop. Scowl, rereading the introduction. I pull the pen out of my hairband and make a note to rephrase.
The wind howls between the six abandoned shipping containers on the train tracks. The train holding them lies in front of a long row of warehouses, most of which have been empty since Ward’s economic collapse in the eighties.
The train tracks are also the site of Ward’s most notorious massacre. In 1997, six men highjacked a passenger train on these rails and slaughtered every single person onboard, including the conductor. As the story goes, the engine propelled the train past half a dozen towns before it finally rolled to a stop in Ward. They say on stormy nights, you can hear the train’s phantom whistle, the hissing and screeching of the brakes grinding to their ultimate stop.
“Should I replace ‘who we will become’ with ‘who we are’?” I tap thepen against my lip. Auditions for graduation speakers are next Wednesday, and so far, I hate every word I’ve written.
“If this is your revenge for my comment at the diner, consider it carried out successfully.” Jesse hops to the ground. The stones beneath the tracks crunch under his boots. I think of child-sized bones sticking out of the earth and shudder. “You said you wanted me to show you how to fight.”
