Lib Novel Page 78
He shrugged. “Not exactly.”
“Did you eat?”
“I had water.”
“Why are you skipping meals? What’s going on? You don’t like the MREs? Trust me, when you have to go without a bathroom for long stretches, constipation can be a blessing.”
He snorted a laugh.
She picked something off her shoulder and flicked it into a gust of wind. “Don’t tap out on us, Adrían. You can do this. It’s hard. I know it’s hard. I can feel you pulling away, and isolation won’t work out here like it did for you in Chamas.”
“Why do you need me so badly?” he asked.
She looked back over her shoulder and then scooted closer. Spettro left his tent, stretched, and glanced at them before walking off, announcing that he was looking for a spot to “take a leak.”
“I can’t say much,” she began, voice lower, “but if something happens to me, I trust you, Lee, and Trev to get Sayeda to safety.”
He gave all of his attention to the conversation. “What will happen to Sayeda?”
“That’s the thing. I don’t know, and I’ve been trying to talk to you about it, but,” she waved a finger through the air, “the airways are laced with spies.”
“Is she in danger?”
“Not from who I initially thought. I love my aunt, but I’ll never leave her to her mother’s devices.”
“Dr. Bentley, right?”
“Sayeda told you?”
“Yes.” These days, he was learning that she’d trusted him with more than he’d realized. “Hannah, are you saying you don’t trust her mother?”
“I don’t know anymore.”
Spettro made his way back, briefly looking their way. Instead of crawling back into his tent, he lay on the ground just in front and closed his eyes with his hands tucked behind his head.
“Do you speak any Portuguese?” Adrían asked. “Any French or Spanish?”
She frowned. “No. Why?”
“Never mind.”
“Because of the ‘dryness’ of the ‘desert,’” she began, “let’s talk about something lighter, shall we? Like how, had you been anyone else, I would have argued, with confidence, that you’re in love with my…with Sayeda.”
“But because it’s me?” He turned away from the weak-limbed, unskilled minion who kept them back more than he assisted them in non-technical situations.
“I have no clue. Adrían, you left Sayeda more than half of your payout for training. Without blinking. What does that mean to you?”
“That I want her to be all right if something happens to me.”
“Which means?”
“She deserves it?”
She rocked from side to side, intermittently nudging him with her shoulder. “Adrían, you have this…this wall around you,” she said. “Like a glacier. I think, even if you tried to give yourself to somebody, you still wouldn’t be able to.”
To him, what she referred to as a glacier felt like a malformed block, but he preferred the imagery her ice wall gave him. A block could be almost anything. Ice, however, could be picked at. Ice could melt. It gave him hope for one day feeling less of a void he’d been reasonably certain would never disappear completely.
“If I could give myself to someone, Hannah, I think it would be Sayeda.”