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“No,” he said, folding the paper he was reading in half, watching her approach.
She moved round the side of the bed. There were no chairs near the bed, just two nightstands heaped with books and more books. She glanced at the spines of one stack of books. The titles were all different, most foreign and it was like viewing the entries in an international film festival—French, English, Arabic, Italian.
Tally picked up a book from his nightstand, studied the cover.Theory of Economics: Supply and Demand in Agrarian Society. “Nice, light reading,” she noted, returning the book to top of the stack. “Are they all like this?”
“There’s a comfortable mix of history, politics and economics.”
She bit her lip, wondered how on earth to start. The beginning, yes, but what was the beginning?
“Something’s on your mind,” he said.
“Yes.” She suddenly wasn’t sure she could do this after all.
“So tell me what’s on your mind.” He set the paper aside. “Or let me guess. You’re angry about the wedding plans. You don’t want to marry me. And you’ve no intention of staying here and spending the rest of your life at Bur Juman. How’s that?”
“Pretty good.”
He patted the side of his bed. “Sit.”
Tally sat on the foot of the bed, taking a seat as far from him as she could. “So you know why I can’t do this.”
His gaze met hers. “I know why you can’t leave.” His gaze never wavered. “Tally, you know too much about us.”
“Too much?”
“You have seen where we live, and work. You have seen the most private aspects of our lives. I can not send you back now. I can not risk my people’s safety.”
“I’m no risk. Surely you can see for yourself. You are a leader. You must be able to read people. You must be able to see the truth. I am not a dangerous person. I’m a good person.”
“But even good can turn to bad.”
“Not me. If I’d gone bad, I would have been years ago. But I’ve always done the right thing, the good thing. I love art, and nature, books and adventure, and more than anything peace.”
Tair’s cheek pulled, a grim hint of a smile. “Are you sure you’re not a politician?”
Tally made a soft sound of protest. “I know this much—you wouldn’t have saved me three times if I was a bad person. You risked your own life three times for me. That means something.”
Tair didn’t move, just his lashes lowered, and yet he seemed harder, tougher. “Maybe here you pose no threat, but if I send you back to Baraka…” His voice drifted off.
He seemed to think he’d conveyed something very important, something earth shattering but she didn’t have a clue as to what it was. “How does it change in Baraka?”
“In the wrong hands, you would be dangerous.”
He was just confusing her. “I don’t understand what you mean about the wrong hands?”
“I have enemies,laeela. We have enemies and I work very hard to protect my people. The women, the elderly, the children.”
“But I would never hurt them—”
“Of course you wouldn’t. But the problem isn’t your camera or the photos anymore. It’s you. Your mind. Your memory. The pictures in your head. In the wrong hands, with enough pressure—coercion—you could reveal things that would cause us all great harm.”
Tally turned away, went to the window where night cloaked Tair’s walled mountain city. Earlier the sunset had painted the city red and pink before fading to violet but now it was dark and she could only see dim murky shapes.
Pressing her hand to her cheek, her palm felt so hot against her skin, her cheek cold, cold, cold like the rest of her. “I can not live here forever,” she whispered. “I can not stay here. This would be death for me. This would be nothing short of prison.”
She didn’t hear him leave the bed but suddenly his hands were on her shoulders. Firm, but not heavy, steady, but without pressure. “You do not know the meaning of death, then,” he said nearly as quietly. “Bur Juman is not death. Even prison is not death. Death is death. Death is death and nothing else.”
She felt her eyes burn, her throat ache as if swelling closed. “My life is spent traveling. I live in hotels. I never stay in the same place long, never spend more than a week in the same city. I just can’t live another type of life anymore.”
His hands fell away. “Maybe it is time you stayed in one place.”
