Existence (12 page)

“Don't you read the newspaper?” Akil asks. He doesn't stray far from Rabiah's side, and from the way he looks at her, brushes against her every chance he gets, Hilal can tell the boy is in love. From the way Rabiah looks at him—or, rather, looks through him—Hilal can tell she has no idea. And perhaps wouldn't care if she did.

“Don't you live?” Rabiah asks. “Don't you breathe?”

Hilal lives and breathes in cloistered isolation: even his missionary time has been intensely focused on the local, not the global. He has an encyclopedic knowledge of the ancient world, the strengths and frailties of the human body, the detailed myths and traditions of divinity across the globe, and those international events that might signify Endgame-related action: conflict between the bloodlines or a message from the stars. His knowledge of petty national politics is somewhat . . . lacking.

“Today is the anniversary of the revolution,” Dalila explains. She has removed her veil, revealing a soft, rounded face and large, friendly brown eyes that belie the edge in her voice. “One year passes, and another, and nothing changes.”

“Nothing will ever change, unless enough of us raise our voices to insist on it,” Rabiah says. She's lying down, an ugly purple bruise blooming across her face, yet somehow she still radiates strength.

The others join in, spilling out their grudges against the government, their dreams of a new Egypt, a true democracy governed by rule of law. An end to oppression, an end to corruption, Rabiah tells him, eyes blazing. Freedom of speech. Fair wages. Antidiscrimination laws.

“Equality for women,” Dalila says.

“Equality for everyone,” adds Farid, a boy with a sharp gaze and a neatly trimmed beard. He slips an arm around the waist of the young man next to him, and they smile at each other.

“And you believe you can accomplish all these things with a night of protests?” Hilal asks. He realizes he has little grasp of politics, but this seems far-fetched.

“One night?” Rabiah laughs. “This is only the beginning, my naïve friend. This isn't a night; this is a
movement
. And we will move mountains.”

“It sounds like a noble effort,” Hilal says. “I wish you good fortune.”

“It's not about luck,” Rabiah says. “It's about hard work. So how about it?”

“Excuse me?”

“How about joining us?” she says. “You know how to fight, that's obvious, and you're no coward. You're well-spoken, you're attractive—”

Dalila coughs. “Understatement of the year.”

The others laugh, but not Rabiah. “Exactly. You're ridiculously handsome, Hilal, and people are shallow. They respond to that. We could use you. We're having a rally tomorrow afternoon outside the university; you could—”

“No, thank you.” Hilal tucks his bag into his chest, reassuring himself that the manuscript is still safe inside. He has to get the book back to Ethiopia, back to Eben. Right now, that can be his only priority. “I wish you luck with your fight, but I must return home to mine.”

“You have something more important to do than change the world?”

“I prefer to effect change without fighting,” Hilal says.

“No such thing.”

“I disagree.” Hilal is polite but firm. There is obfuscation here, because of course he
is
a fighter; he trains and prepares for the ultimate fight. But that is a higher battle, a battle
for
humanity rather than amongst it. He believes in the spirit of what he's saying—it is the spirit that has animated his life of service. “Choosing sides, waging a battle, these can be distractions. Who is helped,
today
, by your shaking fists and shouted slogans? While you demand justice for the poor, who will feed and clothe them?”

Rabiah snorts. “Ah . . . you're one of those.”

“Give him a break,” Akil urges her.

“No, I won't give him a break. He's everything that's wrong with this world.” Rabiah looks Hilal up and down. “Let me guess, you're some kind of religious do-gooder.”

“I do attempt to do good,” Hilal allows.

“Missionary?” she guesses. “Think you can bring the Lord to a bunch of heathens?”

“I don't think in categories like that,” Hilal protests. “I share the ancient truth, as I see it, yes. And I also share food and clothing and medicine. I
help
people.”

“You help yourself feel better,” Rabiah says. “That's it. If you really wanted to help people, you'd change the system that deprives them of food and clothing and medicine. You'd take a stand, fight for something. Instead of feeding the poor, you'd work to end hunger.”

“You make complicated things sound simple,” Hilal says, “but that doesn't make them so.”

“Okay, then you tell me,” Rabiah challenges him. “All those people you've supposedly helped, are they any better off now than they were before? You gave them a few meals, some medicine, but
structurally
?
Politically?
Is
anything
different? Did you change anything, or just say a few prayers and go on your way?”

Hilal doesn't want to argue with her anymore.

Hilal can't argue with her.

This girl is infuriating, but he respects her passion and admires her certainty. He feels a kinship with her, senses that, beneath the surface, they are more similar than she knows, both committed to saving their people, to creating a new world. He almost envies her, despite the apparent futility of her fight, because her battle is
now. We must spend each day saving the world,
Eben always says, but he also says,
You must save
yourself
for the final battle,
and these two directives are, for Hilal, increasingly difficult to reconcile.

Sometimes he tires of waiting.

“You're hearing me, aren't you?” Rabiah says, with the smile of someone who knows exactly how good she is at making people listen. “I'm getting through.”

“Thank you for your hospitality,” he tells her. She will think he's afraid to listen to any more of her talk, that he doubts his commitment to his own argument. Perhaps she will be right. “I must sleep now, in preparation for my journey. As I say, I wish you good fortune in your endeavors.”

Despite her goading, he will say no more, and finally Rabiah gives up. Akil shows him a back room where he can stretch out and get some sleep. He uses his bag as a pillow.

“Don't mind her,” Akil says. “She's on fire with this stuff. She can't see anything but the cause. She can't see that other people might . . . care about more than just one thing. That sometimes people are as important as systems.” He frowns, casting his gaze into the distance, as if watching something approach that gives him great sorrow. “Sometimes I don't think she understands people at all.”

“She sees the bigger picture,” Hilal says. “Sometimes that's necessary.”

Akil leaves him to sleep, but when Hilal closes his eyes, sleep won't come. He thinks about his own bigger picture, about Endgame and the Makers and the oath sworn by generations of Aksumites before him, that they will defend the ancient truth and protect their line at all costs.

He thinks about the village he's left behind, and the people there he was unable to help. How, even had he offered them a cure for their plague, it would not have rescued them from poverty; it would not have changed their system, or their futures. He thinks about how he has recused himself from intervening in the petty human squabbles of politics and governance, and that perhaps Rabiah is right, that this is naïve.

That this is wrong.

He listens to the soft murmur of voices from just beyond the door, these powerless students plotting to take on a nation—not sitting
around, waiting for the war to come to them, waiting for their destiny to arrive at their doorstep, but making their own moment in history. Choosing
now
.

Hilal serves a higher cause, he reminds himself, and should be grateful for that.

But this night, in this restless darkness, he envies Rabiah and her friends and their hopeless fight.

He's almost sorry that, come the dawn, he will have to leave.

When the screaming begins, Hilal thinks he's dreaming it.

His dreams these days are full of horrors, screaming and gunfire and flames.

But this is no dream. This is the safe house filled with danger, soldiers knocking down doorways and guns drawn and these fierce protesters cowering in closets and beneath furniture. These are fighters with no idea how to fight.

Before he's fully shaken off sleep, Hilal is on his feet, a machete in each hand. They are his favorite weapons, deadly blades that feel like extensions of his limbs—of his very soul. The word
hate
is inscribed along the blade in his left hand. On the other, the word
love
.

Hilal detests violence.

But he is very, very good at it.

He streaks into the common room, where four soldiers have cuffed the students and are pushing them into a line against the wall. Akil stands beside the soldiers, free. Abashed. Hilal, who sees into people so easily and sometimes too well, understands the situation immediately. Akil has betrayed them.

“I'll ask you once to set down your arms,” Hilal tells the soldiers, politely but firmly. “I invite you to leave this place. Now.” The soldiers whirl on him, but Hilal is already in motion, machetes slashing through the air. Gunfire echoes through the apartment, tears holes through the cheap plaster, but Hilal dances away from the bullets, ducks and spins and cuts down one soldier, slicing him from shoulder
to hip. As he lashes a foot into the soft gut of a second, he slashes a bloody wound into the shoulder of the third, then spins, leaps over both of them, and lands hard on the fourth, knocking him to the floor.

He doesn't want to kill these men, but he will if he has to.

“Retreat!” they're crying to one another, as Hilal knocks one weapon after another out of their hands, kicking the guns across the room, disarming and disabling all but the first soldier, the one with the gaping wound in his chest.

Hilal thinks him too bloody and beaten to be a threat, and so makes his mistake: he turns his back on the man.

Doesn't see him stagger to his feet, grab Rabiah around the neck, and put his gun to her head.

“Drop the knives, or she dies.”

“You think we're scared of you, pig?” Rabiah struggles in his grasp, undaunted by the steel muzzle against her temple. “You think you can stop us? There are too many of us to stop.”

“You said you wouldn't hurt her,” Akil bleats.

“Shut up.” The soldier is backing away with Rabiah. Hilal calculates the variables: the distance to the closest gun, the distance between his machetes and the soldier, the distance between the muzzle of the gun and Rabiah's temple.

He sets the machetes by his feet.

He will not risk her life.

“This one's under arrest,” the soldier says, as his fellows join him in the doorway and back out of the apartment. “We'll be back for the rest of you.”

“You did this.” Dalila is pointing at Akil. “You turned on us, didn't you? Told them what we were up to, where to find us?”

Akil is crumpled on the floor, broken. “They threatened me. My family. You don't understand.”

“Bullshit,” snaps Farid, the one with the beard. “She didn't want you, so you decided to punish her. And all of us. Simple as that.”

Akil rises to his feet. “You're all fools if you think you can win this. We're not talking David and Goliath. This isn't some storybook with a happy ending. This is the government. The
army
. And us—a bunch of kids who don't even know how to fire a gun. You stay here and fight your stupid fight to the death, if that's what you want to do. What I want to do is stay alive.”

Hilal watches Akil walk out. No one stops him.

Now Dalila turns to Hilal. “You—how did you do that?” she demands. “Take out all those soldiers?”

“I think what she means is thank you,” Farid says.

“No, I mean who the hell are you?”

Hilal bows his head. “I am no one.”

“I think you should go,” Dalila says.

Farid whirls on her. “Are you kidding me? This guy is some kind of one-man army, and you want to throw him out? Hilal, tell us you've changed your mind, that you'll join us.”

“I—”

“Are you mad?” Dalila shouts. “Now is not the time to be trusting strangers! After Akil?”

“Akil is a worm,” Farid says. “This boy is . . . who knows what this boy is, but he's obviously on our side.”

Soon the room is filled with the noise of bickering, all of them seized with an opinion about what to do next, how to root out other potential traitors, whether to give in or fight harder, shout louder, press on.

Hilal sees how essential Rabiah is to this movement, how her sure vision gave them cohesion; how they are lost without her.

“What will happen to Rabiah?” he asks, his voice slicing through the clamor.

They fall silent.

“They'll take her away to prison,” Dalila says softly. “There will be no trial. Or, if there is, it will be only for show. And once they've got her locked away, the things they'll do to her—”

“We won't let that happen,” Farid says, resolutely. “We'll get her out. We need her.”

Their will is evident; Hilal believes they want to save their leader. He believes, even, that they will attempt it.

And no doubt get themselves killed in the process.

Hilal has already saved Rabiah's life once: by Aksumite tradition, this makes her his responsibility—spiritually, she is now of his line.

By dallying in Cairo another day, ascertaining where a certain political prisoner might be held, he's only doing what he must. So he tells himself.

He tells his master only that there have been unforeseen complications, and that he will return home, soon. As they speak on an unsecured line, Eben asks no follow-up questions. Perhaps this is for the best.