Nazir reminded her of her brother when they were younger, with all the promise and apprehension of youth. She saw that promise and apprehension before her. And an inextricable bond. Something relentless had brought them together. And she knew they were on their own to find out what.

“How old were you when your parents were killed?”

Nazir turned to her, his eyes spheres of sorrow, as if she was looking into his heart.

She saw his sorrow ease when she got that he knew she cared.

“Hashim told me they’d died in an attack.”

Nazir’s breathing calmed and he said, “I was six.”

“You’ve been fighting ever since?”

“Yes.”

Dominique remembered what Catherine told her about what Hashim had written when he was boy.

There are stories we carry inside that have slipped beyond the veil of consciousness and wait until a certain time. And, as a falcon descends upon its prey, we rise up more fierce and hungry than the falcon, through ashes at the merest fraction of light, grasping, trembling for God.

She saw that trembling in the young man before her.

“What happened to you in the warehouse?” she asked.

Nazir’s eyes took in the pale light of the moon as it brushed through the kitchen.

He looked at her.

She could see he was lost. She knew that he, too, was leaving the stories—ones he’d believed all his life—behind. Stories dissolving like the sunlight after the bomb hit the warehouse, as if it had been vacuumed into the air.

“I heard a voice,” he said. “I’d never heard voices before.”

“What did it say?”

His body tensed. She could see he wanted to avoid the answer.

“We all had something happen to us in the warehouse, Nazir. We’re connected in a way we weren’t before. What did the voice say to you?”

She remembered the first time she heard a voice in that hospital room in Pittsburgh, and how she dared not tell anyone. She reached for his hand. He moved away.

Julian entered the kitchen.

“What did you do with the body?” Nazir asked, rushing to him.

“What I needed to. But once the cells discover he’s missing you’ll be their prime suspect and wanted by your own people as well as the FBI.”

“They’re not my people.” The words slipped out of Nazir’s mouth. He turned away. Ashamed.

The hush gave way to the scent of roses.

Nazir turned back to them.

Dominique saw that what still held Julian rigid in doubt, and the fear and bewilderment that had kept Nazir in need of his past, were melting. And, in the opening of their hearts, Nazir said, “‘Ask the lawyer about the girl.’ That’s what the voice said to me in the desert.”

“What the hell does that mean?” Julian asked.

“It means we’re on the right path,” Dominique answered.