Page 2 of Broken Rejected Mate

This part of the nightmare is familiar, too. It always happens like this. From the closet in Emin’s bedroom, trying to protect myself, to seeing Sarina, and being unable to protect her.

Like I always do, I open my mouth, trying to scream for her, trying to tell her to get out of the way. Above us, the sky darkens and grows heavy with black clouds. Dirt whips around her ankles, twirling like a tornado is about to form with her at its epicenter.

“Mom!” she calls, but her voice is swallowed, whipped away from the storm, so I’m only imagining the sound of it, twinkling and light, a sound that normally puts me at ease instantly. A sound I’m suddenly very sure I will never hear again.

“Mom!”

When I snap awake, Sarina’s face is bent over mine, her eyes still sleepy and half-shut, it only takes me a few seconds to drink the details of our little hut—the camp stove propped up on a table on the other side of the room, the wash basin, the jug of purified water. Our clothes, folded neatly and stacked on a shelf.

Groggily, I watch as Sarina takes a few steps, then climbs back onto her own cot, still rubbing at her eyes.

“It’s just that same nightmare,” she says gently, using the same tone I’d use with her when she was a kid. “Go back to sleep, Mom.”

I blink again, scrub my hands over my face, and look at the door. Pale light is already seeping under the crack, dawn hinting at the horizon. There’s no way I’m going to sleep now, and besides—it’s market night. We need to get our things together.

When I step out of our hut, the entirety of the camp sprawls out before me. While to most people, the home that Sarina and I share might not look like much, it’s practically a mansion compared to most of the homes in the camp.

Carefully, I step through the dirt, watching the ground for scorpions as I make my way around tents and even some people directly on the ground. Sounds of sleep breathe through the space, snores and exhalations, shifting and turning. There are a few early risers, like me—another mother, already scrubbing at clothes in a wash bin. A man is rolling up a sleeping bag, his face haggard, his beard scraggly.

Every time I wake up here, I’m reminded of what it was like the first night.

“Veva!”

I look up and see the very woman who took care of me the first night I was here—who knew I was pregnant even before I told her. When I’d started to cry, she took my head in her hands, looked me in the eye, and said, “You have options, dear.”

Willow—now wrinkled, gray eyes twinkling behind her glasses—wraps her arm around my shoulders, like she always does, and draws me in close, already pushing a hot cup of coffee into my hands.

“Good morning, it’s going to be a hot one,” Willow says, her voice more feeble than the last time I heard it. It seems like every day I blink and she ages right in front of me. It’s already been ten years since I met her—when Sarina turns ten, it will be nearly eleven.

I play along, raising my eyebrows. “When is itevera hot one around here?”

She laughs and drops heavily down into her chair—a faded old thing she saved from the dump, cleaned up, and planted right outside her shed. She’s sat in it every morning since. Two years ago, she found a companion for it, and it’s the chair I lower down into carefully, after checking to make sure there’s nothing on or around it that might pinch or bite me.

“Got some more gems for you,” Willow says, blowing on her coffee and glancing over at me. Despite the fact that we’re out here in the desert, it’s surprisingly chilly. This is nothing new to me—the weather was just like this at home, too. No moisture in the ground to hold the heat.

“That’s great,” I finally say, mind catching up to what Willow said. “I could use a few more to imbue before the market tonight.”

A beat passes, then Willow says, “You given any more thought to it?”

I know what she’s talking about. My gift—the one I inherited from my grandmother when she died. The gift I have no idea how to use. I blow on my coffee, shake my head.

Willow has a friend she thinks can help me learn to use it. I’m not sure it matters—casting is enough for me, and it feels a little too late to make anything of the clairsentience.

“Just let me know,” Willow says, snapping, “and she’ll come over like that.”

After that, we fall silent. If it weren’t for the market tonight, I’d see Willow for dinner. We don’t have much to talk about, because she already knows everything there is to know about me, Sarina, my plans for the future.

When we finish our coffee, I bring the mugs into Willow’s hut—slightly nicer than ours, with more insulation and, somehow, a set of rain-collecting plumbing—and scrub them out, setting them up to dry on the rack by her sink.

Willow’s little hut is full of trinkets, odds and ends. Back when her knees were good, she’d spend a lot of time out at the dump, picking out perfectly good pieces, hauling them back here, and giving them to the folks who needed them.

Sarina and I were often the recipients of those items, and that’s part of the reason why I managed to procure a tent before she was born. By her fifth birthday, we’d already started piecing together the little home we have now, with the real wooden floors, insulated walls, and separate cots for the two of us.

“Did Willow have anything good?”

When I duck back into our shed, Sarina is already awake, face scrubbed pink, her fingers working her hair into French braids as she sits on the edge of her cot, a book propped open on her pillow.

“Just coffee,” I say, crossing through the room and dropping a kiss on her forehead. She does something between a sigh and a laugh, and doubles back to fix the braid where it slipped.

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