Burn (Story of CI #3) by Rachel Moschell Page A

phone. "I haven't caught you knitting, have I?"
    "Lalo." He could almost see her slow grin over the line, all the way from Morocco. They had talked after the school burning for just a few minutes. Obviously, Lalo hadn't been in a very good mood. "No, I am not knitting. Last night I did bake a couple loaves of honey oat bread though, after killing an exact hundred tin cans. The bread was really good at breakfast today."
    Lalo stretched his legs out into the sunshine, felt them start to bake right away in the Sahara rays just like Cail's loaves of bread. Hearing her voice was warming him up inside just as quickly.
    "The bread sounds good," Lalo told her. He and the guys had been subsisting on corn gruel and old tea. That's why the missionary-sponsored breakfast this morning had been so heavenly.
    "Yeah, it was pretty darn good. Comes from making bread in the wood stove every day til I was seventeen. Hey." Cail's voice sobered. "What's the update on the kids?"
    She already knew that twelve had died. "The ones in the hospital are all still alive. But we're gonna need some real medicine. And a lot of them will need plastic surgery." It sounded stupid and hopeless to say it. They were in Timbuktu, after all. Skin grafting for burns was extremely expensive and complicated. Who was going to fund all the surgeries for a bunch of kids from Mali? Travel and stay with them overseas during the recovery process?
    Lalo felt himself blinking compulsively. He forced himself to stop.
    "So I talked with my mom," Cail said after a long pause. "Didn't go very well."
    "I'm sorry."
    "Lalo, she still thinks God's calling me to shoot the Antichrist!" Cail bit off her words. “I can't believe my parents can still talk like that. After everything that's happened. Can't they see?"
    Cail was really upset.
    "They can't see," he told her softly. "Look, I know the way you grew up was toxic to you. But you had family birthday parties with pretty cake and ate pizza that your mom made, all sitting around the table together. Your parents never hit you. It hurt you, but at least you grew up with love."
    That was all there was to say. Of course Lalo never ate pizza around the table with his family, because he didn't even know which of the women in the cult compound was his mother.
    They all knew how to beat you with a cane with equal passion, though. No prejudice there.
    He could feel Cail's pain, the pain of having been manipulated by a belief system that took away who you were, forbid you to think for yourself. But Cail had known love in her family, and in that way she and he were very different. Cail must have taken the point and she decided to change the subject.
    "Uh, Rupert said something really dumb yesterday."
    Lalo felt a bicep flex and he folded his legs up against the boulder, out of the searing sun.
    "He said he was going to ask you to help him find Marquez."
    "Huh?"
    "Yeah, well, I think I talked him out of it."
    Lalo should have known this was going to happen. It was Timbuktu and he was already sweating, but another cold drop of perspiration shimmied down his cheek. "I can't. He'll find out. If I track anything, he'll find out."
    "I know," she said.
    "Ask me to help in any other way," Lalo said tightly. He wasn't really talking to her, but to Rupert. To the universe.
    God, if he could actually help people, wouldn’t he do it? But if he did, it seemed pretty obvious to Lalo that bad stuff was gonna happen. Very, very bad things.
    The eye. The pure evil and the fire.
    It would find him.

Bread Crumbs
    "I FOUND IT! THIS IS THE PAGE." Wara leaned back from the tablet on the glass table and into the sleek coffee shop upholstery. "I can apply for the visa right here, pay with my own credit card. Everything. Wara Cadogan is about to go to Mali."
    Wara shifted her eyes over to the chair at her elbow, but Alejo barely glanced at her. He had brought one of his mud balls and was perched on the café chair with one ankle on his knee, polishing the rust-colored