Prism (Story of CI Book 1)

by Rachel Moschell

  Wara glanced over at Alejo sharply. They were entering an area where the dusty road was pock-marked with rocks and shaded by eucalyptus trees. On either side, brightly-painted walls rose up, sporting neon signs with names that did not appear to be those of respectable hotels: Safari, the Oasis, the “Park Drive-In”, and Lover’s Paradise.

  Wara stared in disbelief, and then her eyes fell upon a towering sign of a glowing cupid, complete with heart-tipped arrows. And underneath, a giant closed gate painted the color of red hot candies with an enormous pink heart.

  Oh, this was not good. Someone had once made a comment to her that in some part of Cochabamba there were “motels” where one could pay for rooms by the hour, usually for romantic encounters. The taxi that held Alejo and Wara had pulled up in front of the looming hot pink heart, which now filled the entire windshield. Their taxi driver honked twice merrily and waited, still tapping the steering wheel to the rhythm.

  You have got to be kidding me, Wara gaped, then snapped her mouth shut and whirled towards Alejo.

  “What is this?” she hissed.

  He tried to appear unfazed, obviously having known Wara would react this way. “This is the only place where you can stay without having to show ID,” he whispered in her ear. Alejo scooted closer and slung an arm around her shoulder. “Just act natural, ok? I had to lie through my teeth to get Danny back at the Salta to let you stay without ID, and he only did it because he’s a nice guy. We’ve got these nice, dark tinted windows. That’s why I picked this taxi.”

  Alejo motioned fluidly towards one of the windows, as if waiting for Wara to take in how they were invisible to prying eyes outside the taxi and stop being angry that he had brought her to a motel called El Cupido. Then he continued, squeezing her close against his side for the taxi driver’s benefit. “Probably just some kid will come out to take our money, and then we’ve got a room. If the guys from my team would come here, no one has got our ID. Plus, this place is pretty secretive. I’m sure you can imagine why”

  Wara swallowed hard. She closed her eyes and counted to ten, mortally embarrassed, doing her best not to rip herself away from Alejo’s grip. Just when she thought she couldn’t stand it a moment longer, the huge wooden door of love swung open by some invisible hand and the idling taxi drove inside.

  The courtyard they entered was grassy, shaded with trees, and mostly dark. Off to the right, Wara could see a long row of motel rooms, each sporting a pair of hearts painted on the red hot, numbered doors. Stifling a groan, Wara leaned her head back onto the seat back. Alejo winked at the driver, who seemed to be enjoying this.

  “You’ll talk to the boy for us, right? Just slit the window so no one’ll see us.”

  “No problem,” the guy in the peach shirt nodded, and with one touch of a button the cobalt glass glided a few inches lower, revealing a brief glimpse of a young boy with chocolate skin and a tattered green Hulk t-shirt.

  “Si, amigo?” he said into the taxi, and Wara was shocked by the squeakiness of the kid’s voice. He couldn’t be more than ten years old. What was he doing in this kind of place?

  “Ask him how much for two days,” Alejo told the driver.

  “Five hundred bolivianos,” the taxi driver announced after consulting with the boy outside. He raised his eyebrows at Alejo in the mirror. Alejo pulled out a fat wad of red one hundred boliviano notes from the pocket of his jeans and peeled five off. The driver passed them through the cracked-open window and the kid counted the money, crisping the bills in his hand with the efficiency of a Los Vegas casino employee.

  “Number six,” the kids squeaked, and passed something metallic and jingly into the interior of the car. Alejo snatched the item from the driver’s burly fist, and Wara saw it was a single silver key, attached to a key chain with a cherry red, puffy, lace-trimmed heart. Alejo started to hand her the key, saw her face, and then lowered his eyes, stuffing the key into the pocket of his hoodie. The driver sealed the window shut with a soft hiss, and then slowly pulled across the grass to leave them closer to the heart doors. Without a word, Alejo opened the car door for Wara, then paid the driver.

  “Don’t look behind you when you get out,” Alejo breathed into her ear, and Wara’s cheeks flamed as she exited into the cool night. She gathered her composure and followed Alejo, forcing herself to stare at the double hearts ahead instead of behind her, where she thought the boy who had taken their money might still be watching in the darkness. But then again, the kid was probably already back inside watching cartoons, so used to this life that there was absolutely nothing exciting about the arrival of yet one more couple.

  “See, that wasn’t too bad,” Alejo said under his breath as he jammed the silver key into the lock. The plush heart bobbed around wildly as he turned the key to Motel Room Number Six. The wooden door swung open, immersing Wara in a warm glow of cinnamon red.

  The entire interior of the room was varying shades of red. Lit, neon red Christmas lights ran around the ceiling, and the walls were cherry red and white stripes, crisscrossed with painted cupids, arrows ready to fly. Shaggy, worn crimson carpet blanketed the floor, cushioning Wara’s ankles as she warily stepped inside. And in the center of the room sat a double bed, fire-truck red satin comforter shimmering under a gaudy gold headboard in the shape of a heart.

  Alejo gingerly closed the door behind them and flipped on the light, causing Wara to gasp. A monstrous, cheap crystal chandelier exploded with light above them, and every diamond-shaped light bulb was red, spreading a rosy scarlet hue across everything in the room, including Alejo’s face.

  “What do you think?” he had the audacity to ask with a crooked grin. Wara didn’t know whether to laugh or run out the door. “Of course you can have the bed. I’ll take that couch.”

  Wara followed his gaze to the wall, where a plush couch, the color of cinnamon red hot candies, snuggled against the wall. Next to it, a wicker chair with a matching footrest was adorned with cushions to match the couch.

  It was all just too much.

  “I hate it!” Wara responded to his question, turning in a slow circle around the room. “I have never seen anything so ugly in my entire life. It’s…indescribable.”

  “I’m sorry I had to bring you here,” Alejo said, seemingly feeling bad for her. “It’s just that it really is the best spot to hide…”

  “Yeah, your reasoning does make a twisted kind of sense,” Wara sighed.

  Noah would have chuckled at this, and for sure he could have written a hilarious song about this room with this Taylor guitar. Nazaret would have been shocked, then dissolved into a fit of giggles.

  Wara missed both of them so much, and felt awfully, terribly alone.

  Alejo hauled the wicker chair over under the room’s only window, a long, rectangular-shaped opening that ran higher than the level of their heads next to the door. He pulled aside the gauzy red curtain and peered outside, probably checking for any bad guys. The gaze he fixed on her as he stepped down from the fuzzy red couch was so like Nazaret’s that for a moment she blinked, forgetting he was really so different from the other Martirs.

  “Were you really good friends with all those guys I saw up there?” she asked.

  Alejo dragged the wicker chair back to the corner and sat down, considering how much he was going to tell her. Finally he said, “Most of the guys that were there at first—the guys that carried you up from the road--were only there for the weekend, for training. I wasn’t only in charge of my team, but of training all the guys in most of South America. That’s why they’re going to be so mad.” That last sentence was muttered. “Four of the guys were on my team—we were like brothers. Gabriel, Stalin, Benjamin, and Lázaro. Well, not Lázaro. He’s new. But Gabriel and Benjamin and I shared a house together in Coroico. And Stalin and I have been friends for ten years.”

  The memory hit her, leaving a sour taste in her mouth: Alejo worked with Lázaro. Back when she knew him, Lázaro had said he was a Christian. Wara did not even want to think how
he had reached the point of becoming a radical Muslim who was about to cut her throat.

  And she really didn’t want to talk with Alejo about it.

  She wandered over to the bed and collapsed on it with slumped shoulders. She felt sick and weary to the bone. Wara twisted Noah’s silver ring on her finger, her only comfort in this awful place.

  22

  sickly pink

  WARA WAS EXHAUSED. SHE WAS SUFFERING, and Alejo had done this to her.

  He watched her, sitting there on the horrible bed in this place he’d brought her to, playing with a silver ring on her finger. Her eyes were ringed in dark circles, glazed over and in another world She shivered and absently scrubbed at her bare arms, trying to get warm.

  Alejo’s heart hurt.

  He got up and walked over to her backpack by the door and found a black sweater his mom’s friend had brought for Wara. “Its cold in here,” he offered it to her. It was dark outside now, chilly and menacing in the shadow of the darkened Andes. She looked into his eyes as he handed her the sweater and her face was bathed in red from gaudy chandelier. Her nose was a sickly violet and yellow, puffy under her reddened eyes. It had to hurt. A lot. Alejo closed his eyes slowly, then opened them. “I think we should try to rest.” He dragged his feet over to the couch. The ugly thing was three cushions wide, good enough for a decent night’s sleep. He curled up facing the wall and stuffed a small, hard red pillow under his head.

  “Whenever you’re ready, you can turn out the lights,” he told Wara. “I can sleep anywhere, with lights or without, so don’t worry about me.”

  As if she would. Alejo grimaced at the back of the couch. He had no idea what else to say. Wara switched off the light and covers rustled behind him, then everything fell silent.

  Way too silent.

  Suddenly, the horror of the day pressed into him with a vengeance and it hurt.

  Franco Salazar was dead, and he couldn’t say he was sorry.

  He believed what he’d told Wara, that he couldn’t just sit by and watch while thieves attacked the man in the story of the Good Samaritan…or while Franco Salazar abused kids. But he’d never really thought about other people who could be hurt in the middle of delivering justice to the bad guys.

  He’d never laid eyes on Noah, but Alejo had seen his sister’s tears, heard how the guy played with his little brothers and sisters and made sure Nazaret got home safe late at night. For all Alejo knew, that silver ring Wara was always playing with was a gift from Noah. It was obvious she cared about him, a lot.

  Always before, when Alejo killed, he had been sure the man who died was scum and deserved whatever he had coming to him. Now, for the first time, someone innocent had been taken out along with the bad.

  Alejo knew the reason Wara’s presence was undoing him: she was the incarnation of a person simply caught in the crossfire. He felt guilty for the other innocent people on the bus, but he had never seen them. When he looked into Wara’s eyes and realized what he had done, there had been no going back.

  The combination of leaving Islam, leaving the Prism, and trying to figure out why, if he had done God’s will, he could still feel so wrong, spun Alejo’s world upside down.

  A half-hour or so went by, and Wara’s even breathing seemed to indicate that she was asleep. A slightly hellish glow filtered into the dark room through the sheer red curtains from a street lamp in the courtyard outside. Alejo closed his eyes but he just couldn’t sleep.

  And then there’s my family.

  Who he had avoided in anger for years, then dragged into the very path of death.

  He kept thinking about his father, and the few words they had had just before the Martirs went to Sacaba to take the bus away from Bolivia. Pablo Martir told Alejo he wanted to speak with him up on the roof again, alone, and Alejo had steeled himself for the conversation. He really hoped his father would understand that there wasn’t much that could be added to what had already been said.

  There was nothing Alejo could say that would make it right.

  There was nothing his father could say that would make Alejo feel more acutely how badly he had messed up, getting his entire family into this situation.

  There was no other solution that Alejo could see to the problem; even if he would walk right back into Coroico and show up at the doorstep of his old house so the Prism could shoot him, the 964 would still be angry, and they could still go after his family. And Wara was still a witness.

  Alejo had trudged up the concrete steps to the roof, following the broader form of his father. All these years, he had imagined that his father was still occupied as a pastor, preaching that Jesus saves while letting the world go to hell. Somehow, finding out that he had been directing the only center for children with AIDS in the country, which would now be left without leadership because of Alejo, made Alejo feel even more depressed.

  The faded sheets were still drifting lazily on the line in the afternoon breeze on the hostel rooftop. Alejo’s father turned to face his son squarely. “Son, I can’t tell you how sorry I am we can’t have more time together. There is so much more I’d like to talk about, but as you said, now is not the time…” His voice cracked a little, and Alejo felt his shoulders tense. “So much time lost,” Pablo continued, “and now I don’t even know what will happen, what you…” He stopped and sighed, obviously thinking something along the lines of, “…if you are going to continue being a criminal, because that really complicates our relationship.”

  “The one thing I want to ask you before we leave, though,” Alejo’s father said after the scowl had faded, “is about what you said before, about Jesus. You said that you have been a Muslim?”

  “Yep, I’ve been a Muslim since I was eighteen,” Alejo confirmed dryly, wondering where his father was going with this.

  “But you told me that you are no longer a Muslim, that you are a Christian.”

  Alejo hesitated, the term Christian still racking him with unpleasant sensations of long sermons with too many amens. People pretending to praise God while peeking to see whose hands were raised the highest. Little boys dead in the grass so that no one would disrupt the worship of God in the church building every Sunday.

  Alejo exhaled loudly. “I guess so...Dad. I don’t want to be a Christian like I was taught. I’m sorry. When I read the Bible and saw what Jesus said…it was like I had never heard most of it before. And I wanted that. I want that. It’s him I want, not a religion.”

  Pablo sighed deeply, eyes boring into his son’s. Then he actually stepped forward to clasp Alejo’s shoulder, tears in his eyes. “We all need a lot of grace right now,” he said hoarsely.

  Pablo Martir let go of his son and turned as if to go, then paused. Without looking back he said, “Noah had Jesus living in him. He would have forgiven you, Alejandro.”

  Alejo had shivered, staring at the back of his father’s head as he walked towards the metal door that led back downstairs and disappeared.

  Then Noah was a better man that I am, he thought.

  Alejo, who usually could sleep like a baby even with a rock for a pillow, finally drifted into a fitful sleep on the soft red couch. He jerked upright at a foreign sound filling the room. A cell phone! Slapping around in the darkness, he got a hold on the metal chain of a pink floral lamp next to the couch and yanked it, flooding the motel room with sickly-sweet light. Wara had already flown across the room towards her bag and was throwing out clothes, looking for the phone that kept drilling its tinny tune into the night. Realizing it wasn’t there, she dove back for the bed, crawled over it, and grabbed the phone vibrating across the nightstand.

  Her hands were shaking so hard she could hardly flip the thing open to gasp a breathless, “Hello?”

  Alejo sank back into the couch, hoping the call was his sister in need of a midnight conversation. The odds were against that, however; there really wasn’t a good chance a call in the middle of the night would bring good news.

  “Yeah, it’s me.” Wara’s voice quiver
ed. She waited, then waited some more. Alejo exhaled as her entire body crumpled and sank back into the sheets, seemingly buried in the mass of fluffy pillows and thick satin bedspread.

  “When?” Silence, and then she choked out, “Th-thank you.” The cell phone shut with a near-silent click, and then Alejo saw Wara pull the covers up over her head.

  “You can go back to sleep,” she finally said in a voice that did not sound like herself. “The Bennesons just wanted to let me know that the funeral will be tomorrow at ten.”

  They found him.

  Alejo’s blood chilled, and he pulled the lamp off quickly, as if afraid to sit any longer in the light when he just found out he had caused a funeral. Rubbing his temples, Alejo rolled back onto the couch, slowly, staring up at the ceiling.

  His brain told him he should say something. What kind of man just sat there without saying anything when a woman finds out the guy she loved has died? Alejo didn’t even need to run through the possible options in his mind, however, to know that finding something adequate to say to her would be impossible.

  Taking a deep breath, he shivered, eyes fixed on nothing in the darkness until it was nearly morning.

  A morning in which Alejo would go to a funeral.

  23

  bittersweet

  THE MORNING PASSED BY AS IF IN A DREAM.

  After somehow getting ready, Wara followed Alejo out of El Cupido and waited a few blocks away on a shaded corner for a missionary family, the Paulsons, to come pick them up. Alejo had said something about the Prism finding them, so they would need to try to sneak into the house where the funeral would be held. He insisted she call someone with a van so they could hide out lying on the floor. The Paulsons had quickly agreed to pick them up.

  Corban and Misty Paulson had been good friends with Noah; no one said a word during the entire ride to the house where the funeral would be held.

  A solemn metallic clanging and the stilling of the purring engine told Wara that the van had finally arrived inside the gate of the Bennesons’ house. She picked herself up off the floor, brushing crumbs off her pants in a daze. She followed Alejo and the Paulsons across the wide lawn with its spiky green grass, around a multitude of assorted Land Cruisers and Brasilias already parked inside the house’s walls. The zip of cool air inside the shade of the white-walled house hit her face, along with the unnatural hush emanating from within.