advised visiting staff to wear—emphasised rather than hid a shapely body, the colour enhancing the classic purity of her features and lending warmth to the honey-coloured skin.
Not that he could afford to be distracted...
‘Nalini lived at the palace because she was family, as you will, if you are family,’ he said firmly, as the door opened and a nod from the man beyond it told him they were ready to leave. ‘Come, there are more comfortable places where we can discuss this, and probably a better time. You must be weary after your journey, and should rest. Later, we will talk.’
He put out his hand to help her up from the low seat, but she refused it, standing up herself, very straight—defiant...
Tariq cursed himself. He’d handled this badly from the beginning. A long night searching bone-marrow donor registers had led to nothing, then the call from the airport, when what he’d really needed was a few hours’ sleep.
So, tired as he was, seeing the woman—a woman called Halliday who looked so like Nalini—had thrown him completely. He’d been thrust into the past and a time of tension, bitterness and even hatred in the palace.
Added to which, she was wearing the Ta’wiz, the most sacred of the objects that had gone missing at the time of Nalini’s disappearance. Customs and immigration officials had been on the lookout for all the jewellery for decades but the Ta’-wiz was the one they all knew best, for the hollowed-out crystal with the elaborate gold-and-silver casing around it was believed to carry the spirit of the people’s ancestor.
The immigration officer would not have needed to look closely at it, for he would have felt its power, as Tariq had the moment he’d entered the room, for this simple piece of jewellery was believed to have spiritual qualities—and the strongest of these was protection.
He waved her towards the door, and followed her, looming over her slight form like an evil jinn.
Lila, her name was Lila, he remembered, and right now he wanted to go back in time, to have been at the airport when the plane landed, not finishing a despairing computer search for the magic formula that might save his brother.
He could have greeted her properly, taken her to the hospital, maybe not even noticed the locket around her neck.
The scars on her fingertips told him she’d clung to it as her mother—as both her parents—had died in a flaming inferno. Apart from it being a last gift from her mother, it had protected her, of course she didn’t want to take it off.
Neither could he take it from her...
But perhaps with it safely back in the palace—even in the country—some of the uncertainties and ill-fortune of the last decades would diminish and peace could be restored.
He shook away such thoughts. His country had grown from a collection of nomadic villages to a world presence in a matter of decades and his concern was that it had happened too quickly for many people to adjust and the happiness everyone had expected to come with wealth had somehow eluded them.
* * *
Swept along in this surreal dream, Lila followed the man who had first taken her to the small room down more corridors and finally out onto a covered parking area.
A driver in striped trousers and a long striped tunic leapt from the only car parked there, a huge black vehicle, to open the back door, the tail of his turban dropping forward over his shoulder as he bowed towards her.
Uncertainty made Lila look back, but the large man—her new boss—was right behind her, sober-faced but nodding as if her getting into the car was the right thing to do.
Not that she had a choice unless she decided to run straight out into the blinding sunlight and just keep running.
To where?
Home and family, and the only safety she knew, were all a long way off. Besides, she’d come here to find out about her birth family—her parents—about their country! So she’d put up with the tall man’s bossy ways and just go with the flow.
For the moment!
She tightened her lips then smiled to herself as she imagined her sister Izzy’s reaction to such lip-tightening.
‘Beware, the quiet one is ready to erupt,’ Izzy would have said, and usually laughter would have followed, because Lila wouldn’t have erupted.
But Izzy wasn’t here to laugh her out of it. Izzy was thousands of miles away with a new husband and a new father for her daughter...
And she, Lila, was on her own.
Her fingers crept up to touch the locket, shaking it as if she might be able to hear the tiny grains of sand the kind young woman at the University International Day had put into it for her.
Though not pink sand...
She knew there’d been pink sand once...
The man, Dr—Sheikh—al Askeba, was in the vehicle with her now, not close, for the seat was wide enough for four people, but she could feel his presence as a vibrant energy in the air.
‘How did you know to come here? To Karuba? Had your parents told you of it?’ he asked, and Lila turned to stare at him—or at his strong profile for he looked not at her but straight ahead, as if someone else might have spoken.
She shook her head.
‘I just kept looking,’ she said quietly, remembering the dozens of times when something that had seemed like a lead had turned to nothing.
‘But with your parents dead how did you know what to look for?’
Now he turned to her, and she saw the question echoed in his eyes. Not an idle question then, not small talk. This man wanted to know, and she guessed that when he wanted something he usually got it.
‘I didn’t, not really, but sometimes I would hear a note or phrase of music and it would hurt me here.’ She pressed her fist against her chest. ‘Or I would see something, a design, a colour, that brought my mother’s face to mind. I grew up in a small country town so I had to wait until I went to the city to go to university before I could really start looking. But then, with studies and exams...’
‘So, it’s only recently you discovered something about Karuba?’
Lila smiled.
‘You could say that,’ she told him, remembering the joy of that particular day. ‘From time to time I gave up, then something would remind me and I’d be off again. Two days before I emailed to apply for a job at the hospital here, I heard about an International Student Day at a nearby university.’
‘And you went along, listening for a scrap of music, seeking a design, a pattern?’
‘You make it sound like a plan,’ she said, suddenly wanting him to understand. ‘But it was never that, just a—a search, I suppose, a first clue that might lead somewhere else. You see, when the accident happened, the police tried for many months to identify my parents—to find out who they were and where they were from, looking for family for me, I suppose. But all they found were dead ends.’
He nodded as if he understood, but all doctors
