Chapter 93 CHAPTER 93
A bad dream
Jamal woke with his lungs burning and a taste of metal at the back of his mouth. For a breathless second he lay still and tried to remember where he was, then the remembered walls, the framed crayon drawings, the little map rug in the children’s room all slammed back into place. The dream didn’t go quietly. It stayed with him like a bad song: the window glass, the wrongness of sky directly below his feet, the soundless fall and the way his chest had hollowed as if someone had pulled a plug.
He pushed himself up on his elbows and the room tilted. The clock on the wall blinked a time that belonged to morning but had the same thin quality nightmares left behind. His heart hammered. He listened. For a moment the house was as soft as paper, quiet in the way that meant everyone else was either asleep or pretending to be. He could hear a faint hum from somewhere down the hall: a fridge, a radio, the house breathing.
Jamal swung his feet to the floor. The rug felt safe under toe. He padded over to the small window that looked out onto the back garden and the little stone path, and for a while he just watched the yard catch the first light. The dream’s edges were still sharp, but outside the sky was ordinary: a strip of blue that didn’t promise danger. He breathed in time with the rhythm of a day that had not yet started and tried to talk himself into calm.
“Jamal?” came a small voice from the bunk bed behind him. Kamal’s head appeared over the covers, hair a stick up mess, eyes huge and honest. Beauty and Pretty followed his cue and blinked into the dim room like other small moons.
“You okay?” Kamal asked, moving off the bed to stand beside him and put a tentative hand on Jamal’s shoulder. There was a brotherly steadiness in Kamal that shouldn’t have belonged to a boy of eight, but it did, and he offered it now as if it were a thing he had in his pocket.
Jamal swallowed and forced himself to steady. “Bad dream,” he said. The words came out small.
“Again?” Beauty’s voice was a thread of sound. She wrapped the blanket tighter around her shoulders like armor.
He nodded. He didn’t want to tell them everything. Dreams had a way of making small items into huge traps when you said them aloud. But the others had the blunt courage of children who’d already faced too many hard things; they asked and wanted him whole.
“It was just a dream,” Jamal said aloud, trying to create a truth for the room. Saying the lie made it feel less monstrous in his chest. He shut the window and the latch clicked, a sound that landed like a small reclaiming.
They shuffled and padded in close despite the way he’d woken them. Honestly, there was a kind of protective bustle that arrived with dawn: toothbrushes, the scratch of cereal boxes, the rattle of a small plastic cup. They ate at the little table by the window, the four of them trading bites of toast and whispers as if growing used to some kind of normal. The morning light softened the sharpness of the dream until it felt possible to breathe around it.
But ordinary had a stubborn way of breaking. By midmorning the kids began to talk in the sort of conspiratorial voice that makes plans sound like games.
“We should run,” Pretty announced between mouthfuls of toast, already shaping the idea into a bright, dangerous thing. Her eyes shone a mix of excitement and fear.
“Run where?” Jamal asked, keeping his voice flat. He had spoken to himself in the dark last night about the ways adults solved things. Running was not a solution. Running led to more questions and less safety.
“To the station,” Kamal said before anyone else could. “We can take the bus and go find dad. Or go anywhere. We’ll be brave.”
Beauty nodded fiercely. “We can hide behind the big market. We know how to be small. We can give the money to the people who’ll hide us.”
The words landed like cold water. Jamal felt his stomach pinch. Part of him understood the impulse, he’d seen the hunger in their faces, the way fear flicked their hands when strangers came near. They wanted control. They wanted to choose their fate. He wanted that for them too. But the dream remained a shadow at the edge of his vision, telling him how thin the margin between movement and catastrophe could be.
“No,” he said, too quickly. The word was flat and final and shocked them into silence. He held his fork like a weapon he didn’t want to use. “We can’t. We have to stay. Ayisha and Ethan will come back. They’ll know. They’ll be angry if we leave.”
We’ll be punished, Jamal thought, but didn’t say it. He was tired of being the grown up all his life, always measuring risk and love in the same breath. The dream had taught him something viscous, some instincts pulled and put a knot inside him. It had also taught him that in motion there was danger. The image of the three of them at a ledge, the open sky waiting, made him dizzy again.
Kamal’s face fell. He looked at him like a man who’d been refused a plan he had crafted. “You’re scared,” he accused, but not meanly. He was young with a fire that wanted action. “You always stop things.”
“I’m not going to let you do something stupid,” Jamal said, more patiently, because he wanted to be the steady one. “Not today.”
Pretty pouted and then pushed back. “What if they come for us?” she demanded. “What if mommy Tessa comes and takes us away again? What if dad is somewhere and waiting?” Their words spilled out in small, sharp pieces. The one thing they all believed, that there was a place where they should be, didn’t map cleanly to what the world had given them.
Beauty reached for Jamal’s hand under the table and squeezed. “It was only a dream,” she said, the certainty of child logic trying to anchor everything. “We can be brave and run, but Jamal’s right too. Maybe we should wait until Ayisha or Ethan say something. They know more. They’re old.”
The conversation sat there, humming like an unanswered bell. Jamal felt the pull of both truths: that staying promised structure and perhaps safety; that running promised freedom and danger. Nights made his mind smaller. Days made the decisions louder.
They argued in small ways for an hour. The plan pieces were ridiculous and grandiose by turns, pack small, go when the gardener leaves, ride the bus to the station, hide under a truck, ask strangers for help. Each plan hit Jamal with its own list of what could go wrong. He listened and then moved to the only point he could find solid ground on.
“We wait,” he told them at last. “We don’t go anywhere. We stay. If there is a person who comes to take us, Aunty Ayisha wil
l stop them. At least we know she won't harm us."