Chapter 110

[ 908 words ]

Katia’s POV

The car collected us at four.

Not a hotel car, but a private Land Cruiser, sand-coloured, the kind of vehicle that looked like it had been somewhere real and intended to go back. The driver was a compact, quiet man named Hassan who greeted Julian in Arabic, and Julian responded in kind, which was the second time today I had watched him use a language I had not known he spoke and had decided not to comment on because commenting would have required acknowledging that I was cataloguing these things.

I was absolutely cataloguing these things.

Sam had texted at three forty-five: Where are you going?

I had texted back: Desert.

She didn’t type back for approximately ten seconds. Then: Alone?

Me: Hassan is driving.

Sam: That is not what I asked.

I had put my phone in my bag and gone downstairs.

The desert began where Dubai ended, which happened faster than you expected. One moment there were buildings and roads and the specific organised density of a city that had been constructed with intention; the next there was sand. Not gradually — definitively. The boundary between city and desert in the UAE was not a transition. It was a fact.

Hassan drove us into it without ceremony.

The landscape changed completely within fifteen minutes of leaving the city. The dunes rose, properly rose, the kind that existed in photographs and that photographs always failed to adequately represent because photographs could not account for scale or silence. These were enormous. Amber and rose and deep red in the late afternoon light, their surfaces textured by wind into the specific geometry of something that had been shaped over thousands of years by a single patient force.

I looked at them through the window and said nothing.

Julian was beside me in the backseat, also saying nothing, which was one of the things I had noticed about him in the months we had been working together — he did not fill the silence. Most people filled the silence. Julian sat in it with the same composure he brought to everything else, which was either deeply restful or deeply unnerving depending on the day, and I had not fully decided which.

Today it was both.

Hassan stopped the car at the top of a dune ridge. He said something to Julian. Julian said something back, and Hassan nodded and got out of the car and walked a short distance away and produced a phone and appeared to make a call, which was either genuine or the most tactful exit I had ever witnessed.

Julian got out. I got out.

The wind hit immediately, warm and moving, carrying the smell of the desert that was nothing like anything else. Sand and heat and something older underneath, the smell of a landscape that had been here before the city and would be here after and did not particularly care about either.

The dunes spread in every direction. The city was completely invisible. The sky was doing what desert skies did at this hour, building toward something, the light thickening and warming, the colour of everything shifting through amber toward a gold that had no equivalent in a city.

“Come on,” Julian said.

He started walking up the face of the nearest dune.

I looked at him, at the dune, at my sandals, which were not designed for this.

I took them off and walked up after him in bare feet, which turned out to be the correct decision; the sand was warm and fine and gripped differently than anything I had walked on before, requiring adjustment of weight and momentum that was interesting in the way new physical challenges were always interesting.

He was faster than I expected. I was faster than he expected. We reached the top within ten seconds of each other and stood on the ridge, and the desert opened in every direction, and the light was extraordinary.

Neither of us spoke for a moment.

The sun was behind us and low, that late afternoon angle that stretched shadows long and thin across the sand. Our shadows fell ahead of us down the dune face, enormous and golden, two figures side by side against the amber slope. His taller, the kandura giving him clean lines against the sand. Mine beside him, the abaya pooling slightly where the fabric met the ground. Our heads were tilted toward each other. Just slightly. Just enough that the shadows showed it.

Julian looked at the shadows. Then at me.

He stepped closer, close enough that our shoulders were touching, close enough that his shadow and mine merged at the edges into something that looked, from above, like one shape rather than two. He held his phone out and angled it toward the sand ahead of us.

He took the photograph.

I looked at it on his screen. The two shadows on the amber dune, the desert spreading beyond them, the last of the extraordinary light catching the texture of the sand. Just the shape of two people standing at the top of a dune at sunset with their heads tilted toward each other.

Then he opened Instagram. The account I knew existed – I had seen the France posts, two of them, both hands and shadows and nothing that could be identified, no captions, no explanations. Just images dropped into the world like questions nobody could fully answer.

He posted it.

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