Cristal - Novella by Anne-Rae Vasquez Page A

smile was relaxed, and his face seemed to have an
afterglow. It was then that she picked up her cell phone, and
pointed the camera lens at him.
    “I want to keep the way you’re looking at me
now in my memory forever,” she whispered.
    He tilted his head and raised his fingers in
the “peace” sign, the pointer and middle fingers up.
    “Actually, it means victory ,” he said
as she snapped the photo.
    She liked that it could mean both peace and
victory.
    She cuddled up close to him and slept for
the rest of the flight, listening to the songs on her phone with
Kerim’s voice singing along in her head.

Chapter 16
Calm before the Storm
    KERIM WAS MEETING HER in the hotel lobby
soon. It was their first full day off since they arrived, and he
had promised to show her around.
    The first few days going to the Global
Nation office in Haifa was awkward to say the least. Every morning
at 7:00 a.m., like an alarm clock, Harry waited in a small silver
Subaru hatchback, outside the hotel—never a minute late. Although
it was annoying, she was comforted knowing he would be there. Life
was different here. Not that it was a bad thing. It was difficult
for her not being able to speak or understand the language. Hotel
workers were generally polite.
    “How are you, Miss? Do you need anything,
Miss?” they would say, always with their well-rehearsed smiles.
    But if she wanted something, an extra towel
or bar of soap, suddenly no one could understand English.
    ***
    Every night, Kerim patiently tried to teach
her conversational Hebrew and Arabic. His creative teaching style
using music was experimental, but she had to admit that it was
working. The only phrase she was able to say in both languages was
“Ayph hshyrvtym?” and “Wayne hamam?” which meant, “Where is the
washroom?”
    “Well, at least I will never worry about you
finding a bathroom,” he teased her.
    She smacked his shoulder playfully.
    During the day, she and Harry were
supposedly restoring the server networks at GN, but in reality,
they were downloading data for Cristal to decode. If it were all
about work, she wouldn’t have minded so much. The problem was that
Harry was always trying to corner her.
    “There are things I wish I could share with
you,” he said, searching her eyes, hoping to see the old Cristal,
the one who used to be willing to listen.
    That wasn’t going to happen.
    “Let’s keep things professional, Harry,” she
said, refusing to let him get an inch closer to her. “We’re here to
do a job, so let me do my work.”
    He grabbed her elbow, pulling her to
him.“You know I care about you,” he whispered into her hair.
    Her mind was telling her to push him away,
but her body froze.
    “I always have,” he said, releasing his
grip. He turned away and left her feeling confused and empty.
    If that weren’t enough, Dr. Saeed was
beginning to give her the creeps. He would sneak questions into
their conversations, like: “Have you been sleeping well? Have you
had any other fainting spells? Do you want to talk about the
visions you’ve had?”
    How she wanted to tell him— Leave me
alone! I’m not your lab rat. But she bit her tongue, trying to
keep things polite.
    She wished she could be with Kerim and
Gabriel instead of being stuck at the GN office. Harry had sent
them on missions in Haifa and Gaza to meet with other Truth
Seekers.
    “I want to go with them to meet the others,”
she told Harry.
    “No, we need you here at GN. We can’t let
the New York office suspect what we are doing,” he said. His tone
was sharp and authoritative.
    “You’re the boss,” she mumbled under her
breath.
    In the evenings, Harry asked all of them to
meet to discuss the missions. Cristal made sure to sit beside
Kerim. He could speak to her inside her head while she had one ear
bud in her ear, listening to her music.
    “ I’ll take you back to your hotel after work,” Kerim’s voice told her.
    “ You promise to tell me everything you