Milagra made a little "hmph" sound in response. At the mature age of thirteen, the girl tended to consider herself above such childish pursuits, but, for all her reserve, the fastest way to get Milagra to do anything was to tell her that she couldn't. So, naturally, she had to prove Mike wrong. The long skirt and sandals she wore didn't make it any easier to run over uneven asphalt made slippery with blowing sand, but all the same, any lead she had was almost certainly due to Mike holding back. At the least, Milagra managed to keep her footing.
Antonia elected not to participate, but she and Al-Adil cheered Milagra on - Antonia with jumping, shouting, and clapping, and her adopted father much less exuberantly so. They came along placidly in the dusty wake of the race.
Al-Adil considered Mike, watching him play with the children. He hadn't known that the man had a child of his own, though from the way Mike spoke, his daughter must be almost grown. Al-Adil thought that it would be interesting to meet this man's daughter. How much like her father would she be?
Al-Adil's association with Miguel Alejandro Vega was short, but he had first met the man many years ago in Spain. In those days, fear of the impending meteor fall had plunged the country into chaos. The people rioted; homes were burned, people killed. The Americans and the UN had sent peacekeeping forces and there were soldiers everywhere in the streets.
At that time, Al-Adil was alone. Khulud had left him once more for parts unknown, and the house was quiet. In retrospect, perhaps it had been a mistake to isolate himself as much as he had, or perhaps the looters would have come eventually anyway. They had come over the wall and into the courtyard one night with guns. Al-Adil could have driven them off. At one time, he might have, but they were desperate men, and his possessions meant less to him than the taking of a life. Their bullets, he knew, could not harm him; he had been shot before - an unpleasant experience, certainly, but not crippling.
And so they found him sitting in the garden, making dhikr under an orange tree. The beads of the masbaha slipped smoothly through his fingers with the ease of long, long practice, clicking softly as he counted them out. He did not look up from his prayer until the butt of a rifle proded his shoulder. The eyes of the thieves fell avariciously on the masbaha. 99 beads of silver and amber. They wanted them, they said. "Take what you wish from the house," Al-Adil had said, only he wished for them to leave the beads with him. They had come from Damascus long ago, had belonged to a great scholar who had gifted him with them. The men laughed. They thought he was joking. "We will shoot you," they said.
Al-Adil did not know what he would have done, then. Would he have given up the beads? Would he have killed those men? He had not had the chance. He had heard the shot, smelled the blood before he saw how it seeped through the shirt of the thief. Miguel had put a bullet through his back. The other thief had dropped his gun and run. Al-Adil looked for the one who had fired, then, and saw him: a young man in a foreign uniform. He had seen the robbery. He had been afraid for the defenseless man. He could not have known then that Al-Adil's life had been in no danger.
He was calling himself "Mike", now, but it seemed that the man's nature had not changed. He was still dedicated to protecting the defenseless, and that was what had led Al-Adil to accept the first invitation to Boulder City. In Mike, he saw much of himself as he had been when he was young and alive. The world had changed much since then, but men like them, not at all.