Blackmail Earth Read Online Free

other appetites as still as the concrete beneath his feet.
    Now he relaxed with his meal and leaned against a building, taking a bite of tuna. He was thinking of how to arrange a rendezvous with Senada when a bomb exploded a hundred and fifty feet away. He looked up, stunned by a horrifying ball of flame as wide as the street. An oily cloud rose to the sky.
    He dropped his plate and ran toward the screams, dodging survivors reeling past him and glimpsing bodies lying in the ruins of a storefront. He rushed closer, and through the pall saw men, women, and children riddled with nails, scrap metal, and razor-sharp coral chips, their limbs twisted, charred, and melted like the bicycles incinerated by the blast. His eyes raced over the dead and injured, three of them trying to crawl away; he shouted in anguish at the sight of Basheera. She lay in a crater, smoke rising around her where minutes ago the muezzin’s call had turned Rafan’s thoughts to questions of devotion and diaspora.
    His sister reached a hand to him, and he ran to her knowing with his first panicky step that a second bomb might await the rescuers.
    *   *   *
    Khulood walked a sandy path that separated her thatched home from a seawall on the small island of Dhiggaru. The concrete chunks and coconut shells rose as high as her chest, but could hold back only the refuse the sea tossed to shore, not the warm salty water that spilled through the wall. A week ago the ocean touched her house for the first time, soaking the floorboards by the front door. The wood stayed damp for a full day, and a stubborn stain remained even now, as if the future had cast an inescapable spell.
    Khulood had lived on Dhiggaru all her life, as her ancestors had. Her skin was as brown as the voyagers who’d migrated to the Maldives: Ethiopians, Arabs, Indians—people of color and sweat and the sea. But she had traveled only to Malé. Her son, Adnan, had sailed the world and returned with pictures of wondrous places. He worked on ships bigger than many of the islands she could see from her house. But he hadn’t left Dhiggaru for five months. The world, he’d said, was slowing down and didn’t need so much oil. Maybe next year.
    She spied him at prayer, eyes filled with Mecca. So much more devout than she.
    He turned when he heard her steps, smiled, and rolled up his prayer rug and tucked it under his arm. He’d begun to pray earlier this year when Parvez, his closest friend since childhood, had returned from four years of foreign study of Islam to become a cleric.
    Parvez had chided her to pray like her son, but Khulood had declined. She did wear a headscarf, not as a concession but to keep the sun off her scalp.
    She and Adnan spoke Dhivehi to each other, although her son’s English had surprised her. Parvez had sent him English language CDs and urged him to study them. No one but Parvez and her son spoke English on the island.
    “I will cook fish and cassava,” she said to Adnan.
    He walked into the house with her and put away his prayer rug. “I’m not hungry, Mother. You eat. I must see Parvez.”
    He spoke his friend’s name shyly, then kissed her cheek. She watched him walk away down the path, which narrowed to a single set of footprints when it passed through a palm grove. Out there, in the gathering darkness, Parvez had made his home.
    *   *   *
    Rafan cupped the back of Basheera’s head, easing it inches from the smoking earth. Acrid fumes rose all around them, as if hell itself had exploded. Basheera’s eyes were stark with shock. Blood poured from her mouth.
    “They’re coming,” he said to her. Doctors? Or the ones with more bombs? he wondered.
    He looked around frantically for help, nose burning from the smoke. Waves of heat drifted over his back, and he turned to a flaming cavern that had been a tea shop. The dead and dying spilled at odd angles all around him, bodies lifted by force and dropped with fury. An old woman struggled to stand. A much