Sandstorm Read Free

then simply collapsed across her thighs as if the invisible strings supporting the cat had been sliced. The sirens must have disturbed him from his usual nighttime haunting of her flat.
    The low purr continued on Safia’s lap, a contented sound.
    This, more than her breathing exercises, relaxed the taut muscles of her shoulders. Only then did she notice the wary hunch in her back, as if fearing a blow that never came. She forced her posture straight, stretching her neck.
    The sirens and commotion continued half a block from her building. She needed to stand, find out what was happening. Anything simply to be moving. Panic had transmuted into nervous energy.
    She shifted her legs, careful to slide Billie onto the comforter. The purring halted for a moment, then resumed when it was clear he was not being evicted. Billie had been born in the streets of London, alley feral, a wild fluff of matted fur and spit. Safia had found the kitten sprawled and bloodied on the flat’s stoop with a broken leg, covered in oil, hit by a car. Despite her help, he had bitten her in the fleshy meat of her thumb. Friends had told her to take the kitten to the animal shelter, but Safia knew such a place was no better than an orphanage. So instead, she had scooped him up in a pillow linen and transported him to the local veterinary clinic.
    It would have been easy to step over him that evening, but she had once been as abandoned and alone as the kitten. Someone had taken her in at the time, too. And like Billie, she had been domesticated—but neither ended up completely tamed, preferring the wild places and rooting through lost corners of the world.
    But all that had ended with one explosion on a bright spring day.
    All my fault… Crying and screams again filled her head, merging with the sirens of the moment.
    Breathing too hard, Safia reached to the bedside lamp, a small Tiffany replica depicting stained-glass dragonflies. She flicked the lamp’s switch a few more times, but the lamp remained dark. Electricity was out. The storm must have knocked down a power line.
    Maybe that was all the commotion.
    Let it be something that simple.
    She swung out of bed, barefoot, but in a warm flannel nightshirt thatreached her knees. She crossed to the window and twisted the blinds to peer through to the street below. Her flat was on the fourth floor.
    Below, the usually quiet and dignified street of iron lamps and wide sidewalks had become a surreal battlefield. Fire engines and police cars jammed the avenue. Smoke billowed despite the rain, but at least the fierce storm had faded to the usual London weep. With the streetlamps darkened, the only illumination came from the flashers atop the emergency vehicles. Yet, down the block, a deeper crimson glow flickered through the smoke and dark.
    Fire.
    Safia’s heart thudded harder, her breath choked—not from old terrors, but from newborn fears for the present. The museum! She yanked the blinds’ cords, ripping them up, and fumbled with the lock to the window. She pushed the sash open and bent out into the rain. She barely noted the icy drops.
    The British Museum was only a short walk from her flat. She gaped at the sight. The northeast corner of the museum had crumbled to a fiery ruin. Flames flickered from shattered upper windows while smoke belched out in thick gouts. Men, cowled in rebreathing masks, dragged hoses. Jets of water sailed high. Ladders rose into the air from the back of engines.
    Still, worst of all, a gaping hole smoked on the second floor of the northeast corner. Rubble and blackened blocks of cement lay strewn out into the street. She must not have heard the explosion or just attributed it to the storm’s thunder. But this was no lightning strike.
    More likely a bomb blast…a terrorist attack. Not again…
    She felt her knees grow weak. The north wing…her wing. She knew the smoking hole led into the gallery at the end. All her work, a lifetime of research, the collection, a thousand