The War to Save the Worlds

by Samira Ahmed

I hurry to my brother’s side, ready to lecture him, but when I look at the small object in his hands, I’m transfixed, too. Drawn to it. It’s beautiful. “What is that?” I gasp.

  “Al-Biruni’s Box of the Moon,” Hamza whispers back without taking his eyes off it. It’s round and shiny—like a polished, circular jewel box. Unlike everything else in this exhibit, it’s untarnished. It fits perfectly in Hamza’s cupped palm.

  I quickly read the museum note attached to its case:

  Built in approximately 1000 CE, al-Biruni’s Box of the Moon was a wonder of its time. Its golden gears replicate the positions of the sun, moon, and Earth. The Box of the Moon is considered an early analog computer. Recovered from an ancient shipwreck found in the Caspian Sea, the nature of the Box has baffled modern-day scientists because it was unaffected by the ravages of time or the corrosive effects of salt water. The alloys and materials used to make this miniature computer cannot be identified as any currently known to humans.

  “They can’t figure out how to make it work,” Hamza says. “Serious bummer. Look at the tiny 3D moon, Earth, and sun—I bet they revolved around one another at some point. So awesome.” It’s weird, because I know he’s excited about it, but his voice sounds automatic, like he’s talking in his sleep.

  I lean in to look closer. Hamza’s right. On top of the gears lies a flat disc with etchings around the perimeter—almost like a platform for the tiny spheres. The largest globe—the one in the center of the disc and about the size of a mini-Gobstopper—is the sun. Earth, an M&M, is about halfway between the sun and the edge. The moon, a micro-Altoid, is in Earth’s orbit.

  It’s mesmerizing.

  I blink. Try to take my eyes off the Box, remembering why I came down here. We’re going to miss the telescope tutorial. “Hamz, you need to put that back now. Ummi says you have to come upstairs.”

  “You go upstairs. I want to see if I can figure out how this works.” Hamza takes a half step away from me.

  I move closer to him. I can’t explain why, but I want the Box. It feels like it’s mine. “You’re not supposed to take artifacts out of cases. I’m surprised alarms haven’t gone off.” I put my hand out.

  Hamza shrinks back. I reach out. I know I shouldn’t grab it. My brain is screaming at me to be careful, that it’s a delicate artifact. But my hands act like they have a mind of their own and latch onto the Box of the Moon to snatch it away from Hamza.

  “Let go!” Hamza yells.

  “Give it! It’s not yours.”

  We start a tug-of-war. What am I doing? I need to stop. Why can’t I stop myself? Hamza pulls in one direction, and despite knowing I shouldn’t, I jerk it in the opposite. I can feel my palms getting sweaty, and my face starts to flush. But I have to have it. I yank really hard but lose my footing, which throws Hamza off balance. Both of us fall down as the Box of the Moon—this ancient, invaluable object—arcs through the air and falls to the ground with a loud clatter as it skids across the floor.

  The world screeches to a halt. My heart pounds in my ears. I shake myself out of my brain fuzziness, realizing what we’ve done. Even Hamza has to know how badly we’ve screwed up. I force myself to scramble across the floor and pick up the fragile, beautiful box with trembling fingers. I can’t tell if Hamza is breathing. I can’t even tell if I’m breathing. I turn it over, terrified that all the gears and the tiny celestial objects will fall out or that they’ve been shattered. I’m too afraid to look, but there’s no other choice. We can’t exactly pretend this didn’t happen. There are probably security cameras in here.

  But not only is everything intact, the gears are moving. The mini-Altoid moon is orbiting the M&M Earth.

  Holy Newton’s first law.

  This thing hasn’t worked for centuries, and now it’s moving? I remember the stories Nani used to tell us—about how things would move around the veranda of their house in Hyderabad. How her mom thought it was jinn playing funny tricks. Goose bumps pop up all over my skin.

  All the color drains from Hamza’s face. He has to be thinking of the same story. He scooches closer to me and grabs the Box from my hands. “Maybe… we fixed it?” he says. “I’ll put it back in the case. It’s fine.”

  “What is wrong with you? You can’t put it back without telling an adult what happened! We dropped an ancient artifact and probably wrecked it. I’m going to tell Ummi and Papa.” I jump up and run for the stairs.

  “Wait! Stop!” Hamza chases after me, but I have too big a lead and longer legs and can take the stairs two steps at a time.

  I shove open the door and am blinded by a flash of crimson light. As I stop at the threshold and raise a hand to shield my eyes, Hamza charges into me. We both stumble onto the rooftop.

  I open my eyes. It’s dark as midnight.

  All the adults are staring up at the sky, and none of them are moving.

  The world around me slows down, like a scene in a movie when you know something terrible is about to happen but you can’t stop it. I hear the muffled thud of my heart in my ears. I see my mom and try to get to her, but my limbs don’t respond to my screams telling them to move. I call her name, but I can’t even tell if any sound comes out of my mouth.

  My mom turns her head toward me, her mouth open and her eyes wide. She smiles, but there’s no comfort in it. Before I can scramble up, her knees buckle, and every single person standing there faints. But instead of collapsing like sacks of potatoes, they all gently fall to the floor of the roof like feathers wafting through the air.

  The world jerks back to full speed. “Ummi! Papa!” I scream. I run and kneel by my mom’s side, grabbing her wrist with my panicky fingers, feeling for a pulse like we learned in health class. Letting out a breath when I find one. “Ummi! Ummi! Wake up.” Tears fill my eyes as I shake my mom’s shoulder, then my dad’s.

  Is this a dream? This must be a dream. Because it can’t be real.

  “Amira—” Hamza pulls on my arm. “Amira.”

  “Hamza, run inside and find help. No. Wait. Grab Papa’s phone and call 911.”

  “Amira, you—”

  “Stop talking and do what I say!” I yell at my little brother.

  But as I look up at him, I notice what he’s staring at.

  I tilt my head up toward the dark sky. A feeling like ice spreading under my skin makes me shiver. I stand up, and Hamza steps up next to me. A vise squeezes my heart.

  A piece of the moon has cracked and is drifting away. It looks like it’s moving at a snail’s pace, but I know being able to see it move like that at all means it’s hurtling through the sky, growing bigger. God, it’s heading toward us. My eyes lock on the jagged puzzle piece of lunar rock, its edges slashing the night and making it bleed stars.

  CHAPTER 3

  That’s No Moon!

  WE NEED TO FIND SOME ADULT, SOME AWAKE ADULT, WHO can tell us what’s happening or… or… what we should do. But how can anyone possibly know what to do when the moon starts to break? I jerk Hamza’s hand and pull him past our parents, who are still unconscious with all the other sleeping people on the rooftop.

  My brain whirs with a million terrified thoughts, but they all lead to this one: I have to get Hamza somewhere safe. And suddenly, I can focus. I drag him through the rooftop door, and we race down the stairs, bursting into the empty exhibit hall. Panting, heart racing, I pause for a second to look at Hamza, whose dark brown eyes are as wide as saucers. He’s clutching the Box of the Moon to his chest with one hand like it’s his favorite stuffie.

  “Sis, what… what—”

  “I don’t know,” I say. “But we have to find someone who does. C’mon.” I don’t want us to get separated, so I tighten my death grip around Hamza’s wrist and drag us outside to see if there’s, like, a cop or museum security. I’ll take a crossing guard if they could help us. But help us… what?

  The small side street is empty. Of the conscious, anyway. People are everywhere, but it’s the same as on the roof, their bodies crumpled on the sidewalk i
n weird positions, like they’re action figures that got caught in a playtime tornado of nursery school kids.

  The sudden dark is quiet. Too quiet. I look down the block toward the normally busy avenue, and every car is stopped. There’s no honking. No metal clank of wheels driving over uneven manhole covers. I don’t feel the rumble of the El train. And why are there no planes? Oh my God. What… happened to all the planes? I think for a second that this must be a dream—a nightmare—one that feels so real you can’t tell if you’re really awake when you wake up or if you’re waking up in the dream itself. But that broken piece of the moon, plunging through the blackness of space, looks like it’s getting bigger, which means it’s getting closer. Which means it’s on a collision course with Earth.

  “Oh God. We’re going to die. This is how the dinosaurs went extinct,” Hamza whispers. “A massive meteorite smashing into the planet. Da—”

  “Don’t you dare!” I turn to Hamza, my mouth agape. “You’re going to have to put a dollar in the swear jar when we get home.”

  He rolls his eyes. “How was that a swear? I was about to say dang it, but you cut me off!”

  I scoff. “You were so about to swear. I could tell.”

  “Only you would care about swearing during the end-time. Even Cap swore in Endgame.”

  “It’s not the end of anything. No one is dying, and… and… this…” I pause, searching for anything that sounds remotely possible. “This is probably from eating too many parathas.”

  “You’re blaming Mom’s parathas for the apocalypse? When she wakes up, she’s totally sending you to boarding school in India.”

  I shake my head. “When I was studying the super blue blood moon, I read about an Indian superstition that chandra grahan—an eclipse—can cause indigestion. Maybe it’s real, and this could be like a hallucination from that. That’s the most logical explanation.” I’m a big believer in logical explanations. Once, when I was stuck on a mapping problem in a geography unit, my teacher explained Occam’s razor to me. When you’re faced with a problem that could have multiple solutions, the simplest one is usually the right one. And in this case, a delusion based on overeating or food poisoning seems way more likely than… uh… the earth-shattering alternative. I guess?

  Hamza has been looking up the whole time I’ve been talking. I don’t think he’s listening at all. But then he points one shaky finger at a bright object in the night sky while pulling at his Star Wars Death Star T-shirt. “That’s no moon! The moon is breaking, and there’s also a UFO. You still think this is indigestion? Indigestion makes you burp and can be cured by sticky pink medicine. I don’t think that—” Now he waves at the thing with both hands, the thing that is not the moon but is speeding toward us. “That isn’t a figment of my upset stomach!”

  I fix my eyes on the shiny object that is much closer and much faster than the runaway chunk of moon. I blink. It looks like… a golden sofa? No, maybe a throne? What? Maybe Hamza’s random, nonstop theory-spewing about the Marvel possibilities of branch realities, time-travel loops, and portals to other dimensions is… actually… real? Please, please let this be a bad dream, because a world created by Hamza’s imagination would be terrifying.

  We don’t have time to debate reality right now. Because dream or not, I have to get us somewhere safe. Safer.

  The flying golden throne (whoa, did I really say that?) is getting closer, and I must be hallucinating, because I swear I see shadowy wisps that look like creatures sitting on it. But I blink again, and they’re gone.

  I spy a dumpster in front of the construction site across the street. I point it out to Hamza, who solemnly nods. For the first time in probably ever, neither of us has anything to say. We can’t outrun that… that thing. But we have to at least try to hide.

  We dash across the street and pull the large metal dumpster closer to the brick wall of the building behind it. The wheels squeak and screech. So much for stealth. We have no other choice, so I dive behind it, crouching low. Hamza shrugs off his backpack, dragging it behind him, so he can fit in the cramped space we’ve created.

  “Did you see something sitting on that throne?” I ask Hamza.

  “I thought I did—shimmery waves, like when you look at pavement on a super-hot summer day? But, like, only for a second?”

  “Same. Weird, right?”

  “Weird?” Hamza whisper-shouts. “Weird is Walter Paxson eating glue in second grade. Weird is people thinking salmon roe tastes good. This is way more than weird; it’s… it’s…”

  “Freeze-your-blood terrifying.” My voice is a scratch, barely a whisper.

  Hamza inches closer to me until our shoulders touch. “I might have gone with ‘nightmarish,’ but blood-freezing terror is good, too.” He looks at me with a small twinkle in his eye.

  Then there’s a piercing screech. Like a train coming to an emergency stop on metal tracks, making sparks fly.

  I suck in my breath.

  I peer around the dumpster and watch, mouth open, as the golden throne skids to a stop on the street. The throne is empty. Not even a glimmer of the creatures I glimpsed earlier. It’s a bit hard to make out in the dark, but a bunch of black cauldron-looking pots are also behind it.

  Then we hear indecipherable voices all talking over one another. And a thundering herd of footsteps. Loud enough to wake the dead. Except everyone is still asleep.

  Everyone but us.

  A loud word I don’t know the meaning of echoes through the still night: Eest!

  It feels like hundreds of feet stomp to attention. Then silence.

  I turn to Hamza, whose face is starting to resemble the yellow-green insides of a ripe avocado. Oh God. Please, please, don’t let Hamza puke on me. If I’m about to die, I don’t want to be vomited on, too. I give him a somewhat reassuring smile while also leaning out of hurling range. It might be the end of the world, but it doesn’t mean I have to stop being practical. I want to whisper some encouraging words to Hamza, but all my words stick in my throat like a dry bone. Then we hear footsteps again.

  Not the herd this time, only a couple. And they’re getting closer. I still can’t see any bodies, but the footfalls ring in my ears.

  Hamza flattens himself on the ground to look under the dumpster and then glances up at me. “It’s ghosts?” he whispers. “Ghosts with loud feet?”

  “Sssshhhh. They probably also have ears.”

  “No. No. No!” A booming, disembodied voice shouts into the dark. “Of course it was necessary to bring the army to meet them. This is the way it is done. This is how it was written.”

  A calmer voice answers. A voice like a frustrated kindergarten teacher trying to answer twenty questions all at once, but lower and more gravelly. “Yes, my Vizier. Yet it is merely two humans we are tasked to collect. Surely we don’t need a hundred jinn brandishing swords to do that?”

  Hamza grabs my knee, and I clamp my jaw shut to choke back a yelp.

  “Did he say ‘jinn’?” Hamza mouths.

  I nod.

  “With swords?” Hamza slashes an imaginary blade through the air.

  I roll my eyes but nod again.

  The louder, bossy voice roars again, “The Box of the Moon has awakened. War is upon us. The Box is an instrument that must be protected at all costs. I will not chance it falling into the hands of our enemies.”

  I narrow my eyes at Hamza when he gives me a sheepish smile.

  “I told you not to touch that thing,” I snarl.

  “Well, you shouldn’t have grabbed it!” Hamza growls back.

  I clap my hand over his mouth.

  “Where’d you put it, anyway?” I ask my brother, and he silently points to his backpack.

  We’re doomed.

  The footsteps move closer. Closer still. Then stop. Right in front of our dumpster.

  I don’t hear anything but a whoosh of air in my ears and the slow rise and fall of my chest.

  I need to do something.

  I have to do something.
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  Maybe a mawashi geri or an uraken sayu uchi? But my limbs are jelly, and how do I hit a ghost, anyway? I can barely hit a live human standing in front of me. I squeeze my eyes shut and remember Sensei’s words. I have to believe in my power. I have power? I have power.

  I hear a soft rustling and then the backpack being unzipped.

  I open my eyes and whip my head around, but it’s too late. Hamza is crouched like a spring, brandishing his zombie bowcaster. Before I can stop him, he pushes the dumpster forward and pops up, yelling, “Back off, foul ghost jinn!”

  The words have barely left his mouth when he’s lifted in the air and over the dumpster by an invisible force.

  “Hamza!” I scream, pushing past the dumpster to see him floating vertically about ten feet above the ground.

  “Let go of me,” he shouts before unleashing a volley of foam darts into the empty space in front of him.

  “Ow. Ow. Ow!” a voice howls as the darts bounce off the air.

  Two… uh… things that look kind of like silver skewers appear in the air in front of Hamza.

  “Don’t make me a human kebab!” Hamza screams, dropping the bowcaster to shield his face.

  I run toward Hamza, jumping in the air, trying to grab his foot, but something snatches me by the collar and pulls me up and away.

  “Hold still, small, rambunctious human. This is for your own good,” the annoyed kindergarten teacher voice says as the silver skewers shoot straight for Hamza’s eyes.

  CHAPTER 4

  Bleary Eyes, Scared Hearts, Probably Gonna Lose

  I SCREAM AND TWIST AND KICK AT THE DARKNESS. MY form is terrible, but Sensei never taught us katas while being suspended in midair. Still, I manage to kick some… thing, because the toe of my sneaker jerks back when I hit it. Which—ow!—this thing is muscly and obviously really tall if I hit it from this high up.

  “Enough!” I can practically feel a gust of wind on my face as a loud voice booms in front of me.

  I turn toward Hamza, who is wriggling and flailing in the air next to me, shouting Urdu swears.