The War to Save the Worlds

by Samira Ahmed

  The mom peacock-dog turns to me and bows her head and fans out her feathers. I don’t know what else to do, so I bow back. Maybe a normal greeting for their kind?

  “You have my humble gratitude for saving my baby.” She’s speaking. Words are coming out of a dog’s mouth, and every second I’m here I keep wondering how this place is going to outweird itself. Ta-da! Peacock-dogs speak human languages.

  I’m sure my face is twisted up in all sorts of confusion, because the creature looks at me and smiles. “I am a simurgh,” she says. “To your kind, I suppose, we are a bit of an enigma. We appear to be hybrids of Earth-based animals. Yet here, we are what we are.”

  “Oh, I… I… I don’t think it’s weird at all that a dog can speak.” Obviously, it’s totally weird, but I’m not going to say that out loud! “I mean… also, I really like dogs. And peacocks. Also, your lion paws are probably super handy to, um, kill… uh… prey with?”

  The simurgh laughs—I think it’s laughter—it sounds like a very breathy inhale and exhale. “You have nothing to fear from our kind. We fight on the same side, Amira, champion of this world and yours.”

  “I… I’m not a champion, though.” My chin drops. “Abdul Rahman made a mistake.”

  “You approached an injured creature and offered it compassion and love. There is no mistake. You are a champion.”

  A smile crosses my lips. “Thank you,” I whisper.

  “I must warn you: Leave this place, now. The Island of Confusion can make even creatures of Qaf lose their mind and wander the sands for years, certain it has only been moments, until time turns them to ash.”

  I shudder. “How? How do we get off this island?”

  “Ifrit, the devil you seek, is close. Can you not feel the air thickening? Taste the foul dust on the wind? You must cross the sea; see with your unseeing eye beyond the fog to reach him. It is no small feat. For the island will want to draw you back, sink its claws into you, and thus it will have done Ifrit’s bidding.”

  “What about you and your baby? Do you live here?”

  “No. The Island of Confusion is no home but a trap. A roc—an enormous eagle-like bird—loyal to Ifrit waylaid us as I was flying my child to the safety of Iram and the court of the emperor. As I held my child in my paws, he slashed at them, hurling them toward the Island. I rushed after as soon as I clipped the roc’s wings, sending him spiraling into the sea.”

  “Can you help my brother and me? Can you fly us off the island?”

  “Would that I could. But I must carry my child to the safety of Iram and cannot lift the weight of two additional human children in my paws. Forgive me.”

  My heart sinks. If we don’t defeat Ifrit, Iram will be the final realm to fall—that’s why creatures are fleeing there in hopes of finding safety. Even if the simurgh could fly us there, it would mean we gave up. It would mean the end of everything. “I understand,” I sigh.

  The simurgh turns her head, plucks a copper feather from her plume, and carries it to me in her mouth. I take it. “Though I cannot help you now, if you find yourself in dire circumstances, you need only burn this feather and I will hasten to your aid. It is the debt I owe you. Now, I take my child to join the many who are already at Iram’s gates seeking safe harbor. Peace be with you.”

  With that, the simurgh clutches her child in her paws and flies off. I watch her rise, her coppery-bronze feathers glinting in the sun. Now we’re really alone. I have to find Hamza. We have to get off this island. A red-orange mist swirls over the cool jade tablet’s face when I ask it about Hamza: Love is the bridge between you and everything. More unhelpful, cryptic messages that sound weirdly familiar. Then a photo of the island emerges out of the swirly mist, and the tablet zooms in, like it’s Google Earth. It shows Hamza on the other side of the island, lying down under the shade of a palm. Taking a nap? His timing, as always, is absurd. Not like we have an apocalypse-creating monster to stop or anything.

  The photo zooms in more, closer, to Hamza’s face, his forehead. The tablet draws me in, like I’m watching a 3D movie but without the funky, germ-infested plastic glasses. Then I see what Hamza sees, but his dream is like a film being narrated by that deep-voiced dude who does the voice-overs for trailers.

  Hamza’s Island Adventure

  The breezes on the Island of Confusion, the perfect temperature, the gentle lapping of the waves, the impossibly soft sand, all these things are meant to lull visitors to sleep, to a half-waking so they never leave. Hamza, never one to say no to a delicious nap, finds the shade of a perfect palm tree under which to lie down. Curling his body into a comma and using his bent arm as a pillow, he soon enters the world of dreams.

  In his dream, he walks on the soft sands of an island, much like the island on which he sleeps. He comes upon an old man with white hair and a long white beard standing in the middle of a tranquil sea. Next to the man is a large wooden ship. In the ship, all sorts of animals peek overboard. The old man beckons Hamza, who walks on top of the water to reach him. Of course, this is not possible in the real world, but the world of dreams is limited only by imagination. As he approaches, the old man bends low, for he is much taller than at first he seemed, and whispers some words to Hamza over and over.

  “I get the message,” Hamza says. “It was burned into my brain by the fifty-second time you said it.”

  Hamza bolts up from the sand, from his sleep. The daylight has not changed, and Hamza assumes he simply dozed off for a few moments. He rises, stretches, and looks to the choppy sea, wishing it were like his dream. His stomach grumbles. He reaches into his pocket to grab a half-finished granola bar, which he quickly devours. But he is still hungry.

  Hamza glances up at the date palm under which he drifted off to sleep and sees it is full of ripe brown dates. At first, he tries shaking the tree, but the trunk is sturdy. He barely sees any movement. Then he searches for sticks, then rocks, which he throws at the bunches of dates near the top of the tree. Again, to no avail. At this point, he really regrets not taking his backpack with him. There would at least have been some of the snacks Amira stashed in there, he thinks to himself.

  His stomach grumbles again, and he clutches his belly, wrapping his arm around the cummerbund he and Amira retrieved from the iron chest. Removing it, he pauses to look at it, pulling it at either end, surprised at the elastic stretch it has. He steps closer to the rough trunk of the palm, rubbing his hands over the grooves and indentations in the tree.

  “I think I can do this,” he says.

  He loops the cummerbund around the trunk, securing it behind his back, creating a type of harness belt. He tugs at it, pushing his back into it to make sure it feels secure. He doesn’t have a climbing helmet or any padding, but desperate times… or desperate hunger, anyway… call for extreme measures.

  Carefully, he finds a notch for his left toe in the tree, then for his right. Using his hands, he guides the loop higher and takes another step up, left, right, left, right. He eases himself up, trying hard not to look down. About twenty feet in the air, he glances below and gets that familiar queasy feeling. His heart flutters; his palms grow clammy. He closes his eyes for a second. He thinks of how Amira taught him to meditate like she does in karate. Taking deep breaths, in and out, he tries again, pushing himself, one foothold at a time. A sense of elation starts to overtake him, but he tamps it down. Can’t celebrate too early.

  When a stalk of dates is within reach, he plucks one of the brown wrinkled fruits and pops it into his mouth. The sun-warmed sweetness of the date may be the most delicious thing he’s ever tasted, and it reminds him of one Ramadan when his dad got them special dates imported from Egypt for their iftars. He and Amira were both too young to fast, but they still woke with their parents for the predawn meal of suhoor and, of course, joined for every iftar. Friday iftars were his favorite because it meant hanging out with cousins and friends, and his mom almost always made his favorite kheema parathas.

  He sighs as his stomach grumbles but doesn
’t try to push the memory out of his mind like he’s been doing during the entire journey to Qaf. Instead, he imagines his parents encouraging him, as he knows they would. He takes the dagger from his side and carefully cuts down a stalk and lets it fall to the ground. “Yes, I’ll wash them, Amira,” he says out loud. He knows how the conversation will go with his sister. He wishes she were here to bother him about proper food handling and to see him climb this tree, higher than any wall at the gym.

  Slowly, he makes his way down the trunk, and when his feet touch the soft sand, he removes the cummerbund, reties it around his waist, and yells, “Yes!” with a double fist pump. No one is there to see it, but he knows what he’s done. He holds his head up; he may even be taller.

  He places the dates on a palm frond. Surveying the area around him, he begins pulling some of the large leaves to the side and gathers some of the dead branches and trunks, dragging them all to the open beach.

  “That dream,” he says, “walking on the water.… We’re not going to get off this island by air. We’re leaving by sea.”

  I blink, shake my head, jerking myself out of my tablet trance. The jade surface goes blank. “A raft. He’s making a raft!” I practically scream to no one. We’re going to get out of here. I check the tablet for directions, run through the trees, reach the shore, then race along the lapping waves to find my brother, the words of the tablet ringing in my head: Love is the bridge between you and everything.

  CHAPTER 16

  We’re on a Boat to Nowhere

  CHOSEN ONES, CHOSEN ONES/WE’RE NOT REAL, SO WE’RE on the run/Fight a ghul, any size/Throwing devs, from the skies/Look out! Here come the fake Chosen Ones.

  I hear Hamza before I see him, mumble-singing his own lyrics to the Spider-Man theme song. Even though his out-loud earworms make me want to bang my head against our fridge, I kind of admire his glass-half-full approach to life. Don’t tell him I said that.

  As I round the corner, I spy Hamza gathering giant palm fronds and narrow, dead tree trunks that look like bamboo except they’re a rose gold color, with the stripe-y ridges running vertically and not horizontally like you’d see on normal green bamboo. “Putting survival-camp skills to good use?” I ask.

  He swivels his head around, and a smile spreads across his face. “Best sleepaway camp ever. You really missed out.”

  “Hardly. I went to astronomy camp at the Adler Planetarium.”

  “Nerd camp, you mean?”

  “I told you before. Nerds get the job done, little brother.”

  We don’t apologize. We don’t need to. We get each other. Sibling shorthand is sometimes unspoken.

  I help Hamza gather more materials to build a raft and tell him the story of the simurgh.

  “You helped a giant peeing dog with lion paws, and now its mom is in our debt?”

  “Oh my God. I only said pea-dog as a description. Like peacock dog. But, yeah.” I nod and show him the feather. “And we can use this to call her in case of a real emergency.”

  “A real emergency?” Hamza smirks. “Well, maaaaaybe one will come up.”

  “You never know. Our lives have been pretty boring so far.” I giggle. Hamza chuckles. Soon we’re both clutching our stomachs and laughing. I snort. That only makes Hamza laugh harder. Laughing while we’re stuck on an island and the moon is being ripped apart as we face certain death seems like a weird choice. But it also feels like the right one. The only one. I laugh until I cry. I remember Papa saying, “I don’t trust anyone who doesn’t laugh.” He was quoting Maya Angelou. He loves quoting poets. One of his faves is Rumi, a Persian Muslim poet from, like, hundreds of years ago. He always says Rumi’s words are a kind of guide if only you listen to the heart of what they mean and don’t get a whitewashed translation. You know, the usual parental wisdom that adults give with this faraway look in their eyes, like they’re figuring out the key to life’s mysteries. Honestly, to me, life’s mysteries are like: Why does candy corn exist? Or why can’t girls’ clothes have pockets? I wish a dead poet could help me figure those out.

  Our laughter slows, and Hamza shows me how to make a rope by twisting together palm fibers—basically like braiding hair, real tight. While I’m braiding away, Hamza reaches into his bag and pulls out a double-size pouch of Big League Chew and shoves a wad of gum into his mouth so his right cheek puffs out like a chipmunk storing food. I hate gum. I’m still traumatized by his sticking gum in my hair when I was in first grade—it was so hard to get out that Ummi had to take me to a salon to get my hair cut. I was pissed. I’d been growing out my hair because I wanted to be Rapunzel for Halloween. Which, if you read the Brothers Grimm story, is pretty creepy and weird and, as my mom later told me, was kind of a rip-off of an ancient Persian story about Rudaba, a beautiful girl who unfurled her black hair from a tower so the boy she loved could climb up and see her because their parents didn’t want them to get married. I don’t care who I fall in love with, I am never letting them use my hair as a ladder. Ouch. Love is not supposed to hurt. Physically or metaphorically.

  Hamza blows a giant bubble as huge as his face, and when it pops, the sound jars me out of the world of long-haired damsels in distress. Carefully pulling the popped gum from his face, Hamza begins sticking it between the slender trunks. “Are you using gum as—”

  “Glue? Yeah. Basically,” Hamza says, then shoves another wad into his mouth.

  “Give me some, then.”

  “You? Are you going to chew gum? I thought you hated gum.”

  “Yeah, well, we’re kind of in a pinch. Do not get any in my hair, though. Because I don’t care if we’re about to face some Big Bad, I will kick your butt if your sticky, spitty gum touches a single strand.”

  Hamza grins and hands over the Big League Chew.

  After we’ve chewed through all the gum and Hamza cements the fallen trees as well as he can, we start to tie the ropes around the raft. It’s small, barely enough room for the two of us. Please let this float.

  We do our best to fashion oars out of the palm fronds and some fallen branches, using more of the palm fibers to fasten the leaves. Not sure how seaworthy the raft will be, but I don’t have any better ideas. I keep looking up at the sky, but no one seems to be coming to rescue us, so we have to save ourselves. Who knows if they even know where we are.

  Hamza gathers some dates that he climbed the tree to get. I congratulate him, and he gives me a sheepish smile in response. I’m proud of him. But I don’t tell him, because, well, I don’t want to get mushy. As we finish up, Hamza gives me more details about the weird dream he had about the old dude with a white beard and a boat full of animals. It’s what I saw on the tablet. But I’m only now realizing what it might mean because I didn’t put all the clues together.

  “You think the dream was about Noah? As in Noah’s ark? God, I hope it’s not a sign of a flood,” I say. “That’s the last thing we need.”

  Hamza shrugs. “I dunno. I took it more like a sign of my hunger because I usually have really weird dreams when I’m starving.”

  “Fair point. Let’s take another look at the Box of the Moon,” I say, grabbing it from the backpack and flipping the lid. The moon is totally out of its orbit, the little Earth is spinning super fast, and the gears are whirring so quickly they’re a blur. We shouldn’t keep looking. It only makes everything seem hopeless. Hopeless-er, which I didn’t even think was possible. Nothing we’re doing is helping, probably because we’re not the ones who should be here.

  Hamza has the tablet in hand and asks if we’re going to make it off the island: The art of knowing is knowing what to ignore flashes across the screen. What does that even mean? Should we ignore the moon breaking? This impossible island trying to trap us? The lack of indoor plumbing? Aaaarrrrghhh. Hamza and I lock eyes. I shake my head, then pause to take a deep breath. “One thing at a time. First, let’s get off this island,” I say. We’ll figure out the next thing when we come to it. I hope.

  Together, we drag our rickety raft to t
he shore’s edge and then gently shove it into the water and clamber on. Using our “paddles,” we actually start moving away from the shore into the gentle blue waves. Not too far in the distance is a curtain of fog—from the island, it looked like a blank canvas.

  “Yes!” Hamza shouts. “It’s working!”

  It. Is. Working. Holy Newton’s second law. Something is going right!

  “The simurgh said we have to cross the sea and see through that fog and we will find Ifrit.” I thought it would feel like a relief to be getting closer to what we need to face, but it’s basically, completely, freeze-my-blood terrifying.

  We paddle faster, and the fog thins. Glimpses of another shore come into view. But when we’re halfway there, the current shifts and pushes against us, the fog screen rethickening. Even when we paddle away, the waves send us back to the Island of Confusion. “No!” I yell. “Paddle harder, Hamz.”

  “I’m trying, but it’s not working!”

  Moments later, we’re back on the shore of the Island of Confusion. Maybe this is what the simurgh meant. This place wants to trap you.

  We try again.

  And get pushed back again.

  Again and again, we paddle, make it about halfway to the other shore, get a brief glimpse of another island, and then get shoved back here. After what feels like the two-millionth time, we pull the raft back onto the shore and fall onto the beach, panting and totally beat. Even though every one of my muscles is screaming inside, I’m too tired to make any sounds. I feel the exhaustion in my bones. Even my face muscles are tired. I army-crawl to the backpack and pull out the tablet and start jabbing at the screen.