I push myself up from the smoking rubble.
Thirteen-year-old Ghalib wishes his life
could go back to normal. He wishes he
could still hang out at the market with
his friends, root for his favorite soccer
team, even go to school. But civil war has
destroyed his home.
Wipe dust and pulverized plaster from
my eyes and nose. My throat stings. I spit
grit. My lungs scald in the burning air.
As violence rages around them, his family
makes the difficult choice to flee Syria.
Together they start out on a dangerous
journey toward Europe. Along the way
they encounter closely guarded borders,
hardscrabble refugee camps, and an ocean
crossing that they may not survive.
“Hamza?” My voice is small and broken.
Thick with dust. I cough. Spit again.
I search for Hamza in the darkness and
smoke and dust.
When Ghalib is separated from the rest
of his family, he must decide whether to
wait for them or continue alone toward an
uncertain future.
He must be close by. But my world has
shifted.
The gripping story of one boy’s journey
to find refuge pays tribute to struggles
millions of Syrians face in today’s
real-world crisis.
Ages 9–13
Jane Mitchell
CAROLRHODA BOOKS
M IN N E AP O L IS
First American edition published in 2018 by Carolrhoda Books Text copyright © 2017 by Jane Mitchell
First published in Dublin, Ireland in 2017 by Little Island as A Dangerous Crossing All rights reserved. International copyright secured. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—
electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise—without the prior written permission of Lerner Publishing Group, Inc., except for the inclusion of brief quotations in an acknowledged review.
Carolrhoda Books
A division of Lerner Publishing Group, Inc.
241 First Avenue North
Minneapolis, MN 55401 USA
For reading levels and more information, look up this title at www.lernerbooks.com.
Cover and interior images: Secondcorner/Shutterstock.com (background); Chalermsak/
Shutterstock.com (silhouette of boy); Emre Tarimcioglu/Shutterstock.com (letters).
Main body text set in Bembo Std regular 12.5/17.
Typeface provided by Monotype Typography.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Mitchell, Jane (Writer of books for young people), author.
Title: Without refuge / by Jane Mitchell.
Other titles: Dangerous crossing
Description: Minneapolis : Carolrhoda Books, [2018] | Originally published: Dublin : Little Island Books, 2017 under the title Dangerous crossing. | Summary: Forced to leave his home in war-torn Syria, thirteen-year-old Ghalib makes an arduous journey with his family to a refugee camp in Turkey. Includes glossary.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017026040| ISBN 9781541500501 (lb) | ISBN 9781541510548
(ebk pdf )
Subjects: | CYAC: Refugees—Fiction. | Kurds—Fiction. | Muslims—Fiction. |
Family life—Syria—Fiction. | IS (Organization)—Fiction. | Syrians—Turkey—
Fiction. | Syria—History—Civil War, 2011—Fiction.
Classification: LCC PZ7.M69265 Dan 2018 | DDC [Fic]—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017026040
Manufactured in the United States of America
1-43679-33486-11/6/2017
Dedicated to every Syrian child
whose life has been damaged,
changed or blighted by the
Syrian civil war
TURKEY
Izmir
Reyhanli
TU
SYRIA
R KEY
Reyhanli
Kobani
ROJAVA
(Kurdish Syria)
ea
Aleppo
S
ean
E
SY R I A
uphrates River
editerran
LEBANON
Damascus
M
IRAQ
N
JORDAN
Miles
0
40
80
0
40
80
120
Kilometers
TURKEY
Izmir
Reyhanli
TU
SYRIA
R KEY
1
Reyhanli
Kobani
I sprint around the perimeter of Freedom Square in
ROJAVA
(Kurdish Syria)
the center of Kobani. I hardly recognize this place any
ea
Aleppo
more, it’s such a wreck now. I hug my bundle close:
S
women’s shoes and men’s shirts, mobile phones in
ean
boxes, coloring books only a little bit scorched. Even
E
SY R I A
uphrat
bicycle parts—all left in the blown-out shops and
es Riv
bombed stalls of the old souq. I glance over my shoulder
er
to check that no shopkeepers are chasing me. You’d be
editerran
LEBANON
surprised how fast they move, considering the size of
them, but they’ve never managed to catch us. We’re
Damascus
way too fast for them. I squeeze into the shadow of
M
IRAQ
rubble heaps and ruined buildings. Leap past yawn-
N
ing bomb craters and snarls of rusted steel, over spent
bullets and shell casings. I am Ghalib. I am invincible.
My cousin Hamza runs ahead of me. He ducks
JORDAN
away from the square and into the narrow streets.
Miles
0
40
80
0
40
80
120
1
Kilometers
Before I follow, I stop at the gable end of a bombed-out block to wait for my little brother.
“Come on, Alan,” I say.
He stops running when he sees me waiting, his
red sweater vivid against the dusty streets. He wipes
his nose on his sleeve.
“I’m tired, Ghalib,” he says.
His left leg kicks a spit of dust with every step.
His lopsided walk is worse when he’s tired. His bad
hand curls into a small hook-shape.
“Straighten your hand,” I say.
Hamza comes back to where I wait. My muscles
tense. I wish he would go on ahead.
Hamza looks at Alan. “You shouldn’t have
brought him,” he says.
“Shut up, Hamza.”
“He’ll get us caught.”
“He’s doing fine.”
“He’s too slow.”
“You don’t have to wait for us.”
But Hamza waits. He shades his eyes with his
hand. He scans the empty streets, the empty sky. He
does it to try and pressure me. Shopkeepers come
fast
if they see us snatching damaged goods, but airstrikes
come faster, screaming out of the sky to pulverize
2
everything. When Alan reaches us, I take a box of shoes and two mobile phone boxes from him to stack
on top of my stuff. He’s left with a box of shoes and
a plastic bag of bicycle bells.
“You carry those,” I say.
We walk slowly now, sandals crunching on bro-
ken stones and rubble. We pick our way around
crumpled cars and shattered glass. When the road
is blocked with fallen masonry from a collapsed
building, Hamza scrambles over the scorched bricks.
I hand him our goods, then pull Alan past gaping
holes and lumps of concrete.
“Stay away from exposed cables,” I say.
Fat f lies rise from stinking holes where dead
bodies rot beneath smoking ruins. As I lift Alan to
the ground, a mild vibration shudders the twists
of rusting steel poking from the massive slabs.
The metal sings and moans like grieving women.
My heart beats harder. I grip Alan’s hand. All
three of us stop. We wait. We listen. It might be
nothing.
We hold our breath in the silence. Shards of bro-
ken glass in a window frame chime, trembling and
shivering like distant bells. It’s not good. The dark-
ness crouching inside me seeps through my blood.
3
We clutch our bundles closer. I look up at the empty sky. Alan looks at me, eyes wide.
“I want Dayah.” He always calls for our mother
when he’s frightened.
“I want shelter!” Hamza says.
I pull Alan’s hand. “Come on.”
The faint vibration has already been drowned by
the faraway whine. It climbs higher. My chest tight-
ens. We run now, hunting for shelter, panic adding
speed to Alan’s crooked run. The hammering of our
feet is the only sound other than the rising scream of
the approaching airstrike. It splinters the waiting air.
Cracks open the quiet of the empty streets.
I hurl myself through a gaping hole punched in
the wall of what used to be the central library. Hamza
and Alan follow. I shove Alan against the scorched
wall beneath an overhang of bricks and crumbling
mortar. Hamza crawls in next to us. We crouch tight
and hard in the corner, breath panting, hearts ham-
mering. Alan trembles beneath me. Maybe Hamza
was right. Maybe I should have left Alan at home,
especially with an airstrike coming. Dayah will kill
me if he gets blown up.
The air swells and shudders. A flash of darkness
blinks across the sun as the weapon screams over our
4
heads to smash into the ground far beyond where we huddle. A shuddering rumble passes through
us, beneath us. The deep earth itself convulses. The
remaining library walls tremble and shake, scatter-
ing dust and loose stones over us. Then comes a brief
silence—the familiar stillness after a strike. It rushes in, hot and insistent. It crams my throbbing ears. I
lift my head. Wait for the chaos to unfold. Hamza sits
up too, head white with dust. Alan coughs and spits
grit. I grab him and pull him upright to check him
over. He doesn’t cry or even speak. He stares blankly,
eyelashes thick with fine powder. I brush dirt and
dust from his dark hair. Wipe his grimy face.
“I want Dayah,” Alan says.
“We’ll go now,” I say, relieved he can still speak.
We need to get moving before the bedlam that
always follows an airstrike tears the place apart. I take his hand. We clamber from our makeshift shelter,
brushing down our jeans and sweaters. We stare at
the towering column of black smoke twisting upward
from the city’s newest bomb site. None of us speaks.
The excitement of looting has run out of us, knocked
aside by the airstrike and a sudden hunger to get
home. We snatch up some of our scattered goods—
they don’t seem so important anymore—and make
5
our way past blown-out shops and businesses. Buildings spill broken walls and splintered roofs across our
path. People appear in ones and twos from structures
shattered in other strikes. They emerge from cur-
tained doorways. Watch us through broken windows.
“Get home to your families,” a man says. “You
shouldn’t be out on the streets.”
Others perch high on crumbling balconies to
peer across the city. The reek of burning fuel reaches
us now, pushing aside the normal stink that fills the
broken streets, of rotting food and smashed sewers
and bodies.
“Came down near the stadium,” a woman says
from half a room two stories up.
“Near the business center,” another says.
We don’t talk and we don’t stay to listen. Our
bodies tremble. Our ears ring. We hurry back to the
Kurdish district where we live. I shift the goods in
my arms to take Alan’s hand.
“Nearly there,” I say. I keep him moving.
I see Dayah and my sister Bushra before they see
us. They run up the narrow street, peering down
side alleys, stopping to check doorways, gazing again
and again at that tower of black smoke. Dayah’s face
wears the frantic look she always has now. A twist of
6
guilt tightens my belly. Bushra just looks annoyed.
That’s Bushra’s permanent expression. I’ll be in
trouble for leaving the neighborhood. I’ll be in more
trouble for going with Hamza. I’ll be in most trouble
of all for bringing Alan with me. Maybe Dayah would
like a pair of new shoes, I think. I peer at the boxes in my arms, searching for women’s shoes.
When they see us, they stop running. Dayah
stands in the middle of the street, headscarf held to her mouth, eyes locked on us. Bushra scowls at me.
“Hi, Aunt Gardina,” Hamza says. “Hi, Bushra.”
He grins like there’s nothing wrong. Bushra glares at
Hamza; Dayah ignores him. Her gaze is fixed on me.
“Where did you take him?” she says.
I hear anger and relief, sadness and terror, woven
all at once through her words.
“Dayah!” Alan says. He releases my hand and
runs into her outstretched arms.
“See you later, Ghalib,” Hamza says to me. He
heads for his own home.
Dayah drops to her haunches and snatches Alan
to her. She examines him fiercely, running her hands
over his dusty body, feeling the shape of his skull with her fingertips, turning him around to lift his sweater
and check his spine, his smooth undamaged skin. He
7
is her precious baby who nearly didn’t live to be her precious boy. She caresses his two arms, pausing over
the weaker left one, and his skinny legs, touching his
scuffed knees, lingering over his gimpy leg. Only
when she’s certain he is uninjured and just filthy and
frightened, does she hug him tightly to her. She grips
him like she’ll never let him go. She breathes in the
fear that rises
from him with the grit and dust. She
presses her face to the top of his head, her headscarf
coated in the grime from his dust-thick hair, the front
of her dress imprinted with his sooty silhouette.
All the while she examines him, I watch them. I
say nothing. Alan submits to the inspection without
resistance or questioning. There’s comfort for both
of them in the grooming, the checking over, the safe
return. I’m not part of it. I’m too old for my mother
to run her hands over my body, but as I watch them,
something vivid and sweet blossoms in my memory.
I know she doesn’t have the same love for me right
now after I sneaked Alan away from her and brought
him into the city, where airstrikes and barrel bombs
scorch through the sky.
I don’t look at Bushra. I know what her expres-
sion will be like and I don’t want to see it. She ignores me. My sister has little time for me.
8
Dayah turns to me at last. It was only a matter of time. “And you,” she says.
I brace myself. I meet her eye. I stand straight.
“How dare you take him into the city!” Fury
flashes from her words like the glint of a new knife.
“I brought you shoes, Dayah,” I say. I hold out a
box of shoes. She ignores it.
“Look!” she says. She sweeps her hand toward
the towering column of black smoke, snatched now
by air currents so it smears its oily filth across the
sky above the city. Fire alarms and the dull thump
of explosions at ground level fill the silence between
her words.
“Look!” she says again. She gestures toward Alan,
grimy with concrete dust and smudged with dirt.
“It didn’t hit the souq,” I say.
“I don’t care where it hit, Ghalib. Look at the
state of your brother. You could have been blown to
pieces.”
“But we weren’t. And we got good stuff.” I try
again. “Look at the nice shoes I got you.”
“Seriously, Ghalib?” Bushra says. She turns away
from me in disgust.
“I don’t want shoes, Ghalib!” Dayah says. “I don’t
want you going downtown with Hamza to loot and
9
steal. It’s wrong! We didn’t raise you to be a thief.
And it’s worse that you’re teaching your brother.”
We start walking toward home. Alan holds
Dayah’s hand. “I suppose this was Hamza’s idea,”
she says.
“It wasn’t Hamza’s idea,” I say.
“Do you always have to copy whatever he does?”
Without Refuge Page 1
