by Alan Gratz
The agents came back over to where Mom, Dad, and I were sitting, and they questioned us. Had Darius ever expressed anger at the United States government? Had he ever expressed sympathy toward al-Qaeda? Had he shown unusual interest in Sunni Islam? In Sharia law? Who were his friends? His acquaintances? Had we heard from him in the last few weeks? Letters? Phone calls? Emails?
Mom and Dad answered most of the questions, but when the agents looked to me, I answered robotically, keeping my anger at Darius buried deep inside. When it was clear they weren’t going to get anything else from us, everyone departed, leaving behind more TV camera crews and an overturned house.
Mom and Dad went to work silently cleaning up the living room and kitchen. I went down the hall to see what they’d done to my room.
I WALKED INTO A WRECK. MY CLOTHING DRAWERS had been rifled through. My comic books were all pulled out. My bedsheets removed, the mattress flipped. Everything in my desk drawers had been dumped out. They had gone through every book on my shelves, every bag of football equipment, every CD and DVD case. The posters on my walls had all been taken down, my closet emptied. Homeland Security had left no pile of dirty clothes unturned.
I lay down on my stripped bed, trying not to cry. It felt like thieves had broken into our house. Like my belongings weren’t really mine anymore. And they weren’t. Not if the DHS could come in anytime they wanted to and mess with everything.
As much as I hated him right then, I wished Darius were there. He was the person I’d always turn to when bad things happened. Even before Adam. Darius had always given the best advice.
But you never told me what to do when you were the problem, Darius.
I rapped on the wall between my room and Darius’s room with my knuckle, using the old signals we’d used as kids to communicate with each other when we were supposed to be asleep. A certain series of knocks from Darius meant Mom and Dad were watching TV, so it was safe for me to come to his room. I’d sneak over and Darius would invent stories for me, using his G.I. Joe action figures as stand-ins for Rostam and Siyavash, heroes from Persian mythology.
Come over, I tapped. Come over.
Come back, Darius. I need you.
I knew, of course, that my brother wasn’t going to answer. I got up and went next door to his room. Homeland Security had gone through it, too, of course. It didn’t look as bad—Darius had moved out when he graduated from West Point, so there wasn’t as much to mess up. Still, I put all his school trophies and medals and pictures back in place, rearranged all his model tanks and airplanes the way he liked them.
And then I found the Code.
It was buried under some of the things they’d dumped out of his desk. A piece of loose-leaf notebook paper with Darius’s thirteen-year-old scrawl on it, mounted on a faded sheet of blue construction paper. THE CODE OF HONOR, it said at the top, and underneath were written the seven rules we thought all heroes should live by:
1) Be the strongest of the strong.
2) Be the bravest of the brave.
3) Help the helpless.
4) Always tell the truth.
5) Be loyal.
6) Never give up.
7) Kill all monsters.
We were big on killing monsters.
Darius and I had solemnly signed the bottom of the paper in our grade-school cursive. If we could have signed it in blood, we would have.
I read the Code again. It was just kids’ stuff. But Darius and I had played by that code for so long that we knew it by heart. We’d lived it, believed in it so much that it had become part of us. Like those people who grow up and list “Jedi” on census forms where it asks what religion they are. Our Code of Honor had been a kind of faith. I knew Darius would rather die than break it.
This was Darius, here on this piece of paper, in these neat and orderly shelves. Not the shabby, disheveled nutcase ranting on TV. A wave of guilt pushed me down into the chair at Darius’s desk. I’d let myself hate Darius, I realized, because deep down, despite all my protests, a small, dark part of me had believed he really was a traitor.
I felt sick to my stomach. How could I have ever thought the Darius I knew, the Darius I grew up with, could be that person?
I remembered being five years old. Darius was thirteen. We were on the trails outside the horse ranch where Mom worked, in the shadow of Superstition Mountain.
“Just look at them, Siyavash!” Darius called to me. “They’ve all been infected!”
I peeked out through a patch of desert sand verbena. The only thing in the dry creek bed below us was a lumpy brown toad sunning itself on a rock, but in my mind’s eye I was looking down at millions of zombies staggering around the streets of downtown Phoenix.
“What do we do, Rostam?” I asked, dead serious.
This was our never-ending game: Darius pretended to be Rostam, and I was always his protégé, Siyavash. Mom had read us stories about the heroes, but Darius and I loved making up our own adventures, crazy mash-ups of the old Persian legends and whatever movies and books and cartoons we were into at the time.
“We must be the strongest of the strong. The bravest of the brave,” Darius told me. “And we must kill all monsters.”
Rakhsh, the horse we’d ridden out from the ranch, stretched over us to nibble at the verbena.
“But how? There’s so many of them!” I said.
Darius pulled one of those cheap plastic troll dolls with fuzzy hair out of his pocket. “With this,” he said with equal seriousness. “It’s a magic troll statue. It turns all zombies back into real people. All we have to do is get this to the top of the Chase Tower before any of the zombies eat our brains.” He turned and got ready to run down into the valley. “Are you ready, Siyavash?” Darius said. “It’s you and me against the world.”
It’s you and me against the world, I thought, staring down at the blue piece of construction paper in Darius’s room. I couldn’t doubt Darius. Couldn’t be mad at him. Not when everybody else in the world thought he was guilty. He needed at least one ally in all this, one person who still believed in his innocence, and that had to be me.
But what do I do, Rostam?
The answers were staring me in the face.
Be strong. Be brave. Be loyal.
Never give up.
I knew then exactly what I was going to do. I was going to clear Darius’s name.
I WENT STRAIGHT TO MY DESK AND PUSHED ALL THE junk the DHS had dumped on it onto the floor. My laptop was underneath. I was going to start by watching all the videos Darius had made. The networks never showed every minute of them. All they cared about were the “juicy” parts—the parts where Darius said stuff they could turn into sound bites. I wanted to see each video in its entirety. Maybe there was something I could use to prove Darius was innocent.
Out of habit, I first clicked the bookmark to see the status of my West Point application. It took forever to apply for the United States Military Academy. You started halfway through your junior year. Testing, questionnaires, Summer Leadership Seminar, candidate fitness assessments, nomination applications, transcripts—all that had to be done before you could officially apply. Then more letters, more fitness assessments, medical exams, interviews, more interviews, more transcripts, school evaluations, and then, if you’d done everything right, if you passed all the tests and interviews and had all the right grades, then maybe you’d be one of the thousand people accepted out of the fifteen thousand who apply. I’d been building my application for a year now, and every time I got on my computer, I compulsively clicked through to the webpage where West Point marked all the steps as green or red, depending on what had or hadn’t been completed.
Mine should have been almost all green. I was in the home stretch now. Just a few things left I couldn’t do until January anyway.
But right there, in the middle of all the green things I’d already done, was a red X that hadn’t been there before.
Every candidate for West Point had to have an official nomination fro
m their representative in Congress, one of their two senators, or the vice president of the United States. I had already been nominated by my US representative, Kathryn Barnes, but now that green check had turned into a red X. I clicked on the link to find out why. All it said was “Nomination withdrawn.”
It was suddenly hard to breathe. I got up and paced my room, my arms shaking, my eyes unable to focus on anything. Months of letters, interviews, fitness tests, and academic exams, seven years of hopes and dreams, and it was all gone. Darius goes on TV claiming responsibility for the attack on a US embassy, and my nomination letter to West Point is withdrawn. Boom. Just like that. Representative Barnes had probably set some sort of speed record rescinding her letter once she’d realized who I was. Couldn’t let anybody find out she’d nominated the brother of a terrorist to the United States Military Academy.
I stopped pacing and pressed my forehead to the wall. There was still time to get another recommendation, but who was going to give me one now? Certainly not the vice president of the United States. So that was it. I was out. It was over. No West Point for me. My entire life—everything I’d ever done, everything I’d ever planned—was going down the toilet.
I kicked my empty trash can against the wall.
Mom called down the hall to ask if I was all right.
“Yeah,” I yelled back. “I’m just great! Everything’s awesome.”
I kicked the trash can again to let her know just how awesome everything was, and she didn’t say anything more. I paced for a few minutes longer, trying to calm down. As upset as I was, I knew I couldn’t worry about West Point now. It wasn’t important. What was important was clearing Darius’s name. And mine with it.
THE FIRST VIDEO WAS OF DARIUS AT THE US embassy in Turkey, and there was nothing I hadn’t already seen on TV: Darius in the background, wagging his finger in the air as he urged on the insurgents attacking the embassy. No sound. I still didn’t understand how Darius had gotten from Afghanistan to Turkey, but it wasn’t like he’d showed up in Japan. Turkey wasn’t that far from Afghanistan in the grand scheme of things.
I called up the second video. There was a lot more to this one that I hadn’t seen, and it was hard to watch. I stared into the eyes of my brother as he looked up from the speech he read. It really seemed like he meant all of it—all the ranting against America and the infidels. The video was twelve minutes long, but it felt like an eternity. No wonder they edited this stuff for television. It went on and on, Darius rambling about previous attacks on Islamic countries, death counts, and his plans for retribution.
“Like Rostam slaying the dragon, we will cut off America’s head, the poison flowing from it like a river,” Darius said. “Like Rostam in the cave of the Sith Lord, we shall emerge triumphant.”
Whoa. Wait. Had Darius just said “Sith Lord”? I paused the video and clicked back a few seconds. There it was again: “Like Rostam in the cave of the Sith Lord, we shall emerge triumphant.”
What was Darius talking about? The part about Rostam cutting off a dragon’s head, that was real. Or a real myth, at least. It was one of the Seven Trials of Rostam. But the line about Rostam in the cave of a Sith Lord, that was something Darius and I had made up one summer about ten years ago. We’d been obsessed with watching all the Star Wars movies, so we’d started adding lightsabers and spaceships and Jedi to all our Rostam stories. One adventure pitted our hero, Rostam, against Chancellor Palpatine, the dude who becomes the emperor in the old Star Wars movies. In our story, Rostam went to fight him, but he was captured and taken prisoner in a cave by Palpatine’s apprentice, Count Dooku.
Captured and taken prisoner in a cave. Rostam did emerge triumphant in our story, but only after being captured and taken prisoner! And not just that: Count Dooku had used his Jedi mind tricks on Rostam to brainwash him and make him attack his friends first! Darius, as Rostam, had come after me, as Siyavash, and we had fought a long, convoluted lightsaber duel in the backyard. Rostam was just about to kill his old friend when Siyavash used the Force to hit Rostam in the head with a Nerf boomerang. The knock on the head was enough to bring Rostam to his senses right at the last minute, and together Rostam and Siyavash tracked down Count Dooku and killed him.
That had to be the story Darius was talking about in the video. Rostam in the cave of the Sith Lord. But I was the only person who knew that story. I sat back in my chair, stunned. There was something in these videos that could clear Darius’s name. A secret message only I would understand:
Darius had been taken prisoner by the bad guys, and they were making him fight against his friends.
“MOM! DAD! IT’S A CODE! IT’S A CODE! DARIUS SENT me a message in one of the videos!” I called, running down the hall from my room.
Dad came out of his study, a messy stack of papers in his hands. Mom came to the door of the kitchen.
“In the second video,” I said breathlessly. “Darius said ‘Rostam in the cave of the Sith Lord.’ That’s from one of our games we played. You know, how we always used to pretend we were Rostam and Siyavash?”
Dad blinked and frowned. “What?”
“In that speech he read on TV. I watched all of it, the parts they didn’t put on TV. Darius talked about one of our adventures. One where Rostam got taken prisoner, and—”
“Kamran, I seriously doubt Darius is sending you secret messages,” Dad said. “I think what he had to say was pretty clear.”
“But—”
Mom shook her head, obviously fighting back tears as she returned to the kitchen.
“This is all bad enough as it is, Kamran,” Dad said gently. “Don’t make it harder on your mother. On all of us. Not now.”
“But Darius is innocent! He’s been taken prisoner! He needs our help!”
The phone rang. Again. Dad picked it up, and I saw a flicker of hope pass across his face as he said hello. We were all still hoping the army would call. Say Darius had been recovered. That he was safe. That it was all a huge mistake.
Dad’s face immediately fell. It was just another reporter. “No,” he said. “No comment. Please don’t call again.” He hung up and dropped the phone on the couch.
“Dad, I’m serious. Darius was trying to tell me something.”
“Kamran, it’s been a long day,” Dad said. He turned and went back into his office.
I wanted to scream. I picked up the phone and squeezed it. I wanted to throw the phone at the wall and smash it into a thousand pieces. Knock over the lamps. Kick the TV. Break the windows, the door. Anything to get my parents to wake up from this fog they lived in now. I reared back, ready to throw the phone like a football, when I remembered: the DHS. I could call the DHS! That lady from the Department of Homeland Security had left her card here somewhere. Told us to call in case Darius tried to get in touch with us. Well, he had tried to get in touch with me, hadn’t he? In the video.
The woman who’d raided our house less than two hours ago answered the phone on the second ring. “Department of Homeland Security. This is Agent Griggs.”
“Um, yeah,” I said. “This is Kamran Smith. You left your number and said to call if my brother tried to contact me. Darius.”
Agent Grigg’s voice became urgent. “Darius has contacted you? How? When?”
I explained, falteringly, how I was sure that Darius was trying to send me a message in his video. As I told her about Rostam and Count Dooku, I realized how ridiculous it all sounded. A US embassy had been attacked. People had died, and here I was talking about Persian mythology and Star Wars.
“I know it sounds stupid, but Darius had to be talking to me in that video. He had to.”
Agent Griggs was quiet for a half a heartbeat longer than she should have been. I could tell she wasn’t buying it. “Has Darius been in actual contact with you?” she asked, the urgency gone from her voice.
“That’s what I’m trying to tell you,” I said. “I think he’s trying to talk to me in the video. I think he’s trying to tell us he’s innocent. That h
e’s a prisoner. Somebody’s making him do all this.”
“But he hasn’t contacted you directly.”
“No,” I said, frustrated. She wasn’t taking this seriously. “But—”
“Thank you for the information, Kamran,” Agent Griggs said. “Be sure to call us if Darius tries to contact you directly.”
I felt the chance to help Darius slipping away. Be loyal, I thought, remembering the Code of Honor. Never give up.
“Darius isn’t a traitor,” I said quickly, but Agent Griggs had already hung up.
I WAS WATCHING THE EMBASSY BOMBING VIDEO again for the thousandth time when Dad knocked on my door.
“Kamran, dinner.”
I had skipped school for the past week, glued to my computer in my room. Mom and Dad had let me stay home, and both of them had taken off from work. None of us wanted to brave the reporters camped out in our street. We didn’t want to go to work or school and feel the eyes on us, hear the whispers. Adam had texted me a couple of times asking how I was, but I never wrote back. Sometimes I wondered who Adam was going to take to the Super Bowl, or who Julia Gary might be dating now, or who was starting in my place on the football team, but mostly I didn’t care.
I didn’t have time for that stuff. I didn’t have time to care about anything except proving Darius wasn’t a traitor.
I dragged the video slider back to the six-minute-thirty-nine-second mark and hit play. “I’m busy,” I said.
“We have family business to discuss,” Dad said.
Family business? We’d never had “family business” to discuss before. But now we did: dealing with Darius was our family business now.
I dragged myself out of my room, my back and legs stiff. I’d been sitting in that chair day after day, staying up late into the night watching the videos over and over again. Darius made at least one reference to our old Rostam and Siyavash games in each one, and I was sure they were supposed to mean something. Something only I could understand. But I didn’t know what.
