by Pat Forde
Raed just ran for it, leaving his companions for the first time since Floor 82.
He'd made it!
He put a block between himself and the South Tower before looking back to see if it was coming down yet. Smoke billowed out of the hole two-thirds of the way up. He had to get farther.
But Garth and Peter were running over, and for some reason Raed waited for them, watching the sky overhead just to be sure. When they caught up to him, Raed began following the pair again, curious to know whether they'd get far enough away to survive. More than curious: he wanted them to survive. He cared about these two American strangers, having shared in their ordeal and overheard their exchange of friendship. Was that the whole point of this projection? Or was there more to it, something he'd failed to do?
As the two men continued north along the rubble-strewn blocks, Raed felt a weird echo of the relief they were professing to each other. Garth again thanked Peter for saving his life, Peter again dismissed the notion. Little did he know! A clock on a big electronic billboard read 9:59 am. They'd made it down and out with only seconds to spare. Were they far enough away?
Garth stopped in front of a church, and asked his friend whether he wanted to go in. Peter nodded, then they both turned for one last look at the South Tower. It was visibly shuddering.
“That building could come down,” Raed heard Garth say.
Peter dismissed that notion too. “It's a steel structure, there's no way—"
The building began to implode before their eyes.
Peter and Garth dashed around the side of the church for protection, and Raed did too. After a few minutes, the rumbling stopped, but the dust and debris kept coming, thicker and heavier, churning into the all-enveloping gloom. The two men beside him closed their eyes against the dust-fall, and for a few seconds, Raed did too. All those people, he thought, his mind's eye recalling faces seen high in the stairwell, people he was sure didn't make it out. He may have been aware of the outcome of Nazir and Sayf's attack back when he was twenty-four, but only now did Raed understand that outcome. Only now did he appreciate the sort of selfless, courageous people who'd ended up caught in the aftermath of his cousins’ actions.... Nazir had told Raed they'd be bringing down America along with those two buildings. But all they'd brought down was—
Well, Americans.
All those people, he thought again, horrified by the outcome for the first time in his life. Then he heard Peter say it too: “All those people,” the big man croaked, shaking his head. Beside him Garth was weeping.
But they, at least, had lived. Peter and Garth had lived! And as the two men began to swirl away, Raed had just enough time to regret parting company with them before their faces vanished into the tunnel of history, and he found himself back—
In 2033, back in the present.
Back in his cage, blinking at the bars, and thinking of Peter and Garth. Did they still live, in the present?
“Anyone see you that time, Raed?"
It was the veiled psychologist, entering the cage again.
“No,” he answered. “I mean—I don't know.” Some of the people comforting the burn victims in the stairwell had looked up as he'd passed by. Raed had thought they were looking at him at first, before realizing they'd been looking at Peter or Garth or at someone else behind Raed.... Perhaps the same was true of that woman he'd seen in the previous projection, the one in the NYU sweatshirt with the red ribbon—perhaps she'd also been looking at someone passing behind Raed. Who could say?
He was still too horrified by his latest experience of 9/11 to think clearly.
But a feeling of horror wasn't enough. Raed saw that in the eyes of the psychologist standing below him, tapping away at her slate. He had not faced whatever he must face, had not done whatever he must do. What could he do, without changing the past?
“That was your longest projection so far,” the psychologist told him, “almost an hour. So we've only time for a few more. They'll be short and to the point. And for the next one, Raed,” she said, “remember what your lawyers told you."
“Just send me,” he groaned.
But she stayed for another second or two, holding Raed's eyes, her own wide eyes filled with—foreboding? After she slid out between the yellow bars, Raed closed his eyes and clenched his teeth, preparing to ghost once again back to 9/11. So many projections to the same target-time! He thought of the two firemen at Ground Zero who'd taken turns climbing into the crow's nest of their pumper truck, returning to the fire time and again, refusing to give up even though hope was already gone. If they'd been able to face it over and over, well then, so could Raed.
But when he opened his eyes, he was surprised to find that—
He was back in a stairwell in the South Tower, standing on the landing of Floor 54, no one in sight. And right in front of him a zipper-rip was forming in the outer wall.
The whole stairwell seemed to pitch. Raed lurched for a railing of the flight leading down, barely able to keep his feet. What had the lawyers told him? Emotional harm was the only real danger during a projection—and if he used the ripcord before the cage operators brought him back, he'd be automatically disqualified from the program....
Raed scrambled onto the flight leading below only to stop short halfway down, seeing some people appear at the bottom climbing up. Firemen! The same doomed men he'd seen around Floor 30 during his last ghosting. They were all panting, far more exhausted now.
And even if he could get down past them, he would never make it out in time, not this time. Short and to the point, the psychologist had promised.
The building rocked again, and Raed sprawled onto the steps, one hand gripping the railing to keep him from sliding into the firemen below, who were all hanging from the same railing and staring at each other, clearly wondering whether they should continue.
"Go down!" Raed wailed at them, pulling himself back upright.
And the firemen reacted, but not to Raed's yell—someone trapped a few floors higher was screaming for help. En masse they began to climb, aware of the danger of collapse but not of its imminent certainty.
Raed flattened himself against the stairwell wall, wrapping both arms around the railing—and then the firemen were crushing up through him. He could feel their huge souls, giant lionhearts swelling with FEAR-FURY-DEFIANCE-DETERMINATION. And during the endless seconds it took for them to climb by, Raed believed that nothing could kill such men.... After the last of them had passed, Raed slumped to the stairs, and lay there in a heap as the building rocked and rippled. The firemen were forced to stop just above him, all of them bracing themselves against the walls.
“Feel that just now?” gasped a man two steps above Raed.
Another nodded. “Something's telling me we're not gonna get out of here."
Had they sensed Raed's thoughts as they pushed by him? But no, individual thoughts could not be exchanged. Biomass could only produce “strong-weak” interactions: strong from these firemen onto him, too weak from him onto them to change their minds about anything.
And any further words the firemen above him might have said were abruptly drowned out by loud snappings and splittings that sounded to Raed like the fabric of the Universe tearing. The sounds snowballed into a terrific roaring, and Raed moved one hand off the vibrating railing onto his belt, fingered the ripcord, and looked up in anticipation—to his astonishment, some civilians who had made it down from the landing above were squeezing between the firemen. Then the stairwell walls seemed to give out, the people above clutched onto their would-be rescuers, Raed instinctively grabbed the railing with both hands, and God in Heaven dropped the world of 9/11 down on top of him, using the building Raed helped bring down to smite him once and for all—
A sharp smell roused him. Raed opened his eyes, unsure of where he was. Two figures swam into view: the burqa-veiled psychologist and the burly male medic, who was holding smelling salts.
Raed took in a painful breath, raised both hands to his chest, and
checked for broken ribs.
“It's just sympathetic pain,” the psychologist assured him, “all in your mind."
“You're okay,” the medic agreed. “It's just the shock of being blown out of the fold."
“Why—” Raed broke off, sucked in air, still psychologically winded. “Wasn't I crushed? Gravity of the past ... pulled everything down on us—on me."
The medic pointed to the inward-pointing cones studding the cage's arcing bars. “The particles they focus on you only open a transient fold. Any strong force exerted on the exterior—the force of a wall falling on you, a bullet fired at you—and the fold's sphere spontaneously pops, blowing you right back here. Bit of a shock,” he repeated, “but you get used to it."
“You've faced....” Raed wasn't sure what to call it.
“A ‘mortal force’ in the past?” The medic rolled up a sleeve, revealing a tattoo of the Statue of Liberty on one big bicep. “I was born in France,” he said, “so I ghosted back to the Revolution, and got hit by a cannonball fired into a crowd outside the Bastille—I was standing too close to some of my ancestors.” The big man folded his arms, frowned up at Raed. “Gotta tell you, facing death during a ghosting's not the hard part. It's not easy—but it's not the hard part."
“What,” Raed wheezed back at him, “is the hard part?"
The medic looked over the psychologist's shoulder, and read something on the slate she was accessing again. “I believe you already know,” he said, then nodded at Raed and left the cage.
Raed met the psychologist's wary eyes.
“Can you?” she asked him, a hint of pleading in her voice. Had she expected him to ripcord out before the South Tower collapsed? Had she hoped he'd stick it out with those firemen?
The thought that the psychologist held out a faint hope for him gave Raed a little strength. “I think ... I can,” he breathed, then began breathing easier.
After all, he knew now she'd been telling the truth. He couldn't come to harm. And after she exited the cage, Raed watched the psychologist and the others outside the bars begin to slide away, knowing the next projection couldn't get any worse, it could only get—
More strange.
Raed dropped to the floor of an elevator with its double-doors partially open. Beyond the gap in the doors a debris-littered lobby kept rising, then plunging, then rising again, as though the elevator was a yo-yo on a string about to snap. The steel walls around him were visibly vibrating, so he knew he didn't have much time. But he waited until the lobby outside fell from above his shoulders to a foot below the level of the elevator—
Raed threw himself out, landing flat on his chest on the cluttered lobby carpeting. A sign fallen from a shuddering wall told him this was Floor 104 of the South Tower. And there was a man propped against a smoldering reception desk nearby, his legs trapped under a huge twist of black metal that had stabbed down through the ceiling.
The trapped man wasn't alone.
Raed got to his feet, staggered closer, and stared at a woman kneeling beside the trapped man, her arm round his shoulder. She stared back at Raed, following him with her eyes.
“You can't see me,” he insisted, and then fled from the pair, down a hall, and around a corner, not wanting to be seen by a victim about to meet her end. Not wanting to sit idly by as two more people met their doom, unable to do a thing about them or himself.
Not understanding what he was supposed to do here!
Ceiling panels crashed down in a hall he turned into, and an electrical panel exploded. Raed was driven back, his time probably almost up again. Short and to the point.
The point being to meet more of the people he'd help trap in this tower? I didn't trap them, I wasn't on that plane. It was Nazir, Sayf, and their comrades! But no matter how he tried to rationalize, how he tried to escape, Raed was blocked at every turn. There was just no way out. Corridors came down in a rain of rubble, passageways filled with a tingling pressure before bursting into flame, and doorway after doorway was barricaded by debris. All the rooms within rooms closed off to him now, all his mental defenses collapsing, forcing him back to....
The central lobby and the elevators, where he hated to go but had to, and—in the end—wanted to, so he wouldn't have to face the end alone. As he stumbled into the lobby, Raed saw the trapped man now had two companions consoling him instead of one, both comforters wearing red ribbons on their collars but neither looking at Raed. Their eyes were squeezed tightly shut, knowing the collapse was upon them, hearing the roar and hugging the arms of the trapped man, one on either side, their faces agonized.
Yet the man propped between them seemed unaware of his two steadfast friends, his hands clasped together in prayer, face somehow calmer, eyes turned up toward his own version of Heaven. We do this to Americans because they are godless, Nazir had told Raed repeatedly.
And that was not true.
And feeling horror for this trapped trio was not enough.
Raed threw himself down on the shuddering floor before them. He knew what the hard part was now. “I don't have the strength,” was all he had time to say before the world descended on them all again—
Sharp reviving odors.
Opening his eyes, squinting at yellow bars, then down at the big medic, and the small Muslim psychologist.
“Was seen—again,” Raed managed to say when he'd caught his breath. “Were two of them. Two ... shouldn't have been there."
“What do you mean?” The psychologist was tapping it all into her slate.
“Both wearing ribbons,” Raed said, less winded this time. “Pinned to sweatshirts,” he went on, “like the other one who saw me—when I turned up that side street."
She surprised him by replying, “You've gotten a long way into our program tonight Raed, and you're nearly there."
“There?"
“Understand—the program's spiraling you toward the core-event you were convicted of being an accomplice to. Time to take you in for a close-up."
He nodded. The hard part still remained. “Go ahead,” he said, no longer caring.... There were no rooms left to hide himself inside anyway. Raed's own core had been drawn out now, and he was ready for anything, ready for the truth.
Again the psychologist hesitated before leaving, and again her lingering gaze gave him strength. She wants me to see it through.
Raed realized he wanted to see it through, too.
Seconds later the cage-bars began to blur, then bend away, and before he knew it he was—
Back in the South Tower, and for the first time, he'd arrived before it was hit.... The floor around him was filled with people, a dozen desks visible in an open area near some tall windows, a few of the desks still occupied by people making phone-calls, although most looked upset. Most others had left their desks and were standing at the windows, looking out at the North Tower, which had a smoking hole a number of floors higher up its side.
What floor was he on in this building? Raed turned and hurried around to the elevators, darting in and out of groups of people, and in the central lobby discovered he was on Floor 78.
The point-of-impact for the South Tower.
Raed kept right on running through the floor, around to the tower's opposite outer wall. Finding another open area past a row of offices, he peered out through some windows facing south. A gleaming speck was just visible against the blue sky in the southeast, slowly arcing around to get into position.
Raed had often wondered about Nazir and Sayf's last moment in that cockpit. In the early years, he'd even tried to picture it: opening their shirts and exposing their hearts to God, praying for entrance to Heaven. Madmen, and Raed had sensed it even then. But he'd been a little mad himself, in that period.... And now that he was in a position to glimpse the expression on their faces as they plunged into the side of this building, Raed found he had no interest in glimpsing any such thing. He turned his back to the windows.
Four of the dozen desks arrayed before him had knots of people standing around
them. And sprinkled in among the business attire worn by most of those people—none of them currently looking out the windows to the south—there were a handful of standouts in casual clothes, sweats, even one in an all-blue jumpsuit. All the casual-dressed people had their hands on the shoulders or backs of one or another of the victims-to-be.
Raed moved over to the nearest occupied desk, where a young blond-haired man in a crisp mauve shirt and black tie sat facing the outer windows, too busy talking on the phone to notice the speck growing in the sky beyond the windows. Standing directly behind this young businessman was another older blond-haired man, in his mid-forties perhaps, approaching middle-age, yet dressed in silvery track pants and a Columbia University pullover. He had both hands on the shoulders of the desk's occupant and was crouched over him, head bent low, eyes closed and concentrating, to all appearances eavesdropping on the seated man's phone call.
Neither the seated man nor anyone else in the area seemed to take any notice of this peculiar eavesdropper.
Except for Raed.
“Who are you?” he asked the man in silver track pants.
The man frowned up at Raed, his concentration broken. Raed immediately saw that the eavesdropper and the businessman below him might have been twins, but for the ten-year age difference between them. And now the red ribbon pinned to the eavesdropper's collar was plainly visible ... Below him, the seated man continued reassuring whoever he was talking to on the phone that he was all right, that it was the other tower that was hit—but his eyes were finally widening, focusing on something behind Raed, beyond the windows. The eavesdropper bowed over the seated man again, concentrating harder, tightening his grip on his younger twin's shoulders.
Out of the corner of his eye, Raed caught other people reacting to something in the sky beyond the south windows. And now, somehow, there were twice as many people in sweats and casual clothes in the open area—though Raed had seen no one enter the area. All the newcomers had their heads bowed, holding tightly to some shocked-looking businessman or woman.
