by Alan Gratz
Reshmina put a hand to the side of her face, where her brother had hit her. Tears came to her eyes again, and her heart ached at his betrayal. But it was too late for that now. Pasoon had made his choice, and so had she.
Reshmina remembered her prayer in the Kochi camp, for God to show Pasoon a different path. Her request was a du’a. A special request in a time of need. According to their imam, the prayer leader in their mosque, God promised to answer a du’a in one of three ways. The first and best answer was when God gave you what you asked for, right when you asked for it. The second was to give you what you prayed for, but at some later date. The third was to not give you what you asked for at all, but instead to prevent some other hardship or injury from happening to you.
God certainly hadn’t answered Reshmina’s request by changing Pasoon’s path. Did that mean that at some later time, God would forgive Pasoon and change her brother’s heart? Reshmina hoped so. But she wasn’t sure she could ever forgive her brother.
Something red flashed against all that pink, and Reshmina froze.
Patrolling the far edge of the poppy field was a man wearing a green tunic, a white turban, and a red scarf. It was the red scarf that had caught Reshmina’s attention, but now all she could see was what the man carried over his shoulder: an old Soviet-era AK-47 rifle.
Reshmina ducked low in the poppies and held her breath. Had the soldier seen her? She waited for long seconds. Minutes. But no one came.
Reshmina looked around, trying to figure out how she could escape. All she saw were poppies everywhere she looked. She could go back the way she had come, but that would take too long. But if this soldier caught her, there was no telling what he would do. She had discovered his hidden, illegal poppy field.
Sweat ran down Reshmina’s back, and her heart thumped hard in her chest. She could not get caught. Slowly, carefully, as quietly as she could, Reshmina chanced another peek over the tops of the poppies.
The red-scarf soldier leaned against a rock. He was turned away from her, smoking a cigarette. He wasn’t paying particular attention to the poppy field. Or anything, really. That’s why he hadn’t noticed Reshmina as she came down through the pass. He was just a guard, and it must have been terribly boring to have to sit and watch a poppy field all day long, high up in the mountains where no one else could see you or talk to you. If she waited long enough, he would probably go to sleep.
But Reshmina couldn’t wait for that. She had to get past him. Now.
Reshmina inched forward in a crouch, trying to squeeze between the tall poppies without making them move. She didn’t know what she was going to do when she got to the end of the field. Throw a rock to distract the guard? Maybe he would wander off to relieve himself, and she could slip by. But every minute she waited was another minute the Taliban might be getting closer to her village.
Snap!
Reshmina pulled her foot back from the brittle poppy stem she’d stepped on and froze.
“Is somebody there?” the guard called.
Reshmina closed her eyes and silently cursed herself.
Clack-clack.
Reshmina’s eyes flew open. She knew that sound. It was the guard cocking his rifle. Making it ready to shoot.
“I see you!” the guard cried. “Come out with your hands up!”
The blast of fire Brandon braced for never came. He looked up and saw Richard crouching next to him. He’d been ready for a shock wave too.
But if it wasn’t another plane, what was it? What happened?
Richard stood to look. He put a hand over his mouth and pulled Brandon away as new screams—screams of horror—filled the air.
“It wasn’t a plane—it was an elevator,” Richard told him. “An elevator just crashed down, and the people in it—”
He couldn’t finish. He didn’t have to. Brandon could guess without seeing it himself.
This is my reality now, Brandon realized. I hear a crash, and my first thought is “A plane is hitting the building!” He never would have assumed that a day ago, an hour ago, but things were different now. He’d gone from a world where planes didn’t fly into buildings to one where things like that did happen. Now he expected it.
Brandon and Richard hurried back into the stairwell and kept going down.
Everyone seemed to have gotten the message to get out as quickly as they could, and the stairwells were a bottleneck of desperate, frightened people. Their descent slowed to a crawl. Sometimes Richard and Brandon stood on one step for a full minute before they got to move down to the next step. All around them, men and women who had cell phones kept trying to make calls. No one could get a signal.
“Hey, so tell me something about yourself,” Richard said to Brandon while they waited. “What do you like to do?”
Brandon shrugged. “I don’t know. Skateboard, I guess.”
“We’ve got a skate park near us in Queens,” Richard told him. “Drive by there sometimes. I see kids doing the craziest things on those skateboards.”
Brandon knew Richard was just trying to distract him, but he couldn’t think about skateboarding right now. He couldn’t think about anything but getting out of here.
Fifteen minutes later, Brandon and Richard were only to the 36th floor. Brandon could feel his frustration mounting. He and Richard shared a look of despair. But they didn’t say anything, and neither did anyone else. No one yelled, and no one got mad. No one told anybody to get a move on, for God’s sake. For a bunch of New Yorkers who honked if you took a second too long to cross the street, everybody was remarkably calm. Brandon didn’t know how they were doing it. He felt like he was two seconds away from screaming.
They hit the landing for the 29th floor, and Brandon sagged with relief. They were in the twenties! Not far now! A man in a delivery uniform stood in the doorway, handing out bottles of water to people as they went by, and Brandon drank his greedily, his throat raw and dry.
Another man carried a glass coffee pot filled with water, with paper towels floating inside. “I’ve got wet paper towels to breathe through, if anybody needs one!” he called out.
Brandon and Richard kept going. Brandon’s legs ached even worse than before. All he wanted to do was sit down.
One man they came to had sat down, right there on the stairs. He was older and overweight, and he had clearly been pretty high up when he started his walk down. The back and armpits of his shirt were covered in sweat, and his face was pale and his breathing labored. A woman stood in front of him, waving a newspaper at him to cool him down.
“Lionel, can you walk?” she asked him. “We have to keep moving.”
Lionel stayed where he was.
Somehow the fumes were worse down here, even though they were farther away from the fire above. Brandon’s head was groggy, his eyes unfocused. He ran his tongue along the roof of his mouth and realized he could taste the jet fuel fumes.
At the 20th floor, Richard grabbed Brandon and pulled him through the door.
“Come on,” he whispered. “Let’s see if one of the other stairwells is faster.”
The 20th floor was empty of people. Computer monitors still glowed. On one, a cursor blinked in the middle of an unfinished sentence. Across the room, a phone rang plaintively, no one there to answer it.
But that meant the phones here were still working!
Brandon’s heart fluttered with cautious hope. He was desperate to talk to his father again, but he had been disappointed so many times before when he couldn’t get through. He rushed to a phone near a window and dialed the number for Windows on the World.
Richard knew what Brandon was doing and sat down at another desk to try to call his own family.
Brandon waited breathlessly, and then—the line was ringing! He’d gotten through! Brandon clung to the receiver, waiting for someone to pick up, when something went plummeting past the window.
Not something. Someone.
Richard stood from his chair. “Jesus Christ,” he whispered.
He had seen it too, then. Brandon wasn’t imagining things. A man in dark pants and a white shirt and a light blue tie had just fallen past their window, twenty stories in the air.
“Hello? Brandon? Is that you?” his father said, finally answering the phone.
“Dad! Oh my God, Dad, I just saw a man falling past the window!”
“Brandon, I—I can’t talk long,” his father said slowly. His voice was quiet. Weak. “Everybody else—everybody is down on 106. We broke a window to get some air. The smoke is getting thicker. But I waited—”
“Dad, you have to get up to the roof! Get to the helicopters!” Brandon told him.
“Can’t. Too much smoke,” his dad said sadly. “Helicopters can’t land.”
What? How could that be? The helicopters had to be able to land on the roof! How else were they supposed to get all those trapped people out?
“The floor is groaning. Buckling. Fire’s coming up through the floor,” Brandon’s father said. “No sprinklers. We already threw the fire extinguisher out the window to break it open for air. Not that it would help.”
Brandon realized he was crying. He knew what his father was telling him. He could hear it in the strain in his voice, in the things he was saying. His dad just didn’t want to say it, and Brandon didn’t want to hear it.
“Dad,” Brandon said. “Dad, you have to get out of there.” He felt so helpless. He knew there was nothing he could do, nothing his father could do, or his dad would have done it already. But still he tried to think of something.
“Brandon, I want you to do something with your life, all right?” his dad said. His voice was trembling. “I want you to get out of this building and survive and do something worth living for. Do you understand?”
“Stop it!” Brandon cried. “Stop talking like that!”
“Brandon—”
“No!” Brandon told him. “No, we’re a team. I need you.”
“No you don’t,” his dad told him. “You’re strong, Brandon. You make good decisions.”
Brandon sobbed. “But I don’t. I’m always making mistakes. I got suspended from school. I ran away from you this morning.”
“I’m glad you did, Brandon. If you hadn’t gone off on your own, you’d be trapped up here with me right now.”
“I wish I was!” Brandon told him.
“No you don’t, Brandon.”
But he did. Brandon wished he was with his father, even if the floors were buckling and the fire was spreading and they couldn’t breathe. Even if his dad was dying. Brandon would rather die with his dad than live alone.
“We survive together. That’s what you always say,” Brandon said. He couldn’t see for his tears. “I can’t do this alone.”
“Yes you can, Brandon. You’re already becoming your own man. You can survive without me.”
Brandon put his elbows on the desk and covered his face with one hand. He didn’t want to be a man, or make his own decisions, or survive all by himself. He wanted his dad.
“The firemen are going to rescue you,” Brandon managed to say. “They’re going to make it up to the 93rd floor and put out the fire and come get you.”
But even as he said it, Brandon knew it wasn’t true. They both did. Brandon hadn’t even seen any firemen yet.
“Brandon, is that man still with you? The one you were with?”
“Richard,” Brandon said. He sniffed. “Yes.”
“Tell him I need to talk to him.”
Brandon didn’t want to let his father go, but he was crying so hard now he could barely talk. He held the phone out to Richard but couldn’t even say why.
Richard understood. He hung up the phone he’d been using to try to get through to his own family and took the receiver.
“This is Richard,” he said into the phone.
Brandon couldn’t hear what his father was saying, but Richard nodded.
“I’ll make sure he’s safe,” Richard said.
Brandon choked back another sob. This was all so stupid! His dad wasn’t going to die. He couldn’t. This wasn’t how people died. People didn’t die on sunny September mornings, going to work like they did every other day of their lives. People died when they were old, in hospital beds or old folks’ homes.
Brandon’s father kept talking. Richard closed his eyes and lowered his head.
“I understand,” Richard said at last. “I will. I promise.”
Richard held the phone back out to Brandon. “He needs to talk to you again,” he said.
Brandon took the phone, holding onto it with both hands like it was the most precious thing in the world.
“Brandon,” his father said, his voice faint. “I want you to promise to stay with Richard. At least for a few days, until he can figure things out.”
“No!” Brandon said, tears streaming down his face. “I want to stay with you!”
“Do what I tell you, Brandon. Promise me.”
Brandon could only blubber.
“Brandon, I love you,” his father told him. “And I’m proud of you. I always have been. I want you to know that. I know it hasn’t been easy since your mother died—”
“No, I know,” Brandon said. “I’m sorry, Dad. You were great. I’m sorry I made things harder.”
His dad didn’t answer back.
“Dad?”
There was no voice on the other end of the line. Just dead air.
Brandon hung up and dialed again, but he couldn’t get through.
The number was no longer in service.
“Ha-ha!” the guard cried, leaping through the flowers.
Reshmina threw her hands over her head and cowered, but nothing happened. When she peeked out, she saw the guard through the flowers, a few meters away. He wasn’t looking in her direction at all. That snake had been lying about seeing her, trying to get her to reveal herself!
Reshmina stayed low and quiet, watching the guard. He was Afghan and young. Older than her, but not by much. A teenager. He was gangly and thin, with a wisp of beard on his chin.
A boy-man, Reshmina thought. Like the ANA soldiers she’d seen in the village.
This couldn’t have been his field, then. He was guarding it for someone else. For the Taliban? It could be. This was the kind of job they might have Pasoon doing soon.
“Is somebody there?” the boy called again. This time Reshmina heard the fear in his voice. He was just as scared as she was. Reshmina almost felt sorry for him. He was no villain. Just a boy who needed a job.
But he still had a gun, and his job was to shoot her if he caught her.
If I could only go back in time, Reshmina thought. Just go back in time ten minutes. Make a different decision that would erase this moment. But was ten minutes enough? How far did she have to go back to avoid the situation she found herself in? Back to the decision to wrestle her brother for the rifle? To follow him from their home? All the way back to the decision to bring the American soldier into her house?
What if every path she chose was the wrong one?
The guard was getting closer. Right or wrong, Reshmina had to make a decision, and fast.
Reshmina picked up a rock from the ground and, when the boy’s head was turned, she took a deep breath and threw it across the canyon. It clattered against the steep rock wall on the other side, and the boy spun and fired his rifle.
Ka-tung-ka-tung-ka-tung!
The echo in the little canyon was explosive, overwhelming. Reshmina put her hands over her ears and ran in a crouch in the opposite direction. Poppies parted and flattened as she ran. Would the guard turn and see her? Shoot her?
Suddenly Reshmina was at the side of the field, in the narrow space next to the canyon wall where no poppies grew. She threw herself to the ground and curled into a ball. She tried to listen, but her heart thundered in her chest and her ears rang from the gunshots.
The boy didn’t come, and she couldn’t hear what he was doing. She couldn’t wait for him to find her. Reshmina looked around and saw she was sit
ting on a thin, sloping path that ran along the edge of the poppy field. If she followed the path one way, she’d come out where she started. If she went the other way, she would come out where the boy had been leaning against the rock.
Reshmina stood in a crouch again and moved toward where the boy had first been standing guard.
She got to the rock, but the boy hadn’t returned. Reshmina chanced a peek over the top of the poppies and saw him on the other side of the canyon, where she’d thrown the rock. He held his rifle at the ready with tight white knuckles. He looked back and forth nervously, sweat beading on his forehead. The boy frowned when he couldn’t find anything, then looked back across the poppy field, to where Reshmina had run. He must have seen the path she’d cut through the poppies, because he moved quickly in that direction to investigate.
Reshmina didn’t wait to see what happened next. She slipped around the rock and followed the path out of the little canyon. When she was finally out of sight, she ran—ran harder and faster than she had ever run before. Up a ridge she went, slipping and sliding on the loose rocks. Then down into another dip in the peaks, stumbling and cutting herself on rocks and scrub brush. She couldn’t slow down. Not until she had put as much distance as she could between herself and the boy with the gun.
At last Reshmina came to a gap in the peaks, and she had to stop. She was out of breath, and her arms and legs were shaking too much.
Reshmina collapsed against a rock and cried. She cried for herself, out of fear and exhaustion. She cried for her family, who had no idea of the terror that was headed their way. She cried for Pasoon, who was lost and gone to her forever. And the worst of it—the absolute worst—was that every single thing that wore her down now, every single cut and bruise that stung her skin, every loss and betrayal that made her sob, all of it was her fault.
