Ground Zero(41)

Then she saw it.

Reshmina gasped quietly. Camouflaged against the rocks was a snow leopard. And it was looking right at her.

The big cat was light gray and brown with black spots. Reshmina would never have seen it if the rocks under its feet hadn’t shifted as it snuck by. It wasn’t hunting her, she was sure. Snow leopards might take a sheep or goat from the village every now and then, but they never attacked people.

Reshmina’s heart raced all the same. It was incredibly rare to see a snow leopard. It felt almost magical to come face-to-face with one here, now, in this remote, inaccessible place.

The snow leopard held its long tail rigid and stared back at her, its pale eyes flashing in the shadowy light. Reshmina’s skin tingled, and energy coursed through her. It was almost as though she could feel the leopard’s strength in herself. As though they were two creatures who lived outside the bounds of society, beyond the reach of the rest of the world. She breathed in and out, matching the slow, powerful rise and fall of the snow leopard’s chest.

Poom.

The tiny echo of an explosion somewhere far away made them both flinch. Reshmina instinctively looked over her shoulder, toward the sound. When she looked back, the snow leopard was already darting off, around the other side of the mountain.

“Safe travels, leopard,” Reshmina whispered. “Peace be upon you.”

The snow leopard was gone, but the humming, rippling strength of it remained. Reshmina’s long black hair, free of her headscarf, blew around her. She felt a power, a purpose, that she had never felt before.

That morning—before the Americans, before the battle, before Taz, before everything—Reshmina and Pasoon had laughed and played like they did when they were children. Reshmina had wanted to capture that moment in amber, to preserve it like a fossil. She hadn’t wanted a thing in her life to ever change again. But insects trapped in amber, fossils preserved in stone, those things were dead. Forever stuck in the past.

And the Kochi—Reshmina had longed for their fairy-tale life, riding camels through mountain passes and trading food and stories around the campfires of a hundred different villages and towns. But as idyllic as that sounded, Reshmina didn’t want to be a Kochi either. They had been living the same lives, uninterrupted and unchanged, for thousands of years. Every generation the same as the last. There was no way up, and no way out.

Moving forward was scary. Sometimes you made mistakes. Sometimes you took the wrong path. And sometimes, even when you took the right path, things could go wrong. But Reshmina realized that she wanted—needed—to keep moving forward, no matter what.

It was her fault that her family was in danger. It was her fault that Pasoon had chosen today to leave and join the Taliban. If she had chosen revenge over refuge with Taz, she and Pasoon would still be home right now, living their normal lives.

But sometimes what was right and what was easy were two different things.

With renewed strength in her heart, Reshmina drew her scarf up around her head and started down the mountain toward her village.





Brandon almost tripped on a high-heeled shoe. The World Trade Center stairs were littered with uncomfortable work shoes, hand-held radios that got no reception, bulky laptop computers, jackets—anything people had decided they were tired of carrying or wearing after an hour of walking down the stairs. It made the going even slower to dodge all the castoffs.

The crowd stopped moving again, trapped for long minutes between the 17th and 16th floors. A few steps ahead of Brandon and Richard, a woman began to sob quietly, and another woman took her hand and squeezed it.

Brandon felt his own tears coming back. How was it possible that he might never see his dad again, when just that morning they’d been eating breakfast together? Brushing their teeth together? Riding the train together?

Richard put a hand on his shoulder. “Hey, kid,” he said quietly. “You’re going to be all right.”

Brandon shook his head. How was he going to be all right? How was anything ever going to be all right ever again?

“I didn’t say I loved him,” Brandon said. The tears came harder now, and he turned toward the wall to hide his face. “He told me he loved me, and I never said it back, and now he’s—”

Brandon didn’t want to finish. Didn’t want to say it out loud.

Now he’s going to die.

Richard pulled Brandon into a hug. “He knows, kid. Trust me. He knows. And as much as he loves you, he’s happier you’re down here than up there with him.”

Brandon cried into Richard’s shirt until they had to take another step. He sniffed and rubbed his eyes. “What am I going to do now? Where am I going to live?”

“Your dad said his parents live in Honduras.”

“Yeah, but I can’t go live in another country,” Brandon said. “I live here!”

“What about your mom’s parents?” Richard asked.

“They’re really old, and they live in Idaho,” Brandon explained. “I never see them. I barely know them. I don’t want to go live with strangers. This is where I live. Where I go to school. New York City is my home.”

They took another step down and waited again.

“If my mom and dad are both gone—” Brandon swallowed down another sob. “If my mom and dad are gone, that makes me an orphan, right? Will I go into a foster home?”