Richard sat down beside him.
“It’s gonna be all right, kid,” Richard told him. “How old are you?”
Brandon didn’t want to answer. He didn’t want to talk. But he choked out a response. “Nine,” he said.
Richard nodded. “Same age as me when my dad died in Vietnam. I wasn’t there to see it, not like you were just now with that lady and those people in the elevator. But it wrecked me. I wish I could tell you there’s something you can do to make it better, to make it not hurt. But there isn’t. You just ... you just get over it eventually. Because you have to. It scars over, like a bad cut. It still aches every now and then, when it’s cold and gloomy outside and you’re left alone with your thoughts. But most of the time ... most of the time you just forget it’s there.”
After connecting with Richard, Brandon tries to help an elevator full of people. However, a stream of jet fuel from above creates a wall of blue flame over the open door of the elevator. When a woman becomes badly burned trying to jump through it, Richard attempts to reassure Brandon that the trauma of what he is experiencing will eventually not be as intense. But rather than lie to Brandon and tell him he will get over it completely, Richard describes the way in which traumatic events stay with a person. Using an analogy, Richard likens the trauma of having lost his father in Vietnam to a scar over a bad cut: While the wound is no longer as painful as it initially was, the event lingers with you, buried under the skin.
Reshmina brought the lantern down for a closer look. The weapons were made by many different countries. She recognized some of the languages written on the weapons, and others she guessed at: English, Russian, French, German, Spanish, Korean, Chinese. No Pashto or Arabic though. Afghanistan didn’t make the weapons. They just bought them and shot them. It was the big countries that made money selling weapons to the little countries. Who they killed with those weapons wasn’t any of the big countries’ concern.
What would happen, Reshmina wondered, if the big countries stopped selling weapons to the little countries? How would Afghanistan and Pakistan and Saudi Arabia and Iran and the countries around them fight each other and the rest of the world? With bows and arrows? Swords? Rocks? Fists?
Maybe, Reshmina thought, they wouldn’t fight at all. Maybe they would spend their time doing something else instead, like building factories and schools and hospitals.
When Reshmina tracks down her brother in the mountains, hoping to catch up with him before he joins the Taliban, she comes across a stockpile of weaponry the Taliban keeps in a cave. In this passage, Reshmina considers how the weapons that have torn apart her country for decades are not made locally but imported from "big countries" that have little concern for the unrest to which they are contributing. Reshmina's wish for peace is clear as she wonders about what might happen if the weapons weren't available to her people. She imagines that, with less bloodshed, her country might actually begin to function cooperatively.
“Yes,” Brandon said. He was still trying to process what he’d seen, but he just couldn’t make his brain accept it. For one plane to hit the World Trade Center—that was a terrible accident. But for a second one to hit the South Tower ...
“Brandon, you have to get out of the building right now,” his father told him. The calm in his dad’s voice was gone, replaced by a breathless, electric fear. “As fast as you can. Do you understand? Don’t wait for the fire department. Get out.”
“What?” Brandon said, confused. Nothing made sense. What was happening? What was going on?
“Brandon, listen to me. You have to get out of the building. Now.”
“I don’t understand,” Brandon said. He held the phone with both hands. “Dad, I don’t—”
“Brandon, hang up and get out of the building as fast as you can,” his father told him. “This wasn’t an accident. We’re under attack!”
After traveling several flights of stairs in a futile attempt to reach his father, Brandon eventually links up with Richard and realizes that he can call his father on an office phone. Brandon's relief is short-lived, however, because a second hijacked plane hits the South Tower while he is speaking to Leo. Leo understands before his nine-year-old son does that this means the first plane was no accident. In this exchange, Gratz recreates the terrifying moment when the world went from wondering how a passenger jet could have hit the World Trade Center to realizing that the United States was under attack.
Reshmina walked out among the poppies. The flowers were so tall they came up to her nose. The effect of standing among them, of almost being swallowed up by them, was magical. She wished the whole of Afghanistan were covered with the beautiful flowers.
But Reshmina knew it couldn’t be. People didn’t grow poppies for their pretty pink colors. Poppy seeds had a gummy substance that was the raw material for heroin. Heroin was a drug that took away people’s pain. For many Afghans hurt by decades of war, it was the only kind of medicine they could find to erase that suffering—and their awful memories. Afghan parents had long given the drug to their babies to ease earaches, or in place of food to soothe their hunger pains.
But Reshmina knew that heroin wasn’t medicine. It was an addictive, destructive drug that eventually killed everyone who couldn’t stop using it. And addicts would do anything for their next fix—lie, steal, even sell their own children.
While rushing back to her village to alert her family of Pasoon's betrayal, Reshmina comes across a field of poppies. The pink flowers are a beautiful contrast to the rocky, brown terrain of the mountains, but Reshmina knows the poppies are grown not for their beauty but to make heroin. In this passage, the narrator comments on the bleak uses of the drug by desperate locals, who have sedated themselves and their children with opiates to deal with trauma, pain, and hunger. In this way, the poppy field carries a sinister aura for Reshmina, who knows that its beauty belies its true evil.
“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.
As soon as he escapes the elevator, Brandon commits himself to finding his father, even if it means walking up the stairs toward where the plane hit. But despite his efforts, Brandon can't make it past the floors taken out by the plane, which has separated him and Leo. In this poignant exchange, Brandon gets through to his father on one of the internal phone lines in the building. As the top floors fill with more smoke and fire, Leo knows it is unlikely he will survive. Brandon futilely argues with his father, as if he can control the tragic outcome. But it is no use: Brandon must accept that he will live and his father will die.
Richard moaned again, and Brandon put his hands out carefully, trying to feel his way toward the sound without hurting himself again. His left hand found something plastic in a cardboard package, floating by in the ankle-deep water, and as he searched its contours with his fingers, Brandon recognized with a start what it was.
It was the toy Wolverine claws he’d left to buy at Sam Goody that morning.
Brandon blinked in the darkness. It was so strange to finally hold the toy in his hands. This is why I’m here, Brandon thought. This is why I’m not with my dad right now.
This is why I’m alive.
It was so random. So stupid. So meaningless now, and yet so important at the same time.
At the beginning of the novel, Brandon slips away from the Windows on the World restaurant to buy a pair of Wolverine claws to replace his friend's that he broke. Later in the book, Brandon coincidentally comes across the toy claws in their package, which has floated out of the Sam Goody store. In this passage, Brandon struggles to make sense of the claws, which paradoxically hold both so much and so little value to him now. While he no longer wants the claws, his earlier desire to get them has ended up meaning the difference between life and death. However, had he not left to get the claws, he wouldn't have been separated from his father.
Reshmina picked up a rock from the ground and hurled it at Taz. He still couldn’t see well, but he heard the rock strike the wall behind him and flinched. Reshmina picked up another stone and threw it at him, hitting him in the arm.
“Hey, what—?” he started to ask.
“We’re trapped and they’re dead and it’s all your fault!” Reshmina yelled at him. It wasn’t her fault for dreaming. It was his fault for being here.
[...]
“We’re building wells. Roads. Schools!” Taz said. “Probably the school you go to.”
“You killed my sister!” Reshmina cried.
Although she has risked her life and the life of her family members to give Taz the refuge he asked for, Reshmina erupts in anger at Taz and everything represents as an American soldier. Reshmina blames Taz for the deaths of the villagers killed in the skirmish between the Taliban and the Americans, all of which has come about because each side knows Taz is being kept in the village. Taz becomes defensive, reminding Reshmina of the infrastructure projects the Americans have brought to her community, but these gestures pale in comparison to the fact that Reshmina's sister was killed in an airstrike on her wedding day. The exchange is significant because it shows the gulf between the two characters' perspectives. As an American soldier, Taz tells himself that he is engaged in a righteous, virtuous mission in Afghanistan. By contrast, Reshmina knows firsthand how many negative consequences there have been for citizens of Afghanistan.
“The soldiers back in World War I, they changed the words of ‘Auld Lang Syne’ to ‘We’re here because we’re here because we’re here’ because they didn’t know why they were fighting,” he said. “You asked me why the US is still here. I think we’re still in Afghanistan because we got in, and we don’t know how to get out. If we stay, it’s bad, and if we leave, it’s bad. There’s no right answer. I think it’s the same as those boys back in World War I. We’re here because we’re here, and we don’t know how to leave.”
In this passage, Taz admits to Reshmina that he longer knows why the Americans are still in Afghanistan. Having survived the 9/11 attacks, Brandon joined the army at eighteen with the ambition of bringing to justice the terrorists responsible for the attack. However, nearly twenty years after 9/11, he and other Americans are still hunting down members of the Taliban in what seems to him a futile mission that is only destroying local communities and radicalizing young Afghan men. In this passage, Taz relates the situation to that of soldiers in WWI who weren't passionate about the war they were fighting but who didn't know how to get out of the intractable conflict.
THOOM. THOOM. THOOM. THOOM.
Brandon felt each boom in his stomach as the top floors of the North Tower collapsed, one by one, under the massive weight of each new falling floor, and then it was a rushing, expanding avalanche. Concrete crumbled to powder in an instant, exploding outward like a blooming flower, and giant pieces of rock and steel came shooting out like fireworks.
The North Tower was coming down.
Having made it out of the underground mall, Brandon and Richard are greeted with the bizarre sight of empty air space where the South Tower of the World Trade Center once stood. In this passage, Brandon's hopes of his father making it out alive are dashed when the second building collapses. The narrator's description captures a real-life image that traumatized millions of Americans and billions around the world: the horror of a giant skyscraper full of people collapsing one level at a time until it gains so much momentum that the destruction is obscured by a cloud of concrete dust.
“But the Taliban—” Taz said.
“Will take over when you go. I know,” Reshmina said. “But your country helped create the Taliban. You gave them weapons and trained them to drive out the Soviets. We have the old textbooks to prove it. Even when you try to help us, you hurt us. And yourselves. Maybe what we need is for you to stop ‘helping’ us.”
At the climax of her storyline, Reshmina confronts Taz—i.e. Brandon Chavez—about the United States government's culpability in helping bring about the situation it is trying to remedy. Taz repeats that, if the Americans leave, the Taliban will regroup and take over the country, but Reshmina has heard enough of this line of argument. In response, Reshmina points out the irony of the U.S. helping create the Taliban by arming and training mujahideen fighters in the hopes they would drive out the occupying Soviets in the 1980s. Because of the US's history of not being able to "help" without creating more problems, Reshmina suggests that Afghanistan needs to be allowed to figure out things on its own.
