Summary
As they continue down the stairs, stepping past clunky office shoes and other things people have abandoned, Richard reassures Brandon that he’ll be alright. Brandon says he’s going to be an orphan. At the 16th floor, Brandon feels a surge of hope when firefighters move past, going up the stairs, hauling fifty pounds of equipment each. At the 11th, a security guard tells them it’s a historical day: the terrorists also flew a plane into the Pentagon. As they pass the ninth floor, people crowd down the stairs and push Brandon along. He gets separated from Richard, swept down in the river of pressing bodies.
Reshmina arrives home to find that the village has sent the ANA to stand guard at their door. She is relieved, but tells them the Taliban are coming. Reshmina grabs her mother’s arm and says they must go to Kabul. Mor says no. Reshmina gets the idea of hiding in the caves under the village. They hear gunshots in the distance. Anaa and a guard help Taz into a blue full-length burqa to hide him. As they flee, an American Apache arrives. Taz recognizes it by sound. A missile is fired into the hillside. The rocket destroys Reshmina’s home.
Richard catches up to Brandon, making his way through the fleeing people. Richard shouts for people to watch the kid. Finally, an hour after the first plane hit the North Tower, they emerge from the emergency exit stairwell to the open-air mezzanine above the lobby. Port Authority police tell the crowds to keep moving, directing them away from the escalators. Brandon is confused. He sees that the Port Authority people are lined up with their backs to the windows: he realizes they are blocking the horrific images of the bodies lying on the ground. The crowd can’t exit though ground level. They are directed under and out through the back of the building to avoid walking where bits of plane and window and people are falling. They go down a set of stairs until they arrive at the underground mall beneath the World Trade Center.
Reshmina stops moving to take in the sight of her destroyed house. She realizes her mother was right: with Taz, she has brought death to them all. She can’t believe her brother was so heartless as to direct the Taliban to blow up his own home. Reshmina keeps moving with Taz and the villagers. A Taliban member opens fire from a rooftop, shooting the ANA guard. But an American soldier on another roof takes the Taliban out. The villagers crowd into the narrow passage until at last they are in the dark, ancient caves beneath the village.
Brandon moves through the familiar underground mall. He wonders how designer jeans and toys could ever matter again after what he has seen. At the Warner Bros. store, Brandon stops and asks Richard if he can use the phones inside to call Leo. Richard says it isn’t exactly the best place to stop. He says they can try a pay phone once on the street. The ground suddenly vibrates beneath Brandon’s feet. With a rumbling roar, a blast of smoke and dust lift Brandon off his feet.
Inside the cave, Taz hands Reshmina his flashlight. They walk past bits of old Soviet-era machinery and weaponry. An old man from the village warns people not to accidentally kick old landmines. Taz says he’s been in the country ten years, but speaks no Pashto. He does speak Mandarin Chinese though. Taz identifies the helicopters outside by sound alone. When the walls of the cave shake and a chunk of ceiling comes down, Taz freezes in fear, touching the wall. He says it feels like Reaper drones—laser-guided bombs. A bomb hits and the whole ceiling falls in.
Brandon’s eyes open. Debris is in the air. His limbs feel lifeless. He calls for Richard, but he isn’t there. Brandon despairs over the loss of his mother and father, and now himself. But then he remembers his father’s words: You’re strong, Brandon. You can survive without me. In the darkness, he calls out to Richard and hears a moan in response.
Brandon wraps his cut hand in a T-shirt and gets moving, in several inches of water, feeling his way toward the moans. He feels a pair of Wolverine claws in a plastic package. He thinks, “This is why I’m not with my dad right now. This is why I’m alive.” Brandon feels his way to a man with an Indian accent who introduces himself as Pratik. They find a woman named Gayle. The three call out for other survivors and hear nothing. Brandon keeps calling for Richard until he hears someone faintly humming a tune. Brandon gasps, realizing it is Richard.
After the cave collapse, Reshmina hears her grandmother singing “Momardene Afghane,” one of Anaa’s favorites. She finds her grandmother half-covered by the door of a Soviet truck. Using her flashlight, Reshmina surveys the destruction, finding the legs of crushed villagers. When Taz asks if it’s “bad,” she throws a rock at him and tells him the deaths are his fault—for being there. She asks why he and all the Americans are there when all they’re doing is killing people. He says that they build wells and roads and schools. She says the Americans killed her sister. She wonders if the anger she feels burning inside is what Pasoon has always felt. Taz says that the Taliban will take over if they leave. Reshmina says they’ve been in the country for almost twenty years and will never beat the Taliban. Just then Reshmina’s little brother, Zahir, finds a way out of the cave, and hope is rekindled in Reshmina’s heart.
Analysis
Gratz continues to develop the themes of hope and resilience in the face of terror as Brandon and Richard make their way out of the North Tower. Brandon is delighted to finally see FDNY firefighters make their way up the building; he believes his father will be rescued. In Reshmina’s storyline, she beats the Taliban in the race back to her village. Thinking quickly, she plans to move her family, Taz, and her neighbors to safety in the tunnels under her village. Meanwhile, fighting erupts between the Taliban and the Americans, whose forces have descended on the village at the same time.
However, Reshmina’s enthusiasm is dashed when she witnesses a missile destroy her family’s house. She innocently takes on responsibility for this event, deciding that her mother was right to blame her for bringing Taz and the death that comes along with him to their home. In actuality, Reshmina has an overdeveloped sense of responsibility and she has yet to come to grips with the reality that she has little influence over the violence erupting all around her.
In parallel events, Reshmina and Brandon both find themselves trapped underground. For Reshmina, it happens when a missile rocks the ground above her and other villagers, dislodging cave walls and burying them. For Brandon, it happens when he and others are told to flee by going out through the underground mall. Suddenly, something bomb-like shakes the ground and takes out the lights, leaving Brandon to search for other survivors in the dark, dusty, flooded mall. In an instance of dramatic irony, readers who are familiar with 9/11 understand something Brandon doesn’t: the South Tower, even though it was hit second, has collapsed.
The theme of resilience reemerges as Brandon fights against the impulse to give up. Although he has been blinded and his hand is cut, Brandon searches in the dark, using his ears to find the sounds of people who weren’t killed in the ground-shaking disruption. In an instance of situational irony, he finds a pair of Wolverine claws and realizes the toy is the reason he became separated from his father. In this way, the toy, no longer of value in a survival scenario, becomes incredibly meaningful despite being worthless to him.
In her parallel storyline, Reshmina also uses her hearing to locate her family members amid the rubble of the cave. Seeing the crushed villagers around her, Reshmina reassesses her sense of responsibility for the tragedy and decides to blame Taz instead. If it weren’t for him and what he represents as an agent of the American army, none of these villagers would have been killed or injured.
In response, Taz defends the US’s infrastructure-building efforts in the country, essentially accusing Reshmina of being a hypocrite for attending a school the US likely built. But for Reshmina, none of this compares to the fact the Americans killed her older sister on her wedding day. In an instance of situational irony, Reshmina feels inside herself the pure anger that she imagines must always be burning in Pasoon, who until this moment she has dismissed as foolish. In this way, Gratz shows how the desire for revenge can inflame a person’s passion in dangerous and uncontrollable ways.
