Summary
Brandon and Richard go down the stairs to the 89th floor. Brandon expresses his guilt over having encouraged the woman to run out of the elevator; now she’s horribly burned. Richard tells him that at least she’s alive. Richard asks how old Brandon is, and he says nine. Richard said he was nine when his father died in Vietnam. He says there’s nothing to do to get over it. Eventually the wound scars over, like a bad cut. They arrive at Cosmos Services, Richard’s company. Brandon pets the seeing-eye dog of a man named Anson. They turn on the radio to hear two DJs joking about how the pilot must have been drunk to have hit one of the Twin Towers. They switch it over to a news channel. A man is calling in from the 104th floor, where he says they’ve been told to wait for rescuers. Brandon is delighted to think his father on 105 is probably okay. He reaches for the phone on Richard’s desk.
Reshmina looks around for her brother, finding footprints that lead into a cave. She wiggles in the opening and finds a lighter and a lantern. With light, she can see a pile of guns and explosives—a large Taliban weapons cache. Pasoon appears and Reshmina screams, dropping the lantern. They rush to put out the flame, Reshmina beating at the ground with her headscarf. Reshmina follows Pasoon out of the cave and up a ridge to where he earlier shot the rifle. The gun is still there. He cocks it and aims. Reshmina asks what he is doing. He says, “I’m going to call the Taliban.”
Brandon is relieved to get through to the restaurant on the phone. His dad comes on the line and Brandon explains how he got separated. He apologizes for not telling him he was going down to the store. Leo says it’s okay and tells him to stick with Richard. Leo says that they tried going down but there’s no way to get past the 100th floor. Brandon realizes that means the plane must have taken out seven floors, and his father is trapped. However, Leo reassures him that helicopters will take them from the roof if necessary. Brandon then sees another jet liner turn toward them. It crashes into the South Tower, making the North Tower shudder again. Brandon can’t comprehend what’s happening. Leo tells Brandon to get out of the building immediately, saying, “This wasn’t an accident. We’re under attack!”
Pasoon fires the rifle to attract the attention of the Taliban, who have taken over what was once an American camp. Reshmina struggles to wrestle the gun from her brother’s hands, but he overpowers her. She calls him a worm trying to play with snakes. He hits her hard in the face, nothing like he’s ever done before, disorienting her. He says that she may be his sister, but this is Afghanistan, and he is a man and she mustn’t talk to him like that. She realizes he is a snake after all. She reminds him that the Taliban will kill their family and maybe the entire village as punishment for harboring Taz. Pasoon says if so, it will be their father’s fault for siding with the infidels. As three Taliban members begin walking up the hillside toward them, Reshmina realizes that all she can do is get back to the village first. She runs.
Brandon struggles to make sense of having seen a second plane hit the South Tower. He follows Richard and his floormates down the stairs. Esther, Richard’s assistant, says terrorists set off a bomb in the parking garage under the building in 1993. It took three hours to get down the stairs that day. Brandon asks why it happened. Richard says, “The ones who bombed the building back in ’93 said they did it because we kept sticking our noses in the Middle East, and they wanted us out.” The group splits up at the 78th floor, but Richard sticks with Brandon as they continue down the stairwell. People call out floor numbers as they try to group together with colleagues. On 44, a makeshift hospital has been set up with EMTs treating injured people. Everyone screams when something crashes into the floor across the room. Brandon ducks, worried flaming jet fuel will burn him alive.
On the way back to her village, Reshmina comes across a valley full of brilliant pink poppies. She wishes the entire country could be covered in the flowers, but she knows people grow them to produce and sell heroin, not for their beauty. The Taliban makes money selling heroin to pay for guns and bombs, so the Americans destroy any poppy fields they find. Pasoon wanted Baba to grow poppies for the money, but he said it was against Islam. She touches the part of her face that her brother hit. She prays for Allah to show her brother another path. Reshmina is moving through the head-high poppies when she sees a man patrolling the edge of the field with a Soviet-era AK-47. He cocks the gun when he hears her step on a dry stem.
The crash on 44 isn’t another plane, but an elevator falling. They continue walking down the stairwell, which is congested with other people evacuating. However, people are strangely polite as they make their way down. On the 20th floor, Richard pulls Brandon through the door to see if they can find a faster stairwell. Brandon tries a phone and is able to get through to his father, who says they can’t land helicopters on the roof because there’s too much smoke. A man in a suit flies past the window. Brandon tells his dad he has to get out of there. Leo tells Brandon to get out of the building and do something worth living for. Brandon says he wishes he was with him up there. Leo says it’s good he isn’t. He tells Brandon that he is becoming his own man and can survive without him. He asks to speak with Richard, who agrees to keep Brandon safe. Brandon talks to Leo again. Leo tells him he is proud of him. Brandon apologizes for making things harder since his mom died. His father doesn’t reply because the line has gone dead.
Reshmina hides in the poppy field as the guard calls out, pretending to have seen her. He looks away from her. She sees he isn’t much older—a boy-man like her brother, made to watch over the field for the Taliban. She distracts him by throwing a rock in the opposite direction. While he investigates, she moves through the field and hides behind a rock. A rare sight—a snow leopard—is waiting there. She feels the leopard’s energy and strength coursing through her. She knows they attack animals but never humans. With renewed strength in her heart, she starts down the mountain toward her village.
Analysis
Gratz continues building on the themes of lost innocence and resilience when Brandon feels responsible for encouraging a woman to jump out of the elevator, an action that results in her being badly burned by a stream of flaming jet fuel leaking down the elevator shaft. Realizing that nine-year-old Brandon is witnessing things that will emotionally scar him forever, Richard empathizes by detailing his own experience of losing his innocence as a child when his father died in the Vietnam War. Rather than placate Brandon with reassurances that he will get over it, Richard is more realistic, explaining that traumatic experiences stay with a person forever, with the sting of the emotional wound gradually subsiding, but never going away completely.
The theme of terrorism arises when Brandon gets through to his father on the phone. By now, Brandon, Leo, and Richard all know that a plane hit the North Tower, wiping out several floors that separate Leo and Brandon. They have been told by authorities to stay put and wait for firefighters or medics to attend to them. However, in an instance of situational irony, a second plane hits the South Tower while Brandon is on the phone with his father. The surreal event is difficult for Brandon to comprehend, but Leo understands immediately that the two planes are no coincidence, and that they are in the midst of a terrorist attack.
As Brandon and the others on their floor flee down the stairs, the adults discuss how it isn’t the first time terrorists have targeted the World Trade Center. Alluding to another real-life attack, Richard’s assistant explains that a bomb was detonated in the parking garage in 1993; the bombers believed the North Tower would collapse into the South Tower, killing tens of thousands, but in reality only six people died. Touching on the theme of revenge, Richard tells Brandon that the perpetrators of that attack were retaliating against the US government’s foreign policies regarding the Middle East and support for Israel.
The themes of betrayal, loss of innocence, and powerlessness come up in Reshmina’s storyline as she attempts to wrestle a rifle from her brother’s hands before he can alert the Taliban to his presence in the mountains. In retaliation, Pasoon hits her in the face and reprimands her for trying to exercise authority over him; he cites how the gender dynamic in Afghanistan, where women are seen as subordinate to men, still applies even though they are siblings. In this upsetting moment, Reshmina discovers that not only is she powerless to influence her brother, he is no longer the playful innocent boy she loves; his transition into adolescence has made him stronger, more violent, and more misogynistic. Using a metaphor, she denounces him as being not a worm trying to play with snakes but an actual snake after all.
The theme of resilience arises as Reshmina gives up on persuading Pasoon and runs back to her village to warn the locals of the Taliban’s impending attack. On the way, she takes cover from a Taliban recruit guarding a poppy field by hiding behind a rock. There she encounters a rare snow leopard. Just as she is giving in to despair, Reshmina discovers that the snow leopard’s majestic energy and strength seem to fill her own heart with renewed strength. Spurred on, she continues on her journey home, leaving open the question of whether she will get there before the Taliban can mobilize.
