all around them, as if hell itself had exploded. Basheera’s eyes were stark with shock. Blood poured from her mouth.
“They’re coming,” he said to her. Doctors? Or the ones with more bombs? he wondered.
He looked around frantically for help, nose burning from the smoke. Waves of heat drifted over his back, and he turned to a flaming cavern that had been a tea shop. The dead and dying spilled at odd angles all around him, bodies lifted by force and dropped with fury. An old woman struggled to stand. A much younger man with sopping red pants tried to help her, agony in his eyes. They staggered away slowly, clutching each other.
Another bomb. Rafan’s constant fear. He slid his arms under Basheera’s back and legs and climbed to his feet. She was the last of his family, a young woman so slight that he couldn’t feel her weight through his waves of terror. He held her so close that her heart beat against his chest; he remembered her as a curly-haired toddler whom he carried to bed, and as a pretty young girl who splashed in the surf.
Rafan ran toward the hospital, spotting two physicians in white jackets racing to the bombing. “Help her,” he screamed, holding Basheera higher, like an offering.
The woman doctor stopped and opened Basheera’s eyes; Rafan hadn’t noticed that they’d closed. She checked his sister’s pulse. The heart that Rafan had felt seconds ago had failed.
“No,” he pleaded. He shook his head, and his refusal came loudly and without relief.
The doctor held his face in her warm hands and whispered, “Ma-aafu kurey.” I’m sorry. An instant later a second bomb tore apart everyone near the original explosion, and claimed the lives of those who’d tried to rescue the dying, including the doctor’s colleague.
Rafan turned slowly, aware now of Basheera’s enduring weight. His tears fell to her burned and sodden dress, and he cursed the earth and all it held sacred. Then he looked up, shaken by the sight of the doctor, whose life had been spared by his sister’s death, running fearlessly into a curtain of black smoke.
Tenderly, as if he could bruise her still, Rafan laid Basheera on the ground. “Ma-aafu kurey,” he cried to her before he, too, ran into the blackness.
* * *
Adnan lowered his gaze from Parvez. The cleric stared at him from across his prayer rug in the single room of his small house. Then Parvez shifted forward, speaking of an attack by Islamists in Malé. Twelve people killed. Three children.
“This is cruel,” Parvez said. “The radio said they used an IED on our own people. Muhammad, peace and blessings of Allah be upon him, said this is always wrong.”
“Is that what they taught you at school?” Adnan asked.
The cleric nodded without taking his eyes from Adnan, whose skin felt frighteningly alive in the presence of a man so steeped in the highest realms of Islamic thought. And to think Parvez had been his closest childhood friend. That seemed like another life, Parvez another person.
“We must not shed the blood of our own, unless it is our supreme sacrifice.” Parvez leaned closer in the dusky light. “Do you know what I mean?”
Adnan answered with a nod. Parvez rose, his robes swaying. Adnan followed him to a bamboo wardrobe. The cleric opened both doors. Adnan stared at the single item draped on a hanger. Parvez turned it so Adnan could view all of the vest.
“It can end the world as we know it.”
Adnan looked at the heavily stitched pockets—so many of them, and each so empty. Like him. Barely breath in his lungs. It stunned him to know that he had so little of Parvez’s faith, when he wanted to be as true to Islam as his friend.
Parvez placed his hand on Adnan’s shoulder and drew him closer. They stood side by side. “The man who wears this will know Allah’s love. It can end the world as we know it,” he repeated.
“How?”
Parvez whispered his answer, shivery words that spoke of flame.
CHAPTER 3
Jenna boarded a train at Penn Station, joining an early Friday afternoon crush of commuters eager to flee the compressing heat and burgeoning violence of New York City. Two more murders had made the news in the past forty-eight hours, including the savage knifing of a twenty-two-year-old woman whose terrifying screams had been heard by hundreds of West Side residents. Photos of her wholesome, hopeful face were still splashed across the Web, TV, and newspapers; and a sad shrine of