Page 82 of What Remains

And then that was when Poya remembered what John had said, what Johnhaddone when tying Poya’s hands.

I’m going to tie you the same way I will tie Shahida. All you have to do is jerk your hands apart and the rope will away. She has a rifle, but I want you to have this.He’d shown Poya a slim cylinder with a tiny catch and how to flick the catch with a thumb, so a sharp, thin blade sprang out and locked into place.That belonged to a boy who needed to protect himself. I will try very hard to kill Sarbaz if I can, but if something happens and I can’t, don’t be afraid to use this. Because then we have one more trick?—

If Amu did what John told him to do: make sure to give Sarbazbothblack bags.

Now, as Sarbaz shouted, his grief swelled his chest and then burst in a hot, roaring cry of rage and anguish and grief and despair. He jerked his hands apart, and he was moving even as the ropes fell away: flicking the catch with his right thumb and driving his fist backward, point first, as hard as he could into Sarbaz’s right thigh.

Sarbaz screamed; The gun jerked up and away, and then Poya was falling as, at the same moment, he heard Driver bellow: “Cover your eyes!”

Sprawled on cold stone, Poya flung his arms over his eyes—as the two bags exploded.

Still on her rear,still with a bead on Sarbaz, Roni heard Driver’s bellow, didn’t have even a split second to think but did what he said and squeezed her eyes shut. There was a very loudbang, the sound of a car’s backfire, and then the smell of molten plastic and then something else that reminded her of the times she and her friends took strands of their hair and held them over a candle.

She opened her eyes.

“Ah!” Sarbaz was reeling, clawing at his face with his free hand. The hilt of a small knife or stiletto was buried in Sarbaz’s right thigh and already a crimson rose was blooming. But that was not why Sarbaz was screaming.

His beard was on fire. His beard was, in fact, already ash, the fire having eaten its way all the way up his face to touch off his hair and his fur-lined hair and now streamers were spreading over his fur coat and the crackling flames, which even the cold could not put out, grew brighter and higher .

“Ahhh!”Roaring with pain, Sarbaz wheeled and spun like a dervish.“Ahh?—”

Roni shot him in the mouth.

EPILOGUE

POYA: THE FREEDOM TO BE

“This is different,I know, but I’m curious. What was it like?” he asked as Poya crossed to a pair of north-facing windows. “Your room in Kabul?”

Poya had to think. It was nearly summer now in the United States. So much time had passed since fleeing Kabul. The past was less and less like a movie with a continuous thread of sound and color and narrative, and more like a series of snapshots: brief explosive images that flared white and hot as a burst light bulb and only for a second. Close your eyes against that light as Poya had done when John Worthy shot those money bags, and all that was left were the after-images imprinted on the backs of your lids, void of detail and gone within moments.

“I remember my mother’s garden,” Poya said, finally, not turning around, worried that memory would hurt and then he would know because emotions did that. Slid into the eyes, flickered across one’s face. Maybe a lucky thing that the doctors said Poya should wear dark glasses until sunlight didn’t cut tears. “My room was on the second floor down the hall from Baba’s study. My windows looked out onto Mami’s garden. I loved that garden and the beehive, too, the one under a flowering almond. My mother called the bees her ‘little girls’ because, well,they all are, except the drones.” Poya paused. “Maybe I loved it morebecauseof Mami. She spent so much time there, brought her students there for classes. She let me sit in back and listen. I guess you’d call it a kind of secret garden. My room always smelled so nice.”

“That reminds me,” he said. “On one of my visits to your father, he had a very beautiful pink rose in a bud vase. The smell was amazing.”

“Probably autumn damask. They were my favorite. My grandmother planted those bushes, so they were very old. They can live for twenty years if you take good care of them. In spring and before it got too hot in summer, I would leave my windows open so they could perfume my room,” Poya said, and then let go of a small laugh.

“What?” he asked. “Something funny?”

“No, something I’d forgotten I knew until just now.” His house hugged a high cliff over the water and this room, a converted attic space, was on the third floor. So Poya had a very good view: all bright blue sky and water, so much water spreading along the northern horizon though dotted here and there with islands. These were odd, too, not the way an island was described, say, inRobinson CrusoeorIsland of the Blue Dolphins.Those islands had beaches and a lot of sand. These didn’t. Sculpted from deep red sandstone and basalt, these islands were deeply green with pines and balsam firs and slender ash. Rising from the big lake…no,GreatLake, Lake Superior, the islands seemed to have existed since the beginning of time. “Something about home.”

“What do you remember?”

“Baba.” Poya concentrated, but not too hard. The harder a person grabbed at a memory, the faster it tore apart. “From a time when I was little.”

“And?”

“And one morning…I think I was five, maybe six…Baba came in very early. I remember waking up when he sat on my bed. I opened my mouth to say something, but he whispered that I should be very quiet.”I want to show you something many people never see,Baba had said,but hush, we mustn’t wake your mother.“We went outside into the garden and tiptoed into a bed of poppies, so it must’ve been February because that’s when poppies bloom. Anyway, I remember him crouching by one. The blossom was…mauve, yes. A very beautiful color. Because it was so early, there was all this dew, these perfect little drops, like diamonds on the petals.”

“Was that what he wanted to see?”

“No. He said I should look inside the flower.” Poya put a hand to a cheek. Baba hadn’t shaved yet and his whiskers scratched when he whispered in her ear. “He said I would see something most people never do.”

“And what was that?”

“A honeybee.” Even now, years later, Poya still could conjure the image of that bee—a little girl, her mother would’ve said—speckled with yellow pollen. “It wasn’t moving at all. I thought it was dead and started to cry.”

“But it wasn’t?”

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