Heroes in Training, page 8
A tall, uniformed American opened the door and nearly fell on top of him. “What the hell . . . ?”
Ari looked up and answered in his poor English. “Please! Take care of them! There’s more!”
Denying the fire in his muscles and brain, he shifted back to the school. This time, he ran through the entrance, ignoring the cascades of crumbling stone, the choking dust and the angry shouts of confused Shia. A boy his own age lay unconscious under a broken beam. As gently as he could, Ari hugged the boy, but a splintering and cracking drew his attention upward as a piece of the roof fell. Wide-eyed with panic, Ari drew a sharp breath and shifted barely in time.
A crowd of soldiers and medics were waiting around the American hospital entrance. A few jumped away as Ari appeared in their midst with his passenger. Some reached for their weapons. “If you’re really here to help Iraqis,” Ari shouted angrily, “start with this one!”
Without waiting for a reaction, he shifted back to the Saladeen School. His brain burned as if on fire, the cost of so many shifts. But as he looked down at the body of a boy half-buried in the rubble he knew his pain was nothing. In the shadows nearby, another child groped about, blinded, bleeding and whimpering.
Ari couldn’t help himself. He began to cry even as he reached out for the sightless boy. “I’m so sorry!” he muttered as he wrapped the boy in his arms. He glanced back at the dead child in the rubble, but all he saw were his two sisters. That was how he remembered them after the bombs had fallen on their home in the night. A great sob shook him, and he shifted to the hospital again.
“Stop! Wait!”
Ari looked up as he set the blind boy carefully on his feet. The man who spoke was the same one who had nearly fallen on him before. A single star shone on the man’s collar. Ari didn’t know what it meant, and he didn’t care. He wiped a sleeve over his moist eyes and swallowed as a ring of soldiers cocked their guns. “I don’t listen to your orders!” he answered, tight-lipped. “I won’t ever take orders from gunmen and thugs again!”
And he shifted. He wasn’t sure to where, just somewhere warm and familiar. Safe was too much to ask. No place in the world was safe. He collapsed immediately, weak and aching as if he’d taken a beating, and when he hit the floor he wept until exhaustion overcame him.
It was night when he awoke, but he knew where he was. A faint smile with a hint of sadness turned up the corners of his lips. Even in the gloom he knew the shape of the room and its broken roof. He imagined he heard his mother’s soft footsteps, and some echo of his sisters’ voices still wafted among the shattered walls. The moon poured in through an unshuttered window, filling the small house with ghosts and shadows.
He’d come home. Or to what was left of home. Some unconscious thought had brought him here before he passed out. He sat up in the empty corner where his old bed once had been. Some scavenger had carried it off. It had been a good bed, and he hoped someone was getting use of it.
He felt strong again, his pain gone, but in its place he found an emptiness, a loss that felt even worse. He shuffled through the ruins that once had been his house, remembering, saying goodbye to things that were already gone.
“You’re too predictable, Aryamand. I told you to come right back.”
His uncle had found him. He turned toward the silhouette in the crooked doorway and noted the two restless shapes standing a few steps behind. “I’m not coming back,” he answered with calm resolve.
Abad put a hand on his pistol butt. “It had to be done,” he growled. “You’re not old enough to understand the way of God yet.”
Ari resisted the urge to laugh as he kicked at a bit of rubble. Old enough? Did his uncle even remember what day it was? While Ari had slept on the broken floor of his bombed-out home, he had turned fourteen.
“You let outsiders see you today,” his uncle chided. “That was foolish.”
Barely listening, Ari turned his back on his Uncle Abad. In a flat voice he said, “I renounce God. Particularly your God, and especially any God that would justify what we did today.”
One of the men behind Abad hissed. “His mouth is filthy!”
Abad’s footsteps stirred the debris as he moved toward Ari. “He’s confused,” his uncle argued. “I’ll see to his punishment.”
Ari closed his eyes and thought of someplace far away, a favorite place he’d only recently come to know. “You wrapped a present today, Uncle,” he said over his shoulder, “but you forgot to wish me a happy birthday.”
Darkness flashed around him, neither cold nor warm. He felt no sense of falling or flying, no sense of movement at all. One moment, he stood in a stray beam of moonlight in the ruins of his home, and the next he stood under a full moon on a hillside overlooking quiet Bethlehem.
With a soft smile on his lips, he sat down in the grass and folded his arms around his knees to study the faint, beautiful lights below. It wasn’t his first time on this hillside. He’d been pushing his limits, testing his abilities, shifting farther and farther in secret. It was like lifting weights, he’d discovered, like building muscle. The more he tried, the more he achieved.
To the north lay Jerusalem, another city in conflict. Always there was fighting and war. It seemed to make the world go around. No matter how far he shifted, he wondered if he could ever escape it, if he could ever feel safe.
“Ari! Is that you?”
Ari grinned as he leaned back on one hand and twisted around. “Abraham!” he answered in a low, excited voice. His only friend in the world walked down the slope. Abraham was tall, rail-thin for thirteen years and possessed of the biggest ears Ari had ever seen. “What are you doing here?”
Abraham disappeared in mid-step and reappeared at Ari’s side. With gawkish grace, he folded his legs and sat down, too. “I’ve been coming here every night.” Reaching into a hip pocket of his trousers, he drew out a page from a magazine and unfolded it. “Since you showed me this.” In the moonlight it was hard to see, but Ari knew it showed the hillside upon which they sat. “I’ve been practicing and hoping you’d turn up,” Abraham continued. He clapped Ari’s shoulder. “Your English is getting better!”
Ari blushed at the compliment. “How many shifts did you take to get here?”
Abraham inclined his curly head. “Just one.”
Ari’s eyebrows shot up. “From Tel Aviv?”
Abraham nodded. “Thirty-two minutes, three seconds north; thirty-four minutes, forty-six seconds east. It’s easy with your picture, and easier when you know the longitude and latitude.” He looked at Ari from the corners of his eyes. “How many jumps to get here from Baghdad?”
“Just one,” Ari admitted. He tried to cover up as Abraham elbowed him in the ribs.
For a long time they were silent. Both boys folded their hands behind their heads and stretched out on the grass. Ari watched the stars parade overhead, naming the ones he knew, wondering at the others. He hadn’t had much of an education.
Not like Abraham. The Jewish boy was bright, well-schooled and well-traveled. He knew lots of things that Ari didn’t, like the longitude trick, and he learned quickly. Ari let go a long, deep sigh as he remembered. Only four years had passed since he’d found Abraham with some other captives, members of an international peace group, in a terrorist camp in northern Afghanistan.
Abraham’s parents had been killed. Like Ari, he was an orphan, and without understanding quite why, Ari had shifted his new friend to freedom. He frowned as he remembered how Uncle Abad had beaten him for days.
But that one shift had tripped a switch in Abraham’s brain. He’d tried to describe it to Ari. He saw patterns, he said, where he hadn’t before. Interstices, he called them. Small spaces between things that he could slip through.
Abraham was educated. Ari had never tried to analyze what he did. He’d just always been able to do it. As a baby, he’d sometimes turned up inexplicably in his mother’s bed, or so he’d been told.
He couldn’t teach it to everyone, though. He’d shifted his uncle numerous times with no result to see if Abad could learn.
“They’re going to start looking for us,” Ari said. “A lot of people saw me shift today.” He sat up and looked at Abraham’s feet. “Where are your shoes?”
The Jewish boy made a face. “I can teleport farther than ever,” he said, “but I still have trouble with things. I’m lucky to get here with my clothes on!”
Ari lay back again and studied the moon as it sank lower in the sky. Thoughts of the Saladeen School crept into his mind, along with thoughts of the mosque bombing. That wasn’t the first package he’d delivered, and guilt gnawed at him.
His entire life had been filled with bombs. Bombs in shoeboxes and bombs from jet planes. Roadside bombs and guided missiles. What was the difference when the only result was indiscriminate death?
Tears leaked from his eyes, but he wiped them away before Abraham could see. “It’s my birthday,” he blurted.
Abraham sat up. “Really? That’s great!” He squeezed Ari’s knee. “I bet you didn’t get a present yet. What can I get you?”
Ari thought for a moment as silly answers danced through his head. But then he turned quite serious. “A better world, Abraham.” He sat up and looked his only friend in the eyes. “I want a better world.”
Abraham didn’t blink. “Can you wait until morning when the stores open?”
Morning found them in the suburbs of Tel Aviv. Abraham’s foster parents were well-off, if not rich, and their pantry was stocked. While Ari stuffed a backpack with edibles and changed into some of Abraham’s clean clothes, his friend struggled with a note of explanation to leave behind. When that was done, Abraham went to a bookshelf and pulled down a world atlas.
“We’re taking this, too,” he said. “Now where do you want to go? Where do we hatch this grand plot?”
Ari scratched his chin. He’d seen magazines that some American soldiers had traded or given away in his country and remembered the beautiful pictures they often contained. He nodded to himself as he recalled a favorite, a place of monuments and memorials and architecture more grand than anything he’d ever seen.
“Washington,” he whispered, speaking the name as his uncle had pronounced it.
Abraham wasted no time as he flipped through the atlas. “Thirty-eight minutes, fifty seconds north; seventy-seven minutes west.” Closing the book, he looked up with a worried expression. “Ari, I’ve never teleported that far!”
Ari bit his lip, and then put his hands on his friend’s shoulders. “We’ll take it slow in as many small shifts as you need,” he said. “I’ll carry you whenever you need me to, and you’ll learn along the way.” He winked. “Just don’t lose your shoes!”
Sunset of the next day found them on the lawn of the White House. It looked exactly like a photograph Ari had seen in a soldier’s magazine, and he grinned, pleased with himself for making his longest shift ever. “London to Washington!” he murmured.
“Probably not a good spot,” Abraham said as a pair of uniformed men ran toward them. He looked pale and near exhaustion.
Ari wrapped his friend in his arms and shifted. Instantly, they were outside the fence among a crowd of tourists on Pennsylvania Avenue. A group of nuns flung up their arms like startled penguins, and a jogger took a tumble on the pavement. Ari shifted again, moving farther down the street and stared in confusion. He was used to crowded, war-torn Baghdad with its narrow streets and alleys, not to such wide-open space!
“Let me!” Abraham said. “I was here a long time ago with my parents.” Darkness flashed around them, and the scene changed. The street was wide, but busy with honking cars and noisy pedestrians. For a dangerous moment, Ari froze, too stunned to move, until Abraham dragged him out of the traffic to the safety of a sidewalk.
“Georgetown,” Abraham explained. “I think.”
Ari stared at the shops and glittering window displays, the bright lights and neon. He’d never seen anything like it. Abraham tugged at his elbow.
They found an alley and, taking shelter behind a dumpster, searched their backpack for something to eat. The sky was growing darker as night came on, but Ari couldn’t resist peeking into the street. He found the city lights almost dizzying. Yet finally, exhaustion overcame him. Crawling back behind the dumpster, he curled up around his friend. Abraham was already asleep.
For days they lived on the street in alleys and crannies. When their supplies ran out, they engaged in minor thievery, taking apples and candy bars, cartons of milk and loaves of bread from supermarkets and convenience stores and shifting away before they were caught.
Under Ari’s tutelage, Abraham began to shift faster and with increasingly heavier objects. They made up games to pass the time and impress each other. Sometimes, they played pranks. Once, as they wandered through Georgetown, Ari paused to admire a parked Mercedes SL 500.
“You like it?” Abraham asked.
Breathless, Ari nodded. With a chuckle, Abraham leaned against the expensive vehicle. An instant later, car and boy vanished. A dumpster reappeared in the space where the Mercedes had been parked, and Abraham sat perched like a gnome on top of it.
Ari gasped. “What did you do with the car?”
“The Barnes and Noble Bookstore,” he answered, grinning as he jumped down and hurried Ari away. “I left it on the rooftop. Let the owner figure that out!”
But there were serious moments, too. One night, as they slept beneath the loading dock of a business in Dupont Circle, an explosion shook them awake. Filled with the old terrors of his past and his homeland, Ari sprang to his feet. He knew the sound a bomb made. Running around the corner with Abraham quick on his heels, he stared as smoke and flames poured from the ruins of a bar. Car horns activated by the blast raised a cacophony. Shards of glass sparkled on the sidewalk, in the street. A young man, his clothing in tatters, staggered through the wreckage of the door and fell.
Ari cursed. For the first time in his life, he’d begun to feel safe. He’d begun to sleep without listening for the sounds of bombs and missiles and gunfire. Yet not even here could he find such a thing as safety!
Clenching his fists, he shifted to the front of the bar. The flames from inside scorched his skin, and he sucked smoke. Still, he dropped to his knees and put his arms around the fallen man in the doorway. A once-handsome face turned to look up, and Ari gazed into eyes filled with pain and tears and confusion. Ari knew the look too well.
“It’s all right,” Ari said, coughing, “I’ll get you somewhere away!” He stared around, but shattered cars blocked his view.
Abraham appeared at his side. “The park across the street!” the Jewish boy suggested. “Take him there! I’m going inside!”
Ari stood up to get a look at the park. Then he touched the injured man’s shoulder and shifted him to a bench near the sidewalk, startling onlookers who had gathered to watch the excitement. “Don’t move!” Ari urged. “We’ll get help!” He stabbed a finger at a young couple watching close by. “You!” he shouted. “Call your authorities!”
Abraham appeared with another young man whose neck and shirtless back were bleeding from multiple lacerations. “Ari, they don’t speak Farsi,” he reminded his friend. Then he shouted in English at the growing crowd. “Don’t just stand there! Who’s got a cell phone? Someone call for help!”
“I’ve already called it in.” The voice came from a stranger who stepped out of the crowd. He held a cell phone, and. As he bent over one of the victims, his gaze met Ari’s. The Iraqi boy felt a jolt of surprise. Though the man now wore the plain suit of a western businessman, only a few weeks ago he had worn the uniform of an American soldier with a gold star on his collar!
“Ari, come on!” Abraham called.
Ari barely heard. His attention was focused on the hint of a pistol beneath the stranger’s left armpit as his jacket gaped open. It couldn’t be coincidence that this soldier was here in Washington. Ari’s heart hammered, and he thought about shifting away to a far, far place. Instead, he calmed himself and met the soldier’s gaze again with a defiant look of acknowledgement. “I have work to do,” he said, and before the soldier could respond, Ari shifted.
The flames inside the bar were intense. An incendiary device, Ari realized as he shielded his eyes from the heat. He knew his bombs and their types. This one had been designed for maximum damage. He shot a look around, spotting a half-conscious man beneath an overturned table, and on the floor near that one, lay another. Dead or alive, Ari couldn’t tell, but he grasped the hands of both and shifted them to the park. Abraham appeared a split-second later with the bartender, whose arms were burned and broken.
Ari cast a glance around for the soldier as an ambulance arrived screeching at the curb. “Why here?” he said to Abraham. “Why now?”
Smoke and grime smudged Abraham’s face. He wiped an arm over his eyes before answering. “Even America has its religious fanatics,” he shouted. Then he vanished again.
The flames crackled as a brisk wind swept down the street. Choking smoke sent onlookers scattering, but the soldier returned with a pair of dark-suited men. Used to command, he shouted at the ambulance drivers as they hurried with their equipment. “Where the hell is the fire truck?” he demanded. “This entire block could go up!”
The paramedics rushed toward the park bench and the victims on the ground. “It’s stuck in traffic,” one of them answered gruffly. “Two blocks back. Now get out of the way!”
Once again, the soldier turned toward Ari. There was something challenging in the tall man’s gaze, and Ari stiffened, sensing trouble. Abraham reappeared with yet another unconscious victim as Ari walked toward the soldier. “Who are you, American soldier?” he demanded.
Even out of uniform, the man could not conceal his military bearing. He looked down at Ari as if studying him. “General David Piper,” he answered. “Brigadier General.”
