Messenger seemed accepting of my initiative, even approving. “Proceed.”
“What?”
“Don’t be timid, Mara,” he chided. “You’ve seen that we can travel through time. So do it.”
I glanced back along the void. Would going backward take us backward in time? This was not how we’d previously done it. Messenger had always just made it happen.
But of course this was the simple version. This was Time Travel 101, an introduction before greater secrets and techniques could be learned.
I turned and walked with far more confidence than I felt, back along the narrow black bridge between facing realities. And yes, to my satisfaction, time went into reverse.
On her side Samira spit her food into her bowl, placed the stew in the microwave, took it out and put it in the freezer, walked backward from the kitchen.
Far more disturbing, the shrouded body of Aimal once again leaped from its grave and landed on the stretcher, which was then borne away.
I walked faster, faster, and time reeled backward at a geometrically quicker rate. Now Samira was back at school being harassed, and Aimal’s body was being ritually washed by his male relatives, and Samira was in class, and Aimal was quite suddenly alive. I noticed that the time lines were not synchronized, not matched up. I sensed that Aimal’s was the more recent event.
Distracted by that realization, I saw that I had moved too quickly. I reversed my direction and slowed my pace.
Aimal now was in the dirt yard of a bare, one-room cinderblock schoolhouse. There was a single tree providing scant shade from a blistering sun. There were other kids, younger, older, many kicking a soccer ball. Others read. Others just sat in small groups, chatting.
If you ignored the opium poppy fields and the distant but intimidatingly sharp-edged mountains, and the poverty of the school, it could be any school.
A pickup truck came barreling down the semi-paved road, kicking up a plume of dust. There was one man in the cabin, two more in the back.
The kids in the yard didn’t notice. But Aimal did. He rose slowly to his feet, the biggest of the boys. He shaded his eyes and watched the truck and peered closely at something particular.
Without even realizing what I was doing I stepped into his frame and peered as though through his eyes. I saw the thing he focused on.
It was the upraised barrel of an assault rifle.
Aimal began yelling. It was not English, of course, but I understood it nevertheless.
“Hide! Hide!” he yelled. “All the girls must hide!”
But by the time his shouts were noticed and conversation had fallen silent and all heads had turned toward the truck, the two men were already leaping from the back and both were armed with assault rifles.
“Run! Run!” Aimal shouted.
Some of the girls responded now. There were only six of them, ranging in age from ten to perhaps fifteen. But now they saw what Aimal saw and understood what Aimal understood, so they ran.
POP! POP POP POP!
That’s what it sounded like, the gunfire.
One of the girls fell facedown in the dirt. A cloud of dust rose from the impact.
A second girl ran to the fallen one and a piece of her shoulder blew away, a twirling chunk of bone and meat, trailing blood.
Now everyone, boy and girl, was screaming, screaming, but only Aimal was running the wrong way. Not away from the guns. Toward them.
He waved his arms and shouted no, stop, stop, this is against Islam, this is against God, you must stop.
He ran until he was between the gunmen and the girls, some of whom kept running. But two of them seemed to have collapsed in sheer terror.
“Get out of the way!” a gunman yelled, and waved his rifle at Aimal. “It’s not you we want.”
Aimal shook his head, almost a spasm it was so quick and violent, like he could not control his bodily movement. He was terrified. He was terrified and barely able to keep his knees from buckling.
He saw what would happen.
He saw and knew and understood what would happen and still he did not back away.
“Go away! Leave us be!” he shouted at the gunmen.
“We are only here for the girls, get out of the way!”
He shook his head again, slower this time, slower, knowing . . . knowing that—
POP! POP POP! POP POP POP POP!
The two men standing, and one still in the truck, opened fire.
The high-powered rounds did not simply strike Aimal’s body, they dismantled it. Before he could fall his right arm was hanging by a spurting artery and his spine had exploded through his back like a bony red alien, and the side of his face was obliterated, turned to red mist and flying chunks of meat and bone.
He fell and now the two girls who had been unable to move cowered and screamed and died, their bodies jerking and jerking and jerking as the gunmen emptied their magazines into them.
One of the gunmen ran into the tiny schoolhouse and came out with a man so undone by fear that he had stained his clothing. The teacher was forced to his knees.
“School is not for girls,” a gunman said, and fired two rounds into the teacher’s groin. The teacher howled in pain and writhed on the ground.
“And since you are a girl now, it is no place for you, either.”
They executed the teacher with bullets in his head and neck.
Someone, Messenger or maybe even me, froze the scene then.
Shocked boys stood staring. One surviving girl lay slumped over her dead classmate. In the distance another girl was frozen in midstep, running. Aimal lay in dirt turned to mud by his blood.
I felt as frozen as the scene around me. I knew I was panting and yet did not feel I was getting air. The very skin on my body seemed to reverberate with the concussion of those gunshots.
We’ve all seen movies and games with shooting. Sometimes it’s in slow motion, sometimes it’s played for laughs, sometimes it’s shown as tragic and awful, but nothing in media prepared me for the real thing. For murder.
It’s always been an ugly word, murder, but still we manage to sanitize it. We jokingly say we’ll murder someone. I’ve said it. But I don’t think I’ll ever be able to speak that word lightly again. When you see it, in reality, right there in front of you, actual murder, you want to cry and tear your hair and claw at your own face and fall down on the ground and demand to know why such a filthy thing could happen.
Why would you shoot a fleeing child in the back?
What could possibly justify that?
What kind of god could ever sanction such a thing?
The murderers were two older men and one younger, so young he might be no older than me. What poison had been poured into that young man’s soul that he could do such a thing?
“Are we here for him?” I asked.
“No,” Messenger said. “A different justice awaits them. No, we have business elsewhere.”
He was looking at me with something very like concern.
“If you’re going to tell me it gets easier, please don’t,” I said.
“I