“Don’t start crying again, Carlos. We have to get down from here.”

He took a ragged breath, staring up at the ceiling, willing himself not to cry.

“I was scared,” he squeaked. “Then after they took him away, they started looking for me. I thought they were gonna arrest me, too.”

“Didn’t you see me down there?”

“Yeah,” he said, “At least, I thought it was you. But I couldn’t look for too long because I was scared someone would see me. I figured I would come down once everyone left, but they never did. Then when I looked again, you were gone. I didn’t know what to do.”

I pulled him back in for a long hug. The poor thing. He had spent the afternoon huddled up in this tower, not knowing what to do next, terrified as the long afternoon stretched on into evening.

“I tried to pray,” he whispered, “but God didn’t hear me.”

I pulled away and looked at him, smoothing his hair. He was still a mess, but at least now he could go down and face everyone.

“Of course He did,” I replied, smiling. “He sent me here to get you, didn’t He?”

We got up off of the floor, and I gingerly walked to the front of the room. It wasn’t a window, actually, just a framed-out open space through which I could look down at all of the happenings on the ground.

I shouted and started waving my flashlight. Soon, one person heard me, then the word seemed to spread. Like ants, they all began to head our way.

“Are you ready?” I asked Carlos as I turned from the window.

“Yeah,” he said, but it wasn’t until I swung the beam of the flashlight toward him that I realized he was hurt, with a makeshift bandage around his leg.

“What happened to you?” I gasped, kneeling in front of him to see where he had rolled his pants up and tied a sock around a wound on his shin.

“I cut myself,” he said. “Climbing up here, I tripped on one of the steps. It was bleeding pretty bad.”

“Can you walk?”

“Yeah,” he said. “No problem.”

“Let’s get down there, then. We can take care of it at the bottom.”