We had not been back to the underground for more than two years, although Ghassan might have come and gone on his own a few times. Samer was home from Moscow on break from university. With more to lose, he had grown paranoid that his mother or one of his snoopy nephews would find the passage to the underground.

Wadee told Jumana and me, “Samer thinks he’s putting his family at risk for some delusion that we can actually mount a resistance because we found a hole in the ground.”

Jumana examined her brother’s face. “Is that Samer or you speaking?”

Wadee looked away nervously, then turned back to us. “No one except Ghassan has been there in years. We have to forget about it.”

Jumana began pacing. “All right. Listen, we don’t have to make any decisions right now. We only have to ensure that the passage-ways are well concealed, even if the military raid our homes. I think it would give Samer some assurance to somehow fortify the passage in his basement.”

“How about if he built a wardrobe over the space, with a false floor like the one at the salon?” I said.

“Soldiers usually just knock those over,” Wadee said.

Annoyed, Jumana threw her hands up. “Then he builds it into the room, with plastered walls, like a closet! Why are you complicating matters unnecessarily?”

The closet idea proved to be the right solution for Samer. He, Faisal, and Wadee spent a few days building a wardrobe with a complicated floor that could be opened and closed from both above- and belowground. “It’s amazing. You have to know what you’re looking for to figure it out,” Faisal told us proudly.

Around the same time, the negotiated terms of Bilal’s release were made public. He would serve only five more weeks.

When we finally met two weeks before Bilal’s release, we were stunned to see what Ghassan had deposited underground: shelves stacking a cache of twenty crossbows with more than four hundred arrows. Some were more complicated than others, some made of wood, others of plastic or metal. The most complex of them had multiple wire strings, levers, and a scope, and were made of fiber-glass and metal alloys. They seemed expertly crafted. None of us knew Ghassan had been commissioning them, nor how he’d paid for them.

“Whoever made this one is an artist,” Faisal said, running his fingers in awe along the smooth metal and taut wires of one crossbow. The arrows were also expertly made and varied. Some looked like long steel pencils, while others were more conventional, with feathered tails and metal arrowheads.

“This must be because of those posts about ancient warfare,” Jumana said. “It’s amazing Israel hasn’t infiltrated the website.”

All eyes shifted to me. “Why does everyone always look at me whenever there’s mention of the website?” I asked. “Is my brother behind it?”