I knew they were all listening. There was no privacy in the linked radios. The whispers we shared in that dead place were for everyone, but in that moment I didn’t care.

I said, “This.”

Baqir lifted one eyebrow, an expression that under normal circumstances would make my heart skip. “This?”

“This is what I’m afraid of all the time,” I said. “I don’t want to be back here.”

His dark eyes regarded me thoughtfully from behind his helmet. He had never asked me to fill in the blanks of what had happened aboard House of Wisdom. He had known there were lacunae in what the public knew and what I shared, but he never demanded those secrets from me, just as I never asked for the childhood he had spent living in a refugee camp in the desert. We had always been so very careful of the separate horrors of our past, so mindful of the most jagged edges of memory. If he had pushed, I probably would have caved, but resented him for it, and he would have been so eaten up with guilt we might not have come back from that.

“We’ll get out of this,” Baqir said. “We will.”

The panic had mostly passed, leaving in its wake a shivery, cold fear I did not know how to banish. I gently squeezed Baqir’s hand on my chest to tell him it was okay to let go. He did so, slowly. I yearned for the pressure of his arm around me the moment it was gone. I wanted to answer his reassurance, to tell him that I had a plan. But the others were listening, and we had a long way to go.

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