I pointed at the kitchen and then down. The soldier walked around me, lowered his weapon, and plodded down the steps. He moved heavily across the kitchen tiles.

I couldn’t make out what he said. I wondered if I should run back down the hall instead of trying to get to the basement.

“All clear. This floor too. There’s nothing more to do here.”

“Yes. That’s why the commander asked me to get you. Some changes to your assignments, maybe.”

I flinched at an explosive sound—a cabinet door slammed shut.

I squatted in the stairwell, my hands over my ears when I was grabbed by the arm and jerked into an empty kitchen. Fingers pressed into the bones of my forearm.

“Go!” he commanded, and I hurried toward the basement door.

I slipped into the pitch-black basement, my legs shaking. The door behind me closed shut before I’d made it down even two steps. I found the banister and felt for each plank with my toes before taking another step. When my feet touched the cold floor of the basement, the door above opened again. I ducked just as a white light skittered down the steps. A flashlight.

I picked it up and clicked it off.

“That was me tripping over your mess,” I heard the soldier holler. “Are we ready to clear out or not?”

It was Shair’s voice. I was certain. It had been his face behind that rifle.

“A lot messier than it needed to be,” he added.

Keys jangled.

“We have a lot to move before daybreak. You can drive.”

Shair stood at the top of the stairs, clutching in his sweat-slick palm a ring of keys and the dangerous secret of my existence.

Chapter 7

April 28, 1978

Just eighteen months earlier, I’d had my first encounter with death. My grandmother lay in a coffin, gray-lipped and wrapped so tightly in a sheet of white muslin that it would have suffocated her if she had still had breath in her body.

While Boba heaved a shovelful of dirt on the lowered coffin, Madar-jan whispered in my ear that my grandmother would be welcomed into the gardens of heaven. I found it hard to reconcile that ascending destiny with the coffin interred under two meters of earth. I’d watched my grandmother tend to her plants, pruning one stem at a time and checking the soil’s moisture with a finger. Like her plants, she bloomed with the sun and wouldn’t even draw the curtains in her home. How could this dark hole be her path to heaven?

Nonetheless, I chose to believe in the hope my mother offered so that I didn’t despair at the thought of my grandmother in eternal darkness.