But the occurrence in the desert, and being with his grandmother, who had given him nothing but love, flushed him with an awareness he didn’t want to have. That maybe life wasn’t as black and white as he believed. He wondered if she could see the sudden conflict in his eyes.

He turned away, and grabbed the shirt she’d placed for him on the back of the rocking chair.

“Nazir,” she said, in a voice sweet and gentle.

He turned back to her.

He saw sorrow in her eyes, sorrow he’d seen reflected there most of his life. But it was a sorrow that held love. The paradox terrified and moved him. She’d never backed away from expressing what she believed—that even through grief we must know we are loved and can love in return.

He’d strong-armed his heart against that love for so long in order to survive, but his grandmother’s devotion reached deep into that heart. And, it terrified him.

Nazir walked through the busy night streets of Mosul in hopes of finding Hashim. A new world had exploded inside him, a world at odds with the young man he’d forced himself to become.

Hashim had trained him well. Trained him to question and to think. But question and think within the world of jihad. That process fed his dreams, and those dreams fed his reality: a mysticism that served violent ends. He was a mujahid, a soldier to jihad. Allah’s undying vessel. And jihad had begun with the Djinn.

His grandmother knew all about the Djinn. But she’d told him another side of those stories when he was a boy—of these mystical creatures who were virtuous in the sight of Allah. Male and female, equal in every respect, one no greater than the other. She’d kept that belief from all but him, for she knew it went against the core creed that jihad was born of the Djinn.

She also knew Nazir’s heart was good, and that he would one day understand the truth of how love, not hate, was the irreplaceable center of their theology.

17

17

Hashim gazed into the mirror in the basement of an abandoned storehouse on the outskirts of Mosul. It was the place he had taken Nazir when he first began to teach him. They spent many nights here. Hashim saw greatness in the young boy and wanted to instill in him a confidence that would sustain him.

The secret meetings were the beginning of the darkest part of Nazir’s trajectory. They were illuminated by Hashim’s vision, dominated by the bloated figure of the United States that he was resolved to rupture.

That resolve had become dust, and blew through Hashim’s mind now, as quick as the earth he’d scorched.

In that emptiness—heartache.