This continent was completely foreign to me, in every sense of the word. As we stopped to grab gas and food, I curiously tried to eavesdrop on the chatter around us . . . before remembering I did not speak Turkish. Though I’d felt so isolated at home, keeping all those secrets, I already felt more isolated here. At least my father and Macy and Zack could speak my language. Here, I discovered, I couldn’t talk to most people even if I wanted to.
Adrenaline and excitement to be with Jude had gotten me this far into our journey, but exhaustion was setting in, and before I knew it, the car was parked and Jude was shaking me—I’d fallen asleep in the passenger seat. “We’re here,” he said.
I looked out the window and thought we’d somehow ended up on another planet. Rocks growing tall like giant mushrooms with windows carved into them. The hillside dotted with abandoned cave formations. This was Cappadocia, Jude said, and it was the strangest, most beautiful place I’d ever seen. A tourist town, but we walked far beyond where I could see any people. For a moment, all my fears subsided, and I allowed myself to feel the awe of the majestic expanse all around me. It was an odd gift—that despite everything I’d been through recently, Great Spirit had brought me somewhere so amazing, somewhere I never would have gotten to see otherwise.
“Where are we going?” I asked, as our steps sent birds flying out of the tall grass tickling my ankles.
“Base camp,” Jude said, and moments later, he moved some brush aside to reveal a hole in the ground. Stairs made of stone leading beneath the earth. When Dawn had said she wanted to send me underground, she wasn’t kidding. Jude stepped in ahead of me and held out a hand to help me inside.
We descended deeper and deeper into a cave with ceilings so low Jude had to duck. The space was lit only by ornate, colorful lamps lining the walls, and I had to tamp down the claustrophobic panic I felt as we descended. All my instincts said to find fresh air aboveground, to find a way to leave. I tried to distract myself, examining the walls, which were etched with the alphabet of an ancient language. “Written by the people who built this place, centuries ago,” Jude explained.
Soon the rock walls began to widen, and I gasped as we stepped out of the passage to discover we were in a massive meeting hall—just the entryway into an expansive underground city. Tall ventilation shafts carved up to the surface, from which small beams of light trickled down. Shelves were scored into the rock, littered with altars to gods I’d heard of but had never seen worshipped. The hall stretched on for ages, filled with people of more colors and creeds than I’d ever seen before, dressed in bright, varied garb I’d be able to recognize someday, but not quite yet. New York had plenty of racial diversity, but everyone was still essentially the same—they all worshipped Great Spirit, they all belonged to one worldwide culture. But down here was another world, a hundred other worlds. Young boys in yarmulkes, a cluster of men with long beards who averted their eyes as we passed. It was wholly foreign—a refuge at once belonging to everywhere and nowhere, and the stone created an echo chamber that reflected the voices around me in a strange, constant kind of cacophony.
“How did the rebels find this place?” I asked Jude, ducking out of the way of a large stalactite hanging over my head.
“This part of the country is full of these caves. This one had gone undiscovered since it was abandoned by the people who built it, centuries ago. At least, until a member of the Turkish resistance stumbled into it, literally. And we expanded it out from there.”
I heard wings flapping, birds cooing, and I looked up, assuming the sounds came from wild birds, like the ones I’d seen near the cave entrance. But as we rounded a corner, I smelled them before I saw them: live chickens, squeezed four or five into large cages, squawking wildly. “Dinner?” I guessed.
Jude shook his head. “Animal sacrifices. Like I said, ‘Originalism’ is kind of the trend down here. A lot of people are afraid of anything new, thinking it’s a perversion of the truth, like the Universal Theology. So they’re going back to the ancient texts, taking them as literally as they can, practicing in what they feel is the purest way possible.”
I nodded, trying to take it all in. “Animal sacrifices are pretty classic, I guess.”
Farther ahead, I saw a group of white women wearing ornate saris, chattering in English. “Converts to Hinduism?” I guessed with a chuckle.
He nodded. “The Rig Veda’s about the oldest religious text out there. People are learning Hebrew and Aramaic, too, trying to read the Bible in its original form.”
I had to admit, that sounded much more fun than most of the Universal Theology propaganda courses at NYU. “So it’s like a contest, who can go back the furthest?” I asked, joking a little.
“A not very friendly contest,” Jude joked back, with a hint of derision.
As we neared the center of the compound, a bright-faced young woman wearing a yellow headscarf spotted us. With a cry of joy, she ran over and hugged Jude, holding him like she was never going to let him go. “You are back! Thank goodness!” she cried, her accent thick and melodic. This was Layla, I assumed, as my heart twisted with jealousy, watching the two of them embrace, nose to nose, forehead to forehead. Jude lit up looking at her in a way that felt familiar—it was the way he used to light up when he was with me. I realized, that was what had felt so strange, so stoic about him—away from Layla, he didn’t have that spark I remembered. Now, it was back. And as much as it hurt, it made me happy, too, to see him coming back to life like that.
Jude pulled away from her embrace and gestured to me, a little awkward. “Layla, this is Grace. Grace, Layla.”
I put on a warm smile, and I saw her attempting to do the same. She knew who I was, that much was obvious. But for Jude’s sake, she tried to hide any distaste and greeted me with a staid friendliness. “It is good to finally meet you.”
“You, too,” I said, mostly honest.
She immediately turned back to Jude, all sweetness and concern. “Are you okay? Did you have any troubles?”
“Everything’s fine,” he reassured her, in that comforting tone he used to use with me. It killed me to know I wasn’t the only one it belonged to. “We should find a place for Grace to stay.”
“We have a few empty rooms,” she began, but abruptly she stopped speaking and stepped back a few inches from Jude.
A man had entered, tall and imposing. Everyone in the hall had an eye on him, too; clearly, he was an important figure here. My first and only guess: this must be Layla’s father, Mohammed Bashar. The current leader of the resistance.
Father and daughter exchanged a few words in Arabic that I didn’t understand—his gruff, hers timid. I watched Jude, who was looking back and forth as though he comprehended the conversation, hoping I could tell from his expression if Layla was begging for my imminent expulsion. But as Layla’s voice raised in annoyance, I quickly realized this conflict was a more familiar father/daughter spat. Apparently teenage rebellion translated across cultures just fine.
Finally, the man turned to Jude, speaking in English. “Your trip was successful?” His accent had a strangely European flavor to it.
“Yes, sir.” Jude gestured to me.
Mohammed gave me the kind of gracious smile that only an experienced politician could muster on command. “Ah, Grace. Welcome to your new home. We are all glad you are safe. Please, let us know if there is anything you need.” He then said something else to Layla in Arabic, and she stiffened and turned to me.
“I will take you to your room.” She didn’t look happy to be tasked with showing me around, and I certainly wasn’t thrilled by the prospect either. But Jude nodded at me to go, so I followed Layla through the winding stone hallways.
“Was that your dad?” I asked her, trying to make conversation.
“Yes.” Her clipped intonation made it clear she wasn’t eager to chat.
I carefully ventured, “Was he mad about something?”
“He doesn’t like Jude,” she said impassively. “He is from
the old generation; they are all like that.”
“Why not?” I genuinely couldn’t imagine a parent not approving of kind, reliable Jude.
Layla looked at me like I was crazy. “Because he’s Jewish. My father is angry I embarrass him, dating at all, but he thinks at least I should choose another Muslim.”
Jude isn’t Jewish, I almost said. As long as I’d known him, he’d been an adherent to the Universal Theology, like me. But now, I realized, he probably wasn’t. He never talked about Great Spirit, at least not the way I did. If his parents had been Jewish before the Revelations, did that make him Jewish now? Apparently Jewish enough to garner the disapproval of Layla’s father—a strange concept. “Can’t we all just get along?” I joked. “Common enemy, all that?”
“We work together,” she said, ignoring my joke and dodging the rest of the question. “Ten years, we have worked together.”
A thought struck me. “So you’ve always known? The truth, I mean? That Great Spirit wasn’t behind the Revelations?”
“Since I was very young, yes. My father learned not long after the Revelation in Palestine, and he keeps no secrets from our family. My mother and my brothers and I learned the truth when he did.” I felt a deep pang of jealousy. I’d tried to bring my father into our movement, and it had gone so horribly. Here was someone who could speak freely with her family about everything, who’d never had to keep secrets from them. I was reminded again of my deep and unshakable loneliness.
As we passed a huddle of women in burqas, Layla asked, “Tell me, what are you?”
I was confused by the question. “American?”
She managed not to roll her eyes. “No, what do you believe? What religion are you?”
It was a question I hadn’t been asked since I was a small child. “I believe in Great Spirit,” I said confidently.
She stifled a laugh. “The Universal Theology? That is not a real religion.”
I stiffened, defensive. “Just because Great Spirit didn’t cause the Revelations, that doesn’t mean He doesn’t exist.”
“Yes, it does,” she said, a little condescending. “It is a religion that someone invented.” Her demeanor lightened a bit. Perhaps because she thought I was so ridiculous, I couldn’t be any kind of a threat to Jude’s attention.
“Allah didn’t cause anything either, and you believe that He’s real,” I pointed out.
Her voice grew sharper. “Allah speaks to us through the Quran, through the words and actions of the last prophet, Mohammed . . .”
“But Great Spirit is Allah, and Yahweh, and the incarnations of Vishnu . . . Great Spirit is the next step, the final step, in the evolution of our understanding of our creator . . .”
“I do not wish to argue religion,” she interrupted, annoyed. “I just need to know where to put you. Muslim, Christian, atheist, Buddhist, Zoroastrian, you can choose.”
As I looked down the halls she pointed to, I knew I didn’t have a place in any of them. Once again, I’d landed somewhere where the beliefs of those around me didn’t match mine, where I’d always be an outsider. And if I didn’t have a place here in this rebel fortress, maybe I didn’t have one anywhere.
Layla eventually gave up on trying to talk sense into me and deposited me in an empty room in the corner of the complex. “Our brand-new American wing,” she said, covering a smirk. Though I knew she meant the comment in jest, I still hated her for it. Really I hated her for who she was, the person with a father who fought by her side, the person who’d taken Jude away from me. As she left, my anger swirled into exhaustion, and I collapsed into bed, falling deeply asleep.
My dreams were wild, vivid, full of strange places, strange people. Turkish travelers. Zack, in his CIA training. And finally—my mother, on the day of the American Revelation, slipping away from our worship center. Turning around to look at me one last time. Her final moments. The buzz of the crowd quieted to a hush as she began to speak.
“Follow me,” she whispered.
“I can’t,” I told my dream mother.
“Great Spirit will show you the way. Listen,” she said. I nodded, and she walked out, leaving me alone in the crowd. But her voice still echoed around me, repeating, over and over, “Follow me. Find me. Follow me.”
I woke up in a cold sweat, her voice still clanging around my ears. Follow me.
3
It took me a few days to adjust to life in this confusing, renegade underground city. For one, I was hopelessly jet-lagged, and being cut off from the sun didn’t speed my recovery. For another, the only person I knew down here was Jude, and he spent all his time with Layla, whose aloof demeanor made it clear she did not want me around. At meals, I tried to make conversation with strangers, but more often than not, they didn’t speak my language . . . or maybe they just pretended not to, suspicious of anyone they didn’t already know, anyone who hadn’t already been vetted as a member of their in-group. It was very clear that people stuck to their own down here, and I was no one’s own.
The longer I stayed, the more I took on everyone’s wariness. If all these people were afraid of one another, maybe I should be, too. Sometimes a random stranger’s face would give me a spike of fear, a twist of apprehension. A feeling in my gut that, despite Jude’s words, it still wasn’t safe down here. I desperately wanted to flee this claustrophobic cave, fantasized about making my escape and starting a new life somewhere in Southern Europe, but I didn’t know how to do it. So for now, this was home.
During the day, I roamed the halls, exploring all the nooks and crannies of those shadowy tunnels, hollowed out of rough, beige stone. The space was generally sparse, function over form, but it was big enough that my expedition took ages; each day held a new surprise. Everywhere I went had different smells—food cooking somewhere—but I was too timid to ask to try any. I was also too timid to ask why they called these mini neighborhoods quarters, when there were clearly more than four of them. The children were the only ones who, like me, ventured beyond the invisible boundaries here. I enjoyed watching them hurtling through the halls, as frustrated parents called after them.
After about a week, I stumbled upon a library with tons of books, many in English. Since I’d brought nothing of my own, it was a relief to decompress, just to read a few chapters of an old spy novel—books that had been banned and burned after the Revelations, full of violence and blasphemy. They’d preserved some of them down here, and though they weren’t great art, they were still fascinating, a kind of literature I’d never been exposed to. Once I discovered that library, I spent most of my time there, devouring gruesome mysteries, subversive political thrillers, erotic romances.
Each time I visited, I saw the same familiar faces—including a young blond man about my age, head buried in a Greek textbook, who kept glancing my way. He was handsome enough, so I usually offered a smile when he caught my eye. But he never smiled back, like most of the people I met down here—and I remembered that constantly smiling at strangers is something of a small-town American quirk. Because he never spoke to me, and I was too proud to try and speak to him, we went days in silence—feet away but never interacting—until one day, he sat down next to me.
“You are new, yeah?” His accent was unmistakably German.
“Yeah,” I said. “Grace.”
He shook my outstretched hand. “Max. I heard about you.”
The idea that strangers in this bunker knew who I was unnerved me. “What have you heard?”
To my surprise, he gushed, “You were fighting in America. You are the girl who has tricked Prophet Joshua. The one who destroyed his most dangerous weapon.” I blushed—I guess my reputation could be worse. Max certainly seemed impressed by it, and it gave me a little rush of excitement, to think of myself that way.
“Yeah, I guess that’s me.”
He scrunched his face in contemplation. “You do not look like I expected you to look.”
“Oh.” I was suddenly conscious of my appearance. But the way he’d said it,
I could tell he wasn’t disappointed.
“You are Christian, yes?” he asked next. I was surprised by the question, but I shouldn’t have been. Many Americans had been Christian before the Revelations. Heck, I’d even been, as a little kid . . . but after ten years of listening to my father preach that the old religions were crude, inferior ways of accessing the divine . . . I just couldn’t go back to believing in any of them. I couldn’t define myself as something I’d spent most of my life trying to be “better” than. Even on the other side of the world, my father’s sermons still stuck with me, convinced me to keep believing in a deity everyone else in the resistance had abandoned.
But I was also tired of being alone down here. And after my conversation with Layla, I knew better than to try to explain what I really believed, to make some futile case for Great Spirit. So I gave an answer that was technically true, though misleading to its very core: “My father was a Christian minister before the Revelations.”
That seemed to please my new friend Max to no end. “I am part of a Christian group, people of all countries. We are going tomorrow to watch the debates together.” Before I could ask if that was an invitation, he confirmed it. “You can join, if you want.”
My first friend down here, and my first chance to make more friends. All of it was based on a lie, a lie of omission at least, but I didn’t care. “That sounds great.”
“See you soon,” he said, leaving the library with a grin on his face, and I felt excited for the first time in a long time.
4
The next night, the Christian quarter was filled to the brim with young people in their teens and twenties. It was more of a party atmosphere than I expected; I saw cups filled with wine—my first exposure to alcohol, ever. “There is a black market not far from this underground city,” Max explained when he saw my shock. “Down here, there are no Punishments, no Prohibitions.” Everyone was taking the same drugs I was, he meant, the ones that prevented guilt from turning into Punishment. I marveled at the idea of a whole society, governed only by laws and conscience.
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