I was running out of options, and thinking through any kind of plan required all my focus—but my thoughts were so jumbled. I could keep talking or make a run for it. But then maybe they’d restrain me, and I wouldn’t be able to get to the cyanide capsule that remained in my pocket.
Irene’s cyanide—that was pretty much all I had left. Could I do it? Could I really end my life, right here right now? In the abstract, sure, it had been simple enough. I wanted to protect Jude, Dawn, Irene, Mohammed, Dr. Marko, Father Dennehy, and all the other people who were working toward a goal I thought was noble—whether I approved of their methods or not. I’d gladly give up Layla in self-preservation, if you asked my very worst self. But everyone else, including Jude, would fall if I was weak.
I reached inside my pocket. I could feel the cyanide pill there; I could take it at any moment. I should take it, this was the time to take it. But I was going to have to do it quickly, or these two prophets would stop me.
As I grasped the pill, I silently prayed—something I used to do all the time, but had fallen out of the habit. If there was ever a moment I needed guidance, this was it. Great Spirit, I thought, please help me. Please get me out of this. Please help me save Jude, please help me save everyone.
And then, as clear as day, I heard a response. Tell them the truth. The voice was at once deep and melodic, and light and ethereal, as though spoken by a chorus of all shapes and sizes. The voice was so loud, instinctively I turned my head—but no one had entered the room. It spoke again, Tell them the truth. You can trust them.
Was this just the drugs talking? I had a feeling it was the drugs. But it felt familiar—it felt like the voice I’d been hearing in the back of my mind forever, the voice that had been growing louder and stronger as I grew more confident in it. The voice that had told me to save Dr. Marko, the voice that had told me to look for my mother, the voice that had told me to leave the rebel compound and come here. If I could indeed talk to Great Spirit, maybe all it took was a little hallucinogenic push to give me the ability to listen.
Or . . . maybe I was just being foolish. I reminded myself, I was supposed to take the cyanide. If I didn’t now, there would be no second chance. Should I listen to the voice?
Take the risk, it said. The risk of being tortured.
I found myself letting go of the pill as the prophets moved toward me. “Well, I guess she’s not talking,” Prophet Itai muttered, and I realized he’d been asking me questions for nearly a minute and I hadn’t noticed.
“Wait,” I said loudly, drawing their attention. “You’re right.”
All three of them were shocked at my bald admission. “About what?” Hamza finally asked.
I forged ahead; the more I spoke, the more I got a gut feeling that I was doing exactly what Great Spirit wanted me to do, whether I understood His reasoning or not, and the words poured out of me. “I’m a double agent. I’m working with the resistance.” As I said it, I realized I needed to buy myself more time and quickly improvised: “But I want to be on your side.”
The prophets and Aviva went silent for a moment. Had my ploy worked?
But then Prophet Hamza gestured to two armed guards, who moved to handcuff me. “Call Washington,” he said to Hamza. “Let’s see what Prophet Joshua has to say about this.”
I was being arrested.
5
As the guards led me down the hall, everyone stared at me, horrified. Decorations on the walls that had once seemed beautiful now seemed menacing. My darkest thoughts were amplified—every terrible thing I’d ever done played on a loop behind my eyelids, and every fear seemed real, tangible, possible. Because, at this moment, they all were. I prepared myself for whatever torture I was about to face as they deposited me in a white, windowless room and handcuffed my wrists to the table. “Stay put.”
I didn’t let up with my protests: “I want to help you, I’m trying to help you.” “Great Spirit is going to Punish you for this.” “Ooh, that mosaic is pretty.” The guards were not swayed.
And then I was left completely alone. Time passed, though in my shroom haze it was hard to be sure how long time was, exactly. I could hear voices outside, speaking in a language I didn’t understand.
The bliss of interconnectedness couldn’t mask my terror. That voice in my head, Great Spirit or whatever it was, had reassured me that everything would be okay, but this didn’t feel okay. Any moment, someone would speak with Prophet Joshua, and they’d find out the depths of my treachery, including the guard I’d killed, and these foreign prophets would return, ready to torture me. It felt like torture already, the way this high had turned sour. I needed to find a way out of here.
But I couldn’t. My thoughts were dark, the darkest thoughts I’d ever had, screaming, wailing, stabbing at me. This was what I’d imagined hell must be like. I felt like I belonged in this cell. That I’d been drawn here because Great Spirit thought I deserved to be imprisoned, to suffer for my sins. Nothing would ever be okay again, that was the only thing I was sure of.
It’ll be okay, that ethereal voice chimed in again. You’re in a safe place. I tried to trust it, tried to believe that salvation was on its way. In this state, at least, it was easy to believe I was talking to something real, even if what it was saying seemed so obviously impossible.
“What do I do?” I asked the voice. I think I actually said that out loud.
You can trust these people, the voice whispered.
That seemed objectively false. These prophets were working with Joshua, weren’t they? Weren’t all the prophets working together, declaring one another as the true word of Great Spirit? That was what Dawn had told me, at least.
Trust them.
“I don’t trust anyone,” I told the voice. “You’re in my head, you should know that by now. After everything that’s happened, the only person I trust is myself. And maybe you, I guess, if you’re Great Spirit. Are you Great Spirit?”
Listen to me, it said. I’ll show you. I’ll make you feel better. I’ll protect the people you love. I’ll help you find your mother.
“My mother?”
And then, it whispered an echo of a dream, two words that shook me to my core. Follow me . . .
“Where?” I asked breathlessly. “Where should I follow you?”
But before it could answer, I heard footsteps coming down the hall. Someone was coming for me.
I braced myself as the door swung open—it took me a moment to realize I was looking at Layla. Dressed like the guards and holding a tray of food. Was she working with these prophets? Was she an agent for their side? Her smirk seemed to confirm my theory.
I tensed as she approached. “What are you doing here?”
She glared, placing the food in front of me as she whispered, “Aren’t you hungry?”
“You’re working for them?” I whispered back, incredulous.
She put her finger to her lips, annoyed. “Be quiet.”
And then she pulled a key from her pocket to unlock my cuffs. My mistrust had been misplaced. She’d come here to rescue me, almost certainly risking capture herself.
“We don’t have much time.”
6
Indeed we didn’t. Before she could unlock my cuffs, one of the guards entered the room. “Who are you?” he asked her.
She hid her fear, calmly gesturing to the tray. “I was asked to bring food.”
The guard inspected the tray. “You’re new?”
Layla nodded. “First day.” She was a good actress, I was impressed.
“Come with me,” he said, gruffly. With a nervous smile, she left the room, surreptitiously pocketing the key.
The only rescue party that was coming for me had just failed, and now Layla was in trouble, too. Would she be able to talk her way out of this? She seemed plenty smart and capable, but this was the belly of the beast—escaping from the hands of the prophets wouldn’t be easy. I wondered how long it would be until she was inside this cell with me. As my mind swirled with fears and
worst-case scenarios, I began to despair. There was no way out of this.
I thought about what that voice in my head had just said. Trust them. What did that mean? A thought occurred to me . . . what if it’d meant I was supposed to trust Layla? Had the voice predicted what was about to happen? I’d questioned her, because I was suspicious of her, and that had alerted the guard that someone was in my cell. If I’d listened to the voice and trusted her, might our silence have given us the time to escape? It seemed like a stretch, but hey, everything’s a stretch once you start hearing voices.
I listened again. Did it have any new wisdom to impart?
You’re safe here.
I tried to trust it. Safe. My mind still spun, trying to figure out what was real and what was imagined. But the more the voice spoke, the more I began to feel safe again, the more it brought me out of the dark place the drugs had taken me to. And given how little I could do here in this cell, I was happy to take a little hope, wherever it came from.
After what felt like an interminable number of hours, I heard the door open again: it was Prophets Itai and Hamza this time, circling me with skeptical eyes. A guard joined them, unlocking my cuffs.
“You’re free to go,” Itai said gruffly.
“I am?” I tried not to appear too confused—this could be a trick, an interrogation tactic. They’d asked me no questions. It didn’t make any sense.
“Someone likes you in America, after all,” Hamza grumbled.
I looked down at my free hands. You are safe. Apparently I was. But for some reason, I felt less safe as they walked me outside. My gut wanted to walk back in, stay in that cell until I knew better what was happening.
But here I was on the outside, left all alone near the Western Wall.
“Now what?” I asked the voice.
For once, it seemed not to know either.
7
As I took a few steps through the bustling Jerusalem crowd, I looked around desperately for a familiar face. Aside from Layla, there was no one I knew in this whole country. On this twisted drug trip, the crush of tourists now felt oppressive: they were freaking me out, their eyes wide and buggy, their expressions contorted and biting. In retrospect, these folks must have been even more weirded out by my frightening, morphing face. I saw more than one family take a look at my strange features and quickly divert their course.
Layla had set a meet point in case I got out, a train station where I could find my way back to the underground city in Turkey. But though I knew I should go there, I found my legs wouldn’t move. The thought of being back in that cave sickened me. I didn’t want to go back and work for Mohammed and Dawn anymore, I didn’t want to sit and watch Layla and Jude falling deeper in love. My body physically rebelled against the idea. But where could I go?
As I tried to work out some kind of plan, I was startled as someone walked up behind me, hushed and intense. “I’ve got a car not far from here.” I turned to see Layla—she was alive!
“You’re okay,” I whispered, relieved.
“Of course.” She seemed offended that I’d even consider she might be incapable of protecting herself. “Now, come.”
Though everything inside of me resisted the idea of returning to Turkey, I forced myself to follow her back through the winding alleys, where the shiny souvenirs on sale kept distracting me.
“Are you all right?” she asked, still keeping her voice low.
“Yeah, other than this drug trip.” I paused, then added, genuine, “Thank you for trying to help me.”
This time, she grinned. “We are on the same side, remember.”
“Why did they let me go?” I wondered.
She gave me a puzzled look. “You don’t know?”
“No, I don’t.”
My uncertainty seemed to make her nervous. “I thought you talked your way out.”
“I didn’t say anything,” I insisted. “Itai and Hamza said ‘someone likes me in America, after all.’ What does that mean?”
She shrugged. “Perhaps you have a friend working for the American prophet?”
I thought of Zack—could he have somehow manipulated the Israeli-Palestinian prophets to help me? But I didn’t think he’d have the access, or the power—like he’d said himself, he wasn’t the kind of person who got told high-level secrets. Though all I had was his word—who knew if anything he’d told me was the truth.
“I have no idea,” I said honestly, as my mind roiled with the question of who my savior might be.
Layla, however, wasn’t one to find fault with a bit of good luck. “Well, we don’t have time to find out. We need to move quickly.”
Our car was waiting outside the walls of the Old City, and after we got in, Layla stepped on the gas, speeding us through the hilly streets. “Where are we going?” I asked, a little disoriented.
“To meet your friend Dawn,” she said dispassionately.
“Dawn’s in New York,” I replied, confused. Also, I’d recently been told she was not my friend, by none other than her own wife.
“No, she’s at the airport in Tel Aviv; she’s here to meet you.”
“We’re going to pick her up?” I asked.
“No, I am dropping you there. They did not tell me where you are flying. But the plan worked.”
It took me a moment to remember what plan she was talking about. “We found the person?”
“Yes. And soon we will have the information we need.” The key, the code, that would unlock our brains from this collective cage.
As we drove, I realized that all my animosity toward Layla had disappeared—and it wasn’t just some hippie-dippie drug thing. She’d been a true friend, risked her own life to try to save mine. “I’m glad you’re with Jude,” I told her impulsively.
“You are?” She seemed appropriately surprised.
I nodded. “He’s happy. I just want him to be happy.”
And then I stared out the window to watch the houses roll by. Layla watched me with amusement—to be fair, I was being pretty amusing. “Thank you,” she said tentatively, and I felt a new kind of bond forming between us. Trust, maybe even friendship. After a moment, she glanced at her phone, and relief washed over her face. “They have the source in custody.”
“The guy who knows the code? Already?” I asked, surprised.
“The resistance moves quickly,” she said gravely. “There is not much time.”
Imagining what horrors might be done to that man, because of my actions, filled me with disgust. But I pushed those thoughts out of my head with better ones, of a world where my friends would be safe, and people could be free.
As if reading my mind, Layla echoed those thoughts. “Thank you for doing what my father asked. You saved our lives. Jude’s life.”
“Of course,” I said simply. “I love him.” Later I would remember I said that and kick myself.
But Layla just smiled warmly, moved, and I was genuinely sad to be saying goodbye to her.
That said, while I’m sure I did say goodbye to her, I don’t really remember it. The next thing I remember is standing in line to check my bags at Ben-Gurion-Abbas Airport. I must have been coming down off my high at this point, because I began to wonder what could possibly be in those bags. I chuckled as a cursory examination showed that Layla had packed up some drab, ugly clothes for me. One final jab at her romantic rival.
Suddenly, Dawn was next to me. “We need to talk, but not here,” she murmured.
I nodded, glad for the excuse to stay silent while I waited for my thoughts to sort themselves out again. As we moved through the line, Dawn made sure I had my passport, which I had not considered I would need until that moment but which thankfully Layla had put in my bag. When Dawn handed me my ticket, I audibly gasped. “Johannesburg?” I hissed to her.
She shot me a look—not here.
When we’d made it through security, Dawn pulled me to a private corner. “What’s happening? Why are you here? Why are we going to South Africa?” I asked.
> “Because that’s where your father is,” she said. I saw an anxiety on her face I never had before—something was clearly up.
“My father?” I asked, trying to make sense of why that would matter to her.
Her gaze was unflinching, startling me. “You have to convince him to help us. He’s the only one who can.”
“But I can’t,” I said, embarrassed to admit it. “I tried already. He’s a true believer, like you said—there’s nothing that will ever convince him that Prophet Joshua is anything other than Great Spirit come to Earth.”
Dawn looked worried, but she shook herself out of it. “Your cover isn’t the only one that’s blown. In a few days, they’ll know about all of us. This is our last chance. If you don’t convince your father to help us—this is the end of the resistance.”
8
I stared at Dawn, hoping this was just the intense way she talked sometimes, hypothesizing a worst-case scenario. But when I asked for more information, she wouldn’t elaborate, not somewhere there was any chance of being overheard.
Her evasiveness, her cold way of relating such bad news, reminded me of what Irene had said—that we were all just pawns in her chess game. Still in my drugged-up haze, my feelings spilled right out. “Why should I trust you? I know you don’t care about me.”
She was dismissive. “Of course I care about you.”
“I almost died, and you haven’t even asked me if I’m okay.”
“Grace, I asked you, like, six times if you were okay.”
“You did?” I genuinely didn’t remember.
“Yes. Well, maybe not six. But you kept saying that the bells would ring if you weren’t okay, so I took that as a yes.” Apparently I was still higher than I’d realized. And glancing at the clock on the wall, I discovered it had only been a few hours since I’d taken those shrooms . . . my stay in that cell must’ve lasted mere minutes, even though it had felt like eons.
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