Who is Right and Who is Dead

Who is Right and Who is Dead 11 MINUTE READ

“You know what Agent Siham told me? I was nine. She said, ‘Little Mohsen, you are a stupid child. You are a stupid child, with big ears, and you’re going to die in an alley off Vali Asr, unremembered.’”

The mother in the corner of the room, cradling a baby to her chest and holding a sleeping toddler to her thigh, gave Mohsen a strange look. He didn’t catch it. The hovel he chose to hide in had just one window, a rough hole cut into an old, divided shipping container, and his eyes scanned the gathering darkness in the narrow streets outside.

“She said, ‘The only people who’ll go looking for your sad and sorry corpse will be the fathers of the girls whose honor you’ve besmirched, hoping to take a pound of flesh to cover their trouble.’ That was of course when I was older. By then when she threatened to leave me a corpse, at least she admitted it would be a pretty one.”

What seemed to have the young mother most worried was that Mohsen sat with his HK G3 in his lap, a thumb rubbing circles on the stock, other hand playing idly with the safety. His drab Foundation fatigues were soaked in blood, though the dim light and dark fabric helped conceal the look— the smell, however, was cloying in the tight space.

Old blood. Fresh blood.

“So how did I make it here?” Mohsen asked the dark outside. The Dari was familiar on his tongue, becoming more fluid by the second, half-remembered from childhood and half-honed by training, taking him back to a lifetime ago. A street rat in Kabul. No family, no prospects. But at least none of this.

Mohsen used the barrel of his rifle to lift the edge of a pile of blankets and rags beside him. What he saw made him blanch. He dropped the blanket and went back to clutching his gun, staring into the dark, wincing at the sound of chopper blades and the occasional pop of small arms fire.

“Whenever Shahab asked me what my favorite Western movie was, I always said Die Hard.” Mohsen laughed. “What’s not to love? And I do love it. But it’s not my favorite. I couldn’t tell him. But that time I got to come over, and the maid left me with Agent Ebrahimi’s VHS collection… It’s The Princess Bride.”

Mohsen started laughing, a hand coming up from his gun to drag down the lower half of his face, rasping over a few days’ stubble. The mother in the corner gathered her children closer. Under the pile of blankets and rags, something moved.

“The subtitles were terrible. Complete garbage of a bootleg,” Mohsen continued, grinning. “But the story was funny and it had it all… sword fights, poison, revenge…”

He sobered as he watched the movement in the blankets. He lifted a part of them with his gun again. Winced again. Maybe a little bit less.

“A resurrection,” he whispered, “coated in chocolate. A miracle made to go down easy.”

The toddler was awake by then. Some sense in the back of his little head had him pasted to his mother’s leg and his eyes fixed on the scene by the window. His tension, his mother’s tension, and Mohsen’s all snapped at the toddler’s shrill scream.

From under the blankets, from a figure swaddled in a blood-stained burka, came a painful, rattling breath.

“Mohsen,” Najma rasped, “leave me in the river.”

The mother took her children and bolted. Mohsen crossed his legs as the makeshift door slammed shut behind her, one foot beating a rapid tattoo against the dirt floor. His grip on his gun never loosened.

“It took the pirate guy a while to come back, too,” Mohsen said. He kept his eyes firmly out the window. “The hero. The good guy. They killed him, but he came back. Just took a miracle.”

“This is no miracle,” Najma whispered. Her exhales lifted the face of the burka enough that the slit of the eyes showed everything. The cloudy but re-developing eyeballs. The raw, red muscle of the brow. A sliver of the milky nose cartilage. And every second, like a wave coming into shore, her brown skin creeping back into place. “Leave me in the river, little brother. Return me to the water. Weight me down.”

Mohsen shoved a fist into his mouth and bit down. He shook his head, hard, but his other hand trembled on the assault rifle.

“There is a demon in my blood. I tried to purge it. I had nothing but prayer and fresh water for seven days, I tried so hard to hide it from you, all of you… but it is still in me.”

“You’re not a djinn!” Mohsen screamed, fist shaking and covered in angry red indents from his teeth. “Stop saying it! Stop!” “You served ORIA,” Najma continued. Her voice was laced with exhaustion. “You saw them. There is no glass in my eyes or mouth, but there is pond water. It’s a coldness, not a burn. Put me in the river, little brother, and go home.”

Mohsen let himself cry then, like he always did, when the others were gone and he was done being stupid. Shahab was the only one who had known, before. He would pat Mohsen’s head and recite lessons about strength from the Qu’ran. Not even his handlers had known— Agent Siham had a suspicion, maybe, but that was nothing combat training couldn’t beat out of him. Now he cried for Najma, with Najma.

“Where is home?” Mohsen choked out. “The Foundation tried to kill us all! We have no other home! Do you really think I would be allowed to just go back to Kabul with what I know?”

“Oh, Mohsen,” Najma mumbled, and there was a waver in her voice too.

He cried for a long time, like lancing a boil. Nastiness flowed out of him. It didn’t bring clarity— Shahab, Ahmad, Najma… even Anush, once upon a time, they found clarity. Mohsen just had a lot of noise. But sometimes after a long time spent crying, he could find a conviction in the noise.

Mohsen sat up. He scrubbed at his face again and leaned his head back to clear his nose, letting the hateful snot run back into his chest, a habit in other circumstances Ahmad always chided him for. He took in a deep breath of the hot, dry air.

“You know they beat her?” Mohsen asked, much quieter than before. “The crazy blonde, with the doll. I heard through someone else Bright Star, who overheard them bragging, after. Beat her— and other things, too. I don’t think that was the first time, either.”

Najma said nothing. Mohsen finally looked away from the window, really studied the way her eyelashes were coming back in as best he could in the dim light.

“I called her djinn today,” he said. “But I don’t think she would have been djinn if they hadn’t hurt her for a long, long time.”

“You were never just a stupid child with big ears, and terrible taste in movies,” Najma said. “You’ve been our heart since the beginning. You feel too much.”

“They feel nothing,” Mohsen said. “We feared they were getting too close to the monsters, but they’re too far away. This is a game. They look on from above and take the pieces off the board that don’t work. Just like ORIA. Monsters don’t even get to be monsters.”

It took him a moment, shamefully, to realize Najma had started crying.

“I took the water because I thought I was going to die,” she managed. “I did that! I changed, it changed me, to keep living! I don’t want to die, Mohsen. But I don’t want to be a monster either.”

“You aren’t,” Mohsen insisted, coming out of the chair he’d been sitting in by the window to crouch near her. “You won’t be. I won’t let them make you djinn.”

“You have a plan?” Najma asked, voice thick with tears. Mohsen snorted but had the decency to look embarrassed.

“Have you ever known me to think ahead? No, I don’t have a plan,” he said, scratching at his close-shaved hair in an aggravated motion. “But I think you could have a plan, if you’d stop wishing for death. If you’d stop letting our superiors come out of your mouth.”

Najma was quiet for a long time. Her breaths as she calmed were ragged, but more even than they were before. Mohsen gave up on crouching and stretched out his sore legs. When Najma spoke again, it was so loud after the quiet that he jumped.

“Agent Kni… Lucas, real or not, said they knew. They knew someone else on the team was like him. Able to regenerate.”

Mohsen shrugged. “Maybe. They seemed to know something was wrong with him. I didn’t stick around. I got you and got out. For all I know, they killed your whole team.”

Najma paused. Then, “Tali came to see me. The morning Lucas first showed severe symptoms of… She came to my room. And when she finally discovered I shared his affliction she got me out of the site. She was a researcher before she was a field agent, and she got me out of the site.”

“Bad agent,” Mohsen suggested, without conviction, trying to gauge her reaction. She nodded. Then she sighed.

“Good person,” she added. “None of them are, or were, bad. I should’ve done better by them, I should…”

This time when she ground to a halt Mohsen perked up. He knew this kind of silence from her.

“You have a plan,” he said.

“They think I’m dead,” Najma observed. “Right now, the MTF sent to eliminate us thinks I’m dead. But if they go back to the bomb site and only find one body—”

“—no bodies,” Mohsen cut in. “The thing you shot, it came back too. I was around to see that happen.”

Najma took a moment to curse in every language she knew. The fragility left in Mohsen after his crying pushed him to near hysterical laughter with each new swear. When she calmed down she continued, “When they find no remains, then, the hunt will begin. We have a very short window to begin.”

Mohsen glanced over. His shoulders slumped with relief on seeing Najma’s familiar brown eyes—whole and sharp once more—through the burka. He folded his arms and leaned back against the blanket pile, head against her side.

“What do you need to do?”

She looked at him very hard. Mohsen realized in that moment that while her eyes had come back the same, the person behind them was not. Something about her raised the hair on the back of his neck. But he cared for her so much that what could’ve been unease instead formed a blinding, fierce need to follow her, gun raised, wherever she meant to go. A fanatical conviction that cut through the noise.

“Something very bad,” Najma whispered.

“You don’t like killing, hamshira,” Mohsen pointed out.

Najma stared him down as she said, “I don’t like being killed, either. If it’s to be them or us, it will be us.”

Najma pushed herself to sit up. Mohsen helped her to stand. Out from under the burka fell nasty bits and pieces— old scabs, dead skin, discarded scar tissue, rejected shrapnel. All the unsavory scraps of healing. But her feet, amid the refuse, were small and whole. Just the way he remembered them from a childhood of growing together.

“You don’t want them to know you’re alive for as long as possible, so they don’t report back,” Mohsen said. “How do you expect them not to guess who’s fighting them?”

Najma smiled. He could tell from the familiar way her strong eyebrows drew down and the corners of her eyes crinkled.

“Westerners are notoriously bad at telling us apart,” she said. “SCP-5522’s mother will be as good a cover as any. I need you to find me three things: a place to wash, a new set of clothes… and a red hijab. That will be enough for now.”

Mohsen set out with the meager cash he’d had on him before the blast. He had many stops to make— at night markets, at black markets, at the base. But before he got too far, he couldn’t help himself. He whistled.

Just as she had from the depths of the crater hours before, muscle and bone re-growing like a miracle, Najma Behzadi quietly whistled back.

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED JUNE 2015 | REHOSTED 2/27/2024