Chapter One The sky is the color of fire. Somewhere, not very far away, a town is burning. Its haze has transformed the sky, beauty formed from the ashes of her people's lives. Nusaybah lets out a shuddering breath. The emptiness inside her expands, loosening the ties she has to this place she has called home for all her seventeen years. Her eyes return unwillingly to the grave that lies freshly mounded beneath the withered arms of the olive tree. Her mother is not alone; her grandfather rests in a grave right beside hers. Nusaybah buried him two weeks ago.

Earlier in the day, she bathed her mother's body, wrapped her gently in a shroud, and gave her one last hug before burying her. There is still dirt beneath her fingernails from when she dug the grave. Now Nusaybah must carry out the funeral rites and prayers the imam at the mosque--or her father and brothers--would normally have performed. But no man was spared the Muhtaleen's conscriptions, and no other person remains alive in her family. Nusaybah prays, her movements stilted. She hasn't cried since her father and brothers were taken to fight in a war that means nothing to them. She has withered like the olive tree, leaving her eyes just as dry. Her prayers finished, Nusaybah fills in the grave, one shovelful at a time.

Then she returns to the emptied spaces of her small house. Its wooden walls and tiled floors are bare save for the old carpets, soft underfoot. The furniture, what little there was of it, was sold to buy food. The earthen jars in the kitchen contain only a handful of rice. In the past few months, Nusaybah had learned all the distinct corners and colors of hunger. And now there is nothing left that she cannot carry on her back. Her mother named her for the warrior woman who protected the Prophet on battlefield after battlefield. A woman who stood strong and kept fighting.

Nusaybah stands alone in a house filled with the echoes of her family and raises her chin. She refuses to end her fight here. She will keep fighting to live. If there is only war here but no victory--if there is only oppression and no safety--she will go somewhere else. She packs her bag with what food remains and two sets of clothes. She looks out at the garden and finds herself stepping back out into remembered scapes, tumbling through the open spaces with her brothers, working together among the vegetable rows, gathering beneath the olive tree to share a meal with aunts and uncles and cousins she will never see again. There is no way to carry such memories except in her heart . but the earth holds its memories, and perhaps she can still take a little of her home with her.

She takes a worn fabric pouch from her mother's things and walks one last time through the garden. She gathers a fistful of earth from beneath the olive tree, beside her mother's grave, and pours it into the pouch with a whispered prayer. Back inside, she slips the pouch into her bag and turns with sinking heart to the last treasure she has left: a copy of the holy Quran that has been in her family for generations. She touches the thin pages and remembers the afternoons she spent learning to read it with her grandfather, reciting the surahs together, letting the words sink through her skin and into her blood. She doesn't know what the road ahead holds, or how she will keep the Quran safe, if she can. But she cannot leave it abandoned in an empty house, either. Finally, she wraps it in her mother's khimar, breathing in the scent of cloves that once clung to her mother's skin. She slips the precious package into her bag, knowing she must find a new home for it, her throat so dry she can barely swallow.

It is time to leave.