The Tattooed Heart

Parts of this book are inspired by Aitazaz Hassan Bangash,
who died saving his school from a suicide bomber. I've changed
names, locations, and details to serve my story.

For Katherine, Jake, and Julia

1

FROM CHILDHOOD I SUFFERED FROM OCCASIONAL nightmares featuring the most vivid monsters and the most intense of emotions. A constant theme was helplessness. I was often paralyzed in my dreams. Or, if I could move, it was in slow motion while everything and everyone around me moved at normal speed. I would often wake myself by screaming. Deliberately, you see. In the throes of the horror I would tell myself to scream, to scream until I was awake.

When my father died, my dreams changed and became bittersweet. I had one terrible dream in which
I saw him dead. After that he was never dead, just far away. I never saw him in his casket, nor did my unconscious mind conjure the moment when an enemy's bullet took his life. He was always alive and his eyes shone not with fear but with regret and love. I would savor those dreams and seek to prolong them. And when at last, reluctant, I woke, I would find my pillow wet.

I think maybe dreams provide a type of balance. When life is good, dreams remind you that fear still lives out there in the world. When life is bad, dreams offer hope.

I am Mara. I am sixteen years old. And my dreams now are most often of my home, my school, my friends, past pets, objects I hold dear, and my mother and my ever-absent, ever-present father. They are dreams of loss and alienation, but not nightmares.

Life is my nightmare now, and paradoxically, my dreams have become escapes.

So, in the seconds before my eyes fluttered open, I was at my friend Suzee's pool party for her thirteenth birthday. The sun was shining, but not hot—it seldom gets really hot in Marin County, California. The pool in the dream was overflowing, lapping around the legs
of my chaise longue. My flip-flops were floating away. But in compensation the water was carrying a bag of blue corn tortilla chips toward me and in the dream I thought,
Well, that's a fair trade
. I waited patiently for the flip-flops and the snacks to pass each other, indifferent to the fact that a current cannot flow in opposite directions at once.

In reality, after that pool party, after that lovely, languorous day, I had a terrible nightmare in which the water kept rising until, immobilized, I began to drown.

Now my subconscious mind goes back to that pool party as a pleasant antidote to the traumas I endure daily. The mind strives for balance, doesn't it?

Balance has become a very important thing to me. Balance is the explanation for the indignities and cruelties I must inflict on the Messenger's targets. I justify myself with that concept, hoping it is not an illusion or a lie, hoping that I am doing good and not evil.

I no longer live in the land of suburban pool parties, I live in . . . well, it's hard to summarize the nature of my existence for the simple reason that I do not yet fully understand it myself.

What I do understand is that there are things
at work in this dull world that are more vivid, more bizarre, and more awful than rational people can easily accept. Everything about this life I now lead spells dream, and yet it is terribly real.

I have moved through solid objects.

Understand this: I do not mean that I have imagined doing so, or that we're still in dreamland, or that some spectral projection of me has done this. I mean that I have moved
through
solid objects.

I have been transported effortlessly through time and space. I've been to a past I never experienced and to a future that is not mine.

I have caused the world to rewind, to advance at half speed, to accelerate as though reality itself was just Netflix on my laptop.

I have dived deep into the tortured unconscious minds of people I did not previously know.

These are not my powers, but power granted to me by gods older than any known to mortal man. It is the gods who labor to keep the world balanced on the edge of nonexistence so that it should not fall into oblivion.

Balance, you see, always balance.

Yes, it is the gods who right the wobbly balance of
justice, and their instruments are Messengers of Fear. And I, as punishment for my own terrible sins, have been made the apprentice of one such messenger.

I know him only by that name: Messenger. And I know the day is coming when my name, too, shall be only Messenger.

He was in the kitchen when I woke and stumbled in in search of coffee and breakfast. Please note that I do not say “my” kitchen. There is nothing about this place I inhabit that is truly mine. It is a place, or perhaps just a cunning and convincing illusion of a place, where I sleep and eat and recuperate in between following Messenger on his duties.

But were I to open the front door I would not see the suburban neighborhood that should be this abode's native habitat. Rather I would see the mist, the soul-crushing yellow mist that surrounds this place. And yet through the kitchen window I could see the sun-blanched leaves of a tree. A real tree? I very much doubt it, but whoever or whatever created this space had some concern for my well-being and must have known I'd go slowly mad if I never saw sunlight.

“Did you rest well?” Messenger asked.

“I did,” I said, smiling at the memory of trading flip-flops for corn chips.

“I took the liberty of making coffee.”

I could smell it. I poured myself a cup and took a sip. I'd always taken coffee sweetened and with milk before. I took it black now. The bitterness no longer seemed significant to me. Indeed there was something reassuring about it.

“Are we traveling?” I asked him.

“Yes. We have a complex situation.”

I don't think he'd ever referred to one of our missions in quite that way before. I might have asked him what he meant but the Messenger of Fear is not easily questioned. He speaks or does not, as he chooses.

He is a boy, not yet a man, though as with everything now I'm never sure if what I'm seeing is really him. He is tall, thin, and has long very dark hair and eyes the blue of a sunlit tropical ocean.

He is beautiful, Messenger is. I am perhaps pretty, or maybe just cute, but Messenger is beautiful.

He wears the same thing each time I see him: a long black coat that goes down to midcalf, a steel-gray shirt, black pants, and tall black boots. Yes, that almost
completes the outfit. I say almost, because there are details, like the buttons of his coat, which are small silver skulls. And the two rings he wears.

The ring on his right hand is Isthil, goddess of wickedness and justice. She is stern, magisterial, and shown on the ring carrying a sword.

The other ring is a face. It's a young face, contorted by unendurable terror.

“Let me get dressed,” I said. I popped a strudel in the toaster and went to shower and dress. There's a closet with several rather dull outfits, all perfectly sized, none really mine.

When I got back Messenger was sitting on a stool and doing nothing at all. He's good at that. In a world where no one who owns a phone can ever be without some diversion, he is diversion free. He is patient, and that patience is slowly beginning to be mine as well, simply because there is no point in impatience.

By the time I was ready, the toaster strudel was cooked and cooling in the toaster. I wrapped it in a paper towel and began to take careful bites even as we were out of the house and—without a flash, a sound, or even a sense of movement—instantly somewhere else.

We stood on gravel and loose stone beside a road that had once been paved but had since fallen into disrepair, so that the gray of pavement was like a series of scabs over the richer soil beneath. Grass poked up here and there but seemed to lack sufficient moisture to thrive.

Across the road were cultivated, irrigated fields, and there the crop grew. It was a rich green, neat rows of what looked like tall grass that bent over at the top. Beyond that, in the distance, a vast field of pink flowers. This field was being worked by men bent low with bags slung from their shoulders. Other men with automatic rifles patrolled the edges of the field and appeared to be supervising or protecting or controlling, or some combination of the three.

Beyond the lovely but sinister flowers the land rose into terraced hills and, still farther, far off in the distance, the gray and white suggestion of snowcapped mountains.

Between the road and the fields was a small, off-white building. It was not an impressive sight. It was roughly square, a single ill-proportioned story in height, whitewashed brick on the sides, stuccoed brick in the front. There were three doors, all in a line, too
many obviously for such a small structure, with the two flanking doors smaller than the central one, which was itself only tall enough to allow a six-footer to scrape beneath the top of the casing. The doors were painted green, a darker green than the Dr. Seuss–like tree that provided a comically small patch of shade.

The only feature of note was a small tower, just twice the height of the building itself and narrow, like a blunt, brick rocket. It leaned just a little to one side.

But my eye was drawn away from the building by the sight of a group of people walking slowly up the road toward us. A dozen people, perhaps, it was hard to be sure, but certainly no more than that number. The men were dressed in what looked like long shirts over loose-fitting pants, all of unadorned cotton. The women wore voluminous black with only their faces and hands showing.

Four of the men carried something, and I could already guess, from the muted crying, from the downcast eyes, from the slumped shoulders, from the way some supported others, that this was a funeral procession.

The body came into view as the mourners neared. It
was wrapped in white cotton. A red rope tied the top of the shroud just above the head, a second rope gathered the shroud just beneath the soles of the feet. Two more such ropes were wrapped around the body's midsection, keeping the shroud in place. It had the unmistakable gravity of sacred ritual.

The body was large and at first I thought it was too large to be that of a child, but then I noticed that some of the men were of large size as well, so perhaps it was a family trait.

As the procession reached us more men came from the small brick building and joined silently in.

“Their mosque,” Messenger said, nodding slightly toward the building.

“It isn't very impressive,” I said. I suppose I had images from news stories of the huge mosque that protects the Kaaba Stone in Mecca, or even of the overwhelming Hagia Sophia.

We were, of course, invisible and inaudible to the mourners. Had we wished to we could have walked right through them. But death and grief impose limits, even on those with great power. We kept our distance. I finished my pastry, feeling foolish and disrespectful
but needing food and having no better plan.

“This is a poor, rural area,” Messenger said. “Farmers and shepherds. Their mosque is humble.”

“Why are we here?” I asked. “This is a very long way from home. Does your duty extend this far?”

“This is the victim, or one of them,” Messenger said. “Our business is with the ones responsible.”

“But how did . . .” I let it drop for two reasons. First, Messenger showed what he wanted to show, when he wanted, and in whatever order he thought necessary for me to understand.

Secondly, there was a new person with the mourners, a person who clearly did not belong since her eyes tracked us as she approached.

She was dressed all in black: loose trousers beneath a flowing robe, with her head covered in a black hijab. Black but not dull or even quite monochrome, because as she drew close I saw that the fabric swirled with woven patterns which, unless my eyes deceived me, moved and changed in subtle and fascinating ways.

Her clothing was unadorned, but she wore rings, and I knew instinctively that they were of Isthil and the Shrieking Face.

“She's a messenger,” I said.

Messenger's silence was confirmation.

The procession passed by, and the young woman in black joined us. She was quite beautiful, with dark skin, unusually large eyes, and a quirk in her mouth that spoke of humor.

“Messenger,” she said.

“Messenger,” he acknowledged with a nod. “This is my apprentice.”

No names. I was disappointed. I was certain that Messenger had a name, at least had had a name once upon a time, but evidently I would not learn it here and now. Even my name was dropped from the introduction.

I stuck out a hand, an instinctive offer of a handshake, a gesture this new Messenger declined with a wry smile.

“You must be new not to know that a messenger is not to be touched,” she said in accented but easily understood English.

“Sorry,” I apologized.

“Thank you for allowing this intrusion,” Messenger—my messenger—said.

“We serve the balance,” the woman said. Then, “It makes no difference, but he was a good boy. Fifteen years old. Brave. Kind. He burned fiercely for justice.”

Without a word being spoken by either my mentor or his counterpart, we three were half a mile down the road, past a village that was really little more than a cluster of a dozen brick and plaster buildings, none even so grand as the humble mosque. We stood in a dusty field marked with twenty or thirty stones, some cut to rectangles, others obviously just hauled here in their natural rough state.

It was the placement of these stones that told the tale, for they were evenly spaced, six feet from left to right, in approximated rows. It lacked the carefully manicured grass, or the cut flowers, or the chiseled limestone markers and grandiose marble obelisks I recalled from my own sad travels to cemeteries, but cemetery it was.

A hole had been dug, long enough and wide enough for a body, deep enough to discourage whatever wild creatures roamed this strange and unfamiliar landscape.

Now the mourners stood praying in three rows.
Men stood in front, closest to the grave. Women behind them. Children in the row farthest away.

A woman's knees buckled and she released a small, despairing cry. She was held standing by women on either side. It was beyond doubt that here was the mother.