Though she was awake, Harakat did not come out of her room until she heard Riyad leave the apartment. He knew because he'd waited for a moment after closing the front door to hear her lock unclick. She'd avoided him the night before and remained in her room until he'd departed for the trip he'd tried to tell her about while she slept on the other side of the sealed door.
With Hamza in the passenger seat of the vehicle, Riyad departed from their camp with a stack of concealed equipment placed all around the small white vehicle. They'd made sure to bring along their forged identification tags to conceal their identities as members of the Resistance. Once they'd joined the force, their original identities were wiped away to cut off their familial ties and create new citizens under the names of previously deceased members. Members of the Resistance were hunted expertly by the Occupational Forces, so it was even more important to isolate and cut themselves off from a past that might be used against them.
People that might be used against them.
As he drove through the empty roads of the early morning, Riyad couldn't help but wonder how it might be for Hamza who'd entered the force still having his family as potential targets to the enemy military. Amer, Kader, and Farhan had lost their families just as Riyad had. They were not at risk of placing the ones they loved in harms' way because of their lifestyle. In fact, more than often, it was because their loved ones had been placed in harms' way and were taken from them that most members of the Resistance joined in the first place.
Riyad had lost his brother, who'd been his only place of weakness. Now, he had Harakat as his wife, but it was not the same. Not only was Harakat hidden from everybody except the members of the camp and the sheikh so her security was ensured, but Riyad did not consider her to be a point of weakness for him.
He wondered how he might feel if they were to find her.
But they'd already found her, hadn't they? That was why it was imperative to hide her from the Occupational Forces who appeared to still be hunting her. The thought sent him into another distraction filled with questions regarding the girl's identity. Where had she come from? What had she done? Why did it seem like that soldier had been afraid of her while she stood in front of him, unbothered—failing to remember her own truth?
"What are you thinking about?" Hamza asked, dropping his head back against the headrest to watch Riyad, who'd been driving in silence.
Until his friend spoke up, Riyad had failed to notice the conversational emptiness that had sat heavy between them because his thoughts had been overtaken by nobody other than the girl he'd left back in the apartment. He hummed in question when he heard the question. "Nothing," Riyad murmured, his free hand tugging at the growing hair near his left ear.
Hamza snorted. "You're sitting in this silence looking like that and you expect me to believe that your mind is completely empty, Riyad? I may be of an older generation but I am not a fool, after all," he chuckled, raising a teasing eyebrow at the younger boy sat beside him. "You're thinking of her."
"Her?" Riyad repeated.
"Your wife, the one who continues to lack a name for us to refer to her by," Hamza spoke lightly, his tone friendly. "She is the reason your brows sit so heavily above your eyes as they do now. You look quite intimidating when you are lost in thought, you know."
Riyad hummed, continuing to look forward. "Do I?"
"What are you thinking then?"
He took a deep breath, unsure whether it would be useful to share his worries with Hamza. Usually, Riyad only opened up to Kader and hardly ever to any of the other men of the camp, but he had become occupied since his marriage to the girl and Kader's schedule deviated from his. Riyad did not have to share everything, only the shallowest of his thoughts. "She's unusual, isn't she?"
Hamza raised a curious eyebrow. "What's unusual about her?"
Riyad fell silent, pursing his lips in thought. Somehow everything about the girl was unusual yet, when he considered it more deeply, nothing was. He hadn't retrieved his answer by the time Hamza spoke up again. "Is she the one you find unusual or are you?"
"What does that mean?" Riyad asked, his brow knit when he turned to the man grinning beside him.
"It means is it her behavior that is unusual or your feelings for her?" Though the dimple between his eyebrows deepened, Riyad sat in silence, keeping his eyes on the road stretching ahead of them. "I will not overstep, ya akhi, but I will offer one statement that I had learned to be true. Often when our mind becomes complicated because of a person, we assign them that complication rather than seeing it within ourselves."
Riyad ran his fingers over his jaw in thought. "And what is it about my mind that is complicated?" He asked, half of his tone defensive and the other half wishing that Hamza might provide him a genuine response.
But the man only shrugged. "I can't do your homework for you, can I? You should figure it would yourself and realize what it is that your wife stirs within you that makes your mind 'unusual' as you defined in your words."
Once they arrived in Jinen, Hamza took a different path at the beginning of the town and left Riyad to drive along the outskirts on his own until he found the camp grounds—hidden between rising olive trees that threw a protective shade over them. He was invited in swiftly and offered his first meal of the day as a lunch while four other men stripped the car's interior for the materials he'd smuggled through the military checkpoint earlier. He watched them work while feasting on the small duck that had been plated in front of him, sharing with the little girl sitting on the rocking chair to his right. Riyad didn't speak with her. It was clear enough that a child so young should not have been at the camp in the first place, so he pretended as if the pieces of duck he placed in the plate near her were simply ones he did not find appealing. She fell for it and ate each and every one.
"Arwa," a man Riyad quickly identified as the leader of the group approached with a deep scowl on his face. "Didn't I tell you to go with your mother? You cannot be at the camp today."
Riyad's eyes widened at the address, realizing that the girl who'd been sitting with him was the daughter of the Resistance member. He looked up at the man whose expression dissolved into a smile when the girl shoved a final piece of duck into her mouth, keeping her fingers buried in her mouth to hide the fact that she'd been eating with the guest from her father. "Run along, yalla. Tell Mohammed to take you to your mother, understand?"
The girl nodded and hurried out, waving happily at Riyad before she disappeared into the surrounding bushes. Riyad placed another piece of sesame-covered bread into his mouth, his eyes watching the approaching man until he sat on the couch beside his chair. "How are you?" He asked.
"All thanks to God," Riyad murmured, rightfully caught off guard by the friendliness of the man. Normally, exchanges such as these were carried out with minimal conversations to keep identities hidden and secured between one another. But in just a few short minutes, Riyad had met this man's daughter and broke the first rule of the military exchange.
He nodded. "Is the tea to your liking?"
"It's good," Riyad replied, ignoring the lack of sugar that had made him purse his lips at the first sip he took. "Thank you."
"Your gratitude is appreciated, my brother," he smiled. "The men will finish unloading the products very soon so you can return to your camp before sunset. There is heavy security placed around the southern edge of the town so I recommend you take the eastern path then distantly round back toward your town. It will decrease your chance of running into the troops."
Riyad nodded. "I appreciate the warning."
"Of course. After all, if we do not look out for one another, then who can we rely on in times of difficulty?" The man offered lightly, his tone laced with unserious humor as he watched Riyad, reading his discomfort easily. "Have you been warned about the invasion they are planning on our town?"
"I've been warned of its rumor."
"It is not a rumor. I dreamt of such an event months ago, when there were no talks of a potential raid, but now I am sure. My family will leave town for one of the beach cities, we have relatives there who will house them until it is safe to return to our homes. By God's will, we will fight to keep ownership of our town." The kindness in his eyes had been replaced with something else, something more solemn and determined between his brows.
Riyad watched him, finding similarity between his expression and the one that had haunted Hamza's face the day before. "By God's will, Jinen will remain yours. We will all lay our lives down to defend its soil."
The man smiled at Riyad. "You're young, but you're words are powerful and your eyes are aged. That's a sign you're a mujahid and it is the mujahideen amongst us that do the most damage to those Occupational Forces. I saw it in you when you arrived. That is the only reason I trusted in a conversation with you."
Riyad wasn't sure if he should thank the man.
Once the materials had been exchanged and Riyad was given the keys to the car, he departed from the camp on his way to pick up Hamza from where they'd separated. But Riyad did not find Hamza at the side of the street. Instead, he saw him a few meters before as a faint outline standing in the graveyard. He sat in the car for a moment after cutting its engine, unsure whether the silhouette belonged to Hamza or someone who looked exactly like him.
Taking the keys with him, Riyad left the car standing in front of a group of chatting teenagers and made his way through the entrance of the sandy graveyard. He stepped over the neat patches of grass that rose softly toward the sky, ready to brush against the ankle of anyone who walked through them but spent the remainder of their time dancing calmly in the light wind.
"Hamza," Riyad announced his approach when he positively recognized the silver bracelet sitting around the man's wrist.
He turned at the sound of his name and allowed his deep expression to morph into one of surprise when he saw Riyad. "You've finished already. Why did you not call? I could've met you so you did not come all this way."
Riyad shrugged, letting his eyes shift over the graves extending in front of Hamza. "It's only a couple minutes in the car." He did not recognize the two feminine names but noticed something within the dates written across the plaques that laid on the grassy floor. One was born a little over thirty years ago—similar age to the man standing beside him—and the other thirteen years before. Both death dates matched exactly. "What are you doing here?" Riyad asked curiously.
"What I always do when I come to Jinen," Hamza offered a weak smile, motioning to both graves. "Visiting my family."
The response shook Riyad into silence as he looked between his friend and the growing patches of grass in front of him. Hamza always spoke of his family, of his visits to his family, of the city where his family lived as if they were still alive. But the growing greenery on the graves confirmed that they were not alive. In fact, they had not been alive for a very long time. "This is your family?" Riyad whispered.
"My wife and daughter," Hamza nodded.
"They're...," he hesitated, unsure how to continue.
"They are. May God have mercy on them," he replied, his tone different but not overrun with heartache as Riyad might have expected. It only confirmed for him how long the two had actually been deceased. "They are the reason I cannot let the Occupation take this city. If they take Jinen, they'll take the graves of my wife and daughter... and everyone who lays here."
Riyad knew what Hamza meant. The Occupation had carried out missions of graveyard destruction for other construction projects that built upon the resting places of other deceased bodies. If they invaded and took over Jinen, the graveyard would become under their sole jurisdiction to do with it as they pleased. Riyad reached forward to place his hand on Hamza's shoulder. "They won't take Jinen. We've held off their raids before."
"But this would not be a raid, akhi. It would be a military invasion. What I am most scared of is that those children sitting over there and their families will die while we fight to keep them safe? Just like my wife. Just like my daughter." Hamza turned back to the graves. "I will lay down my life to defend my home. Let the world view me as a raging terrorist, they are not the ones whose children have been killed by raining Occupational bullets."
"All of us will lay down our life, Hamza," Riyad assured him. "We are The Resistance, trained soldiers who have only one thing left to lose. Trust that there will not come a day where the Occupation wins because the Resistance will never be destroyed. It's in our hearts," he teased lightly. "Whether they are buried in the ground or running around with marbles, as long as any of our people survive, the Resistance will always thrive."
Hamza scoffed. "You sound as if you've come out of a melodrama."
"We are living a melodrama," Riyad nudged him lightly. "Now come, we need to leave now if we plan to return before the sun sets and the streets darken."
But they would not return before the sun disappeared.
Both would not return at all.
Riyad realized this when they were pulled over at a checkpoint that only consisted of a grey metal rail spread across the street, decorated on either side by soldiers who held their rifles high against their chests. When they asked for the identification, Riyad and Hamza both offered the ones given to them by Farhan earlier that morning. When asked to step out, they did as any normal citizen would do and exited the car.
"What is your name?" A soldier nudged Riyad onto a seat within a run-down booth at the side of the street. He dropped into it, keeping his expression unbothered at their usual aggression.
"What does it say on my ID?" Riyad murmured as he watched them lead Hamza in beside him, forcing him to kneel on the floor.
The soldier narrowed his eyes at Riyad. "Don't play with me, boy."
"Bashar," Riyad replied. "Bashar Obaidy."
At his reply, the soldiers smirked and laughed with one another as if they'd just witnessed genuine comedy. "Bashar," the same soldier chuckled alongside his friend. "If your name is Bashar then I am a wolf. Should I bark?"
"Wolfs howl, smart boy," Hamza snarled.
"Either way, you are a dog, aren't you?" Riyad replied, his eyes sparkling as he peered up at the men before him. "My name is Bashar, my friend is Alaa', and you are all dogs. Do you have any more questions for us?"
A soldier beside the door glared at him. "Watch your language, boy. We are the ones with the guns," he warned.
"Are you?" Hamza rolled his eyes. "I apologize, sincerely, I think I've been mistaken. I was taught that you simply came with the guns. You see, without them, you are nowhere. Have you ever seen one of them without his gun, Bashar?"
Riyad shook his head. "Not once. You'd think that—without their weapons—they just disappear as if they weren't there at all. A gun by itself is a gun. One of them by himself is a-."
His words were interrupted by a sudden blast against his cheek, the force with which the gun had crashed into his skull sending the chair a few inches to the side. Riyad pressed his teeth together to keep in the groan of pain as blood began to pool beneath his tongue. "You speak so proudly but don't realize that we could kill you in a second and nobody would look twice."
"I disagree, though. I believe the thousands that repeatedly march in the funerals of those you unjustly kill would look twice," Hamza replied, drawing the attention to himself so Riyad could spit the blood from his mouth.
"You think those 'thousands' matter? You think your lives matter."
"Which question would you like me to answer first?" Hamza asked. "I've learned of your simplenature so I wouldn't want you to get confused if I suddenly throw two different responses at you. It's truly unfortunate. I wonder if it's just a soldier-thing or if the entire Occupation struggles with a lacking mental capacity."
Riyad turned at the sound of a gun cocking, watching another soldier threaten a careless Hamza. "Watch your language, grandpa. I will not warn you again, do you understand me?"
Another soldier spoke. "Do not speak down to me as if I'm less than you. One finger of mine is worth more in this world than an entire school of your children, you know? That's why nobody flinches when I use this finger to kill hundreds of you Arab rats. Soon, your entire town will be wiped out, cleansed of your filth, and renewed to civil Occupational territory. Then you will see which one of us is lacking in mental capacity," he dropped his voice and neared Hamza, his tone dripping with empowered malice.
"It'll still be you and your animal mother."
Riyad flinches when Hamza suddenly shot forward, slamming his forehead into the soldier's nose and stealing his gun. He dropped off the chair quickly when a bullet went off, shooting through the glass above his head as a fight broke out. Riyad charged forward to wrestle another soldier, using him to knock two others down in an attempt to wrestle for control over the weapon he'd been aiming at Hamza. It went off, its bullet shooting through Riyad's shin.
Another gunshot exploded and he saw blood spurting from Hamza's shoulder. Riyad used the chair to attack the men circling his friend, stealing a rifle from one and using it to shoot the other's abdomen. "Let's go."
"You go first," Hamza breathed back, struggling for control over the bloodied soldier who'd made the mistake of getting too close to him.
"No, together-."
Riyad tumbled back when a force suddenly wheeled him away from Hamza, forcing his head through the cracked glass, and throwing him onto the floor. He gasped in a moment's surprise, feeling heat overcome his skull and blood dampen his hair, as a man kneeled on both of his arms and pressed the barrel of his weapon against Riyad's temple.
"We are not fools, Riyad," he smirked. "You are Riyad Mousa. Your friend is Hamza Zawba. Both of you are members of the outlawed Resistance force. Both of you are terrorists... and terrorists deserve to die."
For the first time, Riyad had genuinely been surprised by what an Occupational soldier told him. His name and Hamza's name were concealed, not even known to other members of the resistance outside of their camp. Now, they were known to the very same Occupational soldiers they needed to hide the most from. He heard the gun click above him but hardly reacted, still sitting in shock at what had just been announced to him.
Then, another gunshot rang out, completely shattering the window above him and piercing through his attacker's forehead. It rained blood on him until the man fell back.
Riyad acted quickly, stealing the gun from him and lifting his head off the floor to search for his friend. Another gunshot came that forced him down. It buried itself into another soldier's back before a firm hand dropped onto Riyad's shoulder, spinning him around.
"Come on!" The voice demanded. Riyad's bloodied vision kept him from examining his savior's features closely. He complied as the man pushed him through the broken window, ducking both of them down through the sudden rain of gunshots until they climbed into an unmarked vehicle that quickly whisked them away from the violent confrontation.
"Brother," the voice shook him. "Is this your blood?"
Riyad turned to the man, only recognizing him from a much closer point of view as the one who'd conversed with him earlier. Then he turned to the other side, searching. "Where's Hamza?" Riyad breathed, his eyes wide as he whipped his head around the large vehicle.
"Who?" The man asked. Hamza had climbed out before Riyad met the men and had only reunited far away from them. They had no knowledge that Hamza had even come with him at all. They hadn't gotten Hamza out.
Riyad shot forward to grip the driver's shoulder. "Stop the car. We have to go back to get Hamza, he was with me," he tried to resist the men who reached out to pull his arms back and keep him restricted. "Let me go! I had a partner with me. He's still back there! We have to go get him."
"Calm down-."
Whoever the hand that reached toward him belonged to, it was violently shoved back as Riyad forced the men away from him. He reached toward the door of the vehicle that continued driving. "Move- I'll get him! They'll kill him if you don't- Get out of my way!" He screamed, kicking and thrashing at the dozens of men that suddenly jumped forward to restrain him. Blood smeared all across his clothing and, for a passing moment, Riyad was horrified that it was Hamza's blood.
"You don't understand...," he tried to appeal to them. "I have to leave. I have to get him or they'll kill him. He...."
"Do you see his eyes? What is that?"
"One of them is bigger than the other, right?"
"Let me see," the man's familiar voice spoke again. This time, through Riyad's blurring vision, he felt his head be turned firmly to the side and faintly saw an outline of two men's heads. He narrowed his eyes to squint, wondering if they were sitting incredibly close to one another or were the same person. "Kheir! Get us to the hospital, now!"
The voices began to fall away as they released Riyad's head. He realized how heavy it had become and gradually fell back onto the seat, but the seat had become another man's arm. "It's all his blood... bleed out," their voices faded as the world was sucked away.
Riyad's vision continued blurring as he stared up at the car roof above him, his eyesight tainted with colors of red and black from the blood pouring from his head. He needed to go back. He needed to get Hamza.
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My goal was to get this chapter out to you guys early since yesterday was my b-day, and I thought we'd celebrate together, but life got busy😭 so please forgive me!
More important than that, though, I just realized I never ask about you guys. I only know my frequent commenters but I want to know everyone! What are your names and where are you guys from??? Let's drop a comment and build our community!!!