‌Brandon’s eyes fluttered open, but he couldn’t see a thing. He was lying on his side in three inches of water, arms and legs splayed out and pieces of metal and wood on top of him. The darkness pressed in on him, like he’d been holding his breath in a pool for too long and the water was trying to push its way in. The air was a solid thing that surrounded him. He couldn’t breathe, couldn’t hear. He tried to move his arms, but they didn’t want to move. His legs were like dead lumps attached to his hips.‌

Brandon’s heart hammered in his chest, and he gasped for air. His mouth and nose were full of dust and little bits of debris, and he coughed and spat and retched until most of it was gone. Slowly, dully, the feeling in his arms and legs came tingling back. But his eyesight didn’t.

Panic welled up inside him. I’m blind, Brandon thought. I’m blind and I’m lost and I’m alone and the air is closing in on me and I’m never going to get out of here.

“Richard?” he called. “Richard? Are you there?”

No one answered, and Brandon sobbed. He couldn’t see and his ears were ringing and he was all alone.

“Richard!” he called again. But Richard was gone.

Brandon curled up into a ball and cried. The world had exploded, and now he was totally, utterly alone. All his life, a parent had been there for him. First his mother, who had loved him and laughed with him and cared for him when he was little. He remembered her face—her blonde hair and pale skin and blue eyes—more from photographs now than his own fading memories. But the idea of her was still there

—a tall, warm, embracing figure who picked him up and sang him lullabies.

When his mother had died, Brandon had thought he couldn’t go on. He had stopped talking, stopped caring. Every night he had cried himself to sleep.

It was his father who brought him back. His father, who had probably been losing sleep too, and who might have wanted to withdraw from the world when his wife had died but hadn’t, for Brandon’s sake. His father who had read comic books with him and taken him to the skate park every weekend. They had been a team.

And now Brandon was alone.

He couldn’t do it. He couldn’t go on. It would have been better if he had never run away at all and stayed trapped in Windows on the World with his father, with the smoke choking them. He needed his father to make the decisions, to guide him through the danger.

Without his father, Brandon thought, he was better off dead.

But eventually his tears dried and the sprinkler stopped and the ringing in his ears faded, and Brandon was still there. He wasn’t dead. He was battered and sore, but his head, his face, his arms, his body, his legs and feet—they were all still there, still working. He had little cuts and bruises all over, but he was alive, and in one piece, and he

couldn’t just lie here in the dark forever. What was it his father had told him?

You’re strong, Brandon. You can survive without me.

Brandon was strong. And he had survived, all by himself. He didn’t want to, but he could when he needed to. And he needed to now.

Brandon put a hand down into the water to push himself to his feet and felt the razor-sharp burn of a broken piece of glass cutting into his palm. He pulled back with a hiss and squeezed his hands together. The mall shops all around him must have been destroyed in the blast, which meant there was broken glass and debris everywhere now. He couldn’t see, and now he was lost in what was left of the underground mall after it had been nuked.

But nuked by what? Had another plane crashed into the plaza above them? Who was doing this? And why? Why hurt and kill all these people?

“Richard?” Brandon called again.

He heard someone moan in response.

Richard! He was alive!

The cut on Brandon’s hand still stung, but he had to move. He’d lost the handkerchief Richard had given him, but feeling around in the darkness, he found a shirt from one of the stores. He threw the hanger away and wrapped the wet shirt around his injured hand. He couldn’t see the cut, but he knew it must be deep from how much it hurt.

“Richard, I’m coming!” Brandon called.

Richard moaned again, and Brandon put his hands out carefully, trying to feel his way toward the sound without hurting himself again. His left hand found something plastic in a cardboard package, floating by in the ankle-deep water, and as he searched its contours with his fingers, Brandon recognized with a start what it was.

It was the toy Wolverine claws he’d left to buy at Sam Goody that morning.

Brandon blinked in the darkness. It was so strange to finally hold the toy in his hands. This is why I’m here, Brandon thought. This is why I’m not with my dad right now.

This is why I’m alive.

It was so random. So stupid. So meaningless now, and yet so important at the same time.

Richard moaned again, and Brandon dropped the Wolverine claws and focused. Brandon was here, now, for whatever reason, and so was Richard. And Richard needed his help.

Arms and legs trembling, Brandon put his hands out in front of him again and shuffled forward, sloshing through the water and the rubble. The air in front of him was empty, but he was sure he was going to run into something.

“Richard, say something so I can find you,” Brandon said. “I am here,” said a man with a heavy Indian accent.

Brandon’s heart sank. It wasn’t Richard he’d heard moaning. It was someone else.

“Help me. Please,” the man said.

“Keep talking so I can find you,” Brandon told the man. “I’m here. I’m alive,” the man said. There were tears in

his voice. “I don’t know what else to tell you. I’m here, and I’m frightened. I don’t know what’s going on. The world’s gone crazy.”

Brandon found the man, and they clasped hands like they were a long-lost father and son, finding each other again after years and years.

“Oh my God, I thought I was dead,” the man said. “My name is Pratik.”

“I’m Brandon.”

“I—I can’t see,” Pratik said.

“I can’t see either,” Brandon told him.

“Oh, thank God,” Pratik said. “I thought I had been blinded. But if you can’t see either, then it’s just too dark to see.”

Brandon was relieved too. I’m not blind, he thought. Not forever. The electricity must have gone out, and now there wasn’t a hint of light anywhere in the windowless mall.

“What happened?” Pratik asked.

“I don’t know,” Brandon told him. “Maybe another plane.

Are you hurt bad? Can you stand?”

“I think my arm is broken, but I can stand.”

“Help,” a woman rasped nearby. Somewhere else in the darkness, Brandon heard another person groan.

There had been dozens of people with them down here in the mall, all following the Port Authority’s directions to the Church Street exit. Some of them might be dead from the blast, but there had to be other survivors like Brandon and Pratik.

They found the woman, who told them her name was Gayle. She managed to stand and join their human chain, and they shuffled their way through the darkness toward the person who was groaning. Please let it be Richard, Brandon thought. Please let it be Richard.

The groaning man couldn’t speak. Gayle bent down to examine him with her hands, and she gasped and stood.

“We have to leave him,” she said.

“Why? What is it?” Brandon asked, afraid it was Richard. “I’m not sure he’s even still alive” was all Gayle would

say.

They heard something rattle and fall nearby, and Pratik turned.

“No, wait—” Brandon said. He bent down to check on the wounded man. “I have to know if it’s Richard.”

“Stay away from his stomach,” Gayle told him, her voice queasy.

Brandon’s hands found the man’s shoulders first, and then his suspenders. Richard had been wearing suspenders! Please no, please no, Brandon said to himself.

His hands fumbled for the man’s face, and he felt smooth, shaved skin. Brandon cried tears of relief. This couldn’t be him. Richard had a beard. Brandon felt a pang of guilt for feeling relieved when this man was dying—maybe even dead already—but he couldn’t help being grateful.

“I’m sorry,” Brandon whispered to the dying man.

Brandon stood, and he and Pratik and Gayle listened again for a groan or a voice in the darkness.

“If you are hurt or trapped and can hear my voice, make any noise you can so we can find you,” Pratik called out.

No one answered.

“I think we should go,” said Gayle. “It’s hard to breathe, and we don’t even know which way is out.”

“Wait, please,” Brandon said. “My friend is still down here somewhere.”

“I’m sorry, boy,” said Pratik. “But if we haven’t heard him by now—”

“Just let me look a little more,” Brandon told him. He couldn’t leave Richard behind. Not after all they’d been through together.

“Richard?” Brandon called. “Richard!”

Long moments went by, and Brandon could sense the other two survivors growing restless. They wanted to get out of here. He did too.

Brandon pulled the human chain farther into the darkness, desperate to find his friend.

“Richard!” he cried.

Then, softly, Brandon thought he heard something. Was that … singing? Brandon’s ears were still buzzing. Maybe they were playing tricks on him. But no, the others stopped to listen too.

“Richard?” Brandon called.

There was no answer. Just the indistinct hum of a tune.

“I think it’s coming from this way,” Gayle said, pulling them gently in the dark.

Faintly, almost no more than a whisper, came the words to a familiar song:

This land is your land, this land is my land, From California, to the New York island—

Brandon gasped. It was Richard!