‌Reshmina wriggled through the hole in the cave wall and fell clumsily to the floor of another room. She paused for a long moment, scared to move. She had no idea what was in this hidden chamber, but she had to see if it led to some way out.‌

Her mother handed the flashlight to her through the hole. “Be careful, Mina-jan!”

“We’ll work on widening the entrance from this side, just in case,” Taz told her, and Reshmina heard him begin to chip away at the rock.

Reshmina clicked on the flashlight, and a bright white ghost with soulless eyes stared back at her.

Reshmina screamed and dropped the flashlight.

“Mina-jan?” her mother called. “Mina-jan, are you all right?”

“Reshmina?” Taz called.

Reshmina grabbed her chest and waited for her heart to stop trying to thump its way out of her. The flashlight was still on but pointed away from whatever she had seen, and she was afraid to pick it up again. But the thing was still there, right in front of her in the dark.

“Reshmina?” her mother called again.

With shaking hands, Reshmina picked up the flashlight and pointed it up at the ghost.

Reshmina exhaled. It wasn’t a ghost at all. It was just a statue. A statue carved out of white marble, with blank, empty eyes.

“I’m all right,” Reshmina told her mother. “I just … saw something that scared me. I’m all right,” she added in English, for Taz.

The shiny white statue was the top half of a bare-chested man wearing a toga. His face was young, his nose was long and flat, and his stone hair was curly.

Reshmina hadn’t seen anything like it before. Islamic art almost never included human figures, so this statue must have been very old. From the time when the Greeks had invaded and ruled Afghanistan, perhaps? But that was thousands of years ago. Had this statue really been sitting here, hidden away in this cave all that time?

“What’s in there?” Taz asked.

“An old statue,” Reshmina called back to him. “And other things too.”

Reshmina played the flashlight over the artifacts in the room, relics of times long past she knew only from her history lessons. There was a round brass shield with a black winged horse painted on it that must have been from ancient Greece. Next to that was a white pith helmet, like the kind British soldiers had worn when they had invaded Afghanistan two hundred years ago. Along the far wall were a few old English Enfield rifles, and next to that was a stack

of curved bows, like the kind the Mongols had once wielded in their conquest of Afghanistan. There were Soviet weapons here too—rusty old land mines and automatic rifles and belts of bullets. Like the statue, everything was covered by a thin gray dust.

Nobody had been in this room in a long, long time. On the other side of the wall, Taz sang softly.

We’re here because we’re here because we’re here because we’re here.

We’re here because we’re here because

we’re here because we’re here.

“What is that song?” Reshmina asked softly. She didn’t know why, but this room made her want to whisper.

“It’s nonsense, really,” said Taz. “Something I heard my sergeant singing years ago, when I came back for my third tour of duty. It comes from World War I. The soldiers in the trenches sang it while they were waiting to be sent charging straight into the enemy machine guns. The tune is something we sing on New Year’s Eve. ‘Auld Lang Syne.’ Do you know it?”

“No,” Reshmina said. Taz sang another song.

Should auld acquaintance be forgot, and never brought to mind?

Should auld acquaintance be forgot, and auld lang syne.

The lyrics didn’t make any sense to Reshmina, but she didn’t ask. She searched the chamber for a way out while Taz kept talking.

“The soldiers back in World War I, they changed the words of ‘Auld Lang Syne’ to ‘We’re here because we’re here because we’re here’ because they didn’t know why they were fighting,” he said. “You asked me why the US is still here. I think we’re still in Afghanistan because we got in, and we don’t know how to get out. If we stay, it’s bad, and if we leave, it’s bad. There’s no right answer. I think it’s the same as those boys back in World War I. We’re here because we’re here, and we don’t know how to leave.”

Taz was quiet for a moment. Reshmina’s flashlight moved across old military medals and flags and pennants. Little statues of the Buddha. A bust of Lenin, the Russian revolutionary leader. Greek and Persian and English coins. Bits of pottery with colorful drawings and a British pocket watch and a furry Russian cap with a red star on it.

“One of the new guys I knew back at Bagram, a rookie soldier named Garcia,” Taz said. “He was born after we invaded Afghanistan. He stepped on a roadside bomb that hadn’t been there the day before, and now he’s dead. He died fighting a war that started before he was born. You have to be eighteen to join the army. Eighteen! We’re still fighting the same war almost twenty years later, and for what? We’re never going to change this place.”

As Taz’s words sank in, Reshmina realized what this room was. This wasn’t an arsenal, like the cave where she and Pasoon had found the Taliban cache. This was a kind of shrine. A memorial to all the armies who had invaded Afghanistan and conquered it, just like Taz and the Americans, only to learn that they could never rule it.

Reshmina’s flashlight caught some Pashto words painted on the wall, and she took a step back. The paint was very old and the dialect a little strange, but Reshmina could just read the words. It said, We are content with conflict. We are

content with fear. We are content with blood. But we will never be content with a master.

“Reshmina, do you see any way out?” her mother called.

There was no other entrance to this little room. But there was a little crack in the wall at the back. Reshmina clicked off her flashlight, and—yes! She saw a tiny sliver of daylight through the crevice.

“This wall,” she called. “It leads outside! If we can just break through it.”

“I’ll come through,” Taz said. “I can chip away at it like I did this one.”

THOOM. THOOM. THOOM.

The cave shook with more blasts from above. Apparently the fighting wasn’t over. Dirt and rock rained down from the ceiling of the cave, right around the little hole to the other room. The statue of the Greek half-man toppled to the ground with a thud, and the shield clattered as it fell.

“I don’t think we have time for that!” Reshmina yelled to Taz.

She spied something in the beam of her light—an old Soviet land mine—and it gave her an idea.

“Stay there!” she told Taz.

Reshmina propped the flashlight on the Greek statue’s head and carefully, gently, dragged the land mine over to the crack in the far wall. She wedged the land mine into the crack, then picked up the Greek shield. The leather straps inside had long since dried out and broken, but Reshmina was still able to hold it up by the metal buckles on its back.

POOM. POOM. More explosions rocked the cave from

above.

“Reshmina, what are you doing?” her mother cried from the other side. “The ceiling’s falling apart in here!”

“Get as far away from the entrance as you can!” Reshmina called back to her mother. “I’m going to try to

blow a hole in the other wall!”

“You’re what?” Mor cried.

There was a partial wall toward the back of the chamber, and between that and the shield, Reshmina hoped she would be protected enough from the mine. Now she just needed something to activate it. There weren’t any big rocks around, but the bust of Lenin would do nicely. Reshmina picked it up and said a silent prayer. Her hand still stung from the gash, but she swallowed the pain, lobbed Lenin’s head toward the land mine, and ducked down behind the wall, the shield held tight over her head.

Thunk.

Lenin missed.

Reshmina closed her eyes, her heart thumping in her chest. She’d been ready for an explosion, and then nothing! Still holding the shield, she got up to get Lenin and try again.

THOOM. THOOM. THOOM.

Big explosions outside rocked the cave again, and this time a little piece of the ceiling broke off right above the crack in the wall. The rock fell on the land mine, and— KABOOM!—the land mine exploded, and Reshmina went flying.