Rahama wouldn’t have wanted me to give away the pen, you think uneasily.
But then a firmer voice in your mind says: She would have wanted you to stay alive – and this is a way you can do that.
You bring the pen out of your pocket, and White Beard watches without a word as you unscrew it to reveal the memory stick.
You glance at his face. There’s a light behind his eyes, and a pleased smile plays about his lips, as if he suspected you might have something like this and can only just restrain himself from grabbing it out of your hand.
‘This is the only copy of the interview with Zayd,’ you say. ‘I’ll give it to you in exchange for my freedom.’
‘Well …’ White Beard seems almost amused now. ‘What a treasure. We were indeed hoping that you might be able to give us something like this. And of course it is worth your freedom … if it contains what you say it does. I’ll have to take it from you to check.’
He holds his hand out for the pen, and you start to question whether you’ve done the right thing.
If I refuse to give it to him, though, you think, won’t he just take it by force?
You’re starting to feel a little foolish. But he did say it was worth your freedom. You have to hope that this deal will go through. So you hand him the pen.
He leaves the room, and you spend ten, then twenty, then thirty minutes chewing your fingernails. Just when you think it’s a lost cause, White Beard comes back.
‘Very good,’ he says. ‘That story was exactly what we needed. Now, your little sister must be worried about you – you’d better be getting along home.’
He holds the door to your room wide open.
‘Really?’ you ask disbelievingly.
‘Oh, yes. I’m sorry to have kept you. Off you go.’ You walk out of the room, full of nerves, a flood of hope rising inside you. From the hallway, you see the two men who kidnapped you, one either side of the doorway. The door is wide open, but the expressions on the men’s faces do not look kind. There is a dreadful curdling feeling in the pit of your stomach.
Run! shouts the voice in your mind, and you begin to sprint for the open doorway. But the two men tackle you, bringing you crashing to the ground, and White Beard steps over you and slams the door closed. The two men begin to punch you, as White Beard stands over you and gives you a lecture.
‘You do not bargain with al-Shabaab. You are not smarter than al-Shabaab. You do not leave al-Shabaab. The only thing you can give that al-Shabaab wants is your faith and your undying loyalty. You do not play games with al-Shabaab. You train, and if you are lucky, you will die a glorious soldier’s death. Your life now is for jihad. Nothing else.
‘Send him back to his room,’ he commands, and the hail of blows stops. You struggle to get up, but Sunglasses drags you down the hallway by your ankle and throws you back into the same room as before. The door slams shut behind you.
FROM THAT POINT on, you try to escape so often that your nickname becomes Jiir Weyn: ‘Rat’.
You try to escape from the locked room that night, and from the van the next day, when they take you to the desert for training. You make countless further attempts over the months you spend training in the desert, even though each ends in a beating.
You vow that you will never stop trying to get back to Jamilah. Your rage towards al-Shabaab – for taking your aunty from you, your sister, your home, your freedom – burns brighter with every passing setting of the sun.
Eventually, you decide the only way to escape is to lull al-Shabaab into a false sense of security, so you pretend to become a model recruit until, at last, your unit commander selects you to go on patrol in Mogadishu.
Your heart swells with hope as you approach your old neighbourhood. But when you arrive in your old street, where the grocery shop and your home once stood there is now nothing but charred rubble. There is no trace of Jamilah.
Your limbs stop working. Your heart, your body, your lungs – everything feels as heavy as wet concrete. The other boys in your patrol shout at you to move, but their voices seem to be coming from another planet. Only when an AMISOM solider starts running towards you, his weapon raised, does the adrenaline take over, and you run and hide just in time.
Something in you stops bouncing back that day. Instead, you become mute, obedient, filled with aggression. You stop crying, or looking at the stars at night in wonderment. You are no longer a child. There is something hollow in your heart, which al-Shabaab fills up with war.
The boys who fight beside you say they’re your brothers, but when they die, you feel nothing – just a bricked-up deadness. It will be your turn to die one day, and you will welcome it.
For now, the only feeling you have left is a glimmer of pride when you see the fear in people’s eyes as you walk towards them.
To return to your last choice and try again, go to scene 4.
You step back from the bomb and run across the street. You can still see the back of Rahama’s red hijab through the window.
‘Bomb!’ you yell at the top of your lungs. ‘Rahama, get out of the building!’
Come on, come on, you think desperately, your heart hammering. Her head doesn’t turn. She must be wearing her headphones. Allah, help me now, you pray.
‘Bomb!’ you shout again, and some people eye you warily; a few edge away from the building, unsure if they should believe you.
There’s a small, broken piece of concrete at
