They scattered before dawn.
Tariq had planned it — small groups, different directions, different times, the careful geometry of people who have learned that leaving together is how you get caught together. He had safe houses in three villages to the north. He had contacts in two others. He had been planning this evacuation for weeks, waiting for the right moment, which had turned out to be this one.
I watched them go from the doorway of a building that looked abandoned and was not.
The families. The old men. The teenagers with their carefully neutral faces, which were less careful now — something in them had shifted in the basement, some door had opened that they would carry with them wherever they were scattered.
The children last.
Tariq had arranged for them to go with a woman named Amira, who was not a member of the church but who owed Tariq a debt of the kind that could not be repaid in money. She had a truck and a route and the particular competence of a woman who has been surviving impossible situations for long enough that impossible had become simply the weather.
The boy with the enormous Bible was the last child to leave.
He stopped in the doorway.
He looked at me.
He held up his Bible.
I nodded.
He disappeared into the pre-dawn dark.
Tariq appeared beside me.
"The militia will be here in four hours," he said. "They will find an empty village and an empty basement and thirty-one people who are no longer here."
"And you?" I asked.
He was quiet for a moment.
"I will be here," he said. "I will always be here. There are always more who need to hear it."
I looked at him. The man who had burned a church and heard his name in the fire and run for two days and been given bread by a stranger.
"Tariq."
"Yes."
"You were the bald sheep before I was."
He smiled. It was the same smile as in the jeep — the smile of a man who has been through the fire and come out still believing.
"We are all bald sheep," he said. "We are all exposed. We are all known by name. That is not a weakness." He looked at the lightening horizon. "That is the whole point."
Daoud appeared with the jeep.
Time to go.
I got in.
As we drove away from the village — away from the empty basement and the three oil lamps still guttering in the dark — I thought about Cornerstone Community Church in Meridian, Mississippi. The folding chairs. The Sunday morning. The coordinator's voice.
We need someone.
I thought about the boy's voice in the basement, five years old, holding a Bible too large for his lap.
Ameen.
I thought about all the people who had looked at the floor.
I did not blame them. The floor was a reasonable place to look.
But I was glad — more glad than I had words for, in English or Arabic or any language — that I had looked up instead.
The sun was coming over the desert.
It came the way it always comes — indifferent to militias and basements and men with knives, indifferent to fear and trembling and the nearly-lost control of a man's bladder in Syrian sand.
It came the way grace comes.
Regardless.
Faithful.
New every morning.
I pressed my hand to my chest.
Something in there.
Something they could not take.
I rode toward the light.