Fool's Gold

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Fool's Gold

Chapter One: The Layaway The snow in 2044 still fell the same way it always had. No algorithm had changed that. No innovation had made it faster or slower or anything other than what it was; quiet, indifferent, and beautiful in the particular way that things are beautiful when they have nothing to prove. Adam Zayn stood outside the jewelry shop on Halsted Street at 6:47 in the evening on Christmas Eve and watched the flakes dissolve against the glass of the window display. Inside the case, under a warm amber light that made everything look warmer than the world actually was, sat a ring. A solitaire. Round cut diamond, platinum band, simple and clean and devastatingly expensive in the way that simple and clean things often are. He had been looking at it for three weeks through that same window. He breathed into his scarf and pushed open the door. The bell above the door announced him with a small, tired ring, and the shop received him the way old places receive people; without cere...
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   Chapter Two: The Boy from the Rubble Adam did not begin with himself. He began, the way most honest stories do, with his parents. His father's name was Tariq Zayn. He was born in Mosul in 1987, the third son of a civil engineer and a schoolteacher, and he grew up in a city that had not yet decided what it wanted to become. Mosul in the nineties was a city of contradictions ; ancient minarets beside satellite dishes, men in suits walking past men in dishdashas, children playing football in streets that had potholes so old they had become landmarks. It was not a comfortable city, but it was a city with texture, with memory, with the particular confidence of a place that has been inhabited for thousands of years and expects to be inhabited for thousands more. Then came the first Gulf War, which Tariq was too young to fight in but old enough to remember. Then the sanctions, which were a different kind of war;  slower, quieter, the kind that works through deprivation rather...
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  Chapter Five: The Descent and the Return James was quiet for a moment before he began the second half. He picked up his coffee cup, found it empty, set it back down. He looked at the window. The snow was serious now, the kind that accumulates, the kind that changes the sound of the street outside by absorbing it. Halsted was quieter than it had been an hour ago. The city was going home. He turned back and looked at Adam. Then at Eli. Then at his hands. "The medals," he said. "You want to know about the medals." Neither man had asked about them. "I had a box of them," James said. "From the Gulf, from Afghanistan, from Iraq. A box you keep in the closet because you don't know what else to do with it and putting it on the wall feels like something you're not ready to claim." He paused. "I threw the box away in 2011. Not because I was ashamed of it. Because I needed to stop using it as a reason not to look at the rest of my life...
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