The next day, Mara’s father, Joshua, called an emergency meeting of the Way. Joshua was a leader in the new church.

Mara loved to watch him. He was tall, strong, and handsome. He looked like royalty. When he spoke, people stopped their chatter and listened closely. His voice, deep and clear, commanded attention. Today it made heads shake, lips tremble, and mothers clutch their babies tighter. As Mara listened, she felt proud and petrified at the same time.

“Believers in Jesus, listen! Stephen’s death will not be the last! In the night Saul’s thugs broke into John’s and Justin’s homes, taking them and their sons captive. Six more, friends. Six more!” A shudder passed through the crowd in the main room of Mara’s house.

As soon as the emergency meeting of the Way had been called, Mara had called another for New Israel. Karis and a bunch of her friends had come with their parents and wanted to sit with New Israel. Mara was annoyed. Can’t they form their own club?

Most of the kids, whether in or out of New Israel, had a younger brother or sister to watch. Sarah had two little sisters. The children stood bunched together in the hot room, made hotter each time one more person squeezed into the back.

People filled the room. Fear filled the air. The babies felt it and fussed. Mara felt it, and her knees shook.

“I knew it!” It was the short, squat man who’d frightened the children at the quarry. “I knew we shouldn’t start separating ourselves and calling ourselves ‘believers.’ People think we’re different. It makes us look suspicious!”

“We are different!” cried a bent old man with a long white beard. Many others nodded. “We know Jesus is the Messiah. He was sent by God to help us, and men like Saul killed Him to shut Him up. Now they’ve killed Stephen too. It’s not going to end there!” People raised their voices in fear, and chaos threatened to erupt.

“Keep your voices down!” Joshua said in a fierce whisper.

Mara was worried. Her father, who usually looked calm and collected, now looked awfully scared. For the first time in her life, Mara didn’t know if even he could keep their family safe.

“Where’d they take the brothers?” Timon, Karis’s father, inquired.

“To prison!” another man answered from the crowd.

“On what charge?”

“That they encouraged others to quit the old ways and to begin anew.”

That started another argument. Faces flushed in anger. Fingers pointed.

“Please, my friends, no fighting,” Joshua urged, trying to bring peace. He spoke in Greek so that all would understand. “This is not about who’s right and who’s wrong. Our lives are in danger. We’ve got to have a plan!”

Mara tensed. Sometimes she thought her father spent too much time trying to include the Greeks in everything. Let them look after themselves. In fact, let them get their own church. They could worship in their own odd way, eat their own funny food, and jabber away in their own language. Leave the Hebrew believers to worship, eat, and speak according to the ways and laws handed down from long ago. For hundreds and hundreds of years, she thought, we true Jews have kept our ways of thinking and worshipping. It’s what makes us special. Jesus is our Messiah!

“Whatever the plan,” her father continued, “we’ve got to be prepared to go to jail. Don’t think being a law-abiding citizen will save you. Saul doesn’t need an excuse. He isn’t concerned about the truth. He thought Jesus was a troublemaker, and he thinks we’re just as bad.”

“Since when is believing in God’s Son a crime?” the white-bearded old gentleman asked.

“Punishable by stoning to death?” piped up the short, squat man.

“It’s because we call sin what it is,” cried another. “That makes us dangerous.”

When Joshua had them quieted once again, he said, “What makes us really dangerous is that we don’t put our trust in priests or governors. We trust in Jesus, the One who died for our sins! But for that, friends, we will suffer.”

Her father’s words upset Mara more. She hated feeling angry and scared and confused all at once. She wished she could forget the nightmare in her mind of poor Stephen bloody and dying. She didn’t want her family or friends to suffer. What if that had been her father being stoned?

Mara dug her fingernails deep into the palms of her hands. It was too horrible to imagine. And too unfair. If Saul wanted to throw somebody in jail who was really different, why didn’t he pick on Karis the tunnel girl? Now there was a weird person.

She felt a jab in the ribs. It was Karis’s elbow. Mara glared at the other girl. Karis glared right back. “Why’d you poke me?” Mara demanded.

“Because you deserve to be poked —and worse!” Karis said. “Haven’t you been listening to your father? Of course not. You think you’re too good for most people. You give the Way a bad name. You and your slave of a brother!”

Now Karis had two people glaring at her.

“You take that back, you overgrown water bug!” growled Nathan, making a fist. “I’ll show you who’s a slave!”

Karis was as jumpy as the rest, but it didn’t hide her disgust. “Saul could come here and take us any minute, but you still want to pick fights. Baby rabbis don’t go around slugging people, unless of course they’re looking for work with the Sanhedrin!” She turned away.

Nathan sputtered but relaxed his fist. “Good thing for you that Torah doesn’t let me punch a girl,” he muttered at her back.

“Does it let you punch a boy?” Suddenly Akbar practically stood on Nathan’s toes, and the look on his face said it wasn’t a friendly visit.

Mara grabbed Nathan. Sarah grabbed Mara. Obadiah bumped into Akbar, belly first, ready to defend Nathan. No member of New Israel looked happy. No nonmember of New Israel looked happy. No one else in the room looked happy either.

Mara hadn’t been paying attention to what was going on in the room, so she was surprised when a chunk of stale bread suddenly sailed from somewhere over the heads of the crowd. The bread nearly landed in a clay pot that was filled with lamp oil and was sitting on a bench near the fireplace at the center of the room. Two young men at the front of the room stood chin to chin, ready to tear each other’s beards out.

Forgetting his own warning to keep it down, Joshua bellowed, “Stop it! Animals behave better than this!”

Startled, the men released each other’s clothing and took a step back. Some people looked embarrassed. All looked uneasy. They turned to Joshua.

“Would Jesus be pleased with us?” he asked, arms spread to include everyone.

The people shrank back, murmuring to themselves. Mara, Karis, and the others stared at the floor.

Suddenly the door burst open with a crash. Mara stood frozen to the spot as five men she’d never seen before stormed the meeting, swinging clubs and lunging for anyone they could grab. Screams and shouts and the shrieking of children turned the room into a madhouse.

The bench toppled to the floor, dumping lamp oil with a splash. The oil caught fire, but a man quickly stamped it out. Mara watched her pretty, hand-woven fruit basket fall beneath stampeding feet. Two huge clay water pitchers fell from the shelf and broke against the floor in a thousand pieces. Mother will be sick. Where is she? Mara wondered. She tried to see through the crowd, but all was confusion.

People shoved and crawled for the doorway. The cows and chickens at the front of the house bawled and squawked in terror.

Mara searched frantically for her father. He was wrestling one of the attackers, trying to yank the thick wooden club out of his hand. What could she do?

A shriek from Obadiah’s little sister made up Mara’s mind. She would save the kids and pray that her father and mother could get away.

Separated from their parents by the intruders in the confusion, the children looked dazed. Mara pushed and herded four of the youngest out the door to the street. Sarah had one in each hand and a third on her back. The older boys followed with the rest.

“Quick!” Mara ordered. “To the roof! Hurry!”

She carried and pulled four children up the stone stairs beside the house. After she’d shoved them onto the roof, she reached back for the others running up the stairs behind her and pushed them forward. Karis joined them and with the older boys made everyone lie flat against the roof.

Mara peered over the edge and watched the men and women, her parents included, being herded down the street like cattle. Other people stopped to watch the spectacle and point at the prisoners.

“Where’d those kids go?” one of the attackers shouted from the street.

“We’ll come for them later,” shouted the one in the lead. “They can’t hide forever.”

The last thing Mara saw before they turned the corner was her father looking back toward the roof. No doubt he knew she would hide up there. It was where she’d loved to go as a little girl. She’d take her pet lamb and watch it graze in the grass that grew in the mud and clay roof. Jesus, Messiah, don’t let them hurt Mother and Father. Without thinking, she started to raise a hand to wave, but Nathan yanked it down.

“Saul’s men!” Nathan warned. “They’ve taken our parents, Mara. They’ve taken all our parents!”

The little ones looked wide-eyed and stunned. Mara put her finger to her lips, and Nathan grew quiet.

“I think we should pray,” Mara said. She looked at Nathan.

“I can’t,” Nathan said in a small voice and then started to cry.

Mara felt the cold of the empty house below come right up through the roof into her heart. “They’ll be back for us,” she said. “We’d better pray!”