I was starting to get weak, a low-grade fever raging through my system. No one except Esperanza was still fighting. We existed in the box, in the small metal world that was our prison. Charlie’s hand was infected, Anna had stopped talking and Deedee was so dehydrated she couldn’t do much more than lie on her side.
“We’re not making it out of here, are we?” Red said, sitting down next to me.
“It’s not if, it’s what condition we’re in when we do,” I muttered. “What percentage of us dead is an acceptable profit/loss margin?”
“There’s a happy thought,” she said. “You must’ve been a regular cheerleader back home, huh, Luna?”
“How the hell are you still so peppy?” I demanded, wiping sweat off my face. I felt like someone was banging a drumstick slowly against my brain, in time with my heart. I knew that the repeated soakings, the lousy food and the appalling sanitary conditions had given me the flu, if not something worse. The were couldn’t heal me if it kept getting exposed to more trauma.
“Benefit of the Diablos,” said Red. “Fast healing. And I do mean fast.”
“We’re all so happy for you,” Charlie muttered.
“You should rest,” said Red. “Rest is the best thing for a cold, my mother always said.”
“Before or after she kicked your slutty ass out of the house?” Charlie said.
“You know what?” Deedee said. “There’s no call for you to be so mean. We’re all here, and we should be sticking together.”
“Pollyanna, you and I are nothing alike,” said Charlie. “Excuse me if I don’t want to be lumped with you sad sacks while all hope of a rescue slips away from me. I am not being the sex slave of some sweaty Soviet farmer, all right? That’s for you saps to hold hands and cry over.”
“Ignore her,” Red said, stroking the sweaty hair back from my forehead. “Try to sleep.”
My survival instinct said that I shouldn’t, that I needed to be awake and alert, lean and hungry in case of attack. Hypervigilance, the books I’d read during training called it, the symptom of posttraumatic stress that put the grinning imp of fear on your back, made you keep that back to the door at all times, never sleep, see enemies everywhere …
I was so tired, though, that I felt my eyelids flutter even as I remembered sitting in the dusty classroom at the Las Rojas Police Academy, listening to Dr. Corchran drone on about trauma and abuse and lingering symptoms of both.
Sleep came fleet and dark, but it didn’t last long. I woke up to see Lily Dubois looking down at me, her hair clinging to her blue-white skin, spots of lividity on the side of her neck.
“You better not forget about me,” she snarled, her hand reaching for me. The pads of her fingers were white and wrinkled, shriveled around her small birdlike bones.
The hand closed around my throat, and it was the cold of deep water. “You better not let me be forgotten.”
I gasped myself awake, sitting up and banging my head on the side of the container. Deedee touched me on the shoulder and I flinched. “What’s wrong, Luna?”
“Bad dreams,” I said, though if I hadn’t known with my own eyes Lily was dead I never would have called it a dream.
“This whole place is a bad dream,” Deedee sighed. “I thought I was getting the story of a lifetime, and look where I am.”
“I thought I closing my case,” I said. “I thought I was doing the right thing…”
“I can tell you from experience that the right thing isn’t always the obvious thing,” said Deedee. “Or even the thing that seems right, on the face.”
“Fucking profound,” said Charlie. I vowed that if we ever got out of this, she was due for a slap.
“Listen,” Anna whispered. “Listen. ”
Charlie and I cocked our heads, as did Red, three pairs of were ears tuned to noises outside the crate. There was shouting in Ukrainian above us, and footsteps.
“Notice anything?” Esperanza said. I put my hands on the side of the container, trying to ignore the crawl of magick. I can Path it, absorb it and use it, but this working wasn’t anything I wanted in me.
“The engines,” I said after a moment. “The engines stopped.”
“We’re saved,” Deedee said. “Someone must have stopped them.”
For a while, the hope that spread among the other women was almost infectious, and I allowed that some kindfaced Interpol agent might open the door and put a blanket around my shoulders and help me get in touch with Will and file charges against Rostov and Salazko and all the rest.
As the time stretched out, I knew that we weren’t rescued. “What’s taking them so fucking long?” Red snapped.
“We’re not saved,” I sighed. “They’ve gotten to where we’re going.”
A cargo crane carried us, swaying and bouncing, to rest on a dock somewhere. Light flickered from the seams of the crate, and then male voices approached, along with the rumble of an engine.
The door swung open and the spotlight hit us again. Mikel shouted, “Stand up, whores!” He tossed in a bundle of plastic handcuffs. “Put them on each other and step out! Keep your eyes down. No talking!”
Charlie grabbed up the bundle. “Come here, Nurse Anna.” She whipped the cuffs around Anna’s skeletal wrists with surprising efficiency.
Anna flinched, dipping her head so her hair fell in front of her face. Charlie rolled her eyes. “I don’t want to get sprayed again. Cowgirl up.”
“You are so fucking compassionate I may cry,” I said.
“No talking!” Mikel barked again.
“You know something?” I said, my fever and my general state making me reckless. “You’re a nasty little man and you’re going to get exactly what you deserve
