Abducted

by Tikiri

  I stared at her through the thin light of Luc’s torch, feeling like a thick black fog had suddenly enveloped us. It was getting hard to breathe in here.

  “I promised to bring the money, but I wanted him to show proof he wouldn’t touch my brother. They asked the church in town to take him as kitchen help, and gave instructions to shoot him if he tried to run away.”

  She stopped and swallowed.

  “What I learned was I can take anything anyone throws at me. I’d do anything to save my brother’s life.”

  She was quiet for a while. We all were.

  When she spoke again, her voice had risen. Her eyes flashed like she was ready to hit someone, kill someone, even.

  “My government doesn’t give a fuck about its own people!”

  We watched in shock, as she got angrier and angrier.

  “I fought for them and they abandoned us. I’m on my own now. That’s why I worked that god-awful job. Do you think I had a choice?” She was shouting now. The bats in the cave next to us screeched as if trying to outdo her.

  “That’s why I want to go back. I’ve got to get Yevhen out. Alive.”

  I remembered Tetyana’s keen interest in taking money in exchange for helping me get Katy and Win out of the London brothel. I’d thought then she was money hungry and without a conscience. That conversation seemed like eons ago, but it had only been seven days.

  “I’m so sorry. I didn’t know,” I whispered, struggling to find the right words. “I’m so sorry.”

  “You know what?” Tetyana sat up, cradling her injured elbow. “I wasn’t even fighting because I was brave or wanted to do a noble thing. Do you know why I fought?” she shouted. “Do you?”

  We shook our heads.

  “Because those bastards came one night and shot my mother, right in front of us. She was the real fighter. She organized rallies and they didn’t like that, you see. So they killed her, just like that.” Her voice broke.

  Tears streamed down her cheeks, streaking through the mud on her face. I wanted to lean over, comfort her, put an arm on her shoulder, anything to make her feel better, but I sat hunched in my corner with a lump in my throat, watching her helplessly, in despair.

  “Then they took Yevhen. He was only nineteen,” Tetyana said, her lips quivering. “I shouldn’t have let him come with me—.”

  And then, our strong and fearless Tetyana broke down.

  This time, no one hesitated. We scrambled over and gathered in a circle around her. We held her, as she sobbed.

  Chapter Fifty-one

  Tetyana led the way down the steps, down the cliff, holding the torch. Luc took the rear. They carried a gun each. Win, Katy and I walked in the middle, holding on to each other.

  Tetyana hadn’t cried for long. As soon she started to catch her breath, she swallowed her sobs and pushed us away. “No time for this,” she said. “If we don’t start walking, we’ll be in worse trouble.”

  She leaned over and took Luc’s torch from his hands. We got up and followed her out of the cave. No one had any idea where we were going, only that we needed to get as far away from the castle as we could.

  The steps in the rock face stopped a hundred feet below the cave. After that, there was only a crude path someone had slashed between the short bushes growing along the cliff wall. The cliff here wasn’t as steep as I’d thought it was.

  “Hunter’s tracks,” Luc said from behind us. “Probably come here to shoot boar.”

  The path was rough, and we had to hold on to each other or the bushes for safety. I was grateful for the torchlight, but other than being a confidence booster, it did little else. Tetyana soon shut it off to rely on the moonlight to guide the way.

  “We can see better this way,” she said. “Our eyes will adjust to the darkness better. Also, someone could be on the lookout and see the light.”

  I shivered at the thought of anyone watching us meander down the cliff. I didn’t have time to panic though, because the trek required all my attention. Certain places were so steep, we had to get down on our bottoms and crawl down.

  “Try not to think beyond your next step,” Tetyana called out. “And always make sure the person behind is fine. That’s all you need to focus on. I’ll take care of the path ahead.”

  I wondered what we’d have done without her. Stayed in the cave till dawn and got caught, I thought. Tetyana knew what she was doing, and sometimes even went ahead several steps and waited for us to catch up.

  After an hour of nerve-racking climbing, we sat down to rest. Win said she was tired. So were the rest of us. “We all need water,” I said. “That would help.”

  “Not too far now,” Tetyana said.

  Yes, I could hear the rush of the river below us. After two minutes, we stood up again, eager to get to the water.

  “I’m going to drink that whole river,” I said. “Don’t care how dirty it is, I’m gonna drink it.”

  “Probably the cleanest you’ll ever drink,” Luc said, from behind me. “It’s spring water. Better than any fancy bottled water you’ll find.”

  “True,” I said. “It’s not the Ganges in India, that’s for sure.”

  “I’m going to have a dip in it,” Katy said. “I stink like a dead cat with all that running and sleeping in caves.”

  “After we drink it, and after we dip in it, we gotta cross it,” Tetyana said from up front.

  “How are we going to do that?” Win asked.

  “We’ll find a way,” she said.

  When we finally got to the riverbank, we ran up. The water was cold, like it came from a fridge, except this water was the sweetest I’d ever tasted.

  Tetyana cleaned the mud off her face and body, and the rest of us followed her in to dip into the water. It was too cold to stay in more than a few seconds at a time, but it felt cleansing, refreshing, like it melted our sweat and fears away.

  Then we rooted around the knapsacks to see what else Win and Luc had thrown in and changed into jeans and T-shirts, thanking them for having packed sensibly, even in those tense circumstances. It helped that we’d been carrying very little anyway.

  After that, we got to work. Tetyana was right. She must have been a scout or trained as one when she was a soldier, because in ten minutes, and in the dark, she’d calculated the narrowest area of the gully where logs had jammed into rocks, and figured out how to get across. We teamed together to haul five logs over, creating a slightly less treacherous path to the other side. Luc sacrificed his shirt for us to hang on to as we stepped across, one by one, guided by Tetyana.

  By the time we got to the other side, my legs felt like scrambled eggs and Katy was barely holding herself up. Tetyana looked for a place behind a line of bushes above the river, where we could get a few hours of sleep.

  We went on a rotating night watch again, Luc for the first two hours, then me, then Tetyana. Katy and Win wanted slots as well, but Tetyana said they’d be on duty the next night, so they needed a full night’s rest. Luc’s hand watch, our only timekeeper, said it was one in morning. There was not much night left.

  This time, I fell asleep the minute my head hit the ground, snuggled between Katy and Win. I went into a deep dreamless sleep and woke only when Luc gently shook my shoulder so I could take watch.

  Before he went to sleep, he handed me the gun and gave me a quick how-to guide. I could barely take it all in. The weapon looked even more ominous under the moonlight. As soon as he curled up with the others, I put it on the ground next to me, too scared to touch it, in case I accidentally set it off and shot myself, or the others.

  I settled myself on the hard ground next to the gun, listening carefully, ears perking to every rustle of the leaves, alert to any change in the sound of the river that might signal an intruder. I was thankful for the moon and the stars above. There was something to look at, at least.

  Tetyana had given strict instructions to wake her up if I saw or heard anything. So I strained my ears and eyes, and I waited. Though I was sitting b
etween two thick bushes, it was chilly. Every once in a while I glanced behind me to see the group huddled together, and wished for a bit of their collective warmth.

  It’s when you’re alone in the dark that your mind wanders inward. I sat cross-legged looking at the moonlit expanse in front of me, thinking of each of my friends. They looked so peaceful, I thought, yet, each and every one of them had gone through unspeakable horror at some point in their lives. Now, under the high Luxembourgian night sky, their faces looked so young, so fragile, I couldn’t help but wonder how anyone could have looked at those same faces and inflicted pain on them. But they had, not once, but over and over again. How could anyone with a human heart take pleasure in hurting others like that?

  Maybe not all humans have human hearts, I thought, and shivered. Aunty Shilpa used to say there is a devil-god, one of the many Hindu deities, who roams around stealing hearts, turning people into demons, and that was why people did bad things. But I had a hard time with that story. It was too easy.

  When Zero trafficked Win, when Vlad raped that yellow-bloused girl in the warehouse, and when the man with the machine gun whacked her to death, no one else was to blame but themselves. When Tetyana decided not to kill Zero or Vlad at the Brussels house, she made that decision on her own. She could have easily taken their depraved lives, and none of us would have blamed her. So, no. I felt no sympathy for the monsters roaming this earth and inflicting pain on others. If their hearts had turned to stone long ago, they were solely to blame.

  I was the luckiest of our group, I thought. There had been times I’d come close, very close, to harm, but I’d always managed to get away. I’d managed to fight back and run. I’d taken wrong paths and I’d made my share of mistakes, but I’d always had options.

  I cried when I heard Katy’s story. She hadn’t had a choice when she was raped at ten. She’d been just a little girl who never saw it coming from her own uncle. It was the same for little Win. Her own father, whom she should have been able to trust more than anyone else, sold her. Sold her. I looked over at Tetyana sleeping at the edge of the group. I’d been wrong about her. What would you do if you’d been captured by a military force and tortured, knowing your younger brother was locked up in a nearby cell, threatened with death? I still didn’t know Luc’s story, but I knew it wasn’t a happy one. I remembered the look on his face when he’d called Zero a monster.

  It was getting to the darkest and coolest part of the night. The moon was my only companion now. The stars had dimmed or gone away, maybe to hide from my dark ruminations.

  I looked up at the moon, searching for the face of the man in the moon, but saw only dark splotches of alien craters. All of a sudden, I felt alone. So alone. The chilly night was getting to me. I started to shiver. I was supposed to be keeping watch. I was supposed to have that gun in my hand and keep a sharp eye out. But all I felt were warm tears streaming down my cheeks.

  I cried silently, shaking violently, without stopping for a very long time. It was like everything that had happened over the past few days, the past few months, the past several years, had finally caught up to me, as I sat alone in the middle of the night in a country I didn’t know, on a continent I wasn’t supposed to be on. I buried my head in my shirt so I wouldn’t wake the others and cried and cried.

  By the time I was supposed to wake Tetyana, I’d composed myself enough to keep watch on the surroundings. I was thankful when she took over, because I badly wanted to close my tired eyes to the pain I was feeling.

  Part NINE

  If it were not for hope, the heart would break.

  Greek Proverb

  Chapter Fifty-two

  The next morning dawned crisp and clear.

  The first thing everyone noticed was the sheer cliff on the other side of the river.

  “We climbed down that?” Win asked, as we all stood gaping at the steep incline in awe.

  “I can’t even see the steps from here,” Luc said.

  “I can’t believe we did that,” Katy said, shaking her head.

  “How did you know which way to come down?” I asked Tetyana.

  She shrugged. “Just felt my way down,” she said. “There’s always clues around.”

  The sound of the river rushing below was comforting. Though I was starved, I didn’t want to leave. I felt safe here, but Tetyana had other plans.

  “No one’s going to expect us to have come down that thing in the middle of the night and survived,” I said.

  “They’ll focus on the forest and the tunnels before they try the cliff, won’t they?” Luc asked. “Gives us a bit of a head start.”

  “That was a hunter’s path we took last night,” Tetyana said. “If they can do it in the day, so can the police and castle guards. And faster too. Time to head on.”

  We began our hike away from the river, slowly to start. Luc and Tetyana, who knew the region the best, scoured the area for berries and leaves we could chew on. It wasn’t much, but it stopped our stomachs from growling. Tetyana had already made us drink as much water as we could from the river before leaving.

  And we were off. This time, we tracked up the hill following a stream, staying under the canopy of trees, Tetyana leading the way. And this time, our destination was as far as we could walk without crashing of thirst or hunger. It took us five hours to get to the top of the hill.

  “Oh my god,” Win said, when we got to the top. We stared at the scene below.

  “It’s beautiful,” Katy said.

  We were looking down on a tiny village set in a lush green valley. A church spire rose among the white buildings, and a herd of cows grazed in a pasture nearby. This place looked like it had been landscaped by a magic wand, like a slice of heaven created on earth.

  Standing at the top of the hill now, the memories of the day before seemed far away. I wanted to run down to the little town and ask the first person I met if they had a place to eat, to sleep, to shower.

  “We’ve got to be careful,” Tetyana said, as if reading my mind.

  “Can we get some food?” Win asked. “I’m starved.”

  Tetyana’s military-trained eyes silently surveyed the area.

  “Follow me,” she said. “Stay close and tread lightly. There could be hunters from the village around here.”

  “What do we do when we get down?” Katy asked.

  “We improvise,” Tetyana said.

  As we began our hike down, the view of the town disappeared.

  My spirits started to rise. With every step, I felt like we were getting closer to freedom, and with every step, I felt a sliver of hope return. Though we still didn’t know if Fred and his goons were running around, looking for us, or if there’d be a police van at the foot of this hill, waiting to haul us away, I felt hopeful. I felt I was on my way back to my original journey, on my way to Goa, closer to reuniting with Preeti.

  We climbed down in silence, watching our steps, making sure the person behind was still with us. As I walked, hearing the soft footsteps of my companions, a shadow of sadness crossed my heart. Splitting up was inevitable, and I didn’t want us to break apart. This is my family now. Why can’t we all stay together?

  I knew where Tetyana wanted to go. Luc still thought Sicily would the best place to hang his hat. Then, there was Win. What’s going to happen to her? She couldn’t go with Tetyana to rescue her brother, as that would be too dangerous. She wouldn’t want to come trekking with us to India, a country totally foreign to her. Would she want to go back to Laos? I wondered. Will this hike be the last time we’ll all be together?

  It took us four full hours to walk into the village. I had a feeling Tetyana had avoided open areas, opting for the longer but safer path where possible. Though we were all hungry and tired, the walk through the woods was almost pleasant.

  A hare crossed our path at one point, and Luc spotted a deer and her fawn among the trees soon after. We stopped to watch them and they stopped to watch us, the mother twitching her ears, ready to spring away at a
moment’s notice. In the bright morning sun, the woods were no longer dark or forbidding. The sun had banished any feelings of foreboding remaining from the night before.

  When we finally got down to the village, there was not a soul to be seen. Tetyana gathered us behind a large oak tree at the edge of the village.

  “Luc,” she said. “This is your job now. You need to take the lead. Find us food and a place to rent a car, okay? If you can find two cars, even better.”

  “I’ll try,” Luc said. “They’ll know I’m a foreigner though.”

  “You speak German and French. That’s better than anyone else. The rest of us will have to zip it,” she said, drawing a line across her lips.

  We nodded.

  Tetyana looked at Katy. “Do we still have any euros?”

  Katy dug into her bra, and brought out the money. “Euros on the left and dollars on the right,” she said, with a wonky smile.

  “Give Luc all the euros we have,” Tetyana said. “There won’t be any exchange booths in this little place. And keep those dollars safe. We’ll need them later.”

  Katy nodded and slipped the wad of remaining money back under her shirt.

  “Okay, let’s go see if we can find something to eat,” Tetyana said, walking out to the open pasture.

  The only noise we heard was cowbells. We found a dirt path that wound its way around the field toward the center of the village. We passed farms with quaint white houses and small red barns. From here, we could see the church in the middle of the village, its tiny spire holding a weather vane in the shape of a metallic rooster. It turned as we watched.

  Suddenly, a large border collie ran from one of the houses, its tail wagging, tongue hanging, and giving us a such an exuberant dog-smile that we had to stop. The dog jumped on Katy like she was a long-lost friend, making her laugh out loud, a sound I hadn’t heard in a while. Win joined in, petting and playing. Even Tetyana smiled watching them.

  “He’s still a pup,” Katy said, scratching behind his big furry ears.