In the Shadow of the Sun

by Anne Sibley O'Brien

  Then Mia noticed a more immediate problem.

  “Simon?”

  “What?”

  “I need to pee.”

  He was quiet for a moment. “Okay, it’s dark enough — I think it’ll be safe if we crawl out of here. But I’ll go first, this way.” She followed him out from underneath the car into the dark space between the train and the last platform. The train hid them from view, even if someone had been in the station or on one of the other platforms.

  “I’ll keep a lookout while you go.”

  “Go where?”

  “Just squat over there.”

  Mia moved down the track. Even though it was so dark she could hardly see her own legs, she still felt self-conscious pulling down her pants with her brother so near.

  After Simon took his turn, Mia handed him her plastic bottle of hand sanitizer. He gave a little snort of laughter.

  “You are too much.” A tiny ray of light appeared. “Hold this. And lemme see your guidebook.” Simon handed her his pocket Swiss Army knife with a miniature flashlight. He paged through the book, to the map of Pyongyang, studying it for minutes.

  “Where do you think we are?” he finally asked.

  Mia smiled to herself in the dark. Gotcha. She put her fingertip on the northwest corner of the city. The train tracks led north.

  “Okay, let’s get going. We’re gonna just follow the tracks.”

  No, no, no. The tiny island of safety they had, hiding there in the dark, sank away as fear washed over Mia. Nothing in her wanted to go north. From the moment that image of the prisoner had appeared on her phone, the day had felt like a kind of torture. Going north would only prolong it. The farther they got from the hotel, the farther they were from Dad. And the harder it would be to get back.

  But they couldn’t stay here. In the morning, their hideout would be exposed. Maybe outside of the city they could find a place to disappear for a little while. Hiding seemed like the least bad option right now.

  Mia followed Simon on the trackway, feeling a mess of conflicting emotions, all bad: Miserable that they were leaving Dad behind. Desperate to run, not walk, toward any place that might offer them a place to hide. Annoyed that there wasn’t enough light to see, as she kept stubbing her toes on the crossbars.

  They passed between old railcars resting or abandoned in the train yard. Beyond, there was nothing but open tracks. On either side, the city slept in near total darkness. Overhead, a sea of stars glittered, hard and brilliant. Mia craned her neck to take in the sweep of it. The stark beauty seemed almost cruel, as if the sky didn’t care about the trouble they were in. This same sky hung over the people who were suffering in prison camps, like the ones in the photographs.

  Simon pointed an arm, solid black against the inky sky. “You follow that side of the Big Dipper, there’s the North Star. So at least we can always tell what direction we’re going in.”

  The stars were like a giant map. How could she not have noticed that before? At camp she’d always gone for the cozy, indoor activities rather than anything out in the wilderness. Now she wanted to fix her eyes on the constellations. Maybe she could detect patterns, give herself a moment’s distraction from the nightmare they were in. But walking with her face turned up made her stumble.

  The temperature was dropping, the night air cold on her face. She concentrated on the warmth of her jacket. Whoever invented nylon, or whatever is keeping out this wind, thank you. And thank you, thank you, thank you that she’d stashed this jacket in her pack. And the food. And everything else.

  Except the phone. If she hadn’t opened the phone and brought it along, none of this would’ve happened.

  “Simon?”

  “What?” He was a dark shape in motion, up on the track to her left.

  “What do you think is going on? Why did Dad get arrested?”

  “I’ve been thinking and thinking about it. I can’t come up with anything that makes sense.”

  “They know who he is, right? I mean, that he’s been here before, that he works with Food for the World?”

  “Remember all those papers we had to fill out in Beijing to get the visas? Of course they know what he does, how many times he’s been here, everything.”

  “So why would they let him in the country and then arrest him?” Mia asked.

  “Well, that’s what I keep asking myself. The only thing I can imagine is that it has something to do with the people who gave us the phone.”

  She raised her head to look at him, though she couldn’t see anything but his silhouette. “How?”

  “Well, Dad says the various government bureaus and ministries don’t always work together smoothly. There’s lots of infighting between different factions.”

  “Daniel was talking to me about that.” It was comforting to remember: Daniel was still out there. Maybe he could help them somehow. “That there are always power struggles.”

  “So I’ve been wondering: what if the guys we met —”

  “The ones who said they were from the Ministry of Agriculture. But Daniel says they were probably from the Ministry of People’s Security,” Mia said.

  “Yeah, whoever they were, what if they wanted to make another group look bad?”

  “Daniel said the Ministry of People’s Security, the MPS, is the regular police, and they’re always fighting with the secret police who run the political prisons. The ones no one escapes from.”

  “Okay, so that could be it. What better way to one-up the secret police than getting photographs of their secret death camps?”

  Simon’s voice was raised, like he was arguing in debate club. Mia glanced around nervously. Nothing but darkness. But someone could be hidden, listening.

  “Maybe the regular police somehow get these photos of what’s going on in the political camps, which they want to use to embarrass the secret police,” he went on. “And maybe the other ministry, the secret police, gets the idea that Dad is somehow connected with the regular police, maybe meeting with them. It’s the only idea I have to connect the dots between the phone they gave us and his getting arrested. Which cannot be a coincidence.”

  Mia suddenly connected some dots herself. “Simon! Dad was wandering around in the middle of the night. The night before last.”

  “Squeak, what are you talking about?”

  She told him what she’d seen.

  “You sure it was Dad?”

  “I saw his jacket. And I heard him come back, sometime after one o’clock.”

  “Huh. That’s weird. I wonder what he was doing.”

  “Meeting somebody.”

  “Hmm.” She could practically hear him thinking. “In which case, maybe the arrest really is some power play by one group trying to make another one look bad.” Simon sounded as if he was trying to assemble a puzzle. “Because holding an American — that isn’t going to make the US happy. It will only make things difficult for North Korea. So what’s the purpose?”

  “I thought you hated all that political stuff, when Dad would talk about it back at home.” Mia was wishing she had paid more attention.

  “Yeah, well, I still heard a lot of what he was saying.”

  Just ahead the tracks split, one veering off to the right, the other bearing left. Simon followed the left fork without hesitating.

  “Where are we going?” Mia stepped faster to keep up.

  “Right now we’re just getting out of Pyongyang. It’s incredible that we managed to hide this long. If we stay in the city, we’re sure to get caught. But the bigger plan is: We’re going to follow the train tracks north to the Chinese border.”

  “To the border?” She stopped short. “You never said anything about going all the way to the border!”

  “It’s the only way.”

  “Simon! We can’t —”

  “Keep it down.” He sounded closer, facing her in the dark. He got to raise his voice, but she couldn’t.

  She spoke in a fierce whisper. “We can’t make it to China! And we can’
t leave Dad!” And he might have discussed the plan with her! “We have to go back.”

  “Go back?!”

  “Yeah, to the hotel. To … get some help. To save Dad. Daniel’s there. He’ll help us.”

  “Daniel? Are you kidding? Daniel’s probably working with the North Koreans.”

  “What are you talking about? Daniel’s our friend!”

  “No way, Mia. I’ve been watching him since we met him. I’m sure he’s connected to this somehow.”

  “Well, I’ve actually talked to him. I know he would help us. Anyway, we can’t walk out of North Korea! It’s impossible! We have to go back —”

  “And what happens after that?”

  “What do you mean?” She could feel the setup; no matter what she said, it would be wrong.

  “What do you think will happen if we just show up at the hotel again? I told you, they arrested Dad; they’d arrest us too. Especially now that we’ve run away. There’s no way Daniel or anyone can protect us, not while we’re still in this country.” There was steel in his voice. “And the phone? If we keep it, things are even worse for Dad. If we get rid of it, the images are lost. No one will ever see the evidence — the executions, the beatings, the starvation, the murdered babies —”

  She put her hands over her ears.

  Walking out of North Korea was completely impossible. Totally crazy. And it felt so wrong to be going away from Dad. Not to mention that Simon was presenting this as a done deal. He had set her up, from the moment he decided they should run.

  But the way he posed it, it was the only choice. The only way there was a tiny chance they could help Dad —

  “Okay, so now can we get back to getting out of here?” Simon’s tone was mocking, like he was talking to a whining child. “As I was saying, the train tracks go north from Pyongyang all the way to the border. That’s how those guys I met got here. Their tour came down by train from China.” He’d started forward, his voice once again trailing over his shoulder.

  Mia’s hands dropped, shoulders slumping. She took a step. For Dad.

  “We just have to make sure we keep to the west coast. Going northeast, it’s about three times as far to the border. We follow the tracks, heading northwest, all the way to — that city on the river, across from China, I can’t remember the name —”

  “Sinuiju.” She said it automatically. Before the trip, she’d pored over the maps.

  “Whatever. It’s about a hundred and twenty miles, I think.”

  One hundred and twenty miles. About two hours driving. But walking one hundred and twenty miles? Her feet became blocks of cement she was dragging.

  “We can’t go south, though it’s much closer,” Simon went on. “We’d never get through to South Korea. The DMZ is way too tightly guarded and there are minefields.” He’d thought the whole thing out. “East or west, in either direction there’s an ocean. Going north is the only way. We should be able to do it in about ten days.”

  One hundred twenty divided by ten was …

  “Twelve miles? We’re walking twelve miles a day?!” Mia was squeaking.

  “Once we get to China, I figure we’ll call the American embassy. We could even call Mom.”

  Mom! Mia felt her heart squeeze with longing. If Mom were here, she’d figure out a way to fix things. Of course if Mom were here, they wouldn’t be in this mess in the first place.

  A lump formed in her throat. If she kept thinking about Mom, she was going to start crying. She forced her mind back to Simon’s plan. “But what about the river between North Korea and China?”

  “There have to be bridges. The train gets across somehow; like I said, those guys I met in the bar came in that way.”

  Mia trudged along behind Simon, saying nothing. It was typical of her brother that he was just making it up as they went along. Assuming he could figure it out when they got there. She liked to make advance preparations. Plan A and Plan B. Especially when they were being hunted by people who might arrest them and throw them into a North Korean prison.

  But her brother’s ideas were like those hardy plants in Mom’s garden that just kept growing and grabbing space. Pretty soon they crowded out the smaller, more delicate plants. Survival of the fittest.

  Mia felt her forehead tightening into a scowl. Everything hurt. Her back and hip from lying on the hard gravel under the train. Her feet from her shoes rubbing. Her legs from the endless tramping. Her stomach from the acid terror that had spilled through her gut, again and again, ever since they ran. Or maybe because she was so hungry she could kill something.

  Her heart hurt too. Like she’d actually torn it, leaving Dad behind.

  The cold air stung her cheeks and the tip of her nose. She yanked the sleeves of her jacket down over her fingers. The whole thing was Simon’s fault. He was forcing her to go along with this crazy escape plan. She hated that he was right all the time.

  And Dad. As fiercely as she missed him, she was mad at Dad too. For being so obsessed with starving North Koreans that he had done something to get himself arrested, instead of just paying attention to his own kids.

  And Mom had chosen to be with Nona instead of with them on the trip and now she wasn’t here when they needed her so much. None of this would have happened if she had come with them.

  Tears were trickling down, chilling her cheeks. She was glad it was dark so Simon couldn’t see. But another part of her longed for him to notice. To stop. To do something to let her know that she wasn’t just extra baggage he had to drag along.

  There was nothing to do but keep moving forward. Even though it felt like slowly, slowly tearing a bandage off a nasty wound. The excruciating agony of it going on and on and on.

  And on.

  OCTOBER 3

  Mia bolted awake to a shrieking, deafening roar. She almost screamed, then caught herself. It was just a train passing. The rumbling faded into the night, but her heart still raced.

  She and Simon were huddled in the corner of an old railway shed. They’d come to it when Mia was sure she couldn’t take another step. Simon had managed to separate the door from its rusty hinges. Inside, in the narrow beam of his knife light, the shed had looked abandoned, full of old machinery, straw mats, and dust.

  Now it must be near sunrise. She could see the outlines of stacks of machine parts. In her sleep, she had slid to the ground, knees drawn up to her chest. Her right hip and shoulder bones pressed into a stiff straw mat against hard concrete. The air in the shed was frigid. Her back, the only place she felt warmth, was wedged against Simon’s leg. Even the train practically running them over hadn’t wakened him.

  She was cold.

  She was scared.

  But most of all, she was hungry.

  She wondered what came after hunger pangs. If it hurt. Maybe she’d start feeling dizzy. Maybe she wouldn’t be able to walk anymore. Then they’d never get to China. They could die.

  She didn’t know how long it took to starve to death. They could end up looking like skeletons … like the people in the labor camp photos.

  Stop. She didn’t know anything about hunger. They’d missed one meal. Those people had been hungry for years.

  Mia remembered Dad’s accounts of babies who wouldn’t stop crying because their mothers didn’t have any milk. Families that had to choose which child to feed. Which to let starve.

  She wasn’t starving. But reminding herself that other people were didn’t make her hunger go away.

  Slowly, trying not to disturb Simon, she unzipped her backpack and rooted around for her snacks. Her hand closed over a Snickers bar. She unwrapped it as silently as she could.

  The heavenly flavor of chocolate flooded her tongue. She tried not to chew, to just savor the taste. It would be gone all too soon. But she couldn’t hold back. Her teeth gnashed at it. She slid her tongue over each tooth to find every trace of sweetness.

  Then she lay curled in a rigid ball on the ground, one hand squeezed around her locket. Her cold and fear and hunger were
just as fierce as before. And now she had more to feel terrible about. Eating without giving any to Simon. Wondering how soon the snacks would run out. Imagining what people in the labor camps would have done for a candy bar.

  And missing home so much it hurt.

  The air on Mia’s back was cold. Simon was up, moving around, opening the shed door. She groaned in protest and raised an arm over her eyes as a shield against the assault of light. She turned over and curled her limbs together more tightly, wanting nothing more than to crawl back into the dark cave of sleep.

  “I’m going to scout around outside.” Simon’s voice came from above her.

  Mia grunted. The tin door creaked closed. She could feel the emptiness of the shed without him. Good. Just a little bit more sleep …

  Within moments, she knew it was hopeless. She couldn’t get comfortable on the scratchy straw and hard concrete, and there was no way to get warm. Worse, the hunger in her gut was getting more insistent, demanding breakfast!

  Yesterday, there had been breakfast at the hotel. How she would savor a piece of that cold, chewy toast, that rubbery egg.

  And there had been warmth. If only she could be warm again … She’d follow the guides anywhere. Bow at the feet of a hundred statues. Visit a thousand monuments, sitting on the cushioned seats of the tour bus. Next to Dad.

  Dad! All the events of yesterday flooded her brain. If only she could turn back the clock. Be waking up yesterday, with the day to do over. She would never, never, never open the package with the phone.

  She sat up then. The phone. If there were no photographs, there’d be no reason to attempt an impossible escape. There’d be no evidence against Dad. And even if they did get arrested, there would be food. And warmth. And something soft to sleep on.

  She clambered onto her knees, reached over for Simon’s backpack, and pulled out the phone. There must be some way to get rid of the photographs. Quickly, before he came back. He would be furious. But she could say she’d just wanted to look at the photos again, and they had gotten deleted by mistake.