In the Shadow of the Sun

by Anne Sibley O'Brien

“Just keep your head down and hope they don’t look back.”

  The voices again, nearing. Mia’s whole body tensed. The doors squeaked open; one slammed shut, then the other.

  “Go!”

  Simon hurled himself into space. She was just behind, the rope slowing her, the truck starting forward as she leaped, tossing her to the ground, rolling her over. She lay in the dirt.

  Simon was on his feet. “You okay?”

  Mia scanned her body. Nothing seemed broken. She pulled herself up, brushing the dirt off.

  An engine whine came from the direction the truck had gone. Simon grabbed her sleeve and yanked her off the road as the noise grew. He threw himself down behind a clump of bushes, but she was still half standing as a motorbike sped around the corner. Mia couldn’t stop herself from looking at the driver, a man in a leather jacket. His eyes met hers, his expression puzzled, before he sped by, raising a dust cloud.

  “Did he see you?” Simon whispered from the ground.

  Mia nodded.

  Her brother swore and jumped to his feet.

  “We’ve got to get out of here! C’mon!” Simon charged up the hillside into the cover of the trees. Mia plunged after him, her heart pounding. They wove through thick brush and among tall trees until Mia was sure they were so lost that no one could possibly find them. She glanced back a few times, but there was no one anywhere in sight. She was panting hard by the time Simon slowed his pace.

  “You should have moved faster!” He swore again, turning his head to vent at her. “What the hell?! We’re walking along the train tracks, along the main highway, for hours, and there’s not a car in sight! Then we’re on some god-forsaken country road in the middle of nowhere and all of a sudden there’s traffic?”

  “Where are we going?”

  No answer. Mia scuttled after him.

  “Simon, don’t we want to go back to the road? I don’t think that guy is coming back. I didn’t see any sign of anyone following us….” She gasped the words out. “He didn’t have time to really look at me, he probably just thought I was some North Korean girl. If we go back to the road and I can find a road sign or a village name or something, then maybe I can find it on the map….”

  He ignored her, stomping up the hill. She scrambled to keep up. They reached the top of the rise and started down the other side.

  “Simon, wait, I think we can figure out where we are. There’s a map —”

  He whirled on her, face fierce, mouth clenched. “Mia, will you just shut up about your stupid map?”

  Something in her burst.

  “What?! What did I do? I’m just trying to help, and you’re acting like I’m the problem!” she shouted. Everything she’d been holding inside came to a boil. “It’s your fault that we’re out here! You’re the one who made us leave Pyongyang! You’re the one who made us get a ride on that truck! But you keep getting mad at me!”

  Her throat was raw, her breathing ragged. But the words, shut up inside for so long, were a flood she couldn’t hold back.

  “I’ve been following you for two days! Doing everything you said we had to do! No matter how hard I try, I’m still this stupid little sister who’s such a bother. It’s like you wish I wasn’t here! Why don’t I matter to you?” Her last words came out in a wail.

  That seemed to be the last straw for Simon.

  “Is that all you can think about? How about looking at it from my side, Mia?” He leaned toward her, eyes blazing. “I’m responsible for you here! You play games with some stupid phone, and all of a sudden we’re in the middle of a freakin’ international incident, running from soldiers, police, and who knows who else? We don’t know where we are, we’ve got no food, and I have to figure out what to do!” He shook his head. “I’ve been kinda busy trying to save your life, so sorry if I happened to hurt your feelings! How about you shut up and let me concentrate so I can get us out of here alive?”

  He turned and continued his relentless march, deeper into the woods.

  It was all she could do to keep from screaming at him. She was never going to share food or maps or anything with him ever again. He was selfish and arrogant and mean and she hated him. And they’d never save Dad if they got lost in the woods.

  Mia clomped along, her frustration building as the foliage grew thicker and harder to navigate. Branches scratched her. Her thigh muscles burned. Her ankles felt rubbed raw.

  Finally, Simon halted.

  “We need to find a place to camp out.” He didn’t look at her. “There won’t be light left for long.” She didn’t look at him.

  Out of the corner of her eye, she saw him stick his index finger in his mouth, then hold it up, turning his hand around from one direction to the other.

  “Wind’s coming from that direction.” He pointed. “So we want shelter on that side. Maybe on the other side of that hill.”

  Mia said nothing.

  On the next rise, they found a cluster of boulders that Simon grimly approved as a windbreak. “We should get some pine needles, grass, stuff like that for a little insulation. It’ll be pretty cold by morning.” His tone was flat, as if he could barely bring himself to care.

  By the time they had a thin layer of cushion, it was nearly dark. “You lie against the rock,” he ordered. “Might be a little heat left from the sun.”

  He was being “responsible” for her, like she was a burden. Mia pressed her lips together.

  With her backpack for a pillow, she tried to find a comfortable position for her bruised body on the hard ground. All she wanted was to escape into sleep, away from the storm of feelings raging inside. At the moment she’d rather be caught by the North Koreans than spend another day following her brother.

  She lay spooned against his back. Trying to steal warmth from his body. Trying to unknot her rigid muscles. Trying to ignore the gnawing in her belly.

  Dad’s voice spoke in her head, saying, “Things always look better in the morning.”

  It sounded like a lie.

  OCTOBER 4

  It was morning. It was cold. And water was dripping on Mia’s face.

  The small pine trees overhead provided some shelter, but a little rivulet of rain was running off the needles right onto her brow.

  She sat up, wiping her eyes, shivering. Walking in wet socks and shoes, they’d have blisters in no time. Maybe she should just go off to find shelter by herself. Leave Simon there.

  She shook his shoulder.

  “Simon. It’s raining.”

  He was deep asleep. Not pleased to be disturbed. “What the hell, Mia —”

  “We have to get out of the rain. Everything’s gonna get wet.”

  He groaned and rolled over. His forehead landed right under the little stream of water. He cursed and sat up, spluttering, wiping his face.

  Mia put her mouth under the stream and let it spill down her throat, gulping a few mouthfuls. Trying to stand, she found that it hurt to move. She struggled into her pack. Simon was already off between the trees, leaving her behind. As usual.

  Her sore legs and feet tripped on rocks. Back muscles strained as she ducked under trees. Her face got splashed with icy drops from pine branches. Soon her jeans and jacket were damp and she was shaking with cold.

  It all matched what it felt like inside her. In the night, the heat of her anger had cooled. Now she felt enveloped in a deep gray numbness. The odds that they would get out of here alive were terrible. She would never see Dad or Mom again. Things did not look better this morning; they looked worse.

  Simon stopped before a slanted wall of rock. It jutted out over a low stone shelf, forming a shallow cave, big enough to hold both of them. The covering of dead leaves and moss and the ground beneath were dry. They climbed in under the rock and huddled on the ledge.

  Within moments the rain picked up, falling steadily. Mia leaned back against the rock, pulled her knees to her chest, and wrapped her arms around her legs, trying to hold in the little warmth she had left.

  Simon’s
arms were folded. He stared out at the sky, his mouth clenched. As if it were raining on purpose to annoy him.

  Mia’s stomach growled. She was too miserable to care, but her body wasn’t. She unwrapped herself, pulled off her backpack, and took two apricots out of the package. She opened the last bag of peanuts and dumped half on top of the remaining apricots. Without looking at him, she held out the apricot package to Simon.

  “How much stuff do you have in there, anyway?” He sounded annoyed, as if having the foresight to pack snacks was a fault.

  “Why are you being such a jerk?” she burst out, angry again. “What’s in your pack? Have you got anything in there that could actually help us?”

  Simon’s face tightened. Then his expression shifted. He started rummaging around in his pack.

  “I just remembered…. Yes!” He held up one hand. Clutched between his thumb and folded fingers was — wonder of wonders — a book of matches. “It’s from the hotel in Beijing, from the bar.”

  Mia’s eyes widened. She didn’t ask what he’d been doing in a bar. For all she knew, he’d been in lots of bars, like in Pyongyang and when he ran away to New York.

  “I think it’s safe to make a fire,” he said. “The rain will keep the smoke down so nobody will see it.”

  They swept the litter of dry leaves, twigs, and grass from the rock shelf into a pile on the patch of sheltered ground. Simon tore some pages out of the Sports Illustrated in his backpack, crumpling them into balls. From a nearby thicket of trees, he gathered an armload of dead branches and built a triangular construction on top of the bed of leaves and paper, like the frame for a log cabin.

  “Okay, here goes.” The little match looked so flimsy, its cardboard stem so short. Simon struck the head on the strip and the match flared to life.

  It immediately blew out.

  “Damn!” he said. Mia counted: only about twenty matches. They had no idea how long they’d need them to last. “Get over here next to me. Block the wind.”

  The second match caught, flickered, then went out. Finally, on the third try, the flame held long enough for Simon to bring it down to the leaves. He cupped his hand around the tiny fire as he touched it to the brush. Mia held her breath, willing it to grow.

  The brush ignited, the dead leaves curling. The pine needles glowed like orange wires before they turned to ash. Then the branches caught and a small, steady fire began to burn.

  Warmth on her face and hands was a miracle. Mia’s tensed shoulders loosened a little. All it took to feel better was some heat.

  “Oh, Simon,” she breathed.

  He glanced at her sideways, a hint of a smile tugging at the corners of his mouth. “We’ve got to dry our clothes so we don’t get hypothermia.” His voice had lost its hard edges. “When you’re warm enough, take your jacket off and hold it up. It’ll dry faster that way.”

  The fire did its work efficiently. Mia stripped off her jacket and held it up to the heat on each side, careful not to get it too close to the licking flames. Then she took a turn holding up Simon’s heavy, damp sweatshirt while he added fuel. When she was tired of squatting and standing, she stepped back to the ledge over the fire.

  “The rock is warm!” She was dry. The surface below her was hard but heated. Her knotted muscles began to relax.

  Now if only they had some food. And, of course, a way to escape from North Korea, save Dad, and get home …

  But just for a moment, there was this little bubble of comfort. She could imagine that things might possibly turn out okay.

  Her stomach growled louder. The few apricots and peanuts had worked as an appetizer. “Time for room service. Hot chocolate. And a cheese omelet. With buttered toast and jam.”

  “And sausages, still sizzling,” Simon said. “And hot, strong, black coffee.”

  “And a big glass of orange juice.”

  They stared into the flames. Mia tried to picture each bite. The cheese melting out of the edge of the omelet. The toast brown and crunchy. She could almost taste it.

  Simon peeled a twig with the blade of his knife and put it into his mouth. Mia remembered one of Dad’s stories about people eating bark during a famine in North Korea.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Cleaning my teeth. You know, after that great meal.”

  “What if … what if that’s some kind of poison bark or something?”

  “Poison bark?” He raised a skeptical eyebrow.

  “I don’t know, like poison ivy….” She trailed off.

  “Squeak, it’s just plain birch. And anyway, I peeled the bark off.”

  “Oh.” Her own teeth felt fuzzy. She hadn’t brushed them since … the morning before last. Two days. “Can I have one too?”

  “Aren’t you afraid of getting poisoned?” But he sorted through the pile and found a twig, peeling it before he handed it to her. It felt good, using the broken end to scrape the surface of her teeth, the point to probe between them.

  The flames danced. The rain pattered on the leaves. It was falling more gently, a pleasant sound now that they were sheltered around a fire.

  Mia played with her locket between one thumb and finger.

  “Do you still have that old family picture in there?” Simon sounded honestly curious, not critical.

  She nodded. “Plus my baby picture. The one Dad and Mom got with my adoption referral.” She held the locket for a moment. Then she pried open the tiny door.

  In the locket’s left half, a wide-eyed baby peered out, wrapped in a blanket. Mia couldn’t read the card pinned to the blanket, but she knew what it said: Han Sung-mi. She held it out for Simon to see.

  “How old were you?”

  “Four months.” The tiny face looked unformed, an image that hadn’t come into focus yet. Her hair stuck up in a point.

  Mia studied the picture in the right half. The six of them on the beach at Silver Sands State Park, when she was about three. Dad. Mom. Nona and Poppy. Simon, grinning, his head cocked to one side. And in the center, Mia. Safe in her daddy’s arms.

  If something happened to Dad, she couldn’t bear it.

  She closed the locket, pressed it to her lips for a moment, and let it fall against her chest. She and Simon sat in silence, watching the fire.

  “Rain’s letting up.” Simon’s voice roused her. “We should be ready to go when it stops. I’ve let the fire die down; I’m going to put it out now so no one sees the smoke.”

  Mia stretched out her hands to feel the heat one last time. She felt a stab of grief as Simon gathered a handful of wet debris from the ground nearby and smothered the fire. He stomped on the ashes until they stopped smoking.

  As they moved out of the clearing and in among the trees, Mia glanced back at their shelter, missing it already.

  “From what I remember of where the sun was when we started climbing the hill yesterday, we were traveling west, maybe northwest,” Simon was saying. “Then we got all turned around.” He pushed aside a large spray of dripping branches and held it for her to slip through.

  “Obviously, we can’t get back to the railroad tracks where the truck turned off. It’s like twenty, thirty miles back, maybe more.” He sounded like he was figuring it out as he talked. “So I think we should keep pushing northwest. No matter where we are, until we hit the coast, the border crossing will be to the northwest. As long as we don’t get turned around to the south or east, we can’t miss it.”

  He stopped and pointed. “The sky seemed to get light from over there, so that’s east, more or less. We’ll get a better bearing if the sun actually breaks through these clouds. I’m hoping if we just keep going northwest, eventually we’ll cross a road and find a signpost you can read, and then maybe we can figure out a general sense of where we are.”

  He was actually assigning her a task, including her in his plan.

  Maybe the fire had melted Stone Warrior’s heart.

  “If we get the photos out, what will that mean?” Mia asked. “Could it help anyone besides
Dad, like the people in the labor camps?” They were moving through a patch of dark evergreens broken by an occasional blaze of red or orange. The wet leaves gleamed as if they’d been polished. Birds chittered, chirped, and trilled in the distance.

  “I guess it’s a possibility. It could maybe put pressure on the regime to make changes so that more people don’t starve or get executed.” Simon made a path for them through a thick tangle of brush and started down a slope.

  Mia skidded downhill, dislodging pebbles. “What about Dad?” Her voice sounded young and scared. “You don’t think they’d … hurt him, do you?” It was the thing she’d been trying not to think about.

  “I can’t see how that would help them in any way.” Simon spoke over his shoulder. “The North Koreans might interrogate him; they could try him in court and sentence him to hard labor. But if they really mistreated Dad, they’d have an international incident on their hands. Which is the last thing they need. Probably what they really want is to use him as bargaining power with the US.”

  Mia grabbed a branch to slow her downhill plunge. “Daniel could be helping. Dad stopped and talked to him, remember? Maybe Daniel figured out how to get him freed.”

  Simon shook his head. “If Daniel Moon is working with anyone, I think it’s with the guys who took Dad away.”

  “Yeah, well, I think you’re wrong.” They’d reached the bottom of the slope. “Daniel’s our friend. There’s no way he’s helping the North Koreans.”

  “Don’t be so dense, Squeak. He glommed on to us from the beginning, introducing himself at the airport, always hanging out with you or Dad, having meals with us. Why would he do that if he didn’t have some ulterior motive?”

  “We had all these things to talk about. Like about being Korean and American at the same time. It was cool.”

  Simon turned as he ducked under a low-hanging tree limb, giving her an oh, please look.

  “Just because you’re not interested in what I have to say doesn’t mean someone else wouldn’t be.” She felt like punching him.

  “Get real.” Her brother’s voice was full of scorn. “You’re a twelve-year-old girl. Why would a grown man want to spend time with you?”