I nodded. I’d heard part of this story.
“But when he saw us he called out. I pretended someone was behind our van and pointed and shouted. The cop pulled out his gun and turned to the van—”
“That’s when we ran to the woods,” Luc said.
Tetyana nodded. “I didn’t want him to see where you were running so I shot the nearest police car.”
“Whoa!” Katy said.
“You shot a cop car?” I asked.
“Windshield for maximum effect. I was quick and my silencer was still on, so he didn’t know where the bullet came from.”
Her eyes were flinty.
“He turned around and shot at the van, thinking the shooter was there. While he was looking around confused, I slipped back into the cave. I heard him shoot again, just as I slipped in. I think that van’s a goner now.”
“But how did you get here?” Katy asked.
“Remember those catacombs?” she said. “I had to take my chances. I stumbled down those stairs and ran like hell. I ran through the tunnels hoping it’d take me somewhere. I was either going to get out or die trying.”
“Oh, my god,” Win said.
“It was wet and slippery in there and I couldn’t see much. I fell halfway on some steps.” She jerked her elbow at us. “That’s how this happened.”
“So that catacomb tunnel comes all the way here?” I asked.
“I ran till I hit a dead end. It was a cave, a big one like that one.” She pointed at the cavern where the bats were now back asleep. “I heard someone yell. It was a girl’s voice. It was faint but I was sure it came through that tunnel.”
“That was me,” I said in an embarrassed voice. “Bats freak me out.”
“Glad they did. I couldn’t go back the way I came, so I waited to see if I could hear anything else. Either way, your yell meant there were people out here and maybe there was a way out. As soon as I found the tunnel, I crawled through it.”
“Good thing you did,” Luc said.
“We need someone to look at your bruise,” Katy said.
“Had worse and survived,” Tetyana said with a shrug. Her eyes narrowed. “So how did you all get here?”
Between the four of us, interrupting and interjecting, we described our escape.
When we were done, Tetyana leaned back against the wall and closed her eyes. In the dim torchlight, she looked worn out like she’d just returned from the front lines of a battle. She opened her eyes after a few seconds.
“Hey, we can’t sit here all night waiting for them to find us.” She pointed at the entrance. “What’s out there?”
“We’re on the edge of a cliff,” I said, shaking my head. “There are only two ways out. Back through the woods to the castle or down this straight cliff.”
“Where’s this river?”
“All the way down,” Win said. “At the bottom of the cliff.”
“What’s past that?”
“Looks like a hill with a forest,” Luc said. “Hard to say in the dark.”
Tetyana asked us to describe the cliff in detail, including the ravine below. When we were done, she looked around us and said, “How do you all feel like a night hike?”
“It’s dark outside,” Win said.
“All I have is this tiny thing and the battery’s running out,” Luc said, waving his torch.
“You said the moon’s out tonight,” Tetyana said. “I’ve tracked through worse with gunfire and in the middle of the night with no moon. I’ll find us a way down.”
No one spoke.
“Trust me,” she said. “The castle guards know these caves and they know the woods. It’s only a matter of daylight before they and the police come looking. We need to start moving now.”
“It’s a death wish,” Katy said.
“It’s super dangerous,” I said, feeling, all of a sudden, the warmth and safety of the bat-filled cave.
“You guys haven’t seen dangerous,” Tetyana said, sitting up.
“Tetyana, how do you know all this? What are you?” I said. “I mean—” I didn’t know how to finish the sentence. At twenty-one, she was the oldest, but sometimes the things she said were too old, even for her.
“I’m a rebel soldier.”
I stared at her. What does that mean?
“I didn’t know that,” Luc said. “I thought you were always a—” He stopped.
“A hooker?” she finished his question.
We looked away. That sounded far worse out loud.
“I was a primary school English teacher once,” Tetyana said in a low voice, looking at the ground. “In another life. In another universe.”
So that’s why her English is so good, I thought.
“Why did you work for Zero and Vlad then?” Win asked, her voice innocent, curious.
“Because it’s the fastest way to bail out my brother,” Tetyana replied. Her face looked more haggard than ever.
“Your brother’s in jail?” Katy asked.
“Why?” Win asked.
“Because he wanted freedom.” Tetyana’s voice had softened. “He was at the wrong place at the wrong time. Should never have let him come with me.”
“Come where?” I asked in a whisper.
“To the battlegrounds to fight for independence, but in the end, the Russians captured us. They caught him and me.” There was no emotion in her voice. It was like she was telling us what happened on her way to get groceries.
“They put me in the torture room. I don’t know how many days I was there. The warden said he’d let my brother go if I brought him fifty thousand US dollars. He was the one who enjoyed hurting me the most. I didn’t mind the physical pain, but I broke down when he told me he was going to kill my brother and described how in detail.”
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.
“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.
“My government doesn’t give a fuck about its own people!”
Her anger grew as we watched in shock.
“I fought for my country 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. That’s all I want.”
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 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. 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.
“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, holding the torch. Luc took the rear. They each carried a gun.
Win, Katy and I walked in the middle, holding on to each other.
Tetyana hadn’t cried for long. As soon she had caught her breath and swallowed her sobs, she pushed us away. “No time for this,” she said. “If we don’t start now, 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. 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 exhausted. 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 the morning.
There wasn’t 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 weapon, 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 between 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 with a shiver. 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. If their hearts had turned to stone long ago, they were solely to blame.
I was the luckiest of our group. There had been times I’d come close, very close, to harm, but I’d always gotten away. I’d fought 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 cel
l, 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 evil.
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 uncontrollably. 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 stood gaping at the steep incline in awe.
“I can’t even see the steps from here,” Luc said.
“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. “Instincts. Just felt my way down. There’s always clues around.”
The Girl Who Made Them Pay Page 27
