“It was before my time, so I didn’t witness it. But some of the girls insist it’s true.”
“Why would they just let someone go?”
She shook her head. “No idea.”
“Was she sleeping with one of the guys?”
“Dunno.”
I thought this place would be cut-and-dried, but I was wrong. Organizing an uprising would be complicated, especially when some of the women were more loyal to the guards than the women working at their sides every single day. “I want to talk to my sister, but they keep us apart.”
“On purpose.”
“Are there opportunities to talk to the others?”
“Maybe during one of the drops.”
“Drops?” I asked.
“A plane will fly overhead and drop the coke.”
My eyes narrowed. “Seriously?”
She nodded. “Most are flying from South America. It drops it from the sky, so there’s no trace of it. That’s why these guys haven’t been caught in decades.”
They’d been operating that long?
“They have us go out and put all the boxes in the wagons to be returned to camp.”
“How far out is this?”
She lifted her gaze and looked at me. “Don’t even think about it. The guys are on horses, and we’re on foot. You’ve got no chance.”
“Do they carry guns?”
“Bows and arrows.”
“What?” I asked in surprise. “They don’t have cars or guns?”
“I suspect they have guns, but I’ve never seen them.”
“But why use a bow and arrow?”
She shrugged. “No idea. But I imagine it’s to stay quiet. As for the cars, the journey to get here is too difficult to make in a car, even in a four-wheel drive. The path is too narrow at times for a car to make it through.”
My eyes narrowed. “If they’re trying to be quiet, that means someone nearby could hear it…right?”
She lifted her gaze and looked at me. “Raven, that’s just my guess. I really don’t know—and I wouldn’t gamble your life on it.”
Whenever I was in my cabin, there was nothing to do but wait until morning. There were no books for entertainment, so I spent most of my time soaking in the tub, just to get warm and try to relax.
The only entertainment I had was my thoughts—which made me feel worse.
I’d only been in the camp for about a week, and unless the weather was different, it felt like the same day over and over again. We went to those tables and bagged the coke. It seemed like the women at different tables were bagging different amounts, as if they already had a clientele that wanted specific amounts on a subscription basis. My job was to stand and watch, deliver a new box, and stand and watch again.
My mind used to be entertained by classic fiction, dissecting iconic literary heroes, thinking about their actions and the repercussions those had across time, their fictitious lines reverberating into the present. Those long papers I used to write late into the night. I loathed them and now it sounded like a vacation. I missed my laptop, the mug of coffee beside me, the view outside my window of the most beautiful city in the world.
All of that was taken from me.
The little things we took for granted.
Now I was just…existing.
I sat up in bed and waited for my dinner to be delivered, not even having a window to look through. I stared at my feet most of the time, wiggling my toes and watching them move through the socks.
The door unlocked, and the women set the food on the chair. She darted out again.
The guard entered, the same man who always came to visit me. With his face hidden inside that hood, his identity was obscured, but I recognized his movements, the breadth of his shoulders, the way he carried himself. He always entered my cabin like he owned the place. “You like Italian?”
With my arms crossed over my chest, I just glared.
He picked up the tray and set it on the bed beside me. “You’re getting good food, so you must be behaving yourself.” He stood over me, looking down at me.
I turned away, severing the eye contact I couldn’t actually make.
He moved to the chair and took a seat.
Social isolation was suffocating, but no amount of distance would make me want to converse with a guard. It was probably part of their brainwashing technique, to make you grow attached to the man who locked your door every night since you had no one else. “I prefer to eat without company.”
“Same.” The chair looked too small for him based on the