right through her. She shakes, her muscles spasm and ache. It’s hard to swallow because her throat feels too tight, and her heart jumps and skitters. She is sweating. And then she understands. It’s the drugs. Lack of drugs. She’s withdrawing.
Over the next few days she works out a way to taper off the sedatives. The sodden lumps she spits from her mouth aren’t easy to divide, and sometimes she takes too much, but after six days, she is back to nothing, and no longer shakes.
She makes more holes in the bottom of the tent and explores the floor, a few splintery inches a day. On the fourth day of exploration, she finds a six-inch nail. It is old, rusty black iron, and bent at one end, but it comforts her to hold it between the fingers of her left hand, let it poke forward when she makes a fist. While she has a weapon she is more than a helpless victim. She can think, she can plan. At night, before she falls asleep, she tucks the nail down by her feet inside the sleeping bag. In the morning, she holds it in her fist and smiles.
The nail becomes the center of her universe. Her fingers begin to smell of rust, but for Lore, it is the smell of hope.
TWENTY-THREE
I was still thinking about Spanner’s hard gray smile in the breakroom as the shift started draining their hot drinks, picking up masks, and standing, ready to get back to the last third of the night. The news was showing on the screen, but as I fastened my neck seal and strapped on waders, that dry-bone smile was superimposed on the changing pictures. The sound was off, but the female anchor was nodding at something the male anchor had said, her face composed in that caring expression they always affect when they talk about someone or some cause the listening public will want to take to their hearts.
I should not have said those things to Spanner. They should not have been spoken aloud. It was the kind of thing Spanner herself would have done, not me. Not Lore. And the snake would strike, sooner or later.
A close-up of the male anchor cut away to a second screen: a picture of a teenaged boy with the kind of feather cut that always looks so good on dusty black Asian hair. He seemed vaguely familiar. Perhaps it was the chair he was tied to.
My muscles went rigid, as though my hands were tied to my sides. My body seemed in the wrong place, the wrong position, as if I should be sitting down.
The picture on the screen changed from the boy to me, sitting on the same chair. My body felt confused, in three places at once: sitting in a tent, in bright light, weeping and slurring; naked and bleeding on the cobbles, bathing in the light of images of myself tied to a chair; standing clothed—uniformed, anyway—in a hot breakroom.
The bell signaling the end of the break rang, but I just stood there, stupid and still and alone, while the pictures of me played. Eventually, the screen cut to the male anchor speaking soundlessly, and then back to the sixteen-year-old boy. Then a man, old enough to be the boy’s father, hurrying down some steps on a narrow street, the kind found in the centers of some Asian cities, shielding his face from the sun and bright camera lights.
I could move again. I turned up the sound. “—tape was given to the net an hour ago. Although the family refused to comment, a spokeswoman for the Singapore police department tells us she suspects the Chen family have known about the kidnap of Lucas Chen for over a week.”
Cut to female anchor. “And this isn’t the only similarity to the van de Oest abduction over three years ago.” Another picture, this time of a young Frances Lorien. Solemn-faced, arrogant. I wondered when it had been taken. I didn’t remember it.
I turned the sound off, and sat down. I stood up again, quickly. Sitting made me feel vulnerable, made me remember the light, the camera.
Not again. Not all those pictures running, over and over.
I looked at the screen again. The boy wasn’t me, but the chair was the same, and the tent, the light. Everything. Probably the same kidnappers. Kidnapper, I told myself. Fishface was probably three years dead.
“Bird!” Magyar. Hard-eyed and cross. “Break finished more than—”