does stomach crunches, leg lifts, push-ups, and stretches. She is hungry. For the first time in nearly two weeks she finds herself longing for one of the pills she has hidden under the tent. She takes out her nail, holds it, puts it back in the sleeping bag, takes it out again.
The afternoon turns to evening. No supper.
When her body tells her it is time to sleep, she isn’t tired, but she lies down in her sleeping bag because it makes her feel less naked. She holds the nail tightly and breathes slowly, evenly, trying to relax her muscles one by one, from the feet up.
Bright light floods the tent from outside as someone rips open the flap. “Up. Now.” It is Fishface, but Lore hardly recognizes him, his voice is so harsh. “I said now.” He steps menacingly toward the sleeping bag and Lore wriggles out hastily, nail tucked in her left fist, out of sight. He grabs her arm. “We’re leaving.”
“Did they pay?”
He does not answer.
Lore looks around her as they head across the old floorboards she has only been able to feel with her fingertips. It is a barn, very old. Hundreds of years old, probably.
Outside the night is cool and clear. The smell abruptly changes, and she knows she is in a northern European country—England, perhaps, or Ireland—and that the scents of garlic and sun permeating the inside of the barn are a trick. So much planning . . .
She shivers as Fishface marches her across a cobbled yard toward a pair of headlights. Some sort of vehicle. Lore moves slowly, docilely: she is supposed to be drugged, and she needs to think.
They are now only forty yards from the vehicle. It is an off-track van, the kind with doors that open at the back. The doors are open. She does not want to climb in.
They are going to kill her. She is sure of it. Old farm equipment lines the stone walls of the yard. She can smell the rusting metal.
They are almost at the van now. She can see someone inside, programming directions into the instrument panel. Crablegs. The floor of the van is covered in plasthene. To catch the blood? She maneuvers the nail into position in her fist.
They are at the van. Crablegs is standing at the lip, holding out his arms to her. Fishface is behind her. He moves his hands from her arms to her waist, not gripping now, just getting into position to boost her up and inside.
Lore pretends to stumble. As she knows he would, Fishface reaches to catch her. She turns fast, nail in fist.
His eyes are brown. The look that flares behind them is part shock at her speed, part fear, part a strange kind of acceptance: she will kill him. That nearly undoes her. But her fist is already swinging in its short arc. He doesn’t move. The nail rips into his neck and blood fountains. They tumble into metal. Something sharp. Bright pain. Blood splashes on her face, her arms, her throat, in her hair. She is screaming. Crablegs is screaming. Fishface is silent.
Shock makes all the rest hazy, unreal, underwater slow-motion: the van, the shouting, then silence as the van rumbles through the night. The long sigh, the hissing nasal spray creeping across the air between her and Crablegs molecule by molecule, deadly.
And breathing it in, sucking it down, tumbling backward out of the van while it’s still moving is a rite of passage. She could have died. She should have died. She moves from one life, from Frances Lorien van de Oest, to another, arriving—as all newborns do—naked and covered in blood.
TWENTY-SEVEN
I set the Hammex 20 up on its tripod and sat opposite, in the chair beneath the window. The camera lens was like a cold fish eye, unblinking. I stared at it, forgetting what I was supposed to say. The reflection of a bird flying past my window flashed in the glass eye and made me jump.
I cleared my throat. “When I was seven, someone tried to sexually abuse me. I think it was my mother. . .”
I talked for hours, occasionally sipping water from the glass next to me. I told the camera about Greta helping with the lock, about Stella killing herself, about Tok calling me in Uruguay. I told the camera everything I could remember about my kidnap; about Fishface and Crablegs and the tent; how they had known I was allergic to spray-injector drugs; what they had