A dark smallness, a small darkness. No one came for us. No one protected us. We were alone in the dark, us and the dead. I shut my eyes, waiting for it to pass.
“What are they saying?” I whispered when a sharp left threw us against each other, quickly jerking my knee back from hers.
“Blonde jokes,” she said grimly. She was watching the street signs outside, though I couldn’t understand how she could read them, they were going by so fast; tricky things in French and Arabic, some not even on real signs but made out of mosaic tiles, unlit and stuck to the walls. We barrelled down the empty streets, watching the occasional pedestrian leap back. Rutger’s name fell into the cops’ conversation once, hard in the flow of the soft language, like something silvery leaping out of a stream: Rutger Giehl. I looked at Johnny, but she was still staring out the smeared and barred window. I knew she’d heard it, though. That fucker.
The station was huge, so big I would have assumed it was a bank or office building, spotlit with amber lights and surrounded by different colours of cop cars and cops, struggling or resigned people in handcuffs or plastic ties, whole families, everyone waving their fists and pieces of paper or wads of cash, talking at the tops of their lungs. Cats perched on stone barriers, smugly grooming themselves and watching the crowd.
Our doors opened before the SUV had even stopped moving, and hard hands dragged us out, stumbling, up a flight of curved stone steps. We had to fight our way through the mob—hard elbows and chins banging into me, voices in my ears, breath of spices or mint—just to get to the glass doors of the entrance. Only the weight of my bag banging against the back of my legs told me it was still there. Where was Johnny? I twisted to look for her, earning only a harder squeeze from the cop. Something creaked warningly in my elbow.
By the time I caught my bearings again, we’d been stowed in a small, wood-smelling office with brick walls, as if it had been built onto the exterior of the building, barely bigger than the kids’ bedroom back home. I panted, looking up at the flyspecked fluorescents, the ceiling fan, the stacks of paperwork and books. Johnny stumbled in a second later, pushed from behind, and the door slammed shut. In the abrupt silence, we both listened to a deadbolt turn from the far side, then fading laughter.
She had a bloody nose, though her hands were loose, two angry purple stripes on her wrists. “I leave you alone for two minutes...” I said.
“He was asking for it.”
“You and your kung fu,” I said. “You don’t even have one single belt. Not one.”
“A technicality. Just because I didn’t want to do the exams. I still know all the stuff.”
“No you don’t.”
She quartered the room, mostly looking up at the high ceiling. “Damn. That’s pretty high. Well, they made the classic mistake—”
“Took their eyes off you for half a second?”
“Check.” She quickly dug in her bag, flipped open her cell phone and dialed so fast her fingers were a blur. I watched hopefully as she held it to her ear, but she hissed in what sounded like real alarm. “Shit. No signal. It must be reinforced concrete behind the brick. Maybe I can improvise an antenna, put it up against the window…”
“Who were you calling?”
“Put the phone down,” a strange voice said, and I jumped, falling against the wall. Johnny looked up, then slowly wiped blood from her nose with the back of her hand, letting the drop slither into one of the purple ruts.
“How very unfortunate that they have locked you in here with us,” she said. I held down a frantic sob or guffaw as she pocketed the phone and looked up at the huge man who had stepped out from behind a pile of books beside the desk.
“Yes,” the officer said in a heavy accent: Hessss. “I heard. You were videoed, you know, at the airport. Shame on you.”
“Shame on them.”
He shook his head—a tall, muscular man bulging from the seams of his navy uniform, stained black with sweat at groin and chest, with a thick black beard and moustache.
“We received information from multiple agencies concerned for your safety. So, you are in custody until we have made contact with your guardian or your parents,” the officer said. “No harm will come to you—unless