her work, only a shallow notch has been carved into the brass.
"What time is it?" she asks the darkness.
"No idea, love," Judy says. "They took our watches."
Veronica swallows. "If it starts getting light, go without me."
"Don't say that. Get back to it."
She obeys. Her muscles fall into a rut of sawing. She is getting clumsy now, keeps stabbing herself with the end of the hacksaw blade, and though it is dull she draws blood from her neck at least once, can feel it dripping slowly down her skin. Her mind seems to retreat from herself, take a few paces back to observe, and she almost bursts out in giddy laughter. Here she is in a slave-labour mine, sawing at her chain, about to attempt a desperate escape: a situation so wrong, so ridiculous, so not the kind of thing that happens to people like her, that she has to bite her tongue not to laugh.
The moment passes. Veronica has to close her eyes and grit her teeth against the pain in her arms. She tries to belly breathe, as if this is some kind of demented Lamaze class. But there seems to be no more strength left in her. She is about to ask someone for help when suddenly the hacksaw blade breaks free and the lock swings open.
Veronica's arms feel about to fall off, she can barely pull the chain from her neck, she is panting as if she just ran a marathon. But it feels so good to be free.
* * *
The starlight is not enough to navigate across the gorge. They have to crawl like animals, feeling their way through the mud. The river water feels very cold, and when they climb out the other side Veronica starts to shiver. As if she didn't have enough problems already, now she has to worry about hypothermia.
It takes ages to locate the trail that leads up to the airstrip. It seems unguarded. Veronica supposes the last thing escaped slaves would do is climb to the interahamwe settlement above. Somehow they manage to ascend the treacherous switchbacks out of the gorge without tumbling to their deaths. It helps that they crawl. Veronica has to; her legs are too weak to climb. At least the exertion keeps her warm.
The trail seems endless, she feels like Sisyphus, doomed to climb until the end of time - and then suddenly she crests the cliff edge and sees the airstrip spread out before her, and above it a half-moon hanging in a canopy of stars, shedding enough light to make out even distant shapes. Veronica remembers the equatorial full moon from a couple of weeks ago, fat and radiant; remembers standing on a hilltop in Kampala with her housemate Brenda, reading a newspaper by moonlight just to prove that it was possible. It feels like remembering a past life.
She forces herself back to the present. Red embers are visible on the other side of the airstrip, in the interahamwe settlement, where something is flapping in the warm night wind. Veronica is glad of the wind, it swallows other sounds. Along the cliff edge to their left they see the wooden building, and beside it, looming in silhouette, the pale arc of the satellite dish.
"We have plenty of time," Jacob mutters. "It's just past midnight."
"How can you tell?"
"Astronomy. The stars rotate around Polaris during the night, they're like a clock. Come on."
The satellite dish is mounted on a metal pole set in the earth. Three metal arms project from the lip of its pale bowl, holding a small box at their apex a few feet above the dish. Three cables run from this box into the wooden building. The dish is mounted near the edge of the gorge, on the edge of an overhanging cliff. Jacob looks around as if something is missing.
"What's wrong?" Veronica whispers.
Jacob says, low-voiced, "We need power. There must be a generator, or batteries." He touches one of the cables that leads to the wooden building, so old and weatherbeaten that its planks sag towards the ground. "Inside."
They look at one another.
"It's not like we have a choice," Susan says.
She pulls open the single misshapen door as gently as possible. The one-room space beyond is obviously used mostly for storage; the walls are lined by piled bags, boxes, jerrycans, tools, and random debris, looming shadowed and mysterious in the moonlight. There is a desk in the middle of the room, and on it a laptop computer. Jacob walks in and begins