Booklist
Note to Readers
She struggled to surface from the black hole trying to suck her back down. Her head hurt and she could barely open her eyes. Every part of her body ached so badly she began to think death would be a relief. But her heart, buried behind bruised and broken ribs, beat strong, pushing blood through her veins. And with the blood, the desire to live.
Willing her eyes to open, she blinked and gazed through narrow slits at the dirty mud-and-stick wall in front of her. Why couldn’t she open her eyes more? She raised her hand to her face and felt the puffy, blood-crusted skin around her eyes and mouth. When she tried to move her lips, they cracked and warm liquid oozed out onto her chin.
Her fingernails were split, some ripped down to the quick and the backs of her knuckles looked like pounded hamburger meat. Bruises, scratches and cuts covered her arms.
She felt along her torso, wincing when she touched a bruised rib. As she shifted her search lower, her hands shook and she held her breath, feeling for bruises, wondering if she’d been assaulted in other ways. When she felt no tenderness between her legs, she let go of the breath she’d held in a rush of relief.
She pushed into a sitting position and winced at the pain knifing through her head. Running her hand over her scalp, she felt a couple of goose-egg-sized lumps. One behind her left ear, the other at the base of her skull.
A glance around the small, cell-like room gave her little information about where she was. The floor was hard-packed dirt and smelled of urine and feces. She wore a torn shirt and the dark pants women wore beneath their burkas.
Voices outside the rough wooden door made her tense and her body cringe.
She wasn’t sure why she was there, but those voices inspired an automatic response of drawing deep within, preparing for additional beatings and torture.
What she had done to deserve it, she couldn’t remember. Everything about her life was a gaping, useless void.
The door jerked open. A man wearing the camouflage uniform of a Syrian fighter and a black hood covering his head and face stood in the doorway with a Russian AK-47 slung over his shoulder and a steel pipe in his hand.
Her body knew that pipe. Every bruise, every broken rib screamed in pain. She bit down hard on her tongue to keep from letting those screams out. Scrambling across the floor, she moved to the farthest corner of the stinking room and crouched, ready to fight back. “What do you want?” she said, her voice husky, her throat dry.
The man shouted, but strangely, not in Syrian Arabic. He shouted in Russian. “Who are you? Why are you here? Who sent you?”
Her mind easily switched to the Russian language, though she couldn’t remember how she knew it. In her gut, she knew her native language was English. Where had she learned to understand Russian? “I don’t know,” she responded in that language.
“Lies!” the man yelled and started toward her, brandishing the steel rod. “You will tell me who you are or die.”
She bunched her legs beneath her, ready to spring.
Before he made it halfway across the room an explosion sounded so close, the ground shook, the walls swayed and dust filled the air. Another explosion, even closer, shook the building again.
The man cursed, spun and ran from the room, slamming the door shut behind him.
Her strength sapped, she slumped against the wall, willing the explosions to hit dead-on where she stood to put her out of her misery. She didn’t think she would live through another beating, which was sure to come, because she didn’t have the answers the man wanted. No matter how hard she tried to think, she couldn’t remember anything beyond waking up in her tiny cell, lying facedown in the dirt.
Another explosion split the air. The wall beside her erupted, caving into the room. She was thrown forward, rubble falling on and around her. Dusty light spilled into the room through a huge hole in the wall.
Pushing the stones, sticks and dirt away from her body, she scrambled to her feet and edged toward the gap. The explosion had destroyed the back of the building in which she’d been incarcerated. No one moved behind it.
Climbing over the rubble, she stuck her head through the hole and looked right and left at a narrow alley down below.
At the end of the alley was
