Chapter 16
I’m not havingthe day I planned.
Ha, ha. Understatement is such good humor.
“Shut the fuck up,” says one of the men who’s escorting me to the Rathbek border. I can’t tell if he sounds like a cartoon villain because he is a cartoon villain or because my hearing is going. Could be both.
Somehow, Guard Number One has mistaken my wheezing as a laugh. Who knows? Maybe it was a laugh. Maybe this is all very, very funny. Being in the woods in the dark—how is it still dark, by the way?—is a downright laugh. I don’t have a single weapon on me. No bow. No arrows. No knife. I didn’t even wear my woodland clothes.
It is funny, if you think about it, because I go to lengths to be prepared in other aspects of my life. I glow at people all day long at my think tank to fund policy research so that we can preemptively not have wars over water and food. I am so good at phone calls. I hired Delphi, who everyone loves without her even having to glow at them, and she does world peace all the time.
I would never walk into the woods without my archery accoutrements. And I would never never walk into the woods without Artemis. Without at least knowing that she was there, waiting to hunt me down.
Yet here I am, in these woods, on a mountain, without my archery outfit. I’m wearing a suit. Well, most of a suit. Slacks, anyway. I have a belt, and an undershirt, and nice shoes that are most certainly not fit for mountain hiking.
The other thing that’s not fit for hiking is my body. And these are not carefully maintained trails, no. They are mountain trails. Woodland mountain trails over a mountain that sits between Mociar and Rathbek. My two worst nightmares.
That’s not fair. Mociar hasn’t done anything to me, really. It’s Rathbek who’s doing a Rathbek on me right now.
“I didn’t say anything.”
“Shut the fuck up,” Guard Number Two says.
“But I?—”
“Do you know English?” snaps Guard Number Two. “Do you know what it means to shut the fuck up?”
“Do you know English?” I ask.
The third guard, Guard Number Three, says something that’s not in English but sounds like it means I hate this guy.
“We have English in common,” I mention.
Then my knee goes out. I fall sideways into Guard Number One, who hoists me upright with an irritated grunt.
“Sorry!” I say.
The three of them have a terse conversation around me. It doesn’t sound promising for my immediate future, but who am I to judge? Maybe they’re discussing how much I’m worth to the Rathbek government, such as it is.
Although usually—and I could be misinformed—usually I don’t think it’s a good look to be going around taking Americans hostage. Or, I guess, accepting American hostages who happen to wander up to them at the border and hand themselves over. Usually, that kind of thing results in an international incident. Sometimes, it results in a flurry of tense backchannel meetings, and the United States is down one facilitator.
That’s me. They don’t have me. Because I’m in the custody of three guys from the Rathbek army—or government, I’m not sure if there’s a real difference anymore—in the mountains between Mociar and Rathbek, and I’m probably not going to make it out.
It’s worse than it was on the plane. It’s worse than the time I had three episodes in one day. And it’s getting worse with every step we take.
In one sense, that should be promising. If this hinges on my proximity to Artemis, I should have a chance at survival once I’m near her again.
If I’m near her again.
In another sense, it’s promising in that the farther away from Artemis I get, the more likely I am to die.
I don’t want to die, but I also don’t want to be tortured or whatever at the hands of the Rathbek government. If I have to be forcibly separated from Artemis, I’d rather be dead when it’s happening.
“Would it be better if I was a girl?” I ask the nearest soldier. Guard Number Two, I think. “Or are you just pissed because there’s only one of me?”
The reason they don’t have a bunch of women and girls to escort across the border is because five minutes ago—or fifteen minutes, or an hour, I’m losing my grip on time—I walked out of that building through a side door with explicit instructions to get back in the car, go to the capital city, and inform the president of Mociar that the opposition party would continue to hold the women and girls as an earnest guarantee until the president installed a high-ranking member of the opposition party as the vice president. Once that was done, they could negotiate a peaceful transfer of power during which they would probably not kidnap any more women and girls.
But guess what? I didn’t do that.
I took initiative, because I didn’t like the way earnest guarantee sounded. Like they were putting a down payment on a house, only the house was people. Women. And girls.
And having been a person who was once an earnest guarantee to lots of sick-fuck men who got off on that sort of thing, I didn’t think that was the way to go.
So I went to the clutch of guys in Rathbek military uniforms, and I noticed that they were not paying attention to me.
And the reason they were not paying attention to me was that a good number of people had shown up in the woods beyond the tent, and they were trying to decide whether they could shoot them all without the rest of the world noticing or if they should let it slide.
As I understand it, the main debate was over who would take the fall for either shooting a good number of civilians or losing the hostages, who would be sold off to fund more terrorism. Sorry—more campaigning on behalf of the opposition party.
A couple of things were in my favor. First, there weren’t a lot of Rathbek military uniforms because then they’d show up on satellites, and it’s a lot harder to explain, say, a battalion in another country’s territory than it is to explain a small group of soldiers who had gone too far afield during a training exercise.
They also looked like they didn’t particularly want to be on the training exercise. Their uniforms were well on the way to worn out, and more than a few of them looked as if they might start questioning the prospect of escorting a group of women and girls across the border to sell them.
The thing about military dictatorships is that the military dictatorship part is usually more interested in enriching the military dictatorship than it is in earning the loyalty of its soldiers. It’s not a good long-term strategy. It means that, given the right motivation, those soldiers could be persuaded to do something other than what they were sent to a neighboring country to do.
I glowed the hell out of them. I glowed so much. And I made lots of great points about my value. Namely, that I am rich, and I have a rich family who would pay handsomely for my safe return, and that I have many connections with the United States government. The American people love a story of triumph over evil—in this case framed as misguided kidnappers—so it’s possible the Rathbek government could get something out of that, too, and wouldn’t that be nice?
Simpler than escorting women and children who do not want to be escorted across a mountain, anyway.
My other knee gives out, and I’m caught by two guards again. They are not happy about my decreasing ability to walk.
“What good are you if you die on the mountain?” one of them growls.
“I know.” I can hardly catch my breath, and I’m not the one doing most of the work of walking. “It would be a real shame. It would be for the best if you kept me alive.”
“It would have been for the best if I came back with something of value,” he answers.
“Like assets? Because, look. You don’t want to be in the human trafficking business. It’s corrosive to the soul.”
“I don’t have a soul,” he says. “And I don’t care about those girls. They were in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
Okay. So he doesn’t have a soul.
Maybe that’s why I was in that room, with those men. Maybe I was in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Or maybe, when you have three people who love each other, you can have all kinds of fun with power dynamics. They could get my mother to do anything if it meant keeping me and Ares alive. They could get me to do anything if it meant?—
Well. It didn’t mean, did it? It didn’t mean anything.
It meant a lot of profit for some people, right up until my mother died and they lost all three of us.
And Ares and I got a new family, and I got Artemis. And I thought that if I ran fast enough and hard enough, I’d be able to escape where I came from and it would be clinging to me like so many shadows.
But men like my own personal shadow—introduced to me as Colonel Paul, as though I’d ever give him the respect of a rank—are like cockroaches. They keep coming back. They’re very difficult to kill.
I should’ve killed him when we were alone in that building.
Except! I didn’t have any weapons, other than my bare hands, and I don’t think I’d have had the strength to strangle him. Never follow my lead and become a good-faith negotiator. It always screws you over in the end.
I wonder if Artemis has a knife on her.
The thing about knives is?—
Well, the thing about killing is?—
If you’re going to kill the devil, you have to kill him. That’s how the saying goes, right? You have to really kill him. You can’t wound him and piss him off in front of all his buddies. That won’t go in your favor.
The mountains spin. It’s so hot.
“What are you hoping to get out of all this?” I ask in the direction of the nearest soldier-shaped blob.
It takes a lot of energy to ask the question, and I’m rewarded for it by being hauled into a clearing—or somewhere off the path—and punched in the face.
Ouch.
It hurts less than I thought it was, but that’s because my whole head is on fire.
I’ve never had a fever this high, and somehow, it keeps getting worse.
Well, this is it, then. This is how I die.
The thought brings me a fleeting sense of peace.
It’s not peaceful to think about how furious Artemis is going to be.
“Is it money?” My lip is really swollen. I didn’t realize he’d gotten me in the lip.
“Shut up the fuck up,” Guard Number Three says.
“Is that all you can add to the conversation?”
One of them drops me at the base of a tree. I push myself against it as hard as I can. Won’t be able to sit up like this forever, but it’s nice for now.
The three guards confer, standing so close they’re almost on top of me. I don’t think I’d understand them even if they were speaking English.
Oh, now the sun is starting to rise. It’s the dullest, most resentful sunrise I’ve ever seen. It makes the soldiers look washed-out and tired. Rathbek isn’t taking good care of them, that’s for sure, and eventually they’ll get sick of it.
And then what do you get?
A revolution.
Or another military coup.
Whatever people are feeling at the time.
And after that, the great freedom eagle of the United States will swoop in and save the day. We’ll find a way to fight for democracy, or at least for trade agreements. And if innocent women and children were harmed, then so be it.
But not the women and children in the tents, because they went directly into the arms of their families, who had already put together a plan to get them out.
It’s not the worst case. The Rathbek military didn’t leave with nothing. They got me!
But I left Artemis.
I don’t know what the situation is back at that base, but it can’t be good. If Artemis is mad enough, she’ll threaten people with her bow. She might even shoot them with arrows. She’s shot me with an arrow, and she likes me.
“You might have to carry me if you want to get me there alive.” Getting harder to talk. “I’m probably not worth much, but I have to be worth more alive than I would be as a corpse.”
“Shut. Up,” Guard Number One says, sounding exhausted.
They move a few steps farther away.
When they step back again, I’ll be dead.
I feel…
Very bad.
As I’m accepting my fate—it’s not like I can get up and rescue myself—the breeze shifts.
I catch the scent of Artemis in the air. Clean. Sweet. Pure. Like a dress that’s been drying on a line in the sun. Like a Christmas cookie. Like her.
Now I know I’m dying. Because she’s not here, and I can breathe her in and feel her in the air.
Artemis can’t be here. They didn’t just let her walk out. She’s probably still in that building, arguing with the colonel and trying to figure out what he did with me. Or maybe they’ve taken her into custody so they can use her as a bargaining chip. That would be an enormous mistake. Someone in that camp will have figured out that she’s Zeus’s daughter by now.
This isn’t such a bad way to die, feeling like she’s close.
There’s a quiet sound, and Guard Number Two’s eyes go wide. He does this pathetic little gurgle and collapses. His friends don’t notice he’s going down until he’s a pile in the leaves, an arrow sticking out of his back.
”Uh oh.” My throat hurts. ”You”re in trouble now.”