The car rolls to a stop.
“Mila,” she says, giving me a nudge. “Are we getting close? Does this area look right?”
I lift my head from her shoulder and stare out the window. We have stopped beside a dry riverbed, where trees grow stunted, tormented. Beyond are brown hills studded with boulders. “I don’t know,” I tell her.
“Does it look like the place?”
“Yes, but…” I keep staring, forcing myself to remember what I have tried so hard to forget.
One of the men in the front seat looks back at us. “That’s where they found the trail, on the other side of that riverbed,” he says. “They caught a group of girls coming through here last week. Maybe she should get out and take a look. See if she recognizes anything down there.”
“Come, Mila.” The woman opens the door and gets out, but I do not move. She reaches into the car. “It’s the only way we can do this,” she says softly. “You need to help us find the spot.” She holds out her hand. Reluctantly, I take it.
One of the men leads us through the tangle of scrub brush and trees, down a narrow trail and into the dry riverbed. There he stops and looks at me. He and the woman are both watching me, waiting for my reaction. I stare at the bank, at an old shoe lying dry and cracked in the heat. A memory shimmers, then snaps into focus. I turn and look at the opposite bank, which is cluttered with plastic bottles, and I see a scrap of blue tarp dangling from a branch.
Another memory locks in place.
This is where he hit me. This is where Anja stood, her foot bleeding in her open-toed shoe.
Without a word, I turn and climb back up the riverbank. My heart is racing, and dread clamps its fingers around my throat, but I have no choice now. I see her ghost, flitting just ahead of me. A wisp of windblown hair. A sad, backward glance.
“Mila?” the woman calls.
I keep moving, pushing my way through the bushes, until I reach the dirt road. Here, I think. This is where the vans were parked. This is where the men waited for us. The memories are clicking faster now, like terrible flashes from a nightmare. The men, leering as we undress. The girl shrieking as she is shoved up against the van. And Anja. I see Anja, lying motionless on her back as the man who has just raped her zips up his pants.
Anja stirs, staggers to her feet like a newborn calf. So pale, so thin, just a shadow of a girl.
I follow her, the ghost of Anja. The desert is strewn with sharp rocks. Thorny weeds push up from the dirt, and Anja is running across them, stumbling on bloody feet. Sobbing, reaching toward what she thinks is freedom.
“Mila?”
I hear Anja’s panicked gasps, see the blond hair streaming loose around her shoulders. Empty desert stretches before her. If she can just run fast enough, far enough…
The gunshot cracks.
I see her pitch forward, the breath knocked out of her, and her blood spills onto warm sand. Yet she rises to her knees and crawls now across thorns, across stones that cut like shards of glass.
The second gunshot thunders.
Anja collapses, white skin against brown sand. Is this where she fell? Or was it over there? I am circling now, frantic to find the spot. Where are you, Anja, where?
“Mila, talk to us.”
I suddenly halt, my gaze fixed on the ground. The woman is saying something to me; I scarcely hear her. I can only stare at what lies at my feet.
The woman says, gently, “Come away, Mila. Don’t look.”
But I cannot move. I stand frozen as the two men crouch down. As one of them pulls on gloves and brushes away sand to reveal leathery ribs and the brown dome of a skull.
“It appears to be a female,” he says.
For a moment no one speaks. A hot wind swirls dust at our faces, and I blink against the sting. When I open my eyes again, I see more of Anja peeking out from the sand. The curve of her hip bone, the brown shaft of her thigh. The desert has decided to give her up, and now she is re-emerging from the earth.
Those who vanish sometimes come back to us.
“Come, Mila. Let’s go.”
I look up at the woman. She stands so straight, unassailable. Her silver hair gleams like a warrior’s helmet. She puts her arm around me, and together, we walk back to the car.
“It’s time, Mila,” the woman says quietly. “Time to tell me everything.”
We sit at a table, in a room with no windows. I look down at the pad of paper in front of her. It is blank, waiting for the mark of her pen. Waiting for the words that I have been afraid to say.
“I have told you everything.”
“I don’t think you have.”
“Every question you ask, I answer.”
“Yes, you’ve helped us a great deal. You’ve given us what we needed. Carleton Wynne is going to jail. He is going to pay. The whole world now knows what he did, and we thank you for that.”
“I do not know what more you want from me.”
“I want what’s locked up in there.” She reaches across the table and touches my heart. “I want to know the things you’re afraid to tell me. It will help me understand their operation, help me fight these people. It will help me save more girls, just like you. You have to, Mila.”
I blink back tears. “Or you will send me back.”
“No. No.” She leans closer, her gaze emphatic. “This is your home now, if you want to stay. You won’t be deported, I give you my word.”
“Even if…” I stop. I can no longer look her in the eye. Shame floods my face and I stare down at the table.
“Nothing that happened to you is your fault. Whatever those men did to you-whatever they made you do-they forced on you. It was done to your body. It has nothing to do with your soul. Your soul, Mila, is still pure.”
I cannot bear to meet her gaze. I continue to stare down, watching my own tears drip onto the table, and feel as if my heart is bleeding, that every tear is another part of me, draining away.
“Why are you afraid to look at me?” she asks gently.
“I am ashamed,” I whisper. “All the things you wish me to tell you…”
“Would it help if I wasn’t here in the room? If I didn’t watch you?”
I still do not look at her.
She releases a sigh. “All right, Mila, here’s what I’m going to do.” She places a tape recorder on the table. “I’m going to turn this on and leave the room. Then you can say whatever you want to. Whatever you remember. Say it all in Russian if that makes it easier. Any thoughts, any memories. Everything that’s happened to you. You’re not talking to a person, you’re just talking to a machine. It can’t hurt you.”
She rises to her feet, presses the RECORD button, and walks out of the room.
I stare at the red light glowing on the machine. The tape is slowly spinning, waiting for my first words. Waiting for my pain. I take a deep breath, close my eyes. And I begin to speak.
My name is Mila, and this is my journey.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
TESS GERRITSEN left a successful practice as an internist to raise her children and concentrate on her writing. She gained nationwide acclaim for her first novel of medical suspense, the New York Times bestseller Harvest. She is also the author of the bestsellers Life Support, Bloodstream, and Gravity, as well as The Surgeon, The Apprentice, The Sinner, and Body Double. Tqess Gerritsen lives in Maine. Visit her website at www.tessgerritsen.com.
