But Nason wasn’t there. For a moment, without Nason to protect, Livia was paralyzed. There was another series of loud bangs. Something—a rock? A metal stick?—hit the outside of the box and made it ring like a huge bell. Livia backed up against the far wall. If something came through the door, she wanted to be as far from it as possible.
There was more shouting, more loud fireworks. Several moments of ominous silence. And then there was a huge bang just outside the door, and the door was yanked back and the box filled with brilliant sunlight, and then the sunlight was gone, replaced by fog, but the fog stung Livia’s eyes and her throat and made her cough and drool and gag. She stumbled for the door, choking and blinded. People smacked into her from both sides, but she kept moving, desperate to get away from the choking, stinging fog.
She tripped on something and fell to her hands and knees, retching. She scrubbed her eyes with the back of a hand, and for a moment her vision cleared. She was amazed to see that she’d made it out of the box. It was sunny, the fog was gone, and the boat wasn’t moving—it was stopped, on the side of the river, next to a platform with machines and buildings on it. There were men swarming everywhere, wearing plastic masks and black uniforms. They all had guns—long guns, machine guns or rifles like the ones she had seen on the fuzzy village television. Were they trying to take her?
Even choking and half-blinded, she realized she would never have a better chance to escape. She started crawling in the direction of the platform. Maybe if she stayed low, no one would see her.
But something slammed into her back and drove her to the ground, knocking the breath out of her. She craned her neck and saw one of the men in black clothes, a big man, standing over her with his foot on her back. She struggled and squirmed, but she couldn’t move. The man turned his masked face this way and that, occasionally glancing at her as his head swept left and right, the long gun he was carrying pointing wherever he looked.
There was noise everywhere—shooting and shouting and a weird, rippling wailing sound, like an animal shrieking but louder and unnatural.
Finally, the noise stopped. The big man removed his mask, then knelt behind her and pulled her wrists behind her back. She struggled, terrified, but couldn’t stop him. Something encircled her wrists—something flexible but also strong—and then tightened.
She tried to squirm free, but it was useless. All of it was useless. Why couldn’t she have eaten the bad food? Or just stopped eating, and drinking, too? She would never be able to help Nason, she would never even know what had happened to her. And now these men were going to hurt her, make her do more disgusting things, and how could she stop them? Her parents had sold her, and Nason was gone, and she had no one in the world. Her face twisted in torment and she sucked in a long, sobbing breath, and then another, and then the helplessness and emptiness and despair consumed her and she tilted back her head and wailed.
The man reached down and pulled her up by the shoulders. She didn’t even think about running. How could she run, with her wrists tied behind her? Where would she go?
The big man said something to her, but she just kept crying. She was so tired of gibberish, of people talking to her with words she couldn’t understand. All she wanted was to know where Nason was. And if Nason was dead, then she wanted to die, too. She didn’t care about anything else.
The big man gripped the underside of one of her arms and pulled her along to the dock. Through a blur of tears, she saw more people, and realized from their blue uniforms, like the ones on the Thai officers who had sometimes come to the village because of some problem, that they were police. The realization wasn’t heartening. She didn’t know these people and didn’t trust them. That they wore uniforms could be good or it could be bad. And what difference did it make, anyway?
Some other people from the box were already on the dock. They were sitting cross-legged, and, like her, their wrists were tied behind their backs. Other police were leading more of them to the dock, all with their wrists tied. Livia turned and saw two of the men who had been feeding them on the boat facedown on the ground, not moving, blood pooling around them. The police must have shot them. It didn’t make her happy, or sad, or anything at all. When they were alive, she’d needed them for food and water. Now she didn’t. So it didn’t matter whether they were alive or dead.
The big policeman said something to her again, but the gibberish only made her cry harder. He put a hand on her shoulder and pushed down, and she realized he wanted her to sit. But she didn’t want to sit. And she didn’t want to listen. So she resisted his pushing, crying uncontrollably. The man pushed more. Livia’s legs wobbled, but she wouldn’t let him push her down.