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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.
