Chapter 1: Into the Abyss (9)
The descent nearly killed her.
Halfway down, the shale gave way beneath her feet. She slid, tumbling, scraping her hands and legs raw on the rock face, barely managing to grab a root that stopped her fall ten meters before a sheer drop. For a terrible moment she dangled there, swinging over darkness, her fingers white on the root, her injured ankle screaming.
She hauled herself up, gasping, pressing her body flat against the rock face. Below her, the slope continued downward—steep, but traversable if she was careful. Above her, the root she'd grabbed was already beginning to pull free from the soil.
She moved. Slowly, inch by inch, testing each foothold before committing her weight. The moon provided just enough light to see, casting the slope in silver and shadow. She was trembling, not just from fear but from the fever that still smoldered in her blood, the exhaustion that had accumulated over days of travel with minimal food and maximum stress.
It took her two hours to reach the bottom. When she did, she collapsed onto the riverbank, lying in the mud and the moonlight, breathing like a runner at the end of a race she'd never trained for.
The river was perhaps fifty meters across here, shallow enough that she could see the bottom in places. The current was moderate—not gentle, but not the raging torrent it had been in the mountains. She could wade across.
She stripped off her outer layer—the thin shirt that had served as a jacket, now more holes than fabric—and tied it around her waist. Then she stepped into the water.
It was cold. Shockingly, bone-deep cold, the kind that seizes the muscles and steals the breath. She waded in up to her thighs, then her waist, feeling the current tug at her with insistent, greedy fingers. The riverbed was uneven—stones and mud and sudden drops that had her stumbling more than once.
Halfway across, her ankle gave out.
She went under. The river closed over her head, and for a panicked, thrashing moment she couldn't tell which way was up. Her mouth filled with water, her lungs burned, her arms flailed—then her hand broke the surface, and she dragged herself upright, coughing and sputtering, the current carrying her downstream.
She fought her way toward the far bank, stroke by desperate stroke, her body moving on pure instinct now. She hit the shallows, crawled up the bank on her hands and knees, and vomited river water onto the rocks.
She was across.
She lay there, shivering uncontrollably, her teeth chattering so hard she thought they might crack. The lights of the town were closer now—she could see individual buildings, the glow of streetlights, the red taillights of a passing car.
Chinese territory. She was almost certain of it. The border here was marked by the river, and she'd crossed it.
Elyse pulled herself upright and staggered toward the lights.
It took another hour of walking—limping, really—before she reached the outskirts of the town. It was a small border settlement, the kind of place that existed primarily to service the cross-border trade: cheap hotels, noodle shops, convenience stores with their signs in both Chinese and Burmese. At this hour—well past midnight—most were dark.
She found a police station.
It was a small, unprepossessing building with a fading blue stripe along its wall and a night window where a single officer sat behind a partition. Elyse pressed the intercom button and waited.
The officer looked up, saw her, and his expression shifted from boredom to alarm. She could only imagine how she appeared—a skeletal figure in rags, covered in mud and blood and insect bites, shaking so hard she could barely stand.
"I'm Chinese," she managed to say, her voice a cracked whisper. "I was kidnapped. I escaped. Please help me."
The officer came around the partition, took one look at her, and caught her just as her legs finally gave out.
She woke in a hospital bed.
White ceiling. White sheets. The beep of monitors and the antiseptic smell that could only mean one thing: she was safe. She was in China. She was alive.
A nurse noticed her eyes open and called for the doctor. Within minutes, a young, tired-looking physician was examining her, asking questions she could barely answer. Her ankle was badly sprained but not broken. She had a low-grade fever, dehydration, malnutrition, infected cuts on her hands and legs, and the older welts on her back that made the doctor's expression darken with each new discovery.
The police came next. Two officers, one older and one younger, both looking grim as they took her statement. She told them everything she could remember—D-Zone, Shane, Ahab, the scam operations, the beatings, the other prisoners. She told them about Sylvie, though she was careful to omit details about her being anything other than a fellow captive.
The officers exchanged glances several times during her account. When she mentioned D-Zone by name, the older one closed his notebook and asked her to repeat it.
"D-Zone," she said again. "They called it D-Zone."
The officer nodded slowly. "We know about D-Zone."
She was too exhausted to ask what that meant. The officer must have seen the question in her eyes, because he added, with a gentleness that surprised her, "You're safe now. Rest. We'll talk more tomorrow."
Then he and his partner left, and the nurse gave her an injection that pulled her down into warm, dreamless darkness.
She slept for two days straight.