Reamde

The ship’s engines had started up some minutes ago, anchor had been weighed, and they had pulled out of the crowded cove and begun swinging around to the back side of the island, which seemed to be completely unpopulated. It was exposed to weather from the sea and it lacked a natural harbor, so it was probably accounted worthless. In this space belowdecks, the engines made a maddening racket. But as Zula cleared the bottom rung and touched down on the deckplates, the throttle was eased back to a low idle, just enough to make a bit of headway and keep the vessel under control.

Yuxia’s legs had been tied together at the ankles and knees, and her arms were pinioned behind her back.

A crew member came down the ladder after Khalid, bent sideways under the load of a five-gallon plastic bucket filled to the brim with seawater. A lot of it slopped out as he staggered across the cabin, but when he set it on the deck in front of Yuxia, it was still filled to within a couple of inches of the top.

“Stop,” Zula said, “this is just totally—”

“Unnecessary. Yes. I just finished saying that,” Jones said. “For you and me, yes. And for her, certainly. But it seems terribly important for everyone else.”

Khalid had moved around behind Yuxia, and for a moment the tableau presenting itself before Zula’s eyes looked just like one of those grainy webcam videos in which a helpless hostage gets butchered.

But this was not to be one of those. Not exactly. “Your friend!” Khalid announced, and then nodded to the men standing to either side of Yuxia. They converged on her and, in a display of clumsiness and ineptitude that would have been funny in other circumstances, eventually managed to get her turned upside down, feet in the air, head down, whereupon they maneuvered her head into the bucket. Displaced water flooded over the rim and washed across the deck.

“No,” Zula said quietly.

“Think of it as a performance,” said Jones.

“Please tell them to stop it,” Zula said.

“You misunderstand,” Jones went on. “You are the one who needs to be performing. They want to reduce you to blubbering hysteria. And the longer you continue to play it cool, the longer she goes without oxygen.”

Zula launched herself forward and almost made it. Jones kicked out and tripped her. She fell full-length across the deck, her outstretched right hand only a few inches from the base of the bucket. She gathered herself to spring forward again, but a booted foot descended and trapped her hand. She twisted and looked up into the face of Khalid, staring directly down at her with a look of fascinated ecstasy. With her left hand she pawed at his ankle. He was wearing military-style boots with speed lacing hooks. One of them caught the bandage wrapped around her pinky; this spiraled away from her flailing hand and took the fingernail with it. His other foot stomped down on her left forearm, trapping it too. She had twisted around so that she was lying full-length on her side, both hands pinned, only inches away from the bucket within which Yuxia was now struggling for her life, her nicely cut black hair washing against the translucent plastic as she thrashed to and fro trying to knock it over, the surface of the water burbling as her lungs emptied.

Zula was not feeling anything like what they wanted her to feel. She simply wanted to kill them. And had it not been for Jones’s helpful suggestion, she might have failed to give them the performance they wanted: the only thing that could save Yuxia’s life. But a couple of the details—Yuxia’s swimming hair, and the blood streaming freely from the end of Zula’s pinky—were enough to send Zula over the edge, into some kind of community-theater method-acting headspace in which she finally let go of all the grief and rage that had been accumulating in her emotional buffer during the last several days and let herself fly out of control and degenerate into the weeping, wailing, messed-up, out-of-control basket case that these guys apparently wanted to see.

She understood what Jones had been trying to tell her. These men needed to know that she was broken. Because only then could they trust her.

Which raised the question: Trust her to do what? Because if they just wanted to kill her, well …

What could Zula possibly do for these men that would be worth all of this trouble?

“Please, please, please,” she heard herself blubbering, “please, please, please, let her go!”