Page 8 of Captured By the Pakhan

Raven

The Cabin, 8:14 PM

Thirty-one hours in, I have a complete inventory of the room I’m being held in, and not one thing in it that will help to get me out.

One door, steel core, opening outward — which means the hinges are on the far side where I can’t reach them. One window at shoulder height, ten inches by fourteen, and I could get my head through it or my shoulders but not both. A generator in a housing bolted to the floor. A chemical toilet behind a curtain, which they installed at some point in the last thirty hours and which tells me more about my situation than anything else in here.

Nobody installs a toilet for a person they're going to shoot tonight.

Four bottles of water. Three trays of food, two of them eaten, because starving myself would be a gesture and gestures are for people with an audience.

I've had the zip ties off since hour six. But I've been putting my hands behind my back whenever the door opens, out of pure professional spite.

The guard rotation is every four hours, and they're good — no talking, no phones, and the one who brings the trays in refuses to look at me. I've timed the generator cycle too. Mapped the ground I can see out of the window, which is all of forty feet of grass, a tree line beyond it, and the corner of the main house.

And the thing I keep circling back to, the thing that's actually eating me, isn't any of that.

Nobody's come.

Thirty-one hours. An agent down inside a hostile structure, comms cut, position known to five of her own people. There's a protocol for this. There's a whole apparatus for this, and I've been on the other end of it twice, and by hour twelve there should have been something — a knock on this door by somebody with a badge and a bad attitude.

Thirty-one hours and the loudest thing I’ve witnessed is the generator.

I'm working through the third or fourth version of what that means when I hear footsteps on the gravel outside, only these aren’t like the others. Too light. Too quick, and uneven — the sound of somebody hurrying who is trying very hard not to get caught.

The bolt goes back, and the door opens about a foot, and the boy who I’d stayed for edges his way through it sideways with a plate held out in front of him in both hands like it's a present.

He is, to put it lightly, extremely small.

Pajama pants and a sweater that's too big. He stops just inside the door with his back against it and looks at me with his chin up, obviously unsure.

Neither of us says anything for a long moment.

"Hey kid, glad to see you're ok." I say, then ask, "How’d you get past the guard?"

"He goes to the generator shed at eight." He says it fast, like he’s in trouble. "It takes him about four minutes to fill it and come back."

Four minutes. I've had thirty-one hours, and I've been timing the wrong man.

"Oh." I don't move off the bed; he's still got one hand on the door, and I don't want to give him a reason to bolt for it. "Okay. That’s — good to know."

He crosses the floor in four quick steps, puts the plate on the crate beside the bed that serves as a table, and retreats to the door again. I take a moment to look at its contents: chicken and rice and a bread roll.

"Did you cut this up for me?"

"Karina did. I said it was for me." He shrugs, wincing slightly. "I already ate."

"So you lied to Karina."

"...Yes."

"Good instinct. Terrible execution." I pick up the roll and wink at him with a small smile, attempting to stay friendly. "She's going to notice a whole missing dinner plate. Next time, take it off a plate that's already been served and leave the plate."

He stares at me, mouth opening slightly.

Great. Excellent. You're coaching a ten-year-old in the craft of deception. Good mentorship skill.

"Why are you telling me that?"