Escape Under the Forever Sky (8 page)

“No, it isn't my job, is it?” she said.

“Enough!” Markos snapped. “I will call when the time is right. You will do nothing until I say so. And, Dawit, remember that as far as the police know,
you
are the only person connected to this event. I wonder how many people are looking for you right now.”

“You would not dare,” Dawit said, so quietly I could barely hear him.

I held my breath in the long moment of silence that followed.

“Just be patient, my friends,” Markos said at last, condescension dripping in his voice.

A car door slammed, and I heard the crunch of dirt and gravel as the car drove away.

Despite the sweltering heat, my whole body felt icy. I had a very bad feeling about Markos. He seemed like the meanest one of the three, and he also seemed to be the one in control—not a good combination.

I paced back and forth in the small space, fuming. Whoever they were, if these people thought they could just sit around and take their sweet time dealing with this, then they didn't have a clue about the way things worked in the world. They had kidnapped the daughter of the United States ambassador. My mother wasn't going to just wait politely for
Markos
to decide when it would be a good time to talk. She'd make sure they got sent to jail for life after pulling a stunt like this.

Then I began to wonder. I'd heard that a huge number of marriages in Ethiopia take place by abduction. Sometimes the girls are even younger than me. I couldn't begin to imagine why or how that could happen. Would things really be different for me because I'm an
American
girl?

One of my favorite places to visit in Addis—okay, one of the only places I'm allowed to visit in Addis, but I would like it no matter what—is the National Museum. That's where the other Lucy lives, the one who's more than three million years old and whose skeleton is the most complete human ancestor ever discovered. They keep her in the basement of the museum, in this out-of-the-way section that looks like a shabby old rec room with cheap wood paneling and faded industrial carpet. You know where she is only because someone printed “Lucy Room” in thick black letters on regular computer paper and thumbtacked the sign to the wall over the doorway. Every time I see Lucy, she blows me away. She's so tiny and old, and yet we're the same—same name, same number of bones, same upright walk. I just sit on this rickety wooden stool they have in the room and stare at her and wonder.

Upstairs at the museum there's another skull from the same kind of hominid as Lucy. I asked the curator once why that skull was twice as big as hers. He explained that the skull upstairs was male. “Back then, miss, humans were more like apes, and so the
males were much bigger than the females, almost twice as big.”

“Wow, I had no idea,” I said.

“You do not know about it because Western people do not like to think their ancestors came from Africa. Western people want to believe they are very different from African people. But they are wrong. It does not matter whether you are African or American, Christian or Muslim. Nationality and religion are just politics. We are all one species.”

All one species. Except we don't always treat each other that way, do we?
My mental ramblings were cut short when Helena showed up with my breakfast. Her jaw was clenched, and she looked even paler than she had the night before.

“Here,” she said, handing me another plate of
injera
. She checked my water jug to see if it was empty.

“You should drink more. You don't want to get dehydrated in this heat.”

I didn't tell her I was trying to maintain a delicate balance between the amount of water and the number of parasites in my system.

“Helena, I heard you talking before. Why haven't you called my parents yet?”

“I told you already,” she snapped. “You don't need to know.”

Helena picked up my bucket. “I'm going to empty this. I'll bring you some leaves that you can use for loo paper when I come back with the bucket.” An empty bucket and some leaves. It was ridiculous how happy that made me.

Helena
. I bet that wasn't even her real name. Was Helena the name of one of her friends or a relative? Or maybe someone in a book? Knowing where she got the name might tell me something about her. My dad, who's an opera fanatic, named me Lucy for his favorite opera heroine, Lucia di Lammermoor. I thought it was kind of romantic to be named after an opera heroine until my parents finally took me to see the opera at La Scala in Italy when I was ten. That's when I found out Lucia is this completely oppressed girl who gets forced into marriage with a guy she doesn't love, goes crazy, and kills her husband. I asked my father if my name reflected his hopes and dreams for me, but he just laughed and said, “Stop
being so precocious. Opera is about the glory of the music, not the silliness of the story.”

My favorite Lucy is Lucy from the Narnia Chronicles.
The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe
is one of my all-time favorite books, even though I'm kind of too old for it now. I must have read the whole series at least nine or ten times.

I wish I could be Lucy from Narnia. I wish a huge talking lion would come and rescue me
.

A
FTER
H
ELENA LEFT
, I wolfed down my
injera
and about half of my water and got down to business.
Okay, Dian, let's investigate our surroundings
. First I tried the door, but of course it was locked. Then I checked the compass on my watch and headed over to the north wall of the room, the one Dawit, Helena, and Markos had been standing near. With them out of the way I could see across a football field of tall grass all the way to a fairly dense wooded area. The cracks on the east wall showed more of the same, and south was just grass and scrubby bushes. But when I looked west, I saw another building about twenty feet from mine. It had the same tin roof, but it looked a little bigger. I
guessed that must be where Dawit, Helena, and Markos were staying. Outside their hut I could see three dogs sleeping in the dirt, two brown ones and a black one. They were the kind of skinny, mangy, medium-size dogs you see running around a lot of the villages, and they'll rip your throat out in seconds if they think you've got something they can eat. Luckily, they were chained to a metal post.

With nothing more to explore, I lay down on my mat. The hours crawled by. The heat was stifling. Sweat trickled down my back and the sides of my face. Some of it got in my eyes, which turned out to be a good thing because the sweat helped loosen my contact lenses, which felt like gritty suction cups. After twenty-four hours with no soap and no toothbrush I felt absolutely filthy, and I'm sure I smelled even worse, but those were the least of my problems.

The heat must have been getting to the animals, too, because it was totally silent outside. No lions or birds. No wind at all. Even the flies and the mosquitoes were resting. But I was too jittery to rest. I tried counting prime numbers to a thousand and then making an alphabetical list of all the mammals that
are endemic to sub-Saharan Africa (
aardvark, aardwolf, Abbott's duiker
)—anything to keep from thinking about what was happening to me—but nothing worked.

I was lying on my back on the straw mat, busy calculating the percentage of the total surface area of the hut that each piece of wallboard made up, with a unit of measurement equaling one forearm, when the roar of a car motor broke the silence. I jumped up and ran to the opposite wall to peer through one of the cracks. Within seconds I saw Markos and Dawit pull up to the front of their hut in an old jeep. The dogs started barking, and Helena ran outside as the men were getting out of the car, screaming at each other in Amharic.

“What's going on?” she demanded. “What's happened?”

“The Americans, they will not negotiate.”
What??!
“They will not even listen to the demands,” Dawit said. “They say we must release the girl immediately.”

“There! You see? I told you we shouldn't have waited to call them,” Helena accused, “but you wouldn't listen.”

“Stay out of it!” That was Markos. He raised his
hand like he was going to smack Helena, and for the first time I noticed the rifle hanging from a strap over his left shoulder. My gut twisted.

“I will not stay out of it,” she shouted back, ignoring Markos's hand, which was now down at his side and clenched in a fist. “You know we only have three more days.”
Three more days???
“And then what? Have you thought about that? What are we going to do then?”

All the screaming was driving the dogs insane. It was hard to hear anything over their barking.

Helena pointed at Markos. “I knew you would screw this up!”

“I did not
screw up
anything,” Markos shot back. “They do not mean what they say. They will negotiate. The American government will not let the ambassador's daughter die.”
Die?!

“They let that journalist die,” Dawit said.

“That was terrorism.”

“And this is so different?” Dawit asked, his voice bitter.

“Of course it is,” said Helena. “You know that. This is a business transaction. A business transaction that Markos has so far managed to botch, I might add.”

Markos lunged for Helena, and everything turned into complete chaos. Dawit held Markos back, and the three of them kept yelling at each other while the dogs barked furiously. Finally, Markos shook off Dawit and shouted, “Quiet!”

My captors went silent, but the animals kept barking like crazy. I stared openmouthed as Markos stomped over and kicked the black dog, hard, in the head. There was a sickening crack like dry wood snapping, and the black dog flopped to the ground while the brown ones cowered together, whining.

Markos glared. “Bring it to the forest. The hyenas will take care of it.”

My hands were shaking so hard I had to ball them into fists to make them stop. I scrunched up my face and held my breath to keep from crying out. I couldn't believe what I had just seen. Markos had killed that dog like it was nothing.

The Americans won't negotiate
. No way. I refused to believe it. Mom and Dad would never, ever,
ever
give up trying to get me back. If the Americans weren't negotiating, it was because Mom couldn't, not because she wouldn't. Which meant . . . which meant I was
probably right about the drug traffickers and this
was
about something more than just money.

They're never going to let me out of here alive
.

I watched Dawit drag the black dog by its hind legs all the way to the trees. When he passed my hut, he looked anguished. But by the time he returned, he must have pulled himself together because his face had no expression at all.

Helena paced back and forth in front of her hut. When Dawit came back, he jerked his head in a “let's go” gesture. They walked off together in silence.