Livia Lone (Livia Lone #1)(7)
The men shoved her and Nason into the van. The interior was filled with children—eight of them, including Livia and Nason, some of them crying and babbling in the various languages of the hill tribes, others mute and trembling, their arms wrapped around their knees. The air was damp and fetid with the smell of sweat and urine and feces. There was a fourth man inside, too, and he pulled Nason and Livia in and rolled the sliding door closed behind them. The other two men got in front—one in the driver’s seat, the other in the middle. Livia fought her way to the window on the other side. She wiped a clear swath through the moisture and grime and saw the skull man give her mother the photo, then count out a stack of baht into her father’s hand. She shook her head in shock and incomprehension.
The skull man got in the van and they drove away. Livia watched through the streaked glass as her mother went inside, still sobbing. Her father remained, his eyes straight ahead, not on the van, one hand clutching the baht, the other rubbing his thigh as though trying to wipe something from his palm. The van went around a bend in the road, past the village’s rickety wooden shrine, the kind every village had to ward off evil spirits . . . and suddenly the hut, her parents, the village . . . all of it was gone.
She heard Nason behind her, crying, “Labee, Labee!”
Livia maneuvered around several other crying children and threw her arms around her sister.
“It’s okay,” she said, fighting her own tears and panic. “It’s okay, Nason. I’m here. I’m here. I’m here.”
The van stopped at two other villages and picked up five more children. Then they drove through the forest for a long time, gradually heading down the mountain. Livia had no idea where they were going. The men spoke Thai and sounded like they were from the city, but that was all she could tell. Amid the stink and the sobbing and the bouncing from the ruts in the road, she held Nason and whispered to her that she was here, that she loved her, that they would be okay.
“But where are we going, Labee?”
“I don’t know.”
“Why aren’t Mama and Papa coming, too?”
“I don’t know that, either.” She thought back to the conversation she’d overheard, the one where her parents had argued about the girls getting jobs—could this be what they had been talking about? But then why would the men have paid her parents if the jobs hadn’t even started?
Not really believing it but needing something to tell Nason, she said, “I think maybe Mama and Papa got us jobs. To make money, so we can buy food.”
She hoped that the notion of having something to eat would help, but her words only made Nason cry harder. “But why wouldn’t they tell us?”
Livia had no answer to that. She remembered how opposed her mother had been to the idea of jobs, and she felt a chill steal into her belly.
“I don’t know, little bird,” she said. “I don’t know.”
At midday, they stopped in a clearing and the men pulled the children out of the van. Livia stood in the tall grass and held Nason’s hand, blinking in the glare of the scorching sun, her skin sticky with sweat. She tried not to be afraid, but she didn’t like that they had stopped. The van was horrible, but she had quickly become accustomed to it. She wasn’t afraid of the van anymore. She was afraid of what would happen next.
The four men stood around the children as they unloaded them from the van, obviously intent on preventing any escape. But one boy must have been planning for this moment, because as soon as his feet touched the grass, he took off running. One of the men grabbed the boy by the shoulder, but the boy squirmed free and raced away.
The boy had gotten not thirty feet when a man popped up from the grass like a tiger and clubbed him across the face with a forearm. The boy flew through the air and landed on his back. The man hauled him up, slung him over a shoulder like a sack of rice, carried him back, and dropped him on the ground in front of the children. And then, with no expression and no sound, the man pulled off his belt and began to whip him. The boy writhed and shrieked, but the man continued, his expression almost bored.
Some of the children turned away. Others were crying. One threw up. Livia, without thinking, shouted in Lahu, “Stop it! Stop!” And then, remembering her Thai lessons, shouted it in Thai.
None of the men even looked at her, least of all the one whipping the boy. She watched, horrified, holding Nason’s sobbing face to her chest so she wouldn’t see, then glanced at the other children to see if anyone else would at least protest. One of them, a Yao boy, she thought, looked older than the others. Certainly he was bigger, almost as big as the men, though not as big as the skull-faced one. But he did nothing.
It went on for a long time. And then, as suddenly and dispassionately as he’d started, the man stopped. He looked at the other children, as though mildly curious about which one he would whip next, and Livia thought his eyes were as flat and cold as a snake’s.
If they had been deeper in the forest, Livia could have found one of the herbs her people used for cuts and pain. But in this grass, there was nothing. She wanted to go to the boy and try to comfort him, but Nason was holding her too tightly, still shaking and crying. So Livia stood still and whispered to Nason that it was all right, she was here, she wouldn’t let her go, they would be all right.
One of the men unzipped his pants and urinated into the grass, not bothering even to turn his back to them. Livia realized she needed to go, too. She didn’t want to ask permission—it felt like a bad idea, and besides, it wasn’t as though they would allow her any privacy. She imagined waiting, and realized she couldn’t. So she squatted, lowered her pants as little as possible, and peed. She kept her arms in front, covering herself as best she could, and stared fixedly at the grass, her face burning with shame.