*

The Polish girl was a high-value item. They would risk no damage during transit. That was why she woke up in a dog cage.

The last she thing remembered she had been in the house. The great house, way up on the hill. Now, she was moving. An engine rumbled beneath her, and now and then, centrifugal force from a sharp turn pushed her aching head against one side of the cage or the other.

She pulled the curtain of her own platinum-blonde hair out of her face and tried to look around.

The van was windowless, dark. The only weak light seeped in around the joints of what had to be the back doors.

Stupidly, she called out to her friends. She called out to the South African girl, who she liked and trusted. But no one answered. She was alone in here. The van shuddered over a bump.

How had this happened?

For one valuable second, her adrenaline had spiked at the discovery of her incarceration, but whatever she’d been dosed with was stronger than anything her adrenal glands could overpower, and her eyes closed again. Her head sagged.

Stay awake!

She forced herself to look. And she tried to remember. What was the last thing, the last thing that happened before this?

It hurt to think.

The boy. He had called her. Called her away from the others, to speak with him.

And then?

Some sort of struggling. Something had been done to her. Had he attacked her? No. It wasn’t him.

The memory was so short, so fragmented. He’d called her down there, started to talk – so charming – then someone had done something that overwhelmed her, very, very swiftly, and then the memory went dark. But it wasn’t the boy.

On the other hand, had he tried to help?

No.

In another twenty minutes, she was transferred from the van to a deserted airport hangar. She screamed. She shook at her cage, but no one answered. Then she was carried from the hangar to a cargo hold, screaming all the way. The plane took off, and in twenty-one hours she was in North Africa, in a country she could not identify, among people who could not speak her language, or would not if they could.

Still in her cage, she was delivered directly to the smiling buyer. The first thing he did was stroke her platinum hair between his fat fingers.

Waist-length platinum-blonde hair, unblemished skin. They had risked no damage, and no damage had occurred during transit.

*
BAIT

The difference was a single keystroke. The legitimate exchange program could be found at www.exchangeprogram.com, and thousands of school-aged children visited it each year without incident.

The lure was a misspelling. It included an additional ‘e’ on the word ‘programe.’ Both the English spelling and the American looked close enough for it to be dismissed as a simple typo. Or ignored. It raised no eyebrows. It never flagged up red. Parents dismissed it. Kids never clocked it in the first place.

It was that simple. That was how they caught them.

Their intended target was sixteen to seventeen year olds, with special preference for those who looked younger than their ages, a package that fetched handsome returns in the great houses of Saudi, the elite clubs of Russia, the fleshpots of Asia – and everywhere in between. They were also the easiest to get. Parents were less hesitant to send teens on a trip abroad. Or perhaps they were just happy to have a break from them.

The simple ruse paid off. In the short time it was live, they received ninety-three unique applications.

Of those, some lost interest. Some had the interest, but not the money. Others never got around to following through. And finally, there was a vetting process to weed out the most overt physical flaws. The attrition ultimately left thirty-two teenagers of disparate origins, all of whom were old enough to be on the cusp of independence, yet by a twist of genetics for which the organisers filtered, didn’t look it. They packed their bags, bade farewell to their friends, and kissed their parents as they departed their countries, visas in hand and hope in their eyes, trusting implicitly in the organisation with the extra ‘e’.

Getting the kids to America was only the first part of the ruse.

*

THE SUN GOES ROUND THE EARTH

He’d nearly frozen last night. But they hadn’t caught him. And now he had the gun.

His head throbbed as he raised himself from the newspapers in the sharp morning light. It wasn’t just the drink or the aftermath of the dagga. It was the gunshots. A noise like mosquitoes still rang in both ears. And every limb ached.

The sunlight of a spring morning in Johannesburg warmed the old army coat he wore. There was the sour-sweat stench on it, as usual. But now also the copper of new blood stains. Not his, the girl’s. Some on his chest, some spattered over the brown epaulets. That was a pity. He’d have to scrub it. The coat from the South African Military surplus store had cost a week’s wages.

He rubbed at his face and looked about. The plan had seemed perfect. These things always worked better when you had a traitor on the inside; the girl. For three months, she’d been working behind the counter at the jewellery store, and now they trusted her. She told them when the mall guards changed shift, she told them which items cost the most, she told them where the keys were kept. It was all perfect – perfect – like the ancestors were giving them a gift.

Pity about her. He’d thought they’d maybe hand her around after the heist, but now she was dead and he was wearing her blood. They were all dead. He was pretty sure of that. Now it was just him and the ancestors, if they were still watching. And the gun.

She’d been first to die in the big shoot-out with the police, who got there faster than anyone thought, and she danced backward like a fish when the shots caught her.

How had they been so fast? He wondered whether the police too had a traitor on the inside, but only for a moment. A swig from his bottle of Three Ships pushed the question down in a swirl of throat fire. There were other girls, other gangs, other opportunities. And now he had something he’d never had before.

Barely breathing, he checked beneath the newspaper. It was still there. No one had stolen it in the night.

A quick scan around the loading area behind the stores, squinting against that offensive Johannesburg sunlight. There were men about, here and there. A few day workers in overalls. They loaded and unloaded from trucks in no great hurry. But no one nearby. No one paying any mind to the likes of him; just another homeless drunk emerging into the highveld morning from his cocoon of yesterday’s news.

He inspected the gleaming piece, turned it around in his fingerless wool gloves, careful to keep it beneath the rustling paper. Beautiful. Perfect black. Smooth, like an expensive thing. Wonderfully cold.

People who knew these kinds of things could say what kind of gun it was. He knew just one thing: he now made the rules.

They’d given it to him yesterday, told him it came from a housebreaking. Then  they’d smoked dagga together for courage, piled into the bakkie, and made for the mall. That was before the whole thing went to hell – for the others. He was still here. And one gun richer. Maybe the ancestors were smiling after all.

These things were a crap shoot anyway. Half the time, men got away with it. Other times, half got shot. So even then, your chance of living was half. Good odds.

The distant truck doors slammed shut with a clatter of iron, and one of the workers banged the side panel. The truck went into reverse, beeping.

What a fight it had been. They’d had the take in their hands, fistfuls of watches, jewellery, leather, even the money from the till, which their girl had opened for them, pretending to be surprised.

Then the loudest explosions he’d ever heard. Even through the wool of the full-mask balaclava, so loud it made your thinking stop. Glass shattering, men falling, shooting both ways, loud, loud, loud. The girl wobbled backward, dropping to the tiles with two holes in her head, and she still looked surprised down on the floor beside him.

Had to have been a traitor. No way they could have gotten there so fast otherwise. Maybe she was it, getting paid by both sides. Or maybe it was love. She had a gangsta boyfriend and whispered it to him one night late to make him love her more. Didn’t matter. She was dead now.