Extreme Danger. Shannon McKenna

      Sveti listened intently at the door of the private quarters of the guards. She could hear muted sounds of some sports event on their cable TV. She clenched her teeth and knocked. No answer.

      She knocked louder. The door was yanked open so abruptly, she sprang back with a yelp.

      It was Yuri, the one she feared the most. Yuri was tall, shambling, had stubble on his fishbelly skin, snaggled yellow teeth, blond hair hanging in lank ropes. He liked to pinch and grope, and his dirty, squared off nails left cuts and dents along with the black bruises. All the children scrambled to keep out of range of those cruel fingers.

      He stared at her, his shiny lips stretching into a wide grin. “Look who’s here,” he crooned. “It’s the Snow Princess. Did you miss me, beautiful?” He seized her wrist, and jerked her into the dim, fetid room, lit only by the flickering TV. A soccer match blared. The sportscaster chattering, the horns tooting, it all reminded her of Papa. He’d loved soccer.

      It was a match between Ukraina and a team from a country of dark-haired people. Italy, or maybe Spain. The dark team was ahead. The room stank of smoke, rank male feet, fast food grease.

      Yuri lifted the hand-rolled cigarette to his lips, dragged on it till the tip crackled and glowed, then wheezed out a cloud of sweetish smoke into Sveti’s face, making her cough. Tobacco and hashish. Aleksandra had taught her what that smell was. Among other things.

      “You like your new room, your majesty?” Yuri taunted. “Happy to be off that stinking boat? Want to show me how grateful you are, ey?”

      “Shut up, you degenerate,” Marina barked at him from where she lay stretched on one of the couches. “What do you want, girl?”

      Marina was a muscular, horse-faced woman with close-set ice blue eyes. Her bleached hair was chopped off in jagged layers, and hung dry and motionless as dead straw. She was hard and cold, but Sveti vastly preferred to deal with her rather than Yuri. Marina kept Yuri in check.

      “It’s Rachel,” Sveti said, struggling to pitch her voice loud enough to be heard over the blaring TV. “She’s got an ear infection again. Do you have any more drops? She’s been crying for hours.”

      She swayed on her feet, caught herself. She herself hadn’t actually slept in the six or seven days since they’d been moved from the stuffy cabins of that boat. They had rocked and swayed in a hellish infinity of nausea, vomit, whimpering misery, for weeks, maybe. Time had no meaning on the boat. Time had no meaning here in the concrete dungeon, either. But at least it did not plunge and heave.

      “That whining brat is always crying about something,” Yuri sneered. “I’ll come down and give her something real to cry about, ey?”

      Sveti kept her eyes fixed on Marina’s pale blue ones. “She’s hot,” she said. “It’s a bad fever. She could die.” She paused. “Like Aleksandra.”

      A blinding flash of pain as Yuri smacked her with his knuckles. She hit the cluttered table, but when she looked up, Marina was on her feet, rummaging through her stash of boxes, muttering.

      Sveti sighed in relief. Bringing up Aleksandra was a risk. She’d overheard arguments. Someone had been angry about Aleksandra. Someone the guards were afraid of.

      So, then. It was not in the guards’ interests to let the children die. It left her baffled, but it was something.

      Marina pulled out a glass bottle and sent it sailing through the air. Too high. Sveti leaped, scrambling to catch it. It bounced off the tips of her fingers and thudded and bounced on the ground, landing on a patch of gray, synthetic industrial carpet. It did not break, thank God.

      Sveti dove to the floor to retrieve it, trying not to cry. If she cried, it would be worse. She forced her stinging eyes to focus on the bottle. Amoxicillin. Yes. That would help. She started scrambling to her feet, and was forced down by a heavy boot pressing against the small of her back. She twisted, looked up into Yuri’s bloodshot eyes.

      “Don’t say that name again,” he said. “We don’t want to hear that name again. Or else you’ll disappear too. Then you’ll know exactly what happened to her. You want to know, Snow Princess? You want?”

      She was too frightened to move. He stared down at her, smiling, liking it. Something ugly and horrible flexing inside him, growing big and strong. Reaching out to her, like sticky tentacles that made her dirty and ashamed. Inside, where she was most vulnerable.

      She tightened her fingers around the smooth glass of the bottle, and twisted till she could see Marina again. “I have to go to Rachel,” she burst out, her voice high. “I have to give her the medicine. Please.”

      Marina tamped out the cigarette. “Let her go, pig.”

      Yuri’s laugh was ugly. “You like having the Snow Princess do all the work for you, ey? They picked a cunt for this job because you were supposed to be maternal. Marina, tucking the little angels into their beds, singing a lullaby. You’re no good for that. You’re no good for what other women are good for. So what are you good for? Worthless cunt.”

      “Shut up, Yuri. You’re stoned.” Marina coughed out a cloud of smoke. “Let her go, before I knock out all your teeth.”

      He did. Sveti fled down the corridor that led to the windowless, unventilated room where the children were penned. The din had abated. Rachel’s shrieks had dwindled to whimpers. Stephan and Mikhail had spent their energy as well. She was grateful for the relative silence.

      Sasha held up his precious pen flashlight for her. Its batteries were almost dead, but it still cast a watery yellowish light as she used the bottle cap to measure out what she hoped was the right dose for a two-year-old.

      Rachel choked and coughed and spat out half of the medicine on the sheets. Sveti was sobbing with frustration, fighting the desire to hit the child by the time she finally gave up. She curled herself around the little hot lump of Rachel’s shaking body, barely managing to stay on the narrow cot, to stare with wide, burning eyes into the impenetrable dark.

      Mikhail was whimpering, thrashing in his sleep. He would wake up with screaming nightmares soon. He wet his cot and his clothes with such monotonous regularity, it seemed the whole world, including Sveti herself, stank of piss. Mikhail was five, as far as she could tell. So was Stephan. Dimitri was ten, and Sasha eleven.

      Of the lot of them, only Sasha had been with her from the beginning, with Aleksandra, in that big, decaying apartment in Kiev. But Sasha wasn’t very good company anymore. He had stopped speaking a couple of months ago. The little ones had come later, after Aleksandra had been taken away. None could talk much. Mikhail and Dimitri seemed as if they might be retarded. It was hard to tell. She felt dulled herself, after the boat, after days in a hole with no air, no windows. Day and night were artificial; either the fluorescent lights were on, buzzing like crazed insects, or the children were left in the stifling darkness.

      No sleep tonight. Never, when she had to deal with Yuri. She shuddered with dread. Dealing with him made her remember everything that Aleksandra had told her before she vanished.

      Everything that Sveti had been so much happier not knowing.

      Aleksandra had been taken from her parents as a reprisal, too, like Sasha and Sveti, but she had been taken months before them. She was two years older than Sveti. Worldly wise, cynical. And very ill.

      She had been the one to point out what Sveti had been too inexperienced to see, after she saw how Yuri stared at the younger girl.

      She’d