Hector Contrell comes in the black of night, and another girl vanishes off the streets and wakes up in a stupor in Islamabad or Birmingham or São Paulo. Some of the girls are kept. Some are designated for onetime use.

Anna Rezian is the next prospect. Her father is a plumber, works hard, comes home late and tired. Her mother, a cocktail waitress, comes home later and more tired. Only fifteen, Anna takes care of her younger brothers and sisters, tries to remember to look at her textbooks after she gets the kids down. It’s a hard routine for a girl her age.

One day after school, Addison’s blue eyes peer out from beneath his scraggly bangs and pick her and only her. That night she touches up her eyeliner, sheds the flat-front Dickies with the worn knees, checks the lighting. This choice, this moment, is going to be a portal to a Whole New Her.

But after she uploads the selfie, nothing magical happens. Staring at the image she has released into the world, she feels an unease begin to gnaw at her.

She decides to stop after the one photo. But Addison needs more; they’ve been requested from a buyer in Serbia. In a ganja haze, he catches her in the alley outside her family’s one-bedroom apartment. When his low-rent hipster charms fail him, he tells her what she’d better do. Big-shotting in the Crenshaw night, he lets fly that he works for someone who will hurt her and her family if she turns off the tap.

She stays up all night, trembling in the glow of her ancient laptop, clicking her way through the infinity of Facebook and chasing threads. Friends of friends have heard of friends who have disappeared. Over the top of the screen, she looks at her sleeping siblings and contemplates what it will feel like if harm befalls them because of her stupidity. She looks at her sleeping parents, exhausted after their long workdays. The chasm of guilt inside her widens by the second, pushing her further and further away until she is on an island of her own making, until her family members seem like specks on the horizon. Something awful is coming, either for them or for her. She makes the choice.

She sends new photos.

She stops sleeping. She starts plucking out her hair in patches. She cuts herself at school, hoping the pain will wake her from this nightmare. Maybe it’s a cry for help instead, each crimson line across her forearm a smoke signal released in hopes that someone will ride to her rescue.

Someone does see the signal. One of her classmates’ fathers, an older man with a cane and a fresh limp, finds her sobbing in the bathroom of a 7-Eleven when she’s supposed to be in homeroom. He gives her a phone number: 1-855-2-NOWHERE. A magical fix-it line.

She dials.

Evan Smoak picks up.