“Father, hurry!” Tanya yelled, panic straining her throat.

But Father did not hurry. Father dropped the lid back onto the crate, Clump, and pitch-blackness stabbed Tanya’s wide eyes.

Above, the bullets were cutting the house up like firewood. Tanya sucked at the black air and threw her arms about to orient herself, suddenly terrified that she’d come down here alone. Above, she could hear her mother screaming and Tanya whimpered below the clamor.

“Mother?”

Her father’s muted voice came to her urgently, insisting something, but she could make out only her name.

“Tanya! Ta . . . ugh!”

A faint thud reached into the crate.

Tanya cried out. “Father!”

Her mother had fallen silent too. A numbing chill ripped through Tanya’s spine, like one of those chain guns blasting, only along her vertebrae.

And then the hammering stopped. Echoes rang in her ears. Echoes of thumping bullets. Above her only silence. The attack had been from the air— no soldiers on the ground. Yet.

“Fatherrrrr!” Tanya screamed it, a full-throated, raw scream that bounced back in her face and left her in silence again.

She panted and heard only those echoes. Her chest felt as though it were rupturing, like a submarine hull fallen too deep.

Tanya suddenly knew that she had to get out of this box. She stood from her crouch and her back collided with wood. She reached above her head and shoved upward. It refused to budge. The door had somehow been locked!

Tanya fell back, gasping for air, stretching her eyes in the darkness. But she saw only black, as if it were thick tar instead of emptiness around her. Her right elbow pressed against a wooden slat, her left shoulder bumped a wall, and she began to tremble in the corner like a trapped rat. The musty smell of damp earth swarmed her nostrils.

Tanya lost it then, as if an animal had risen up within her—the beast of panic. She growled and launched herself elbows first toward the space through which she’d descended. Her arms crashed abruptly into rigid wood and she dropped to her knees, barely feeling the deep gash midpoint between her wrist and elbow.

Trembling, she swung her fists against the wood, dully aware of how little it hurt to smack her knuckles into the hard surface. Impulsively, as a course of reflex alone, she sprang every responding muscle and stood, willing her head to break from the grave.

But her father had built the box from hardwood and she might as well have slammed her crown into a wall of cement. Stars blinded her night and she collapsed to the floor, dead to the world.

CHAPTER THREE

Shannon Richterson had watched Tanya down the path, fighting the urge to run after her and insist she stay. She’d glanced back with those bright blue eyes twice, nearly destroying him with each look, and then she’d disappeared from sight.

She’d been gone for an hour when the distant fluttering caught his ears. He lowered the knife he’d been aimlessly whittling with and turned first one ear and then the other to the south, testing the sound carried among a thousand jungle noises. But that was just it; this beating didn’t come from the jungle. It was driven by an engine. A helicopter.