She awoke in her parent’s basement back in sweet ol’ suburban Columbus, Ohio. Lying on the ground, for some reason. The television room dark, and with dirt floors. Aside from that everything was normal. She could feel the cool of the ground as she shifted her body, curling onto her side. Propping up on an elbow, she realized that she was much older. Her body felt the weight of years, the aches and pains. Maybe some bruises. How’d she get them?

The story in her mind felt incomplete. It scared her, how strange the basement had become. How strange her body felt. Then, far off, she heard the distant muddle of voices. Men. Arabic. A stale taste in her mouth, like metal. Her ears ringing again.

When the sound and the pressure went away, she could hear something like an air raid siren. The blast of an explosion prompted a startled yelp, and she instinctively ducked her head and covered it with her arms. Heart pounding, she heard another, and then one more, followed by the loud pop-pop-pop of automatic gunfire. Eyes wide, her pulse racing, fear pulsed through her. She wasn’t home. She was in Afghanistan—a soundscape of a place very far from Columbus.

The fear washed in and made her weak and sick to her stomach. Sophia got on all fours, her head stooped down to facilitate the rhythmic spasms of her vomiting the variously digested meal from the mansion. She heaved twice, spat, and that was it.

She collapsed back down to the ground, her body trembling with the fear of the unknown as her mind struggled to grapple with the situation. With how she got there. With where the hell she was. Inside some windowless tomb. Dirt floors and walls. She wanted to hide but needed to escape.

Out of a growing sense of desperation, she crawled to the nearest wall and clawed at it like an animal before regaining at least some of her senses. Senses enough to follow that wall to a corner, back in it, sit in the corner, and look out to where she thought she saw light seeping in. A dim blue, like the early night sky, or morning sky, coming through beneath the slit of door.

There was no furniture in the room. When her breathing escalated into a frantic panic, she heard the maddening sound of her own hyperventilating echo off the walls. That was what scared her most, more than anything else, the sound of her panic bouncing back into her. Her alone with it. Her alone and waiting.

She wondered how long she’d be alone. And who would be the one to enter the room. And what their intentions were. And if they were good or bad or ambivalent. She could do with ambivalent. Ambivalent would buy her some time.

She waited what felt like an hour, or maybe only minutes, and began to despise time. She suddenly had way too much of it, locked alone and sore and scared in this room.

Do something. Something, at least. Any little thing.

It was hard to even breathe now, the air feeling stuffed and used up. Sophia found herself taking bigger and bigger gasps of air, and still it didn’t take away the feeling that she was slowly suffocating in the thick air and darkness.

Do something.

It took her that long to finally will herself to crawl along that disgusting dirt wall, her hands scratching with it, until Sophia finally arrived to where the light was the brightest. Where she thought would be a door. She pressed on the wooden board but it did nothing. No movement, no give. No escape.

She tried harder, leaning her weight into it in sways, then standing on her feet and launching her body into the wooded slat that was her door to the outside world. Whatever that would be. She didn’t care. She just wanted escape.

But there was none.

She resorted to mad screaming. Hysterical wailing. Until the door opened and man entered, grabbing her calmly, but firmly and roughly and forcing her back to the corner. He pushed her, Sophia’s body flying back through the dark and landing against her dirt wall. White flashes of light burst in front of her eyes as her head hit the wall. She yelped in pain. Then there was the sound of plastic, a tray placed on the ground. Another man had walked in, his silhouette in the doorway even brighter. He had leaned down and placed a tray on the ground. What the fuck was it? And then he slid it forward and said, “Eat.”

He left soon after, the same way he came, wordless and dark.

Eat.

The last thing she wanted to do was eat. Unless it was the face of her captor. She could scratch and claw and eat that if she had to, stab his eyes out with her fingers. No other weapon. Maybe the tray.

Maybe she could use the tray as a weapon or whatever else was on it. She suddenly discovered her appetite, aside from the appetite for revenge. The idea that the plate might just offer some help. She feigned an appetite, scrambling over quick to feel in the dark what they’d given her. A pile of rice. A plastic water bottle. Nothing else. Fine. She would wait to see what else they might bring her. She would wait to figure it out. She would figure it out. She would live.

The siren again, its sound wafting in somehow from the outside world. Only this time the siren was the evening prayer. The call to prayers undulated over the city, a breeze carrying parts of it away. If she still wanted to escape, now would be the time, with the men kneeling over and praying, their minds delving into prayer, their senses abandoned, concentrating on everything but the physical world. Everything but her.

But how would she escape?

The door was too sturdy, and likely guarded—even if it was guarded by a praying man.

She felt around again, first along the floor for any odd tool she could use. The tray was too lightweight to do any damage to the wall, or to her captors.

She searched around for a rock, but there wasn’t one.

Then along the walls, she retraced her early exploration, this time stopping at what she thought might have been a weak spot in the structure. The dirt felt softened, perhaps from previous water damage. What lay on the other side of the wall was anyone’s guess. But it was likely a better reality then the one closed in around her in the jail cell.

Sophia began clawing at the softened dirt and plaster, but it only hurt and chipped her nails. She was likely bleeding, and making very little progress. It was also extremely slow progress, likely taking her a week to do what she only had time to do in a night.

She stopped clawing, her mind starting to wander onto the bigger questions. The who and why of her situation. The what the hell happened?

She had been drugged after the dinner, and then kidnapped. That was probably the easiest bit to figure out. But who did it?

The who . . . perhaps some group looking for a ransom. She almost hoped it was that. At least a ransom was a clear objective. At least a ransom could end in her release. Any other ideas, the darker ideas, she pushed away from her mind.

She returned her attention to the food tray. She had to make use of it. Her fingernails caked and cracked from scraping at the dirt walls, she needed something stronger. She swiped the now-cold rice from the tray and turned it in her hands. She tried to bend it. No use. No, she wouldn’t give up! She stood, slid half the tray under her foot, then pulled upward on it with both hands. It was an awkward position, but she put all her strength into it. She bent it hard enough to break it into two, the plastic snapping loud and forcefully between her bent hands.

She grabbed the side of the tray that had the sharpest end and used it like an extension of her claws, a plastic shovel, and continued digging into the wall. This time she was making progress, the claw digging in and then torqueing out by the flex of her arms, a sucking sound from the wall as the dirt broke free of its mortar and broke out, some of it crumbling against her face, some of it rolling back along the floor in a big messy pile. She wasn’t concerned now with hiding her escape like some patient prisoner with a life sentence. Her life may very well be only another an hour short, so she dug in harder until she felt something collapse. Something giving way for her arms. Suddenly, there was space on the other side. She couldn’t see it, but through her digging, through her hands, it gave way to open air. She pushed harder, her arms now going through, softer now, like dry mud up to her elbows. She scrambled onto her stomach and stuck her head through without thinking, just acting, just pushing through, just trying to escape. She backed out, ripped at the wall with her hands, making the opening a little bigger, enough to slide her shoulders through. She took a deep breath and then exhaled as she forced her body through the little space she’d created, squirming past a tight little hole until she could open her eyes and feel some sense of open space. Open air. Fresh air. Night.

Freedom.

She collected herself on the other side, taking account of her body, knowing she was in one piece and able to stand, able to run. Along the wall she jogged, keeping in the shadows, away from the bright moonlight that swathed the ground in front of the building. It was night, and the prayers were now echoing over the city loudspeakers. Behind her, she heard the sound of goats bleating, the bells around their necks filling the yard, and detected the smell of them and the night air. She felt just like an animal, driving forward with one singular purpose, finding her way along the wall until the alley opened up into a darkened interior courtyard.

Sophia creeped along the gallery to the corner of the house, where she saw it abutting a dirt embankment. That was it. She had to jump.

Feeling another wave of nausea and fear throbbing through her, Sophia willed her feet to move. Keep moving. Keep low. Keep steady. But the outside air, instead of re-energizing her, had somehow reminded Sophia of the sickness she’d felt earlier, how she went down in the first place. And when she moved faster, she could almost feel the edges of her perception blending back to the dizziness of when she’d passed out earlier.

Steady, careful.

Her only option was to jump down, and before the nausea and the fear could influence the decision. The ground disappeared beneath her feet as she fell through the air, then landed hard and ragged, rolling down the rest of the way to the bottom of the embankment.

She got lucky, jutting out her knee and popping herself back up to her feet momentarily, her legs racing now to fight back the pace and keep up, keep her center of gravity, keep her up, and Sophia ran, seeking solid footing, a heart-pounding and panic-induced scramble to safety, scrambling like a wild animal, racing toward the outside wall where a strong grip squeezed her arm. A strong hand, and then another one covering her mouth, squeezing her lips and her jaw shut.

The hand around her arm squeezed harder, and then yanked her down to the ground. In the darkness and the dust, she strained to see her most recent attacker, a large, dark shape, coming closer, and then a man’s weight on top of her, then the background glowing white with an explosion. She could almost see the light through his shape, certainly through the strands of his hair as he hunkered down over her, covering her. A protective white silhouette, her angel.

Her moment with her angel ended as quickly as the rat-a-tat of gunfire. Close gunfire, close screaming. Close panic. She could feel her angel’s heart beating against her chest, almost as hard as her own.