Awakening was like the reverse of a white light at the end of a tunnel. I was moving into the darkness instead of away from it. Everything felt heavy and thick. I was suddenly solid, slow, dim. And something smelled really, really bad.

“Looks like she’s breathing after all. I’m glad she’s not dead.” A voice swam into my mind—a woman’s voice, tobacco-raw and full of sarcasm.

There was a soft laugh in response. “Me too. I wasn’t looking forward to being locked in with a ripening corpse.”

I forced my eyes open, wondering if someone had glued them shut as I’d slept. A blurred form came into focus inches from my face—wavy black hair coming loose from a messy pony tail, and exotic, dark eyes in a brown angular face. For a brief second I saw beyond her skin to a soul that was battered and tired, but bright with an inner glow of strength. Then the glow fell away and all I saw was a young woman—little more than a girl—with worried eyes far older than the face they adorned.

“Smells like she’s dead.”

It was me that stank? Although as I inhaled, I realized I wasn’t the only one with significant body odor.

“Gah. Damn, did they find her sleeping in the sewer? Neck deep in animal carcasses? How the hell can someone smell that bad and still be alive?”

The voice came from my right—the sarcastic smoker voice. I tried to turn my head to see the speaker, but couldn’t. My neck was making alarming popping noises with the effort, as if I’d lain in this position for weeks and everything had locked tight.

“Knock it off, Sugar,” the woman in front of me said. “We all stink. And we’ll probably stink a whole lot worse before we get out of here.”

Where was ‘here’? My head was killing me. My mouth tasted like someone had filled it with salt and cotton balls. My limbs were beginning to twitch with a life of their own. I wasn’t sure if that was preferable to the frozen sensation I’d had a few moments ago or not. My sense of smell came fully on-line and I immediately wished it hadn’t. The air reeked of unwashed, sweaty bodies and diarrhea. And yes, I was one of those unwashed, sweaty bodies. When was the last time I’d bathed?

“She’s a junkie,” another voice said. “Scoring the next fix takes priority over personal hygiene, and it’s not like flophouses have running water and hotel-sized bottles of shampoo.”

Junkie? Flophouse? That didn’t sound right, or maybe it did. Blurred memories surfaced briefly then vanished—a favorite childhood movie, a book read a few months back, the rich sweetness of Boston cream pie, the warmth of a soft blanket. I frowned and tried to think of something more specific about my junkie-self, but came up with only these shadows. Was I a junkie? I couldn’t seem to remember. In fact, the last thing I remembered was…

Nothing.

Panic shot through my chest as I struggled to sit. I had nothing but vague emotions and fleeting impressions, not what I’d done the day before or the week before. Not the details of my childhood. Not my parents. Not anything about where I lived, the car I drove, or even what I looked like. Who was I? And where was I?

“Easy, easy.” Warm hands grabbed my arms, steadying me as the woman with the exotic dark eyes peered at me with concern. “You’re safe. No one here is going to hurt you.”

“Except for the guys. They’ll probably hurt you,” Sugar added.

Who? Hurt me? Something in my midsection twisted and I tasted bile.

“If you’ve got to puke, do it in the corner. And try to do it quietly. I don’t wanna hear that shit.”

Sugar again. I was beginning to sense the irony of her name, and couldn’t help feeling a twinge of amusement. But I did have to puke. Somehow through my gagging I was dragged into a corner where I dry heaved over a pile of very wet excrement. How long had we been in here that everyone had taken to relieving themselves in a corner? Had I been peeing in my pants, or had I arrived here after the rest of them? And where exactly were we?

Gentle hands held my hair, and the woman who’d helped me whispered reassurances in a soft voice. She’d help me. She’d keep me safe. The woman was just as dirty and smelly as the rest of us, but I appreciated that she’d assumed the role of my protector. I was so weak, so sick, confused and out of place in this body that felt like it was trying to turn itself inside out.

When I was finished throwing up, at least for the moment, I scooted away from the poop pile and propped my back against the wall. That’s when I started to shake.

“It’s gonna be rough for a while,” the dark-eyed woman warned me. “It’s cold-turkey, hon. Ain’t gonna be easy, but I’ll do what I can to help you.”

I reached out to grip her hand, holding tight as if she were my lifeline, my guardian angel. The feel of her skin against mine, the pressure of her fingers, the way her nails with their chipped polish dug into my palm…it grounded me.

“I changed my mind. Think I’d rather be locked in with a corpse than a junkie,” Sugar muttered.

“Shut it, Sugar,” my savior shot back. “I seem to remember doin’ the same for you a few times.”

“I was hung over, not coming down off a years-long heroin bender,” Sugar retorted.

Heroin. I looked down at my trembling arms, seeing the tell-tale track marks. No wonder I felt so sick. I might not know where I was or who I was, but clearly I was a heroin user, which meant the headache and dry heaves were going to be the least of my problems during the next few days.

“You’ll feel worse. Gets real bad around day three or four, but it’ll be better after that. Just hang in there.” I felt the woman’s other hand smooth my hair and leaned against her, my teeth chattering so hard I feared they might break apart.

“This is going to suck,” Sugar complained. “If they were going to grab a junkie, they should have brought some drugs as well—for us if not for her.”

“Well, they didn’t and I doubt they’re going to pull over to juice her up.” The dark-eyed woman commented. “Poor thing.”

Pull over? For the first time I recognized the swaying, the frequent jolt of what I’d assumed was a very small windowless room. We were in a vehicle in motion—one with very poor shocks. There were ventilation slats up near the top that let in a tiny bit of light, and an even tinier bit of fresh air judging by the hot, close stench of our surroundings. The rear of the truck trailer had a roll-up door that looked to be tightly locked down, and up front on the side away from the poop pile, was a much smaller access door—no doubt equally locked down.

The door seemed to swell from the middle, like the metal had suddenly become a balloon. I stared hard at it, convinced that if I focused I could break it open and set us all free—or at the very least get some much-needed fresh air in here.

“Crap, she’s burning up.” I felt a hand on my forehead. “She shouldn’t be running a fever this soon.”

We don’t have any medication for her. No cold towels, or even water.

Was that the dark-eyed woman’s thoughts I had heard? She was concerned I might die, worried that she couldn’t protect me as she’d promised. She had to help me. I was weak. She’d been weak once too, and there’d been people who helped her. Pay it back. And hope that in her time of need, someone would be there once again to protect her.

Heaven above, I must be running a heck of a fever if I was hallucinating and imagining myself reading other people’s minds.

“She’s gonna die, you know. I say we strangle her and do us all a favor.” Sugar crossed her arms, her gaze unemotional as it swept me. “Probably do her a favor too.”

The chorus of voices berating Sugar were drowned out by my resumed retching. I crawled back toward the poop pile, not sure if it was motion sickness, the odor of human waste and unwashed bodies, or the lack of drugs in my system causing my stomach to revolt in this fashion. It was all I could do to remain on my knees and to keep from falling into the wet excrement. No matter how horrible I felt, I knew my agony would be worse if I face-planted into the toilet space.

“Water,” I croaked between dry heaves.

“Hon, if we had any water, I’d give you some.”

The woman’s voice was so kind that I couldn’t help crying. Now I was puking acid out of the depths of my digestive system, and bawling my eyes out. Every inch of me hurt, and I couldn’t stop trembling. When I’d finally stopped vomiting bile, arms held me tight and rocked me as I shook and muttered half-coherent words in a strange language.

“What the hell is she saying?” Sugar’s voice seemed closer than it had been before. “Thought she was American. Don’t tell me we’ve got another foreigner here who don’t speak English.”

“It’s just the fever.” The woman’s hand was cool on my forehead and cheeks. “You sleep now, hon. Just sleep it all off. I’ll be here, right by your side, okay?”

I replied and it came out that weird language, as if I were speaking in tongues. Then I fell silent, and slept, dreaming of a world where I flew on wings of crimson and gold, a world filled with anger and sorrow and grief, a world I wasn’t sure I ever wanted to return to.

* * *

I’d been awakened by the truck coming to a stop. We’d sat, listening for something, anything to tell us what was going on. Sugar and the dark-eyed woman exchanged a silent, tense glance, then scooted closer to the side door while the other girls huddled together near the back of the truck. Doors slammed. There was a muffled, deep-voiced conversation, then a laugh that faded as if the drivers were walking away.

“Pit stop,” a girl in the back with spiky blue hair whispered.

Why didn’t we scream for help? Try to get the attention of someone parked nearby? I opened my mouth, only to snap it shut as the dark-eyed woman shot me a warning look. “Don’t. They park us way out away from the other cars, and if we make noise, we don’t get food or water.”

“And they hit us,” an accented voice added. It was dark in the truck, but I could see the girl who spoke was holding her arm at an odd angle. I was pretty sure the dark marks on her face were not just from dirt, either. “Last time…last time I scream and they take me out of truck to woods and hit me. And…what is the word?” The girl said something in a foreign language. Russian? It sounded Slavic, but I couldn’t recognize it.

Something buzzed in the back of my head. There was a time when I knew this language. There was a time when I knew a great many languages, but that knowledge was locked behind some wall, as inaccessible as all the memories of my past.

“They fucked you, and not with their dicks either,” Sugar said coarsely. “Probably got splinters all up in that thing.”

I winced. The girl really didn’t look well. She needed a doctor. That arm. The bruises. The way she sat angled against another girl up on one hip. She needed a doctor. Did these men not care if we lived or died? Did they not care that this poor girl was in obvious pain?

“Shhh.” The dark-eyed woman put a finger to her lips and inclined her head toward the side of the truck. Once more we heard muffled conversation, then the clank of something metal.

A few seconds later, we were blinded by daylight as the access door opened and a man tossed in a plastic jug of murky water and a loaf of white sandwich bread. The jug thudded to its side, the bread narrowly missing our bathroom pile. Everyone sat as if they were frozen as the man peeked in at us, obviously counting. The moment he closed the door, everyone sprang forward, frantically trying to be first to the bottle of water.

“Share,” the dark-eyed woman commanded. “Little sips, everyone. Pass it around and make sure everyone gets some. Tasha, too.”

I looked over at the girl with the broken arm, still huddled safely away from the others where she wouldn’t be jostled. The girl with the blue spiky hair took a swig from the bottle, then brought it over to Tasha, helping her to drink, handing it to me afterwards.

I sipped from the half-empty bottle. The liquid soothed my chapped lips, as I dribbled it into my mouth and down my parched throat. The water smelled like sulfur and iron, but nothing had ever tasted so sweet. I felt more stable than I had earlier, my stomach quiet in spite of the gnawing emptiness.

“Here.” The dark-eyed woman handed me a few slices of crushed, dirt-smudged bread. The other girls were cramming pieces into their mouths, unconcerned about the lack of any sort of hygiene. I stared down at the soft bread and frowned. Hungry people didn’t care about dirt. Starving people didn’t think about bacteria or disease. Food and water. The bottom slab of the hierarchy of human needs. For some reason it all felt foreign, as if these needs didn’t really apply to me.

“You gonna eat that?” A girl with a softly rounded face and a Spanish accent asked me, eyeing the bread.

I wasn’t hungry, but I knew this body needed food. Still, I handed her one of the slices, forcing myself to take a bite of the other. It was artificially soft with preservatives, becoming a mushy glutinous lump on contact with my saliva. Something inside me rebelled at the thought of eating this bread. I ignored it and took another bite, wondering if I’d be puking this all up in another hour or so.

“You’re detoxing really fast. Guess you weren’t as much of a junkie as I thought.” It was grudging praise from Sugar. And it gave me some hope that the bread and water I’d just consumed wouldn’t be coming back up.

Her words made me realize that I did feel better than I had earlier. I sipped the water, taking little bites of the soft tasteless bread and closed my eyes, feeling something bright deep down that seared through my flesh, easing the desperate cravings and the horrible flu-like symptoms. I still radiated heat, but it was as if the drugs and addiction were being burned from my body rather than sickness. Cleansed by fire. Only in my case it was more like cleansed by fever.

By the time I’d finished with the bread, my shaking had subsided and I felt less like I was going to vomit my insides out. Straightening my legs, I looked around and wondered how long we’d be parked here before the men started up the truck again. It must have been close to noon and sunny out, because the light coming through the slats was stronger than it had been earlier. The space we were in seemed to be the back of a box truck by the size and shape. There was nothing inside except the eight other women. No straps, seats, mattresses—only the smelly pile in the left corner and the faint light that filtered through the open slats near the roof. I wondered not only how long we’d been rattling along in this truck, but why we were in here at all.

What had I been doing before I got here? I searched my memory and came up empty. No, not quite empty. There was a very clear knowledge of things like what music I liked, how warm pavement smelled after a rain, that real bread tasted far superior to this mushy stuff they’d given us. But beyond that, I only remembered vague shadowy impressions of what my life had been before today. I closed my eyes briefly and tried to concentrate and got only guilt. I’d done something wrong. No—I’d not done something I should have done. I’d been weak and others had suffered because of it. And now I needed to suffer as well.

Great. I was a woman with a martyr complex, with no idea who I was, or the circumstances that led me to be locked in a truck with eight unkempt women. The likely scenario was that I’d been shooting up and passed out somewhere when they grabbed me and put me in with these others. But why? If this was a drug intervention, it was definitely not like the sort I’d ever seen on TV.

“Where……where are we?” I asked.

I was a bit embarrassed about my strange amnesia, but it was time to swallow whatever pride I had and figure out what was going on. Remembering the marks on the inside of my arms, I figured whatever pride I’d once made claim to was long gone anyway.

“Whoa, she speaks. And she speaks English.” Sugar took a bite of her bread. “We’re in a truck, girlfriend. Thought that much was obvious.”

“But where are we going? How long have we been in here? What’s happening?” I looked around at the other women. “I don’t remember much of anything.”

Understatement of the year.

“I’m not sure how fast we’re traveling, but we left New York City almost two days ago,” the woman with short, spiky blue hair told me.

“They tossed you in here with us early this morning,” the dark-eyed woman told me. “What town were you in when you last shot up? Might give us an idea of where we’re headed.”

I closed my eyes and tried to think of something, anything that might trigger a memory. Shooting up. Could I at least remember that?

Nope.

“I don’t know. I don’t remember,” I confessed.

The dark-eyed woman shrugged. “You were so out of it we thought you were dead. Must have been one hell of a bender you were on if you don’t remember what town you were in. Runaway?” She peered at me. “I thought maybe you were Kitten’s age, but you look older now that the light is better.”

“Junkies all look old,” Sugar announced. “She’s probably twelve. A couple more months on heroin and stores would have been offering her senior citizens’ discounts.”

“Her face doesn’t look like a junkie’s,” the girl with the Spanish accent said. “Her skin is beautiful. It glows.”

I blinked at her in surprise then looked down at my arms. The track marks were gone. All that remained was creamy-white, smooth flesh. And it did glow, as if I’d coated myself in some iridescent powder.

“You all came from New York?” I asked, my voice raspy, as if I were reviving long dead vocal cords.

“Yeah. They kept us chained in an old warehouse for a day or so before they loaded us up. One night some guy came through, herded us onto this truck, and off we went.” Sugar shrugged. “Mess’s and my pimp is probably raging around Soho, thinking we ran off on him.”

The dark-eyed woman laughed. “Like hell he is. Who do you think sold us to these guys? Probably for a twenty and some smack.”

Sugar spat into a corner of the truck. “Dick. I hope he ODs. It would serve him right.”

New York City. I closed my eyes and clenched my teeth, trying to force some kind of memory into my mind. An apartment, a boyfriend, a job, some flophouse—anything. But nothing concrete prior to my waking up sick in this truck existed in my mind.

Nothing except the overpowering need to suffer, to atone for my sins. I’d done something horrible in my life—something that had nothing to do with the vanished track marks on my arms. I’d been weak, and made a horrible choice, and that choice was eating my insides worse than the stomach acids and bile.

“What’s your name, hon?”

I looked up at the dark-eyed woman, having no idea what my name was. Thinking too hard about it only brought on a pounding headache.

She ran a hand over my shoulder. “That’s okay. Two of us don’t speak any English, and Sugar and I don’t exactly go by the names on our Social Security cards anyway. Keep your secrets, bury your past. We’re all in the same boat here.”

We weren’t. I would have gladly given her my name if I’d only known what it was. The throbbing grew in my temples, spreading down into the base of my skull as I contemplated the blank pages that told the story of my life.

“I’m Mess,” she added, “as in One Hot Mess. That’s Sugar, ’cause she’s so sweet. Over there is Pistol, Kitten, Tasha, and Lacy. And that’s Pillow, and Baa.”

They were all semi-indistinct figures in the dim light of the truck, but one thing was clear—they were all young. Most looked to either be in high-school or barely out of it. All were dirty, with filthy clothing and wary eyes. Sugar had shoulder-length platinum blonde hair and was wearing a tattered and stained little black dress. Mess appeared to be a mix of African-American and Asian heritage, with an angular brown face and long, wavy hair. Kitten looked like a preteen with soft golden-brown curls spilling down past her shoulders, and Pistol was the one with the spiked blue hair. Tasha, Pillow, Lacy, and Baa were clustered near the front of the truck—Tasha cradling her broken arm. They all had dark hair, but I couldn’t make out much of their features except for the fact that Pillow and Baa were curvier in build than the other two girls.

I nodded at each in turn, trying to appear friendly. I was vulnerable, a woman without a past on a truck bound to who-knows-where. I needed them. My life, my future depended on their assistance.

“What shall we call her?” Sugar asked, the usual cynical note in her voice. “Junkie? Red? New Girl?”

“She looks like that mermaid.”

That statement came from the one introduced as Kitten. She stepped closer, and I caught my breath at how very young she appeared—I’d thought teenager, but she seemed barely that with her soft curls and a heart-shaped face.

“Mermaid?” Everyone looked at my legs, encased in a pair of torn, dirty blue jeans, not ending in a fin.

Kitten smiled at me, looking sweet and innocent. “Yes. The Disney one. Ariel.”

Now everyone looked at my hair for some reason.

“Yeah, Ariel. That’s what we’ll call her,” Pistol said with a laugh.

Sugar snorted. “I’m not calling her a Disney name. Red. Her name’s Red.”

Sounded good to me. It was better than Jane Doe in my book. “So why are you all on this truck?” I asked, more wondering why I was on this truck.

Mess scooted closer beside me. “Sugar and I were working girls who got on the wrong side of our pimp and found ourselves ‘traded.’ I don’t know everyone’s story. The foreign ones were probably lured over with the promise of jobs. The other girls are likely runaways.”

“I’m not a runaway,” Kitten’s voice wobbled.

“Me either,” Pistol added. “And it doesn’t matter how we got here. All that matters is how we’re going to escape, to get out.”

“In a body bag, that’s how we’re gonna get out,” Sugar replied. “Do you wanna end up like the Russian girl? Or worse? We shut up. We do as we’re told. Hopefully once we fuck enough guys, we’ll be allowed a little freedom. That’s how these things work.”

One of the curvy girls from the back edged forward, the one named Pillow. “Maybe we’ll get arrested,” she said in a soft, Spanish-accented voice. “Screw enough johns and one of them is bound to be an undercover cop. Then we can ask the police for help.”

Mess shook her head. “Oh, girl, the cops won’t believe one word you say. They’ll lock you up for the night, then your pimp will come and spring you. Then he’ll beat your ass for causing him the inconvenience.”

“But most of us aren’t even eighteen,” Pillow protested. “I’m just sixteen. If I tell them—”

“If you tell them, they won’t do shit,” Sugar interrupted. “They’ll say you’re lying about your age so you don’t have to be in jail. They’ll call you a dirty whore. And when your pimp comes to get you, they’ll think you probably deserve the beating you’re gonna get. Girl, cops are not your friend. Getting arrested isn’t gonna be your salvation.”

“We just need to stick together,” Mess told her. “Look out for each other. Try to protect each other as best as we can. It’s not so bad. As long as we help each other out, we’ll be okay.”

“Not so bad?” Sugar laughed. “Standing on a corner and picking up five or six guys a night isn’t so bad. Being stuck in a room and spreading ’em for twenty to forty a day is the meaning of bad. We’ll be lucky if we can walk by the time they’re done with us.”

Kitten caught her breath and Mess tried to shush Sugar.

“What?” The blonde girl scowled. “I’m just telling it like it is.”

I frowned in confusion. “So they’re going to prostitute us out? We’re going to be in some kind of sex ring?”

Sugar nodded. “Damn right. They’ll stick us in a room and advertise us on a few internet sites. On the street, we did maybe five guys a night. We had a quota, but it was mostly just a money quota, not a guy quota. You could pick and choose who you wanted and what you’d do. Some girls went all basic and they’d need to do more to make the quota. Others would do kink and not have to screw as many guys to earn out.”

“Most pimps take a cut, but there’s a minimum you have to give them each night,” Mess told me. “The more you pay, the less chance you’ve got of getting beat.”

“These sex rings are worse,” Sugar added. “Like I said, get ready for twenty to forty guys a day. You don’t get to keep no money. You don’t get to pick and choose who you screw or what you let them do to you. We’re all whores now—the worst kind of whores.”

“I’m not a prostitute,” Pistol argued, the sharp edge of panic in her voice. “This is a mistake. I’m in college. I have a family, and friends. I’m not a prostitute. I won’t do it. I’ll just refuse and fight them. They can’t make me have sex with a bunch of random guys.”

Sugar laughed. “They can make you. Beat you enough, starve you enough, and you’ll be happy to have sex with random guys. Look at Tasha back there. You think she wouldn’t blow some nasty-ass guy to keep from having her arm broke, her face beat, and some stick shoved up her again? A few bruises and you’ll fall in line and do as they say. We all will.”

Pistol glared at her. “Guys won’t want to have sex with a beat-up woman, or a starved one. I’ll refuse. I’ll fight. I’m not going to be a prostitute, no matter what happens.”

Mess eyed her sadly. “Hon, the kind of guys who we’ll be servicing don’t care if you’re bruised or got your ribs showing. They just want to screw a girl, and some of them might want to add a bruise or two to your collection. Fight all you want, but in the end same thing will happen. It’ll just hurt worse.”

I caught my breath, trying to comprehend what Sugar and Mess were saying about our future—about my future. Grabbed by a prostitution ring. Runaways, girls-on-the-corner, girls lured from their country with the promise of a job… With the exception of Pistol, they all seemed to be high-risk. I guess I was high-risk too, as an addict. I didn’t want to imagine what kind of bottom-barrel prostitution ring this was that they scooped an ODing junkie off the street to sell. “Why me?” I asked, half to myself.

“Why’d you get nabbed?” Sugar snorted. “Damned if I know why they’d want a junkie. Well, actually I do know. You’re gorgeous, even with the weird hair you’ve got going on. Your face…your skin…you’re beautiful under all the vomit and track marks. That’s probably the only reason they’d take a chance on buying a girl who might die before we got wherever we’re going.”

I looked back down at the smooth, clear, flawless skin, glowing with a pearlescent sheen. Rotating my arm, I didn’t see any sign of the track marks. I didn’t see a freckle, a mole, a scar, or anything beyond smooth flesh and a dusting of fine hair so pale that it blended in with the skin.

“You are beautiful,” Kitten said, shyly reaching out to touch my hair. “Like a mermaid. Like an angel. So beautiful.”

“Don’t go getting all lezzy on us,” Sugar told her. “It’s gross enough in here without having to watch a bunch of carpet munchers go at it. Save that shit for later.”

“How’d you get your hair that color?” Pistol asked, eyeing me curiously. “I need to freshen mine every week to keep it blue like this, and red is even harder—especially that color of red. You look like a cardinal, a red bird, turned into a human. All you need is a set of wings to go with that red hair.”

I reached up to touch the knotted mess that was pulled back into a low, disordered bun and wished I had a mirror. Realizing how long the tresses were in their elastic, I yanked a lock free and pulled it in front of my face.

It was red. Red as in not-seen-in-nature red. Well, not-seen-on-a-human-head nature anyway. As Pistol had said, my hair was the color of a cardinal’s wing. Bright, bright red.

I’d clearly dyed it at some point, and recently if what Pistol said was true. What color was under the dye? I wondered why I’d chosen this particular shade of red. Given the color of the hair on my arm, I assumed that I was a natural blonde. Maybe I’d felt too monochrome with that hair color. Maybe I’d wanted something shocking to stand out in a life where I felt I’d never been noticed.

Maybe it had been on sale at the drugstore and I’d figured what the heck?

“Where do you think we’re going?” I asked, my voice still raspy from the vomiting and dehydration, and lack of use.

“Doesn’t matter,” Sugar told me. “When the truck stops, we’ll be herded out, cleaned up, chained to a bed, and sold like a piece of meat until we’re not worth paying to screw anymore. If we’re lucky, they’ll drug us to make it all bearable.”

Kitten choked back a sob and turned her head, her shoulders shaking.

“Cut it out. You made your point earlier. No need to keep harping on it, scaring all the girls.” Mess made a tsk noise and glared at Sugar as she put an arm around the other girl.

Sugar shrugged. “There’s one reason girls like us get grabbed up, and that’s to make a bunch of money for someone as sex slaves. Those foreign girls won’t know how to escape, and the rest of us, except for the blue-haired college princess there, won’t have anything to escape to. When this truck stops, we’re just gonna have to spread our legs and survive as best as we can.”

“Stop it.” Mess pulled Kitten into her arms, hugging her tight. “Just stop.”

“There’s no escape for us,” Sugar continued. “None.”

“No,” Pillow protested, the word rolling with her Spanish accent. “We can escape. We can always escape. It’s better on the streets on our own than living with someone who…” Her voice trailed off and my heart lurched as I mentally completed the rest of her sentence.

“We don’t know what’s going to happen,” Pistol said, eyeing the other girls huddled in the back of the truck. “We don’t know. There’s no reason to go scaring everyone and panicking ourselves here. Because we don’t know.”

The look on her face said she did know what was going to happen, and her vision of her future was the same as Sugar’s.

As for me, I doubted we’d be carted around in the back of a box truck for the rest of our lives. There had to be something planned for us, and I was pretty sure it would be unsavory. I might not remember anything beyond yesterday, but some time in my life I’d clearly read enough news to know a human trafficking operation when I saw one. I looked down at where the scars on my arms had once been. I didn’t feel any incredible cravings, only grief and guilt, but I’d seen those scars when I’d first woken. And I knew in my heart why, if not how, I’d woken up here. Penance. I needed to repent, to make amends for a past I couldn’t remember.

No matter who I’d been or what I’d done, I needed to atone. And I had a feeling that here, with these eight women, was where I was going to make amends. Here, with them, was my chance for redemption.