BLOOD AND ASHES

The Cargo Hold

She learned to count.

It was not a skill she had expected to need. She was reasonably good at arithmetic, in a vague and untested way could calculate a tip in a restaurant, could estimate the budget for a month, could look at a receipt and know if it was wrong. She had never imagined that the skill she would end up relying on in the worst week of her life was the ability to count.

She counted hours in the van. She counted by breathing not reliably, because shock did things to breathing that she had not previously been aware of, made it shallow and uneven and sometimes absent for long stretches that she would surface from with a physical jolt, like falling in a dream.

She counted by the rhythm of the road.

Long stretches of smooth tarmac that felt like motorway. The periodic lurch of roundabouts or junctions. Once, a long slow crawl that might have been traffic or might have been a city. Once, a stop of forty minutes or more, where nothing happened and the air in the van went progressively staler and the young girl's hand in hers tightened and tightened until Anya thought the bones might pop.

She squeezed back. She counted.

When the van stopped and the doors opened, it was dark still or dark again, she wasn't sure and the air that came in was cold and salt-sharp and smelled of the sea.

The sea.

She had not expected that.

---

The vessel was not large. She couldn't see much of it, they were moved quickly, below decks, into a space that was below the waterline and lit by a single overhead light. The floor vibrated constantly with the engine. The sound was enormous and physical, a low roar that she felt in her sternum.

Cargo hold.

The word surfaced in her mind with the particular clinical clarity of words you knew but had never expected to apply to yourself.

She was cargo.

She sat with her back against the curved metal wall and the other women around her, the Czech or Polish women had stopped talking and were now sleeping in the specific collapsed way of people whose bodies had simply made the decision for them and she looked at her hands.

She needed a pen.

The need was so sudden and so intense that it took her breath away. She needed a pen. She needed to draw something, anything, the curve of the hull, the overhead light, the way the young girl across from her was sleeping with her mouth slightly open and her eyelashes against her cheek. She needed to put it somewhere outside herself or she was not sure she could hold it.

She had nothing.

She pressed the tip of her fingernail into the inside of her wrist and drew a line there, the curve of the pigeon's wing. She couldn't see it. She traced it from memory, the specific pressure and direction that would have produced it on paper.

The engine roared. The vessel moved through invisible water.

She drew.

---

She learned the other women slowly, in the way of people who have nothing but time and proximity.

The young girl was named Dara. She was Romanian, seventeen, she had lied about her age earlier, up by a year, in the instinctive way of the young who thought being older meant being safer. She had come to London on a work visa six weeks ago, a cleaning job that had dissolved upon arrival into something else entirely. She spoke enough English to communicate in short sentences, which she offered sparingly, like rationed food.

The two women who spoke Polish were sisters, Marta, twenty nine, and Lena, thirty two. They had been taken from Warsaw, which meant their situation was somehow even larger and further from resolution than Anya's. They had family there. Children, in Lena's case. Anya did not ask about the children after the first time, because the look on Lena's face when she mentioned them was not something Anya felt equipped to witness more than once.

The woman who had been praying was named Adaeze. She was forty one and Nigerian and had been in London legally for nine years and had three degrees and a husband and a flat in Hackney and had been taken from the street outside her workplace in what she described, in a flat and terrible voice, as a case of extreme bad luck and incorrect targeting. She believed, and Anya had no reason to doubt her, that there was a case of mistaken identity involved, that she was not supposed to be here, that someone had made an error.

"That doesn't help," Anya said carefully.

"No," Adaeze agreed. "It does not help."

The remaining two were quiet, a woman who might have been Eastern European and seemed to speak no English at all, and a girl who Anya thought might be British but who did not speak for the first twenty hours and then said, quite suddenly, "I'm Bex," and then went quiet again as though she'd used her allocation.

"Anya," said Anya.

"I know," said Bex. "You said it when you were sleeping. Anya and Eli. I think Eli's someone you love."

She had been talking in her sleep. She didn't remember dreaming.

"My brother," she said.

Bex nodded. She had dark circles under her eyes and a split in her lower lip that was healing wrong and a quality of pre-existing toughness that Anya recognised, the kind that didn't come from a good life.

"Is there anyone who'll look for you?" Anya asked.

"No," said Bex, without a trace of self pity. "Is there anyone who'll look for you?"

"My brother."

"Will he find you?"

She thought about Eli. His easy laugh. The lavender shampoo. The way he still texted her if he was going to be home late, even though she had specifically told him that he was old enough to come and go without checking in.

"He'll look," she said. "I don't know if that's the same thing."

---

On the second day, she was fairly certain it was the second day, a man came down the steps with water and food. Bread, pre packaged. The kind that came in individual plastic sleeves. He distributed it without speaking and went back up.

Anya ate hers because she understood, in the way the sensible part of her was continuously calmly informing the rest of her, that she needed to eat. She needed her body. Whatever was coming, she would face it better with her body intact.

She ate the bread and drank the water and tried not to think about what Eli was doing.

She tried not to think about her father.

She failed at the second one. She was always going to fail at the second one.

---

The thing about Derek Reeves, the thing she had never said out loud to anyone because she had never wanted to make Eli know it, never wanted the truth of it to land on his easy open face and change it was that she had known. Not specifically, not in any way she could have pointed to and said *there, that is the dangerous thing*. But in the way you knew things that you didn't want to know, in the body before the brain.

She had known for years that her father was the kind of man who loved you and would still let you down. She had known it when he had borrowed money for a hospital bill and spent it on a sure thing at Kempton. She had known it when he had promised to come to her art school interview and arrived two hours late smelling of the pub. She had known it when her mother was dying and he had held her hand for all of ten minutes before he made an excuse about a thing he had to do.

She had known all of it.

What she had not known, what she had never allowed herself to know was the ceiling. She had not known where the ceiling was. She had thought she understood the shape of him, weak, loving, small in his weakness but still hers, still a father in the skeletal structural sense.

She had not known the ceiling was this high.

Two hundred thousand pounds. Her.

She sat in the cargo hold and she let herself know it fully, without flinching, all of it and she felt it in every part of her body. It burned. It moved through her like weather.

She let it.

Then she folded it away.

She was not going to carry it on the outside. Whatever happened next, she was going to carry it on the inside, where it could not be used against her.

*You can feel it later*, she told herself. *You can feel all of it later when there is somewhere to put it down.*

*Right now you need to be very, very careful.*

She closed her eyes. She was not sleeping. She was thinking.

She was beginning to understand that survival was the only project that mattered, and that project required everything she had.