Auction
964 Words
She had not known what was happening until it was happening, which she thought, later, was probably the point. Knowing in advance allowed for preparation, for resistance, for the kind of determined refusal that was inconvenient to manage. Not knowing kept you compliant in the specific helpless way of people whose brain was still running on the assumption that this could not be real.
It was real.
They were in a city she had gathered that much. They had transferred from the vessel to a car at some point in the night, and she had seen lights through a window, the particular density of light that meant a city. Not London, the skyline was wrong, and there were Cyrillic letters on a sign she had glimpsed, which she didn't know enough to read. Eastern Europe, maybe. Or Russia.
Russia.
Her father had said: *Russian men. They run things. You know the sort.*
She hadn't known the sort.
She was beginning to.
---
They were taken separately, which was when she stopped being part of a group and started being alone.
She had not realised how much the group had mattered until it was gone. Dara's hand. Adaeze's prayers. Bex's flat, bruised voice. Even the Polish sisters' conversations that she couldn't understand they had been something to orient herself against, some evidence that the world was still made of people.
Without them, the room they put her in was just a room.
It was not unkind, in its way. That was the disconcerting part. There was a bathroom and a change of clothes and a mirror, and the implication was clear: clean up, put this on, look like something someone would pay for. She understood the transaction without anyone explaining it, and that understanding was its own particular horror not dramatic, not cinematic, just a cold factual clarity that arrived in her stomach like a stone.
She showered because she had been in a cargo hold for two days.
She put the clothes on because the alternative was nudity, which was worse.
She stood in front of the mirror and looked at herself.
She was not a remarkable-looking woman. She had always thought this matter of factly, without self pity she was medium height and medium build and she had her mother's brown skin and her father's grey eyes, which was an unusual combination that people sometimes commented on and sometimes didn't. She had thick dark hair that she wore in a bun most of the time because it was easier. She had a face that she had been told was interesting more often than beautiful, which she had always suspected was code for something, though she wasn't sure what.
She looked at her face in the mirror.
She memorised it.
She needed to remember who she was. She needed the information to be very clear, because what was coming, what had already arrived was going to try to tell her she was something else. Something smaller. Something that existed only in terms of what it was worth to someone.
*You are Anya Reeves*, she told the woman in the mirror. *You are twenty two years old. You grew up in Peckham and you raised your brother and you draw pigeons and you are not whatever they are going to call you in the next ten minutes. You are not that.*
*Hold on.*
---
She dissociated.
She had not known that about herself, had not known she could do it, had read about it in the way you read about things that happened to other people, things that were clinical and distant and belonged in psychology textbooks. She had not known it was a thing a body could do on instinct, without permission.
She went somewhere else.
Not far. She was still present, she registered the movement, the room with the low lights and the men in good suits and the particular economic atmosphere of wealth combined with crime, which had a specific smell she could not name. She registered being evaluated. She registered voices that spoke in a language she didn't speak, except for occasional English words that surfaced like rocks in water.
She went to the Aegean, which she had never visited but had seen in a documentary once and had not forgotten: the specific blue of the water, the white of the walls, the quality of the light that looked like it had been painted by someone who was trying to prove something.
She stayed there.
When she came back, when her body decided the immediate worst of it was over, she was in a different place. Another car. Another window.
A city going past. Different from before.
Moscow, she would learn later.
Moscow, where the real beginning of everything, of the worst and then the strange and then the impossible was waiting.
---
The man who received her was named Petrov.
She learned this because the man who handed her off used his name, and she had decided somewhere in the cargo hold, in the time between counting and drawing invisible pigeons on her wrist that she was going to learn everything she could. Names. Faces. Patterns. Information was the only currency she had, and she was going to accumulate it even if she had no idea yet what she would spend it on.
Petrov was fifty or thereabouts, heavy in the specific way that suggested a lifetime of rich food and the absence of consequences. He had small eyes and large hands and he looked at her the way she had seen men look at things they had bought, the proprietary satisfaction of ownership.
She looked back at him with her mother's eyes and her father's stubbornness and told herself she was still Anya Reeves.
She was still Anya Reeves.
- Writer
