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keep him from kicking Gideon anymore.
    I’m in decent shape but not very tall, and there was no way my physical strength could accomplish anything. The third one grabbed me from behind and held me helpless.
    I struggled futilely for a minute, but all it did was make the man holding me laugh.
    He laughed .
    Gideon wasn’t getting up.
    And it was happening. The nightmare was happening. The thing I was supposed to be saved from. The thing so many stories taught me would be stopped at the very last second.
    There was nothing to stop it now. I looked back at Gideon as the man dragged me out of the room. He wasn’t moving.
    It wasn’t right. It wasn’t right . It wasn’t the way I’d always understood the world to work. There was something brutally wrong with it. That this good, strong man couldn’t protect me. That he’d given everything he had. There was blood all over his face. I’d heard his bone crack. And it hadn’t been enough.
    Somehow, it made it even worse.
    Despite what Gideon told me, I fought at first. I couldn’t help it. When they tear off your clothes, when they bend you over a table, every bone-deep instinct in your body will tell you to resist.
    It started with the third man. The one who I’d jabbed with my heel. He was angry, and he took it out on me. But Gideon was right. I could tell he got off on my resistance, so I made myself go limp.
    I tried to follow Gideon’s advice about sending my mind somewhere else. I sent it to the world I used to know. The one where Gideon had gotten the gun turned around in time and shot every one of these men dead. The one where the sirens came—signaling order and protection and safety—before this horrible man had gotten my pants down. The one where I was smart enough and strong enough to find a way out, to slip away from all these men and run to another house to call for help for me and Gideon both.
    That was the place I went to in my mind—imagining stories of my being saved over and over again—while these men did what they did to me.
    It wasn’t over with the one man. There were several men in the room, but not all of them took their turn. Maybe they weren’t interested. Maybe they were worried about the orders not to hurt me. There was conversation going on, but none of it I understood.
    In the end, there were three of them.
    You get to the point where the mind just disconnects from the body. I suppose it’s a way for us to protect ourselves, to convince ourselves that what happens to our bodies doesn’t really matter.
    Everyone with any sense knows we are more than just our bodies, but we are our bodies too. The Greeks were right about a lot of things, but they were wrong about this. Our bodies are part of us—a true part of us—and what happens to them can change the whole of who we are.
    Sending your mind away doesn’t really make it better.
    I don’t even know if I was conscious the whole time. Maybe it’s a bitter blessing—not to be aware of every detail, for the world to become a nightmare blur.
    Afterwards, they dropped me back into the room. And it was the strangest thing. That I was back where I started—in this cold, gray room, waiting for the morning when I would be ransomed and when some nameless boss would come to kill Gideon.
    He was still there, still lying where I’d last seen him.
    It didn’t really take that long. For the bottom to fall out of the world.
    I managed to fasten my pants and pull my torn shirt closed over my chest. Then I crawled over to Gideon.
    Even in the dim light of the room, I could tell he was in terrible shape. Blood was dripping and smeared all over his face, and one of his eyes was swollen shut.
    It was hard to feel anything—anything at all—after what had just happened to me, but I was aware of a glimmer of something that wanted Gideon not to be dead.
    “Gideon,” I managed to say. My throat hurt with the one word. I reached out to touch his bloody face.
    Slowly, he opened his eyes. He made a