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angry with her. “I left Angie a note,” I said out loud. I was glad the man wouldn’t know what I was talking about. He couldn’t really read my mind.
    Did they have my phone, I wondered, or was it on the road where I’d dropped it? Maybe the phone was right there in the van. If I weren’t so weak, I could try to overpower the man—I’d taken two years of karate when I quit gymnastics, and I was very strong. I wondered how long the effects of the drug would last. Maybe they planned to keep me permanently drugged.
    Wherever we were, it must be close to the equator to be this hot. How far could small planes fly? Hundreds of miles, at least. Maybe thousands. I felt a horrible, hollow terror in the pit of my stomach, as if I’d been let loose in outer space. I began to cry again.
    “Take deep breaths, you’ll feel better,” the man said. “Twenty more minutes. Just hang in there.”
    I didn’t breathe in deeply—I wasn’t going to let him control my breathing as well as everything else—but I tried to focus my mind, the way I used to do during gymnastics competitions. He was being kind to me, and I wanted to show him that I appreciated it, so he’d go on being kind.
    “Where are you taking me?” I asked. My voice sounded hoarse and strange, and I wasn’t sure the words had been clear.
    “To a place we’ve prepared.”
    “Are you going to sell me?” I asked.
    “No.”
    I knew he could be lying. I clutched the seat handles as if they were my last anchor to the ordinary world. I noticed that the poncho they’d given me smelled of mothballs. Why had they dressed me in this outfit? I had to push away terrifying answers. Maybe they belonged to a strange satanic cult, and this was part of the sacrificial costume. I began to tremble again.
    Don’t imagine the worst , the man had said. They had given me these clothes so no one would recognize me, that was all.
    “I’m afraid,” I said out loud. I felt a little better, saying those words, and I repeated them. “I’m afraid.”
    “Yes, I know.”
    “Are you some sort of cult?”
    “No, that’s just in the movies.”
    It was like a gift, when he said that. He was joking with me—he was stepping out of his role. He was telling me that we were two human beings, as well as captive and captor.
    If he was lying, he wouldn’t have made that comment, I thought.
    “Is it because I’m from the United States?” I asked. “Are you … militants?” I didn’t use the word terrorists because I knew that terrorists thought of themselves as fighters for a just cause.
    “You’re not in any danger,” he said, not answering my question.
    If they were terrorists they’d have machine-guns, I told myself, but in fact I had no idea what sort of weapons they had, or how many of them there were, apart from the man, the driver, and the woman. Maybe the woman was the driver. Maybe there were only these two.
    These two here, now, but he’d said “we.” To a place we’ve prepared. He must have meant the group he belonged to.
    It was hard to grasp. We were two strangers, but our lives were now inextricably tied to each other. My life was in his hands. I’d never been so closely connected to anyone, except maybe Mom, when I was little.
    At least he hasn’t tried anything , I thought. He hasn’t touched me.
    I remembered a movie I’d seen long ago on television. Natasha Richardson had played Patty Hearst, a heiress who’d been kidnapped by a crazy revolutionary group in the 1970s. She’d been locked in a tiny closet for months, and one of the men in the group had forced her to have sex with him.
    I decided that if that happened I would shut myself off completely. I would pretend I was someone else, I would make it not matter. I was only sorry that I was a virgin, if that was going to be my first time.
    No one had made a move so far, but no one had made a move on Patty Hearst either, at the start.
    Could something have already happened on the plane, while I was