She said in a small voice, "Bhalo achi."

I glanced at Rama.

"Thanks," he translated.

"How do I say, 'you're welcome'?"

Rama wrinkled his forehead. "How long have you been in-country?"

Mom broke in, "She was diverted here because of the floods. She didn't train for this destination." All sort of true. To me, she said, "It's 'kichhu mone koro na'."

"Kichhu mone koro na," I repeated gravely to the girl. She smiled and stepped back.

After that, they were a little more trusting. As I handed out the blankets, Mom had Rama translate as she told the girls, "We have a place for you to rest, where you don't have to stand in the water. And there's food."

She and Rama led the way and I brought up the rear.

Mom followed the empty stretches where the rain came through between the tarps or the mud was particularly bad, but some of the refugees, nowhere near the girls, twitched their clothes or belongings away, as if they'd be touched. Others ignored them, and some men smiled and called out. At first I thought they were being friendly but I saw the girls look away, their faces becoming even stonier than before.

We were almost to the door when a large man wearing a formal tunic, a sherwani, stood up and stepped forward, shouting. We'd just passed him, so I was closest, but he reached past me, to the last girl and grabbed her blanket away. He shook it in the air and was talking loudly, not to the girls, but to all the people around him.

I grabbed the edge of the blanket, angry, and tried to pull it back, but he was twice as big as me-not only tall, but heavy. He laughed at me and some of the men sitting nearby laughed also.

I clenched the blanket with both hands and jumped in place, adding an instant twenty feet per second, toward the door. I flew away from him and he tilted forward, the look of contempt abruptly replaced by one of shock and surprise. He let go of the blanket, but it was too late. He fell forward, hands waving, and belly flopped into the mud.

While some of the men had laughed before, now all the women and men laughed loudly, easily heard over the rain on the plastic.

Shifting his mass forward had absorbed my velocity and I barely stumbled before turning to follow the girls, now scurrying, outside.

The girls dashed through the rain to our tent, holding their blankets over their heads for protection. I flipped my jacket hood back up, trailing them, but my eye was on the place where we'd left the shelter of the tarps. Nobody followed us out into the rain, but I couldn't tell if they watched.

Dad was back from taking blankets to the clinic tent and he watched the influx of young girls with a bemused expression on his face. Rama was doing some more translating for Mom. The girls were toweling themselves off with their blankets. Mom gestured to me.

"You all right?" she said quietly. "I didn't see what was happening until I turned, going out the door, when he fell down."

"I'm fine," I said. "Do you know what it was about?"

She grabbed another bundle of blankets and ripped it open, offering dry ones to the girls. "Rama? Who was that man? The one who was shouting."

Rama grinned. "He's a teacher, the headmaster, at a madrasa in the valley. A very traditional, and just now wet, madrasa. He's been giving everybody a lot of trouble, shouting at women for being immodest because of the way their wet clothing clings. The local Imam shouted him down and quoted several Koran verses on compassion.

"When the chukri showed up, he wanted them driven into the flood. When you gave them blankets before his 'chaste' students received any, he became angry again and started preaching to the crowd."

I stepped closer to Mom. "Chukri?"

Mom pursed her lips for a moment, then said quietly, "All right, they're indentured sex workers."

"Prostitutes?" I said, shocked. They were younger than I was!

"Their families sold them. Sometimes a new wife will sell her stepdaughters. They have to work for a year to pay off their 'debt,' but their shordani, the landlady who holds their contracts, charges them for all sorts of expenses, and the debt increases instead of decreases. It can go on for years."

She opened a case of bottled water. "Some of them were probably born in the brothels, of other chukri or of nonindentured prostitutes, who sell them back into the system."

My jaw dropped. I tried to think of something to say but I was speechless. Finally I said, "Why can't they just run away?"

"They did." The corner of Mom's mouth turned down. "But usually they can't. They can't even go out to shop. They buy overpriced food in the brothel and go further into debt. It's like a prison." She shook her head and said, "Enough. Let's feed them."

While I handed out water, Mom gave them each a twelve-hundred-calorie emergency rations bar. They aren't bad-like lemon-flavored shortbread in taste and texture but with tons of protein and vitamins. You can drop packages of them out of a low-altitude airplanes without damaging them, though I'd hate to be the impact zone.

Rama assured the girls that they were okay to eat for Muslims or Hindus and demonstrated by biting into one himself.

Later, Rama got some refugees to come over from the trees to collect more blankets, and followed them back to supervise their distribution.

We shifted some rations and water filters to where the blankets had been, clearing part of the integrated floor. The tent was on higher ground than the tarps in the trees, so for the girls, the expanse of dry tent floor was like heaven after their time in the water.

Fed, warm, and mostly dry, they were asleep in minutes, and I found myself yawning, suddenly, surprised at how weary I was.

Dad looked at his watch and then at me. "Bedtime for you, too, bunny."

The sky had brightened outside and now you could see the rain, not just feel it. I checked my watch. It said 9:30 which was U.S. Mountain Time at night. Local time was also 9:30, but morning. I didn't normally go to sleep this early, but I hadn't slept that well the last two nights.

Huh. I looked at the girls sleeping at the side of the tent, like a litter of puppies. I hadn't thought about Brett in hours.

Good.

TWENTY-ONE.

Davy: "Janitorial"

At night, when the Daarkon Group's offices were fully lit so the janitorial staff could clean, the mirrored glass of Rhiarti Tower was no longer opaque. Davy used a telephoto lens from the opposite rooftop, both securing jump sites and getting shots of the custodial uniform the janitors were wearing.

The next day Davy bought the uniform from a uniform supply store on Foulkrod Street in Philadelphia. "Oh, yeah. Want us to embroider the logo?" The clerk pointed at the emblem over the breast pocket in the photo. "Don't recognize the company. Youse here in the city?"

"West of town." This was true since it covered everything from the suburbs to the Pacific ocean. "They have patches for the company logo."

The clerk snorted. "Patches. Cheapskates. Youse all right with shoes?"

Davy waited until the janitor vacuuming the corner office moved out into the hallway before he jumped. This was clearly the executive level, judging both by the furnishings and the number of offices. The two levels below had fifteen offices on this side of the building. This floor had six.

He was wearing the custodial uniform and his dark goatee. The beard itched. The uniform didn't. He'd run it twice through the wash to get rid of the "just manufactured" creases.

He shook out the large plastic bag he was carrying and pulled the trash can out from under the credenza. It was heavier than he expected and he saw that it had a crosscut shredder built into the top.

This must be the place.

Certainly normal businesses had perfectly legitimate reasons to shred documents, but it warmed his heart nonetheless. He dumped the bin into his bag.

There were no obvious motion detectors or cameras in the room, so he secured a jump site. The name on the door was Mark Liebowitz. Moving cautiously out into the hall, he saw the man with the vacuum moving down the hall away from him. Beyond the man, a woman with rags and a spray bottle walked into another office. Davy walked the other direction, down the hallway around the corner. As he had thought, there were cameras in the corners of the building, covering the hallways. He kept his head down and turned into the next office, which was labeled Todd Hostetler. He bent over to pull out Todd's shredder and an alarm went off.

He hadn't touched the bin yet, so he doubted it was wired. He didn't see any motion detectors.

Bet it was the cameras in the hall.

Davy walked back to the first office and saw all four custodians exiting into the stairwell at the end of the hall. A secondary alarm, on the door itself, was shrieking. He heard footsteps from behind and looked back around the corner. Two men in identical monogramed blazers were coming up the hallway, checking each office in turn, right hands inside their jackets in a way that made Davy want to jump immediately away. The one in the lead saw Davy but instead of pulling a gun from his jacket, he called out, "Fire alarm. Exit the building!"

Davy blinked, then waved his hand in acknowledgement and walked away, toward the shrieking door.

If it was the camera, they would know it was a guy in a janitor's uniform.

Once in the stairway the door alarm was painfully loud. There weren't any cameras evident, so Davy jumped away.

How did they know?

TWENTY-TWO.

"Mastaans"

I woke up two hours before my alarm was set to go off-4:30 in the morning. I looked at the clock and tried to close my eyes, but they popped right open again.

The cabin was silent. I hadn't shut my door last night and the light in Mom and Dad's room was still on.

I swung down from my bed and padded across the hall.

Mom and Dad's bed was empty. I jumped downstairs but they weren't there, so I checked the house in New Prospect-also empty. I jumped back to the cabin and put on my school clothes, then the rain boots and gear.

It had stopped raining in the little stand of trees south of the refugee shelter but the water had risen. I arrived standing in a foot and a half of water, and the temperature was warmer. The air felt heavy, warm and very humid. The sun was near the western horizon, shining through broken clouds. I jumped back to the mud room at the cabin and hung up the rain gear, but kept the boots.

Good thing there was a drain in the floor. Several quarts of floodwater had splashed through when I'd jumped.

When I returned and exited the trees, people were all over the hillock, including just outside the stand of trees. If it wasn't for the high water, they'd probably have been in there, too. I wonder what they made of my splashing.

Many stared at me, strange western girl in what they probably considered to be boy's clothes, threading my way through the crowd. I nodded and smiled, weaving my way between people, repeating what Mom had said when moving through the crowd the night before, "Dekhi. Dekhi."

I hoped I was saying "excuse me."

There were more boats pulled up on the shore. Traditional short and narrow oar and pole boats, a few long, fat-waisted boats with woven rounded covers over their midships, a rigid hulled inflatable with army markings, and a forty-foot, flat-roofed passenger ferry with an inboard diesel.

As I passed the trees with the tarps stretched among them I saw that there hadn't been a huge increase in refugees. Most of them had just moved out onto the grass, trying to get out of the mud, I guess.

I saw last night's angry teacher from the flooded madrasa. He'd rinsed the worst of the mud out of his tunic, though it was still stained. He was sitting on a box surrounded by his students. I averted my eyes as I went by but I heard someone say something and several heads turned. I walked on, trying not to show any anxiety, but I could feel my head dropping down between my shoulders and my footsteps speeding up.

The door side of my parents' tent had been rolled up, and a row of boxes with a blanket thrown over them formed a counter across most of the open side.

The chukri girls were still there, only now they seemed to be working the counter. I looked toward the back of the tent and saw Mom, cross-legged on the floor, leaning back against a pile of unopened blankets. Her eyes were shut.

Seven refugees were standing in front of the counter while my friend from last night, the girl who reminded me of Tara, demonstrated how to use a water filter, pumping dirty river water from a pail, though the filter, and into a clear plastic bottle. When she finished the demonstration, she apparently asked if they had any questions. Then two of the other girls handed out packaged water filters, blankets, and ration bars to the audience.

There was a chorus of "Bhalo achi!" and the girls answered, "Kichhu mone koro na!"

I went around the end of the counter, nodding to the girls. They smiled back and bobbed their heads.

Mom opened her eyes as I walked near, scuffing my feet deliberately. "I wasn't sleeping, really."

"Sure, Mom."

"Was I snoring? I'll bet I was snoring."

"Where's Dad?"

"He's got some errands," she said, vaguely.

I gestured at the girls at the front desk. "I see you've got help."

Mom smiled. "Oh, yes."

"What will happen to them?"

"Rama is working on it. He's contacted a local Imam whose part of an antitrafficking network. Most of their activities are educational-prevention-but there are a few communities that help rescued trafficking victims. One of them is just downstream, but it's on the other side of the floodwaters."

"So they'll be okay?"

Mom rocked her hand back and forth. "No promises. But a better chance than they had before they floated away from the brothel." She shook her head. "They don't swim, you know. Rama has been translating for me. They grabbed onto floating wreckage and pushed out into the storm. Pretty brave."

I thought, Or maybe drowning wasn't as scary as what they had to face every day.

"I've got a couple of hours before I have to be at school. Why don't you go home and get some sleep?"

Mom blinked and her shoulders sagged. I could tell she'd been keeping herself going by willpower alone.

"Well, okay. Your father should be back soon, anyway. They know what to do," she jerked her chin toward the girls at the counter. "Be discreet, but don't be stupid. If there's any danger, jump away."