The key was in the lock.
Daudi hesitated before he turned it.
“She’s been hollering for hours,” one of the guys from the kitchen said. “The bitch just won’t shut up, screaming and shouting and just raging like she’s trying to raise the fucking dead in there. I don’t know how she hasn’t screamed herself hoarse.”
“Has she had any breakfast?”
The man shrugged, “Don’t know, don’t really care.”
“Make something for her,” Daudi told him.
The man shrugged, not about to argue because he didn’t know where the order was coming from. “Give me a minute.”
He’d left him standing by the door. He couldn’t help but wonder about the room’s history; what needed to be kept safe on an army base, next to the kitchen? You wouldn’t store weapons or ammunition. And then it hit him, the logical answer: alcohol. The soldiers needed rations to keep them in line, but not free access to the liquor, because they couldn’t be trusted.
“Here you go,” the man said, returning a few minutes later with a plate of bacon, beans, fried potatoes, and a thick slice of bread.
Daudi hesitated, seeing the knife and fork, but the man read his mind. “She’ll be lucky to cut through the bacon with it,” he said, laughing.
“Let me open the door first,” Daudi said as the man held the plate out for him.
The girl was a ball of fury. She charged at the door even before it had finished swinging open.
Daudi barely reacted in time, arms out to defend himself from her wildly thrashing hands with nails as she clawed at his flesh. He managed to wrap his arms around her, holding her tight until she finally stopped struggling.
All the while, the man holding the plate of food stood laughing at him.
“Enough!” Daudi said, refusing to relinquish his hold until she was spent. “This isn’t going to get you anywhere. You need to know something, girl, even if you get past me, there are a hundred others out there bigger and stronger—and nastier—than me. Where do you think you are going to go?”
He relaxed his grip and she stepped back. He was anything but relaxed, though, ready for a fresh onslaught from the girl.
It didn’t come.
“Why have I been locked up in here all night?” she demanded, still spitting rage and pent-up frustration. “When my father hears about this...”
“It was for your own benefit,” Daudi told her, not sure she’d believe him anyway, but figuring right now truth was the best policy between them if he had any chance of building a bond that would see them safely out of this. “If you’d gone outside in the dark, we couldn’t have guaranteed your safety.”
“There aren’t any wild animals out there, especially not inside these damned walls.”
“Oh, there are, especially within these walls,” he said. “There are worse things here than out in the desert, girl, believe me. I live amongst them. Now eat before it gets cold.”
She glanced at the plate with an obvious look of disgust. It fell a long way short of her usual spoiled breakfast. She was a child of privilege. Hers was a different life to anyone living in the compound. But food was food, and without it she’d starve. He didn’t want her being weak on their journey; that would present a host of different problems for him to deal with.
“It’s this or nothing,” he said. “And it could be a long time before you get another chance to eat.”
“What? Are you planning on starving me? Is that it, some kind of sick punishment?”
Daudi shrugged. “Hardly. But life has a way of turning on us, so I figure it’s best to make the most of it while you can. Why don’t you come through, you can eat it at the table?”
“Have you eaten?” she asked.
“Not yet,” he said. “It was my turn for night watch, so I’ve been at the walls all night.”
“I’ll bring another plate out,” the other man said. “But if she causes trouble, it’s on you.”
“I’ll live with it,” Daudi assured him.
There was no one else in the canteen. The girl glanced in the direction of the door to the outside world but made no move towards it. The rage she’d shown when he’d opened the door was spent. She slumped into a chair at one of the tables. Daudi put the plate down in front of her.
“You seriously expect me to eat this?” she said, moving food around the plate with her fork.
“It’s that or starve,” he said. “It’s not like you’re being asked to split a rat open with your fingernails and pull off strips of raw meat. It’s good food. You want something to drink? Water? Milk?”
“Coffee,” she said. “Black and strong.”
Daudi nodded to the guy from the kitchen. “Make that two, will you?”
The girl pushed the food around a little more, a look of disgust on her face. Daudi said nothing. He’d done everything he could to get her to eat, bar force it down her throat.
She still hadn’t tasted a bite before a plate arrived for him, along with the two mugs of coffee.
She added three spoons of sugar to the heavy black liquid, tasted it, then added another.
“I like it sweet,” she said after she had stirred it a seemingly endless number of times.
Daudi scooped up a forkful of beans.
Eventually she did the same.
“What’s going to happen to me?” She asked. Again, it crossed his mind to lie, to put her at her ease with the promise that they’d let her go, but that would be proved a lie in no time at all, and undermine any sort of fledgling relationship, instead he said something close to the truth.
“You’ll be heading out of here with a bunch of girls and given work to do.”
She said nothing.
She took another mouthful of beans.
The reality of the situation was sinking in. He tried to think how his own mind would be working in her place. She’d be thinking about biding her time, knowing there was going to be one moment somewhere along the chain of coming events where she could try to make her escape.
One moment.
It was down to him to make sure she didn’t take advantage of it if he wanted to buy his way back into Boss’s good graces. Or make sure that she did, if he wanted to trade his way into a different life of servitude with her father. If that was even an option.
“I’ll take you to join the other girls when you’re done eating,” he said.