The next morning, Phuong leads us away from the wide trail. She says it’s best that we climb to higher paths again through the Truong Son mountains, shift to other routes in the network of narrow paths and hidden roads that make up the Reunification Trail. It’s all such a maze, I have no idea how Phuong knows her way around. She hesitates at crossroads, forks in the trail, dead ends where we have to backtrack, but we don’t stop. And when we encounter others—all of them going south—there are animated conversations, pointing, gesturing, questioning glances my way, weapons raised by Khiem and Le Phu and aimed at me, for show, or that’s what I tell myself, though my jaw tightens every time. I squeeze my eyes closed. I hold my breath.

Until someone hits me across the shoulders with a bamboo staff and grabs my arm jerking me forward. Then I’m their prisoner again. No longer just one of four following rolling hills, wading through swarms of black flies, skirting more landslides down orange-faced cliffs, fording shallow streams. We cross grassy plains, interrupted by weathered trees that could pass as abstract sculptures you’d see in a park or at the Met in New York. Strange rock formations like something thrown there from the eruption of a distant volcano.

There are people who live in these hills, and we pass them, too. More farmers in buffalo carts, more terraced rice paddies climbing the sides of treeless hills. There seem to be dozens of different communities tucked into valleys or on the sides of these foothills. They stare as we pass. Sometimes they speak, sometimes they wave. Sometimes their children look fearful and start crying. Sometimes their children sit motionless on the backs of their water buffalo and don’t pay us any mind.

We come across an abandoned coffee plantation. All the furniture has long since been stripped clean, so we sleep on the wood floor, or what’s left of it. Khiem breaks up boards for a small indoor fire. Phuong and Le Phu leave for an hour and come back with food. Spicy buffalo to go with our daily serving of sticky rice and peppers. They don’t say where they got it, but I assume they found a village.

Finally, after a week of hard travel, we enter another hidden supply base—so well camouflaged that guards blend into the brush, and even when I hear them move I can’t make out their faces or their forms until they step forward menacingly. Phuong quickly shows them her papers and explains who we are and why we’re there.

Inside the compound, there are logs shoring up the entrance to underground bunkers, and tall trees bent over to form dense canopy, held there with cables tied to heavy stones. Spotter planes would have to fly so low to see what’s there that anyone with an AK-47 could easily take them out. And everyone there has an AK-47. There are also antiaircraft weapons, dozens of trucks, repair bays, a huge underground cache of rice, and another filled with weapons and ammunition. For some reason, they let me see all of this as we’re led through the camp, which goes on for half a mile, following a brown-water stream. Phuong disappears into another bunker at some point, leaving us next to a pen with a herd of wild boar banging around inside, waiting for slaughter. Boy-faced soldiers stand guard over a sea of chickens. Small fires burn. There’s even running water of a sort—a sluice made from split bamboo lashed together and streaming down from the creek, emptying into barrels. We’re offered food, and the strips of boar meat are a definite improvement over buffalo. Back home I thought of myself as a casual vegetarian. Cheese pizza, french fries, and sugar cereal made up 90 percent of my diet. Vietnam has turned me into a desperate carnivore.

We spend the night at the supply base—on the ground, as usual—with hundreds of bo doi. There are no tents, no buildings except the bunkers, no cover except the trees. I keep expecting to be thrown into another cage, to meet other prisoners, to see more brutality. But here, nobody seems to care. I’m a passing curiosity to some of the bo doi, but that’s all. I keep close to Phuong when she returns—anxious that I’m missing something, that things might go south any second.

I barely sleep. All night long, vague figures come and go through the compound. The small fires from earlier are extinguished. There’s no light, except what little filters through the canopy from the moon and the stars. Deep in the night, from out of nowhere, I’m hit by a frantic attack of loneliness and homesickness and worry about Mom and Dad—a certainty that they are dead, and that I’m all alone in the world. I tell myself that Dad must be alive, though, or why else would they be going to all this trouble with me, unless they think they can use me for a prisoner exchange, because of who he is. And Dad would never let anything happen to Mom, no matter how many NVA attacked the embassy in Saigon on Tet.

It’s little reassurance and longer into the night, I’m still anxious and think about waking Phuong up, asking her to talk to me—about anything, about nothing. Just for the company. Just for a familiar voice.

I know how crazy and ironic it is, that the only closeness I feel in this dark hour is with the person taking me farther and farther away from everything and everyone I’ve ever known.

I don’t know where we are, what country we’re in. I think maybe we’re still in Cambodia, but we could just as well have crossed back into Vietnam, or into Laos. Not that it matters. Not that I think I’ll be rescued from the Trail through some movie miracle.

Has it only been a couple of weeks since the monkey stew, and the food poisoning, and holding on to Phuong, pressing my body against hers to warm her as she shivered so violently, until her fever broke?

I can just make out the contours of her face where she lies near me, on her side. There’s a softness that I haven’t seen before. Wisps of straight black hair fall over her cheek, and I want to reach over and brush it back. It’s stupid thinking about her like that—like I would a girl back home, like Beth maybe. Phuong isn’t a girl. She’s a soldier, doing her job, delivering me up to a prison in Hanoi where they might make a deal to let me go home again, or they might kill me.

On the trail the next day, an hour after leaving the compound, I ask Phuong once again where we’re going.

“I’ve told you many times already,” she says. “North. I can’t say more than that.”

“I mean the route we’re taking,” I say. “The direction. What country we’re in now, and what country we’ll be in tomorrow. The next place we’ll be where there are people. The next supply base or whatever.”

Phuong sighs, like I’m asking pointless questions, but she answers anyway. “We’re still in Cambodia. We’ll climb back higher through the Truong Son mountains into the Three Borders area, where Cambodia meets with Vietnam and Laos. We’ll go to Nong Fa to rest for a few days, just inside the border with Laos, then continue on from there.”

“Nong Fa?”

“Yes. It’s also called the Lake in the Sky. I was there once before. It’s a beautiful place, with orchids growing on the bark of pine trees all around the shore. Nong Fa was created from a volcanic crater. It’s very high, and very cold, and the local people claim that anyone who swims in it will have eternal youth.”

“I could probably use some of that,” I say.