Her feet hit the mud and kept going.
Each step sent small bursts of it spraying outward, speckling her clothes, her ankles, the backs of her hands.
The dress she wore had once been formal, the kind that belonged in a palace, in a hall, behind guarded doors. Now it was torn at the hem and dark with filth in patches that would never come fully clean.
She was breathing in the way that meant she had been running for a very long time. Not the controlled, gasping breath of someone who started sprinting moments ago, but something deeper and more desperate, pulled in and pushed out by a body that had moved past its limits and was running on something that was not quite energy anymore.
She was no one else but Amera. Princess of Ralinder. Daughter of King Edris.
The dark circles beneath her eyes told the story of nights without sleep. Her stomach had been making sounds since yesterday, a hollow, insistent ache that had begun to blur at the edges of her vision.
She pushed through a gap between two trees, ducked under a low branch, and kept moving.
Then her foot caught a root.
She went down hard, hands first, her palms and forearms hitting the mud before the rest of her followed.
She lay there for a moment, cheek against the wet ground, eyes open, breathing in the smell of earth.
She tried to push herself up.
Her arms shook.
She tried again.
They gave out.
The hunger, the sleeplessness, and everything that had been done to her, everything she had run from—all of it settled over her at once like a weight being dropped.
She didn't get up.
Her eyes stayed open a few more seconds, taking in the roots, the dark soil, and a small beetle moving through the grass near her face. Then they closed.
She didn't feel herself lose consciousness.
One moment she was there. The next, she was gone.
While she lay motionless beneath the trees, the jungle continued around her.
And not far away, figures moved through the forest.
They were wrapped in dark cloth, not fully, just enough to break their silhouette, the way people dress when they don't want to be seen clearly.
They checked behind bushes, circled the bases of large trees, crouched to look through undergrowth, and communicated in nothing louder than hand signals.
At the edge of a small clearing, two people stood apart from the search.
One was a girl. She stood with her arms at her sides and her face arranged into an expression of careful stillness, the kind that takes effort to maintain.
The other was a man.
His teeth were pressed together and a muscle worked in his jaw.
He was staring forward at nothing, or at everything, in the way of someone whose mind has been running faster than the situation around him and arriving at conclusions he doesn't like.
His name was Rynold.
When he spoke, his voice came out low and measured at first, the way a fire starts small before it takes.
"Rael sacrificed himself for us. So we could take her away. And we did." He paused.
"Everything was going perfectly until that little brat slipped away from right in front of your eyes." the words came out like a stone thrown at something.
The girl beside him kept her eyes forward.
His voice had been climbing without him choosing to let it. He stopped himself, breathed, and then turned to look at her directly.
"Where is she?" Rynold demanded.
The girl's jaw tightened and her face stayed controlled, even though inside she wasn't controlling a thing.
"ANSWER ME, VILL!"
It wasn't a question. Vill opened her mouth.
Rynold's voice came out loud enough to move through the trees. "WHERE IS SHE."
Vill flinched, her eyes closing for half a second.
"We are finding her, boss," she said. Her voice came out steady, which cost her something.
"How long is it going to take?" He looked away from her again, back at the trees, at the searchers moving between them.
"It has already been almost two days since she escaped. Two damn days." He said the number the way someone says something that shouldn't be real.
"What if she reaches Kabul? Huh? Do you have any idea what happens then? She'll ruin everything. Everything we've worked for will be for nothing. All of it. The whole plan."
He breathed.
The clearing was quiet except for the distant sounds of the search.
"What are you standing there for," he said. "Go find her."
Vill went immediately, moving into the trees without a word, joining the others spreading through the forest.
Rynold stood alone in the clearing.
He exhaled slowly and let himself think it through.
She couldn't have gone far, not in this condition, not without food or sleep, not after everything her body had been through.
She has to be close—there is no way she'd made it to the city yet.
He told himself this with the particular firmness of a man who needs it to be true.
—
The 72nd Guard Station sat on one of Kabul's wider interior roads, calmer than the market streets but still busy in the particular purposeful way of places where official business gets done.
People moved in and out of the entrance with the expressions of people who had forms to file and questions to ask and not enough time for either.
Toviro, Ozair, Aryan, and Haqi joined the flow and made their way to the reception desk inside.
The man behind it looked up at them with the patient, slightly tired expression of someone who had answered the same category of question many times today and expected to answer it several more times before his shift ended.
"What can I help you with?"
Toviro placed both hands on the edge of the desk. "We're looking for information about a criminal currently in custody. One of the kidnappers responsible for Princess Amera's kidnapping."
The receptionist looked at him. "Why do you want to know about this person?"
A pause settled over the four of them.
Ozair opened his mouth. "Because he's"
Aryan brought his foot down hard on Ozair's.
Ozair looked down. His mouth stayed open.
Toviro said, evenly and immediately, "Because we want to help. We heard about the princess. We heard this man was connected to her disappearance, and if there is anything we can contribute as citizens of this kingdom, any information or assistance, we want to offer it. We know Kabul and its forces handle things well. We simply wanted to make ourselves available."
Ozair blinked at Toviro slowly. His mind was working through what had just been said and arriving at a place of deep confusion, because what had just been said was that Mayo was a criminal who had taken the princess, which was the opposite of true, and he had been about to say so, loudly, in a guard station, he opened his mouth again to correct this.
Aryan pressed his foot down harder.
Ozair looked at him with an expression that said several things at once, none of them polite.
Aryan looked back with an expression that said shut up or I will press harder.
The receptionist hadn't noticed any of this. Or if he had, he was too professional to show it. He looked between them all slowly, then said, "I appreciate that. Truly. Ralinder is nothing without its people. Everything we do here, we do for them."
Haqi straightened slightly. The words had landed somewhere genuine in him and his face showed it. "We appreciate that, sir," he said warmly, forgetting momentarily what they were there to accomplish.
Toviro glanced at him, then back at the receptionist. "Can you tell us about this person?"
The man reached to the side of his desk, picked up a sheet, looked at it briefly, set it down, and pulled the one beneath it. He scanned it.
At the gate side of the room, Ozair was hissing at Aryan in a whisper. "Let go. What are you doing?"
"Shut your damn mouth," Aryan whispered back. "If you say anything they'll know we are his allies."
"But he's not a criminal, he is our"
"I know that. Shut up."
Ozair looked at him with the expression of a man watching someone do something that makes no sense and being told the sense will become clear later and not finding this satisfying.
Toviro noticed them. He turned his head and moved his hand sharply to the right.
Aryan understood and steered Ozair toward the entrance area, away from the desk.
Toviro turned back and cleared his throat.
The receptionist looked up with the paper in hand. "Here. So. The individual you are asking about. His name is recorded as Mayo, though we have no confirmation that is his real name. He was detained on the 7th of Jawza at 9:13 in the evening, on the jungle road, one of the main paths through the Babur forest. Arrested by one of the active patrol groups."
"Patrol groups?" Toviro said.
"Twenty groups. Deployed directly on the order of Minister Abed for the matter of the princess. Authorized to operate beyond the city walls, including at night."
"I see." Toviro nodded slowly. "And that is everything?"
"Yes, that is everything I can share." The receptionist began returning the paper to its place.
Toviro looked at Haqi. Something passed between them, brief and wordless.
Then Toviro said, in a careful, ordinary tone, "Was there anyone else present at the arrest? An independent witness, perhaps. Outside of the soldiers."
The receptionist set the paper down and looked at him. "I'm sorry. That falls under data privacy restrictions for an active investigation. I can't discuss it."
Toviro accepted this and moved forward. "Then can you at least tell us how he was identified? Without identification there would have been no basis to hold him as a criminal, correct? There must have been something specific, some detail that matched, some form of proof that connected this particular person to the case. Otherwise any traveler found on the jungle road at night could be arrested on suspicion alone."
He hadn't noticed his voice changing as he spoke. It had picked up speed and volume the way a current picks up when the ground beneath it narrows, and by the time he finished he was leaning slightly forward and speaking with the particular intensity of someone who has almost reached something important.
Haqi looked at him. He understood exactly what was happening beneath the words.
"Can you provide those details?" Toviro said. "The proof used to identify him, sir?"
The receptionist looked at him for a moment. Then he said, calmly and with the patience of someone who wasn't bothered and wasn't going to be bothered, "Excuse me. As I mentioned, that is restricted under data privacy laws for an active investigation."
Toviro went quiet.
The expression left his face, not into blankness but into something more honest than that: the look of a man who has run out of road and is standing at the edge of it, looking at the distance still to go.
There was nothing more to get here. The wall was real and it wasn't moving.
He straightened. Thanked the man. And turned away from the desk.