A Walk Across the Sun by Corban Addison

Author:Corban Addison
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: ebook
Publisher: SilverOak
Published: 2011-01-10T22:00:00+00:00

Sita returned to the flat the next day and the day thereafter, escorted by Dmitri. Each morning, Tatiana met her in the foyer and gave her a task. She dusted the furniture in the sitting room and polished the dining room table and chairs. She cleaned the bathrooms and brought order to the linen closet upstairs. She worked for eight hours with a fifteenminute break for lunch. Tatiana was a perfectionist, but Sita was exacting and met her expectations.

On her fourth day at the flat, Sita’s morning routine changed without explanation. After parking the Mercedes, Dmitri led her back across the courtyard toward the street. He stopped beneath the covered archway and punched in a code on a keypad beside a glass door Sita hadn’t noticed before. She heard a lock disengage. She followed him into a musty vestibule at the base of a spiral stairwell.

Dmitri delivered her a stern look. “You do not speak of what you see,” he said in surprisingly fluent English. “You do what I ask and you keep the rest to yourself. If not, there will be consequences. Understand?”

Sita’s breath caught in her throat. She recalled the blond girl on the couch that first day and wondered whether she was about to discover the source of the girl’s fear.

She nodded and followed Dmitri up a flight of steps to a wooden landing. Two doors bracketed the landing. Dmitri opened the door to the right, and Sita trailed him into a corridor lit by a single bare bulb. Taking a set of keys out of his jacket, Dmitri walked down the hall and unlocked six doors. He barked a few words in his strange language and retrieved a basket from a closet at the end of the corridor.

One by one, six young women emerged from the rooms. They were dressed in T-shirts and gym shorts. The last was the girl Sita had seen on the couch. Sita thought of the sex rooms in Suchir’s brothel. She had no idea what Dmitri did with the girls, but the locks made it clear that they were not free to leave.

Dmitri handed her the basket and spoke in English. “Take the sheets and pillowcases off the beds and gather the dirty clothes.”

Sita entered the first bedroom. The room was small and dimly lit, with space only for a single bed and a chest of drawers. The window on the far wall was covered with a shade, its edges fastened to the trim with staples. Sita stripped the bed of its linens and scooped up a pile of lacy underwear in the corner. She repeated the same motions in the remaining rooms. All had the same dreary austerity, the same sealed windows, the same invisible menace.

The girls used the bathroom and returned to the hallway while Sita busied herself with her task. When she had finished stripping the last bed, she took the basket back to Dmitri. She couldn’t bring herself to look at the girls. The loneliness of their captivity reminded her of Ahalya.

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