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“My stepdad sold me off,” another voice said, flat and dry as paper. “Got himself a few grams of shit that I hope kills him.”

“I missed the bus home after work,” a third whispered. “Two men put me in the back of a van.”

The truck swung around a corner. The hairline of light slid across the dark, and for a moment I saw them. A cheekbone. A tangle of braids. A bitten lip. Then the dark swallowed them again.

“Shit,” I whispered. “How old are you?”

A sob broke somewhere in the dark. Others began to murmur, a soft, practised sound, hands finding shoulders.

“She’s barely eighteen,” the girl beside me said. “I would have been better off in Mexico.”

“How did you end up here?” I asked the crying girl, gently.

“My parents came when I was nine.” Her voice shook, thin and wet. “They got deported and I was lost in the system. I think they were scared and left me here.”

She kept crying, but quieter now, as the whispers around her thickened into something like a blanket.

“They prey on the vulnerable, you know?” the girl beside me said.

I nodded. Then I realised that no one could see me. The thought was oddly steadying.

“Easier to say we ran away,” someone else murmured. “Nobody looks for girls who ran.”

The words landed somewhere deep. I thought of Auntie believing I was asleep on a sofa.

“How many of us are on this truck?”

“Ten of us. Eleven now.”

I felt the blood drain from my face. Eleven girls ripped from their homes, their lives, their families. Each of them had been somebody’s daughter, with a name that somebody was probably saying right now, into a phone, to a policeman who had stopped listening.

For what?

For who?

Sickness swelled in my chest. What was wrong with humanity?

“We heard them talking,” a quiet voice said. “About two shipments.”

My stomach churned. I covered my mouth and gagged, feeling the warm water rise in my throat before it sank back down, and in the dark, eleven girls breathed together and said nothing.

❦ ❦ ❦

Dread wasn’t sitting in the darkness. It was in the way the truck left the freeway and met traffic. The stop and start. The long hiss of brakes, the lurch, the hum of other engines pulling alongside, so close that a car radio thumped bass through the steel wall. Ordinary life, an arm’s length away, and not one person in it knew we were here.

It was the heat, thickening with every stop. It was the way the girls reached for each other without a word, hands knotting into hands, when the engine finally cut out.

With sight gone, every tiny sound swelled. The metal ticking as it cooled. The cabin door opening and slamming. A man coughing, dragging up phlegm and spitting it onto the ground. A thread of cigarette smoke slid through the seam of the door and curled into my throat.

“All alive?” a man said.

“Prince beat his girl up,” the driver chuckled. “But she was alive when they carted her on.”

“Hm. Good.”

Footsteps crunched across gravel, and the voices thinned into the night.

“Get it unloaded and set up next to TCLU-2307914. We switch the containers tomorrow.”