The blow is so swift I do not see it coming. All at once, I am on my knees, and for a few seconds, everything is dark. Anja’s screams seem far away. Then I register the pain, the throbbing in my jaw. I taste blood. I see it drip in bright spatters on the river stones.

“Get up. Come on, get up! We’ve wasted enough time.”

I stagger to my feet. Anja is staring at me with stricken eyes. “Mila, just be good!” she whispers. “We have to do what they tell us! My feet don’t hurt anymore, really. I can walk.”

“You get the picture now?” the man says to me. He turns and glares at the other girls. “You see what happens if you piss me off? If you talk back? Now walk!”

Suddenly the girls are scrambling across the riverbed. Anja grabs my hand and pulls me along. I am too dazed to resist, so I stumble after her, swallowing blood, scarcely seeing the trail ahead of me.

It is only a short distance farther. We climb up the opposite bank, wind our way through a stand of trees, and suddenly we are standing on a dirt road.

Two vans are parked there, waiting for us.

“Stand in a line,” our driver says. “Come on, hurry up. They want to take a look at you.”

Though befuddled by this command, we form a line, seven tired girls with aching feet and dusty clothes.

Four men climb out of the vans and they greet our driver in English. They are Americans. A heavyset man walks slowly up the row, eyeing us. He wears a baseball cap and he looks like a sunburned farmer inspecting his cows. He stops in front of me and frowns at my face. “What happened to this one?”

“Oh, she talked back,” says our driver. “It’s just a bruise.”

“She’s too scrawny, anyway. Who’d want her?”

Does he know I can understand English? Does he even care? I may be scrawny, I think, but you have a pig face.

His gaze has already moved on, to the other girls. “Okay,” he says, and he breaks out in a grin. “Let’s see what they’ve got.”