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like me, and that, despite what he was doing to me, he empathized with my pain? Is that why Hun appeared tormented by his own actions? Or had I imagined the whole thing? Was it nothing more than wishful thinking? Desperately, I searched young Hun’s face for something more, but he was already pulling away. The moment was over, gone, as if it had never happened. Had it?
    Stepping back, the young man held up an iPhone and pointed it at me. Every time it was a different one. I could tell because of the changing case covers. This was the fourth or fifth picture they’d taken of me. Each one using a new phone, probably stolen from an unsuspecting tourist in the medina . They’d take my picture, send the file, and toss the phone.
    But something was different this time. Something important.
    Aside from the day of my arrival, I had never been hurt. The previous pictures had shown me bound, gagged, unshaven, scared, but otherwise okay. This was the first time I’d been beaten. The message they wanted to send to the photograph’s recipient—my parents, Jenn, the media?—was clear: meet our demands, or else. The kidnappers were escalating their game.

Chapter 8
 
 
 
    Hunger is a strange thing. At first it's pure agony as your body is denied and demands food. Physically, this is excruciating; psychologically, the game is even harder. All you can think about is food: your last meal, how it tasted, the food you’d want to eat if you could have it, your favorite food, food, food, food, FOOD.
    Then all of it goes away.
    I’d heard of a peculiar phenomenon reported during famines, where starving children will sometimes refuse to eat even when finally offered food. Now I understood. It’s as if the body throws up its hands and gives up on ever getting sustenance. Then, as a kind of defense mechanism, it decides it doesn’t even want it anymore.
    But the absence of hunger pangs doesn’t mean the physical effects disappear with them. Ever since I’d been taken from the airport and imprisoned, the sum total of my daily dietary intake consisted of a cup of water and what amounted to less than a slice of bread, twice a day. I began each morning feeling remarkably energized and alert. By midday, a sagging weakness would overtake me. My brain felt dull and my body shook with cold. I would sleep for longer and longer periods. I don’t know if it was because I didn’t have the energy to stay awake, or if I mentally craved escape from what was happening.
    What was happening to me?
    I had no idea. After being kidnapped, beaten, thrown into this room, forced to defecate and urinate in a hole that was nowhere near deep enough to disguise its purpose, and screamed at in a language I didn’t understand, I still had no idea why all of this was happening. What did these men want? And from whom?
    Other than Hun—who visited only to yell at me, hurt me, or both—and young Hun, I’d had zero contact with other people. The only improvement to my situation had been having my hands freed and the gag removed. Despite our inability to communicate with words, I clearly understood the threat of what would happen to me if I dared scream for help.
    Most days, the only departure from the terrorizing stagnancy of nothing happening was the stealthy hand that slipped my twice-daily dose of bread and water through the door of the cell. A sick part of my brain began to yearn for Hun and young Hun’s return, just to have some kind of human interaction, something other than inactivity. Because, I’d found, inside those endless hours of quiet and utter solitude lived something far worse: fear of the unknown. Of what was coming next. And, worst of all, memories of what had led me here.
    It was a pitiful, agonizing existence.
    Even so, I would come to wish things had stayed exactly as they were.
     
    I thought constantly about the moment, the exact second, when Jenn would know something had gone wrong. How would it have happened? Did the kidnappers contact