See You at Breakfast
Copyright© 2026 by Megumi Kashuahara
Chapter 4: The Room
They walked her for nearly two hours before the ground beneath her boots changed from open desert to the rutted dirt track of a settlement, though her sense of direction had gone unreliable somewhere in the first thirty minutes, pain and shock scrambling the internal compass she’d relied on for years of flying without ever once questioning it.
The compound was smaller than she expected — a low cluster of mudbrick buildings behind a wall that had crumbled in places and been patched in others, the whole thing looking less like a military installation and more like a farm repurposed for a war nobody there had asked for. Dogs barked somewhere out of sight. A generator ran with the uneven cough of a machine long overdue for maintenance. She catalogued exits and distances and the number of armed men she could see, though what good any of that would do her, given the state of her body and the hands still gripping her arms, she couldn’t yet say.
They took her into a room with a single high window, bars set into mudbrick that had probably held livestock at some point before it held her. Four men stood around her while a fifth searched her, hands moving over her body with a slowness that had nothing to do with diligence — down her arms, across her chest, lingering at her waistband. She stood as still as her shaking would allow and fixed her eyes on a point on the wall above the tallest man’s shoulder, and made herself somewhere else, some cold interior room where none of this was actually happening to her. It was a trick she would rely on more and more in the days that followed, and would spend years afterward trying to unlearn.
When the search was finished, the man in charge of the room — younger than the others, with a scar through one eyebrow — said something short in Arabic, and two of them took hold of her flight suit and pulled it from her, working the zipper down over her ruined shoulder while she bit down against the pain of it, until she stood in the room in nothing but the thin cotton undershirt and shorts she’d worn beneath the suit.
She started to fold her arms across herself and one of them said something sharp and knocked her hands back down.
“No,” the scarred one said, in English. “Like this.”
They left her that way — arms at her sides, nothing covering the bruises already blooming along her ribs — and filed out one by one, the last of them pausing in the doorway long enough to look at her in a way that had nothing to do with search procedure, before the door shut and she heard something heavy dragged in front of it.
She understood, standing alone in the dark with her arms shaking from the effort of keeping them where they’d been told to keep them, that this was not an oversight. Someone above the men in that room had decided how a captured woman should be kept, and the decision had been made with her humiliation as the point of it, not a side effect.
The first night passed in a single unbroken stretch of cold. The high window let in air that turned sharp after dark, and she had nothing to wrap around herself, and by morning her teeth had stopped chattering only because exhaustion had finally outpaced the shivering. When light came through the bars she used it to check her body for the first time — the shoulder swollen and purple, the ribs mapped in bruises she couldn’t yet tell were cracked or only battered, a shallow cut along her hairline crusted with blood she hadn’t known was there.
The older man came on what she guessed was the second day. Gray-streaked beard, eyes that assessed her the way a buyer assessed livestock, English better than she’d expected.
“American,” he said. “Pilot.”
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