See You at Breakfast
Copyright© 2026 by Megumi Kashuahara
Chapter 7: Movement
The twelfth day started differently, and Megan knew something had changed before anyone told her anything at all — the compound outside her door had a different sound to it, more voices than usual, more footsteps moving with purpose instead of the slow shuffle she’d learned to associate with boredom. She sat up against the wall, every muscle tensing, and tried to parse the shift without being able to see past the bars of the high window.
Abu Talib came alone, earlier than his usual visits, and for the first time since the second day he looked less like a man in control of a situation and more like a man managing one. “We are moving you,” he said, without preamble. “Stand.”
She stood, her body protesting in a dozen places at once, and he didn’t offer the courtesy of explanation. Two guards she didn’t recognize came in behind him — not Hassan, not the limping man who’d given her the sling — and bound her wrists in front of her with a length of cord that bit into skin already raw from the restraints she’d worn during the first days of captivity. They pulled a strip of cloth over her eyes, rough and smelling of motor oil, and the sudden absence of sight after twelve days of watching light move across mudbrick sent a fresh wave of disorientation through her that had nothing to do with the blindfold itself and everything to do with how much control she’d fought to reclaim in that small room, gone now in an instant.
They walked her out into open air for the first time since the desert, and even blind she could feel the difference — sun on her skin, real wind instead of the stale trapped air of the room, the ground shifting from packed dirt to something looser underfoot. She heard the compound’s dogs barking, more agitated than usual, and beneath that, voices arguing in Arabic, fast and clipped, a tone she recognized even without understanding the words: urgency. Fear, maybe, though she couldn’t tell whose.
They put her in the back of a vehicle, a truck bed judging by the metal ridges pressing into her through the thin cloth still all she wore, and someone threw a tarp or blanket over her that smelled of diesel and livestock, and the engine started, and they began to move.
She had no way to track distance blind and bound, no way to count anything except the jolts of the road passing under the wheels and the shifts in direction she felt through her own body, left, then right, then a long straight stretch that felt like it went on for the better part of an hour. She used the time the only way she had left to use it — staying present, cataloguing sensation, refusing to let the fear of not knowing where she was going collapse into something larger than she could manage. This is information, she told herself. Movement means something. It doesn’t have to mean the worst thing.
At one point, deep into the drive, she heard one of the men in the cab say something sharp, urgent, and the truck’s speed changed abruptly, faster, the road beneath them rougher, throwing her hard against the metal ridges with every rut. She heard, or thought she heard, beneath the engine noise and the wind, something else — a low, distant thrum, high and steady, nothing like the truck’s engine, nothing like anything she could place. It was there and then it was gone, swallowed by wind noise, and she couldn’t be sure whether she’d actually heard it or simply wanted to badly enough that her mind had built it out of nothing.
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