Free White Crocodile by K.T. Medina Page A

pain. She hugged him to her chest, jiggling and shushing him as quietly as she could. He gasped again, but another sound came before his next cry – so soft she wasn’t even sure she’d heard it – a twig breaking in the undergrowth at the edge of the little clearing? And then it was lost in Chhaya’s next shriek, though she pressed her hand over his mouth to muffle him. Mercifully, he seemed to sense her desperation for him to be quiet because after a few whimpers he fell silent, breathing quickly.
    Jacqueline scrambled to her feet, clutching Chhaya with one arm, clawing the air with the other, as if she could swim forward through the murk, but her injured leg gave way again, and she just had time to wrap both arms around Chhaya before she fell hard on to her knees. She wanted to scream with frustration. She wanted to scream for help too: both impulses were there. But it was too late to give in to that other voice. She was a mother now, not a little girl. She was the protector. And if she did scream, no one would come.
    She had spent many hours in the jungle collecting firewood to barter for food to keep herself and Chhaya alive, and had always felt secure in the privacy it afforded, something that hadn’t been hers since her pregnancy had begun to show. But the place seemed different at night, through the prism of her fear, and she realised that she was hopelessly lost. She had no idea which way led back to her village, or which direction to take to reach one of the other settlements. She started to crawl forward, hauling Chhaya as best she could, dragging her leg behind her, adrenalin diluting the pain.
    Then something slid across her back and she suddenly knew exactly where she was. Mine tape. It was the edge of the Koh Kroneg field. Mined land. Her heart lurched again, but nothing could be worse than what was behind her.
    Every few scrambled paces, she looked over her shoulder, and the mine tape receded, five metres, ten. A curl of moon showed in the canopy of branches beyond. And then, in its light, something else. A pale figure standing in the roots of the banyan, on the very edge of the jungle. She stopped and sat still, next to the hollowed-out stump of a tree, clutching Chhaya’s tiny, shivering body, muffling his whimpers against her ragged T-shirt, feeling the cool mud oozing between her thighs. The shape in the banyan hadn’t moved. But it was there. It was real.
    She was being hunted.
    Hot tears spilled. Koh Kroneg. Her beauty had brought her to the edge of this abyss. It had captivated Arun, ten years older than her and still without a wife. Jacqueline’s father had disappeared, eaten by the minefield, when she was four years old; the dominant memory of her childhood was her mother’s incessant fear of not being able to keep them both alive. Hunger had followed them every day. To be flattered and appreciated by Arun was an escape, and she had allowed herself to dream.
    Now, through her own stupidity, she had written herself the same history. But where her mother had had a husband and honour, she had none. It was her fault, of course, not Arun’s, that she had fallen pregnant, and the consequences were hers to bear. Hers, and Chhaya’s. Her son would have to shoulder them too: the stigma and isolation, the constant hunger. By bearing him, she had cursed him. Now that he was here it felt an impossible betrayal to wish him gone, but before he had been born, she had prayed constantly for his growing life to vanish from inside her.
    She blinked. How long had it been? Minutes? Time passed differently out here at night. She had been sitting in her hut preparing for bed. The best time of day, Chhaya asleep, safe, tucked inside the wooden crate she had found a couple of months before his birth and saved. Her thoughts losing their definition, she had been about to remove her dress when she heard the bottom step creak. No one ever came to their door, and she hadn’t heard approaching footsteps. Lifting Chhaya