Free No Safe Place by Deborah Ellis Page A

The thugs would come back, and they probably had friends.
    Rosalia and the man driving went on in silence for a few hours, heading southwest instead of north.
    â€œWe’re taking the long way to Berlin,” she said, just so he would know that she knew.
    â€œYou think I’d make this long trip just for you?”
    They stopped for the first of the other two girls just west of Plzen. She was waiting in a cheap café. No one was waiting with her, and she cried as she got into the back seat. Rosalia kept her eyes firmly focused out the window and kept her hands deep in her jacket pockets. She did not reach out to comfort the new girl.
    She should be strong enough to comfort herself, Rosalia thought, wishing the girl would stop crying.
    They picked up a third girl and another man an hour later. The girl got into the back seat. Rosalia refused to move away from the window, so the weeper got the uncomfortable spot in the middle. The man, clearly a friend of the driver, got into the front.
    The little car was now full, and they headed for the German border.
    The passport check was cursory.
    â€œWelcome to the new open Europe,” the driver chuckled, tucking the girls’ passports into his pocket after they were waved through by the border guards. The other girls objected but Rosalia didn’t care. Her passport was fake, and not even a good fake. She didn’t have any real papers.
    The car stopped in a small town and the three girls were allowed to stretch their legs and go to the latrine. The men bought them sandwiches and coffee, and they all sat together at an outdoor table, as though they were tourists on a holiday. The weeper — a Czech, who had finally stopped weeping — and the third girl, a Romanian, tried to engage the men in small talk: “Do you go to Germany often?” and “I can’t wait to see Berlin on my days off.”
    Rosalia kept her mouth shut. She listened, and she watched.
    She watched the expression on the men’s faces as the girls talked, and saw how they wore the sort of face people put on when they’re forced to listen to people they don’t consider equals. She’d seen that same expression on too many Czech and Polish faces when the Roma tried to talk to them.
    She saw the way the men’s eyes constantly scanned their surroundings, and recognized in that the eyes of her own people, who could not rest from watching for the police.
    And she noticed how little time it took for them to jump up from their seats and come after her when she wandered away for a little walk.
    She took all this in, and thought about it as they continued their journey.
    They stopped for the night at an ugly cinder-block motel. Everyone went into one room.
    â€œSleep,” the men said, pointing at one of the double beds for the three girls to share. Rosalia kept her day clothes on, even her shoes, and took a space at the bed’s edge, refusing to move even when one of the girls asked her to.
    One of the men stretched out on the other double bed and was soon snoring, and the other sat up awake in a chair.
    Rosalia dozed with one eye open and heard the men change places halfway through the night. She waited until the snoring started up again, and then slowly, quietly slipped out of the covers.
    The man in the chair had his eyes closed. He appeared to be sleeping.
    Interested only in testing, not in escaping — after all, where would she go? — Rosalia reached for the motel room door. She turned the bolt on the lock and opened the door onto the deep German night.
    Slam! The man on watch was out of his chair and smacking the door shut. “Where are you going?”
    â€œFor a walk.”
    â€œNo walk!”
    â€œWhat’s going on?” And then both men were up, standing over her, yelling at her in Romanian and German. “You want to get in trouble — out in Germany without papers? You want to get us in trouble? Damn