U-Pol was so drained that it took all her concentration merely to stay awake and put one foot in front of the other. There was one saving grace to her fatigue: as with work ordeal in the fields, it proved a potent distraction, leaving her with little time to dwell on the fate of her husband and daughter, who’d been led away, along with Ji Lhe-Kan’s husband and son, shortly before the women had been first put to work. No indication had been given as to what lay in store for the men, but U-Pol assumed they had been diverted to some more strenuous labor. As for Na-Li, U-Pol had seen the way the commandant had looked at her daughter, and the thought of what he might have had in mind for young woman was unbearable to contemplate, so she’d struggled to block the matter from her mind.
Soon, the prisoners found themselves heading past a clearing where a handful of soldiers had begun to fling several corpses, one after the other, into a shallow pit barely deep enough to hold them all. The sheer horror of sight alone was enough to unnerve U-Pol, but when it dawned on her that her loved ones might be among the dead, her pent-up emotions suddenly erupted in a sob so loud and wrenching that it doubled her over. Fortunately she wasn’t alone. An equally profound wailing broke out among some of the other prisoners, men and women alike, and several of them strayed from the column, rushing toward the makeshift burial site. They were intercepted by the guards, who brusquely herded them back while shouting for silence.
During the commotion, Ji Lhe-Kan hurriedly spoke with the prisoner ahead of her, then turned to U-Pol and whispered that those being buried were prisoners that had been killed during an incident that had occurred before their arrival at the camp.
“Our men are still all right,” she added quickly. “Na-Li and Rha-Tyr, too. You’ll see.”
U-Pol nodded faintly, but she was consumed by doubt and she saw that her friend, too, was nowhere near as confident of their loved ones’ fate as she was pretending to be. The two women clutched hands briefly, as if attempting to lend strength to one another.
“Move on!” one of the guards shouted, further startling the women by firing a warning shot into the air with his carbine. “Unless you want to join them!”
When another soldier aimed his rifle at U-Pol and Lhe-Kan, the two women pulled their hands apart. U-Pol struggled to regain her composure, but as the prisoners resumed their march back to camp, the image of the mass grave continued to haunt her. She wept quietly, biting her knuckle each time another anguished sob swelled in her throat.
As the procession reached the camp and wound its way around the periphery fence, U-Pol and Lhe-Kan found themselves horrified anew as they were led past a spot where a young male prisoner had just made an unsuccessful escape attempt. He’d apparently made it as far as the top of the innermost fence before sentries in one of the nearby lookout towers had gunned him down, and though he’d been killed, his shirt and one of his pant legs had snagged on the thick coils of barbed wire topping the fence and he hung suspended, arms and legs pinned at an angle that made it look as if he were still alive and dancing in midair. A pair of guards had just reached the body, one carrying a ladder and bolt cutters, the other tugging at a leash to keep a full-size Rottweiler from sniffing at the pool of blood collecting on the ground directly beneath the bullet-riddled corpse.
“The third one this week!” a guard walking alongside U-Pol and Lhe-Kan said with a snicker. “You’d think they would know better by now!”
U-Pol tore her gaze from the grisly sight, blinking away a fresh flow of tears. She could hear Lhe-Kan weeping directly ahead of her, as well, but moments later the other woman’s sobbing stopped as abruptly as it had begun, and soon U-Pol saw the reason why. As they were herded through a side gate into the prison yard, she saw Lhe-Kan’s son, Rha-Tyr, standing bare-chested amid a handful of other young men who’d been given sledgehammers with which to pound away at some of the larger rocks that had just been brought down from the mines.
Rha-Tyr spotted the women in midswing and offered them a faint smile before he brought the hammer crashing down. He glanced around him, making sure that none of the guards was watching him, then gestured faintly over his shoulder. U-Pol looked past him to the side of the mountain overlooking the camp and saw the openings to several mine shafts.
“Seung-Whan and Pho-Hwa must be in the mines,” U-Pol whispered to her friend. Now that they were within the confines of the camp, the guards had moved away, leaving them free to talk.
Lhe-Kan nodded hopefully. “I told you they’d be all right,” she said.
“I don’t see my daughter anywhere,” U-Pol murmured, scanning the grounds for her daughter. Na-Li , however, was nowhere to be seen.