CHAPTER 14

PERCY

I’m going crazy, she thought. With its choking, closed horizons; identical green-gloomed panoramas; moist, dark tree trunks disappearing overhead; and the unending brambles waiting to grab her clothes, the forest depressed her. Malila refused any of the old man’s bitter draughts now. The pain was tolerable, and she wanted as little of the maniac’s home remedies as she could manage.

The old man had no idea who he was up against. She started studying how best to escape. She would have had a good chance … if her body had not chosen that time to betray her.

Her heart rate pounding in her throat, the spasms of colic, the grinding sensation, and the ever-tightening pain in her head accelerated into panic. She realized...

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