Sara knew that earlier, when she had run across the square, naked and unattended, it was the most dangerous thing she'd ever done in her life.

Until now.

Now she was a woman wearing clothes on Purity Island. Perhaps the first woman since Sherry Patton, fifty years ago, to do so. And Sherry had had no idea how much offense she would cause.

Anyone seeing Sara from far enough away would never give her a second glance. She would simply be an island male intent on his business, of no concern to anyone else. She needed that anonymity that clothes would provide. Without them, every male on the island would instantly see her as a runaway slave, to be taken into custody, to be sold at auction, if not simply claimed outright. She might be sold back to the Foundation, but only if she stayed in town. The Foundation would never find her beyond the borders of Purity Town. They wouldn't even look for her. And outside of town was where she must go. Cherise had been taken away. Sara had to find her.

But being acceptable as seen from a distance was one thing. Being seen close up was another entirely. Seen by anyone up close, Sara would never pass inspection. She hadn't had time to do anything about hiding her breasts. The vest did nothing to cover her cleavage, and wasn't tight enough to disguise the shape of her chest. She also believed she was probably too tall to be convincing as the adolescent her stubble-free face suggested she must be. And she was pretty sure no man on this island shaved his legs. If she was caught, she would be in bigger trouble than any woman on the island in fifty years. The end would be the same as if she had gone out naked: sold to spend the rest of her life as a Purity Island slave. But because of the clothing, she would be punished first. Sara looked again at the girl up on the platform, covered in whip marks, struggling to find a way to lessen the pain. In her, Sara saw a perfect example of what she herself would go through, and probably for at least two days, not just one. If caught here in town, she would stand on that same platform, in plain sight of Bart, Derek, all of her friends. And none of them would be able to help her.

It didn't matter to Sara. Cherise needed her.

Sara knew she'd been right to grab the clothes and get out of the door before Derek or Sid could get there. The men would watch all of the doors, waiting for Cherise if she should return, needing to be there to let her in. And they would never have let Sara out to look for her. They knew exactly how dangerous it was, how unacceptable it was to let any girl out by herself. Sara knew they were never going to find Cherise, because Cherise must already be beyond the boundaries of their protection. Only Sara could find her. Sara didn't have any boundaries, any limit to how far she would go for Cherise. And if she had waited any longer, she would have lost her chance.

The rain pattered down around her, running off her hat, her vest, her shorts, all made water-repellent by girlfat. The sky was getting lighter now, definitely past dawn. Around her, the town was coming to life. She saw a trade wagon rattling along at the end of the street, pushed by two slavegirls as their owner rode inside. A shopkeeper was sweeping out the entryway of his store, getting ready to open for business. They weren't close enough to endanger her.

Where to look?

Her first thought was simply to run down every street -- it wouldn't take long -- hoping to see Cherise in plain sight. Sara couldn't imagine she would find Cherise here, though. Cute Guy had to be the one who had taken her, and he was obviously from out of town. He would be taking Cherise back where he came from.

Consideration of the sheer number of places to look started turning Sara's bowels to water. She had an entire four hundred square mile island to search.

She shook her head. Cute Guy couldn't possibly have taken Cherise far yet. He would have wanted to be away as soon as possible with his stolen slavegirl, and had probably left at the very first hint of pre-dawn light. But that wasn't very long ago, and Sara had left the restaurant very soon after. Cute Guy would have made his start no more than fifteen minutes before Sara had arrived at the shack he'd been using for his stay in town. He should still be near. But which way? He would now be getting farther away by the minute, and could have gone in any direction.

Okay, she thought, wait. It was true there were countless small paths leading out to nearby farms, but for the same reason she knew Cute Guy was from out of town, she strongly suspected he was from far out of town. After eleven weeks of restaurant operation, he suddenly appeared one night, and then again the next night. Farmers from nearby were surely in Purity Town more often than that, and they had no reason to stay in town overnight. Sara had studied the geography of the island and the town, as had all of the girls. Cute Guy would be on one of the major roads. Either he was on the coastal road joining Purity with the other trading towns, to the north and south, or he was on the main road that headed west, deeper into the island towards the mountains.

Sara wasn't even a hundred yards from the coast road. She began trotting towards it.

Men were starting to assemble at the dock now. Possibly a mainland trader was expected to arrive this morning. Sara kept buildings between her and the growing crowd, reached the coast road some distance down, and began jogging along it, going south.

It felt so strange to be wearing clothes, after doing without for months. And very nice to run freely. She could feel her leg muscles loosen up, the blood flowing, her heart and breathing settling into a running rhythm.

Underneath the physical well-being, she was growing increasingly frantic. She knew it was possible she might never find Cherise. But Sara considered it an unalterable law of nature, an absolute, that she would not return to the restaurant without Cherise. Sara would either find Cherise or else be captured herself. There weren't any other choices.

She stopped after about a quarter mile on the south coastal road. She could see ahead perhaps another quarter mile, and decided Cute Guy couldn't have gone any farther than that in the time since first light.

She reversed course and began jogging back. Detouring around the dock area, she started up the north road. She went a little farther, but again came to a point where it didn't seem possible Cute Guy could have taken Cherise beyond the farthest point she could see.

She jogged back to town, seriously worried now. She slowed to a walk, needing to rest before starting out on the road to the mountains.

The town was getting busier now, and she skirted the area around the main square in favor of back streets.

There was some traffic at the terminus of the road to the mountains, and Sara detoured into the woods, successfully out of sight but unable to break into a run amid the dense random placement of trees. She told herself walking would be okay. Cute Guy would not be moving faster than a walking pace either, so she wouldn't be losing any ground.

A few minutes later there was no one in sight. Sara moved into the road itself, and began jogging.

She thought she must have gone about a mile, and was biting her lip, almost whimpering with worry, trying to convince herself that, with all the time taken for her earlier searches, Cute Guy might have had time to get this far, when she caught sight, through the lessening rain, of a modest-sized wagon up ahead. That would be about the right place, she thought, if Cute Guy started out right at first light. There appeared to be a slavegirl on either side pushing the wagon by its side handles, and three women following behind the wagon. In the dim light, the distance and intervening rainfall made it impossible to tell if any of the women was Cherise. Sara caught a momentary glimpse of a man seated on a rear-facing bench at the back of the wagon. Too indistinct to tell whether it was Cute Guy.

With a tentative target in sight, Sara was able to still her anxiety to some extent, and suddenly realized how hungry and thirsty she was. She hadn't been able to take care of either need since awakening. She ducked back into the forest, and soon found what she was looking for: a peach tree. She picked several fruits, choosing ones that more or less matched the color of the ones on the ground under the assumption that those would be ripe, sat under the tree and ate them. They tasted wonderfully sweet, but the juice in them did not completely take care of her thirst, so she followed the sound of running water she'd been hearing, and drank several doubled-palmfulls of flowing rainwater from the creek.

As she finished drinking, she decided that her next step should be to try to get ahead of the wagon she had seen. She wanted to have as complete an idea as she could of what she was dealing with before she tried to devise a plan of attack.

She had been hearing the creek for awhile, and decided it probably paralleled the road for some distance. She began jogging upstream beside its bank, checking periodically to make sure she was still near the road.

As she jogged, she wondered what was happening now at the restaurant. They must have discovered her absence soon after she left, and her discarded decorations soon after that. Since they knew she'd still been inside when Cherise was found to be missing, they probably had correctly guessed she'd gone to look for her. None of the other girls would have that opportunity, Sara knew, not with the doors watched, not with the whole staff alert to the problem.

Among all the other things that scared Sara right this minute, one fear flashed to the forefront before she pushed it aside, determined not to think about it: That no one was looking for her, and that no one ever would. The restaurant project was far too important to risk its existence for a single girl, or even two. Sara understood that. She knew it was right. But it was still frightening.

Cherise, she reminded herself. Think about Cherise only. Nothing else.

Sara slowed to a walk as she heard the sound she'd been listening for, off to her right: the slow grind of wagon wheels along the gritty road. There were too many trees in the way to see it except for momentary, unrevealing glimpses, and she didn't want to get any closer, at the risk of being seen.

Walking briskly, she slowly outdistanced it. When she decided she was far enough ahead, she broke into a run again.

She slowed again, and edged closer to the road. If she could find just the right tree...

There! That one was perfect.

She trotted to the tree, adjacent to the road, and needed to jump only a few inches upward to wrap her hands around the lowest branch. Years of daily chinning-bar exercises made it effortless to pull herself up with her arms until the branch was at chest level, and then she swung her right leg up over it. Fully mounted on the branch now, she scrambled higher until she reached the place she wanted. The road was just in front of her, down below. The wagon would be coming from her right side. She couldn't see it coming because a heavily-leafed bough was in the way, which was the point: as the wagon approached her vantage, no one in it could see her either. She also wouldn't be able to see the wagon after it had passed. Only when the wagon reached the point directly below and in front of her would she see it. At that point she did risk being seen herself, but that danger was minimal. She would be very marginally visible through intervening leaves, and only if someone in the wagon just happened to look up in her direction at just the right moment.

She heard the wagon approaching. She prepared to make her mind a camera, to take in every detail she could in the short time she would have.

The very first thing she saw was Cute Guy. He was sitting on a front-facing bench-type seat at the front of the wagon. Behind him, there were actually four slavegirls, not two, pushing the wagon along, their hands chained to outward-projecting handles, two on each side of the wagon. At the rear of the wagon were the people Sara had seen before: a second man in that rear-facing seat -- Sara dubbed him Crushed Hat -- and the three women following the wagon. They were following because they had no choice: each had her standard slavegirl handcuffs locked together in front of her and attached by chain to the rear of the wagon. None of the seven slavegirls, the four pushing and three following, was wearing a hobble chain, though of course they had the ankle cuffs. None of them could get away from the wagon anyway, and Cute Guy had probably wanted to make better time traveling than hobble chains would allow.

By the time Sara had taken all of this in, her breathing had stopped completely. Because among all these things, she was paying the most attention to what was being carried inside the wagon.

It was Cherise.

Her waitress decorations, all left behind in and near the room Cute Guy had used as his in-town hotel room, had been replaced with standard island slavewear. And Cute Guy had used it to hogtie her, dumping her in the wagon like a bag of cement. Her wristcuffs were locked together behind her, her legs bent with her feet pulled towards her hands, the hobble chain pulled around the lock between the wrist cuffs, back to the ankle cuffs and locked there.

Her eyes were closed, and tears ran freely from them. There was a puffy bruise on her left cheek, just below her eye.

The other occupant of the wagon was a doggirl, standing over Cherise in a belligerent pose as if daring her to move. Cherise didn't seem disposed to move now anyway. She was inert, exhausted.

Sara felt the hottest flame of fury she had ever experienced. The rational part of her had to struggle to the limits of its strength to hold her back from leaping out of the tree to attack the two men on the wagon. She had thought perhaps Cute Guy would be traveling alone with Cherise, and Sara thought she could take him if it was only him, that he wouldn't stand a chance against her, mad as she was. But seeing two men changed the equation. She was still angry enough to try, but couldn't guarantee she could fight two men at once. She had to be sure. She had to know she could win. Cherise could not afford Sara letting her fury trump her common sense. Sara would need a better plan than a frontal assault.

The wagon was out of Sara's sight now, but not out of her mind's eye. She kept seeing Cherise, helpless, abused, threatened, and on her way to begin a lifetime of hopeless, empty drudgery at the mercy of evil men. Men who would no doubt rape her frequently, as if everything else wasn't bad enough.

That can't happen, Sara told herself forcefully. That MUST NOT happen!

Cute Guy had probably been in town on a slave-buying trip, Sara decided. There were no trade goods in the wagon now, and he had probably exchanged them for the three slavegirls behind the wagon. And while he'd been in town, he'd discovered the restaurant, and had realized it offered him a way to get a slavegirl at no cost, requiring only his charm. He'd had nothing to lose by trying. And it had yielded him, in Sara's estimation, a treasure beyond price. Sara had to make sure he couldn't keep it.

Obviously Cherise must have fought them. Sara was sure Cute Guy would have been happy for Cherise simply to walk peacefully behind the wagon like the other slavegirls. Cherise wouldn't go peacefully. Sara felt a surge of pride on Cherise's behalf, and a renewed burst of hot fury at the men who had treated her this way.

Sara sucked in a sudden breath, as she realized that could be herself lying hogtied in chains in the wagon. Sara had been Cute Guy's first choice, for now-obvious reasons. He'd preferred a strong girl, one who could handle whatever heavy labor Cute Guy needed her for. And if it had been me, Sara reminded herself, there'd be no one at all to save me. Cherise has me. She'll always have me.

Sara's head whirled at a sudden unexpected sound behind and below her.

A man was standing there, a man with unusually hairy arms. He was looking directly up at her. Sara saw now what she had been too hurried to see before: that when she'd picked out her tree, she had been skirting the edge of a farm. The fields began just on the other side of the creek. There were perhaps a dozen slavegirls in sight, and it appeared that a harvest was in progress. Among the slavegirls, another man stood watching, holding a whip. The man looked very much like a younger version of Hairy Arms, likely his son, and Sara dubbed him Hairy Junior. Junior strode up to a slavegirl who had stopped pulling a cart, filled with what looked like onions, through the field in the direction of what was probably a small storage barn. The girl appeared pregnant, maybe four months along. It looked to Sara as though the girl was simply exhausted. Hairy Junior spoke to her angrily and gave her a hard, surely painful slap with the whip. Sara clearly heard the smack against the girl's skin, heard her sharp squeal, and watched as she took off at a near run, pulling the cart.

Below Sara, Hairy Arms stood with his hands on his hips. "You come down outa there, Sonny."

Sara's heart was pounding so hard she thought her ribs would give way and let it out. At least, she told herself, he doesn't see I'm a woman yet. But that's probably only a matter of seconds away.

Her mind spun through alternatives. I might fight him, she thought, but while I'm doing it, Hairy Junior has plenty of time to join him. I can't handle both at once. I can probably outrun both of them, though. And I can for sure keep running a longer time than they can.

She started creeping downward through the branches, to get low enough to jump. At least, she decided, this will pacify Hairy for the moment. He thinks I'm just going to come down like he said and take my scolding.

She saw Hairy Arms suddenly do a double take, his eyes widening now as he stared at her. Oh shit, shit, shit, shit, she thought. Now he knows.

Hairy Arms shouted out, "Ruben!" and waved his arm, gesturing for Hairy Junior to join him. Junior started trotting over.

No time left, thought Sara. Have to do it now. Jump outward and land just ahead of him. Take the shock of the fall with bent legs, stay on your feet, start running.

She pushed off and jumped.

Hairy, unexpectedly, moved towards her as she fell. Her foot struck his outstretched arm and she spun to fall horizontally. She crashed heavily on her left side. Her head hit the ground, and she remembered later an explosion of light before everything went black.