PROLOGUE

Bangoro village, Mali, West Africa

65 miles north of Timbuktu

Camel meat.

At the thought, her mouth watered slightly. A Philly cheesesteak with camel meat?

Kate, dreaming of comfort food, couldn’t be further from home. For years, her father

would joke, “I’m in Timbuktu,” when he’d call from any of the remote towns of rural

Pennsylvania he was constantly visiting. Now she was living a three-hour drive—or for the

locals, a three-day walk—outside of the real Timbuktu. Beyond the middle of nowhere.

The steel bolt clanged loudly as Kate locked up the classroom. She clamped on a

bright yellow padlock. The key, also schoolbus yellow, was on a leather lanyard around her

neck. It was mostly for show, everyone knew, but the headmaster insisted that security

must be maintained. Especially for the token library of a few dozen books, each preciously

hand-delivered by Kate and the string of Peace Corps volunteers that came before her.

Why not camel? Tastes like beef. I could be the first. I’m a cheesesteak pioneer.

She licked her lips. It’s futile, she knew, to fantasize about impossible snacks. But it

was a ritual she justified as a normal reaction to homesickness. And the searing Saharan

desert heat.

The sun was dropping toward the horizon and glowing in the rich burnt orange that

exists only in the African sky.

 Most of the students were long gone, the girls called home to haul water, the boys to

tend the family goats. A few stragglers were still wandering around the school in tattered

pale blue uniforms, watching the foreigner lock up for the day.

Kate slung her backpack over her shoulder, and turned down the sandy path toward

her home. Other than the school, her house was the only concrete structure in the village.

The rest—the huts, the granaries full of millet, and the tiny shops selling Coca-Cola, long

bars of pink soap, jugs of cooking oil, and mobile phone scratch cards—were made of dried

mud.

Even though dusk was nearing, it was still close to 100 degrees. Bubbles of sweat

were sprouting on her nose and along her cheekbones, periodically sliding down salty

paths onto her lips. Her long red hair, pulled back into a perky ponytail, bobbed up and

down as she walked.

She was exhausted. But her long day was finally over.

“Miss Katie, Miss Katie! Hello! How are you? Miss Katie!” She waved back at a

gaggle of small children, naked and dusty, hopping along the path.

“Hello. Good evening.” Kate forced a friendly smile. The price of being a local

celebrity, she reminded herself. And the first freckled redhead the village children had ever

seen.

“Hello! Miss Katie! Bonjour! Hello!” They giggled and scampered off into the bush.

As she settled into her forty-minute walk, the very one she had made every day for

the past five months, she returned to her thoughts.

She missed her family, especially her dad. Kate loved when they would go out for

brunch, just the two of them, on weekends. For as long as she could remember, her father
spent the work week away from Philadelphia, taking the train back home on Fridays. His

afternoons and evenings were usually also busy with work. But the mornings were for

family. Kate had even chosen Penn over Yale to stay closer to home. So their weekends

could stay the same.

Kate revered her father. To be like him, she knew she would have to see the world.

After college, the Peace Corps seemed an obvious, almost unconscious, choice. Kate had

never even heard of Mali when she received her assignment. She had studied French in

school so she could spend the summers in Paris. Or maybe the Riviera. Who knew they

spoke French in the Sahara desert? When she was told where she was going, she laughed, as

surely Timbuktu was fictional. Like Atlantis. But her father sternly advised that she accept

her duty.

So here she was, in Bangoro, teaching English.

Kate barely noticed the sunset that had helped her fall in love with Africa during

those tough early weeks of adjustment. She spied a single white camel off in the distance,

nibbling lazily at a dry bush. The sight no longer drew Kate’s fascination, but rather pulled

her mind back to cheesesteaks.

Lost in her daydreaming, she didn’t notice that the village was unusually quiet that

evening. Or that all the children had suddenly disappeared.

Kate followed a bend in the path and was startled by a Toyota pickup truck, spray-

painted with the beige and green squiggles of homemade camouflage, parked in front of her

house. Her instinct was to run away, but two men—their faces covered by black scarves,

AK-47s slung on their chests—stepped into her path. She spun back toward her house only

to find more men emerging from the cab of the Toyota.

 Large hands grabbed both her arms firmly and, before she could scream, a burlap

sack was slipped over her head.