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Maybe I shouldn’t have signed off with a threat.

I bow my head. “Sorry. Amen.” I was a little late, but I remembered the sign off. Maybe that will help.

And then it’s time to smear poop. Again, the smell makes me sick, which just gives me more material to work with. I try to make sure that part lands near the drain at least, like I’m aiming to do the right thing. But honestly, this whole thing is just one of the nastiest experiences of my life. I should have, like, spent my time recruiting some kind of special forces team to protect me in cases like this.

Or, you know, figured out how to do magic.

I think about those fire balls and electricity zaps. Were they real? Did I imagine them? Leonid seemed nasty, but perfectly normal yesterday. Boris sucks, but he doesn’t seem magical either. Could I have hallucinated the whole thing?

Maybe he just. . .but no matter how many times I try to think of a way to imagine that what happened didn’t, I can’t block out the image of those men being burned into piles of ash. My heart’s already beating too fast when a car pulls up outside.

Please be Boris. Please just be Boris.

Either God loves me, or I got lucky, because it is Boris, with another box of crackers and cheese. He drops the water bottles and the box on the ground outside when he opens the door, and he swears up a storm again.

“You must be kidding me.”

I shrug. “I told you those are making me sick,” I say in Latvian. I toss my head at the discarded cracker box. “No toilet. No towels. No soap.” I shrug. “What did you want me to do?”

Boris is fuming. He snatches the blindfold off the ground outside and storms into the room. I keep my head bowed, and I don’t fight him when he knots it way too tightly around my head. Ironically, even though it’s tighter than yesterday, I can see more out of the periphery, because the blindfold’s also rolled into a tighter, smaller ring.

I trip and stumble when he drags me outside again, mostly so that he’ll think I’m pathetic and uncoordinated, but also partially because I am shaky. It’s been a week of virtually no calories and limited water. Even the twenty yards we travel feels like a long walk. He throws me to the ground this time, and I immediately start feeling around for anything that might be a clothespin.

He’s spraying off my back when I find one.

But it’s the bad kind. It’s nothing but one piece of wood, split up the middle. I mutter a curse and keep looking.

“What are you doing?” Boris shifts the water off me.

I freeze.

“Are you trying to find a stick? Or maybe something harder?” He laughs. “I swept this area yesterday. You can’t think I’m that stupid.”

I exhale slowly, as if I’m now resigned to the idea that I won’t be able to attack him.

“Besides.” He walks closer. “A stick won’t help you.” His hand shifts—I can see it from the corner of my eye—and then he zaps my shoulder.

Once, when I was five, I backed up into Kristiana’s mother’s electric fence around the property line. That made me jump like a shocked cat and shriek like a baby.

This hurts far, far worse than that did.

“I can incapacitate you from anywhere.” Boris doesn’t sound like he’s boasting. It sounds like a fact.

I shake my head, sticking to Latvian in spite of his Russian. “I’m not trying to attack you, I swear.”

“Keep your hands still.” He stands there for a moment, as if he’s watching to make sure I understand.

I nod.

He clomps back to the water spigot and turns the hose on again. “No moving.”

When the water hits my back, it’s so cold that I fall forward involuntarily.

“Don’t move!”

So much for God’s help. No clothespin means no way to pick the handcuff. And that means I’m stuck here.

As he recuffs my arms around the pole, tears are soaking the front of the blindfold. I never cry. I just don’t. But right now, my life’s as ridiculous as it ever has been. It feels so unbearably pointless.