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She could feel something crawling across her ankle, something else creeping over her forehead. Her skin itched and burned, her muscles screamed with pain, and those two bastards were having a party.

What time was it anyway?

Not very late. She was sure of that. And what did it matter? She bit back a bubble of hysterical laughter. It wasn’t as if she had someplace to go.

There were sounds in the trees and bushes around her. The sounds of things moving. Small things. Big things. Harmless creatures and ones that were not so harmless.

Better not to dwell on that.

She had to think about how to escape. Or how to survive.

So far, she hadn’t done very well at survival. Otherwise, she’d still be back at The FURever Fund’s compound instead of here, in the middle of nowhere.

Stupid, she thought, and not for the first time. How could she have been so damnably stupid?

Her second night at the compound she’d awakened, desperate to pee.

Sounded simple. But it wasn’t.

There were rules about nighttime peeing. One rule, really.

Use the chamber pot in your tent.

That had been explained to her right away.

“If, you know, you need to use the john at night, you’ll have to use the thing in your tent,” one of the researchers had told her.

“The thing?”

“Yeah. A chamber pot. It’s got a cover and you’ll find a roll of toilet paper next to it.” The researcher had laughed at the look on Alessandra’s face. “Just pretend it’s Victorian times,” he’d said. “When chamber pots were what everybody used.”

The thing was, the organization was new and its goals were great. Alessandra was delighted to be part of it, but she understood that it had problems. Not enough staff. A cramped office in Jersey City. Plus, she thought the name was clever, but possibly confusing. She’d mentioned it to the marketing guy, a nice kid straight out of college who’d looked stricken and said he’d just sunk hundreds of bucks into FURever brochures. Even if they came up with a new name, ditching the brochures would have wasted money they couldn’t afford to waste because FURever’s other problem, its big problem, was that it was underfunded.

The compound was a Quonset hut and half a dozen tents on a cleared patch of jungle five miles from Escobal City. A small room in the hut contained a chemical toilet, the only toilet, it turned out. And the hut was kept locked at night.

“Okay,” Alessandra had replied, “but, really, I can just go a couple of feet into the trees.”

“Better not. There’s no way of knowing what’s out there once it’s dark. I know it sounds gross, but we all use chamber pots. You can empty it into the toilet in the morning.”

He hadn’t been kidding.

There was, indeed, a pot in her tent.

Actually, it was a big round plastic container with a cover. One glance and she’d known she’d never look at a container of potato salad the same way again.

She’d also known she couldn’t use it.

Alessandra wasn’t squeamish. She wasn’t foolishly modest. But the idea of beginning the day among people she hardly knew while lugging a chamber pot in her arms just didn’t work for her.

She was fine during the first night of her stay.

The second night, she’d awakened in the dark, needing to pee.

Desperate to pee.

Dammit! One cup of coffee too many at supper.

What the hell. She’d camped out when she was a kid. Well, she’d camped out once, her first year at college. Okay. She hadn’t camped out, exactly. She and a couple of hundred other students had spent a night in tents in support of a student anti-hunger drive…