Total pages in book: 89
Estimated words: 84913 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 425(@200wpm)___ 340(@250wpm)___ 283(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 84913 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 425(@200wpm)___ 340(@250wpm)___ 283(@300wpm)
But, well, Ferryn wasn't even sure what a girl like her was anymore.
All she knew as she made her way out of Navesink Bank was that she wasn't the girl she was when she had been thrown in a trunk and ripped away from the life she had always known.
Everything had changed.
Not just because of the days of fear and hunger and cold and uncertainty, but because of the things she had discovered about the world. About the ugliness to be found there. About how many girls and women were defenseless. About how many men—and women—decided to take advantage of that.
As she ran off, the only thing that seemed to permeate through the swirling thoughts in her head was that something had to be done. Someone had to help.
She knew, also, even as the brambles bit at her feet, ripping them open across the forest floor, that everyone says something should be done. And no one ever does anything.
The law had its limits.
The criminals knew that.
It just made them better at it.
It made it harder to find them, to stop them.
So many news stories that had been background noise to the seemingly pressing concerns of teenage life suddenly came rushing back to her, the memory of them blocking out the wind through the trees, the sounds of her loved ones calling her name.
News stories about how rape victims end up in jail for killing their attackers. About how rapists get a few months in jail or simply probation and a stern, "Bad boy, don't do that again!" from the judge. About girls—especially girls from inner cities, children of illegal immigrants, or ones from foster care—going missing, never to be heard from again. Likely thrown on ships, taken overseas, drugged, used by men for money over and over and over again for years. Because these traffickers knew they would get away with it, that the news would let the stories die, that the families couldn't afford to fight, that some had no families at all.
And those were just the ones that were reported.
Who knew how many runaways ended up in the grips of traffickers.
Who knew how many women and children were simply never missed?
The numbers, when she made herself think about it, were staggering.
She'd been informed of most of this before, of course. Her aunts—most especially her Aunt Lo who was the badass leader of a paramilitary camp known as Hailstorm who, on occasion, carried out some good, old-fashioned vigilante justice simply because it was the right thing to do—had often tried to start that conversation with her. Discussions full of statistics that had gone in one ear and out the other.
Or so she thought.
Because as she got on the bus and watched her hometown slip away from her, they came rushing back.
An estimated four million people were victims of sex trafficking in the world.
Ninety percent were women and girls.
It was a hundred-and-fifty billion-dollar business worldwide.
And it was on the rise.
While prosecutions in all regions—including the US—were on the decline.
Someone was dropping the ball.
And no one was stooping down to pick it up again.
Somehow, while she had been able to feel horror at that fact before yet still move on with her life, now, the knowledge, the firsthand knowledge, was too horrific to avoid. She felt crippled by it. It was all she could think about. All those people stuck in places like she had been stuck in, scared of the things she had been scared of, hoping someone would come to save them. And then no one did.
It was unconscionable.
She couldn't let it stand.
Ferryn might have been young, but she wasn't naive. She knew that a sixteen-year-old girl knew nothing about working on such a huge issue. Even if she did have over a decade of mixed martial arts in her back pocket. She also knew that if she had done what any normal, well-adjusted girl would have done and gone home, that she wouldn't have been able to help, that no one would have let her, that they would coddle her and reminded her she was safe. Even if millions of others weren't.
Eventually, she knew she would have fallen back into herself, would have let the knowledge, let the statistics, the ugly realities of the world once again become background noise.
Which was why she had to go.
She had to.
She had to become someone who could do something about it.
She had to help.
In her mind, she could hear her loved ones trying to remind her that she was just one person, that she could only do so much, that there were experts in the world to help. Or even that, if she wanted to help, she could turn to her Aunt Lo and her team at Hailstorm to help her do something.
From afar.
See, she knew that was the only part they would ever let her have.