LITMIR.BIZ

      Copyright

      This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

      HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd.

       1 London Bridge Street

       London SE1 9GF

       www.harpercollins.co.uk First published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2005

      © Conor Grennan 2010

      Conor Grennan asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

      A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library

      All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins ebooks

      HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication

      Source ISBN: 9780007354160

       Ebook Edition © 2011 ISBN: 9780007354191

      Version: 2018-06-14

      For Lizzie

      Contents

       Cover

       Title Page

      Copyright

      A Note on the Crisis in Nepal

      Prologue

      Part I: THE LITTLE PRINCES

      Chapter One

      Part II: AROUND THE WORLD AND BACK

      Chapter Two

      Part III: SEVEN NEEDLES IN A HAYSTACK

      Chapter Three

      Chapter Four

      Part IV: INTO THE MOUNTAINS

      Chapter Five

      Part V: LIZ

      Chapter Six

      Chapter Seven

      Chapter Eight

      Photographic Insert

      Afterword

      Acknowledgments

      About Next Generation Nepal

      About the Publisher

      A Note on the Crisis in Nepal

      THE DECADE-LONG CIVIL WAR in Nepal (1996–2006) claimed more than thirteen thousand lives. The devastating economic consequences destroyed hundreds of thousands more lives in one of the poorest countries in the world.

      In the remote regions of the country, the Maoist rebels, who had taken up arms against the king, used intimidation and murder to control villages. They abducted children, forcing them to join the rebel army in the fight against the royal government.

      Child traffickers, preying on villagers’ fears of Maoist abductions, deceived families by promising to take their children to the safety of the Kathmandu Valley, one of the few regions left in Nepal that was still free from Maoist control. For this “service,” they collected vast sums from impoverished families. The traffickers then abandoned the children in Kathmandu, hundreds of miles from their mountain villages. These children, who could be as young as three years old, effectively became orphans.

      There are tens of thousands of children still missing in Nepal.

      Prologue

       December 20, 2006

      IT WAS WELL AFTER nightfall when I realized we had gone the wrong way. The village I had been looking for was somewhere up the mountain. In my condition, it would be several hours’ walk up a rocky trail, if we could even find the trail in the pitch-dark. My two porters and I had been walking for thirteen hours straight. Winter at night in the mountains of northwestern Nepal is bitterly cold, and we had no shelter. Two of our three flashlights had burned out. Worse, we were deep in a Maoist rebel stronghold, not far from where a colleague had been kidnapped almost exactly one year before. I would have shared this fact with my porters, but we were unable to communicate; I spoke only a few words of the local dialect.

      Exhausted, I slumped down beside them. I zipped up my jacket and knotted my arms tightly around my chest to keep out the cold. Six days had passed since I split from my team. I had sent them home, back to their villages, promising them that I would be okay. My guide, Rinjin, tried to stay with me. Just to make sure the helicopter comes, he had said. I assured him everything would be fine and pushed him to leave with the others. The trek back to their villages would take the men several days, and they had been away from their families for almost three weeks. Rinjin had taken a last look at the empty sky, shaken his head at my stubbornness, and clasped my hand in farewell. Then he hurried to catch up with the others already descending the trail.

      I reached into my bag, looking for food. I pushed aside the weather-beaten folder, crammed with my handwritten notes and photos of young children, children who had been taken from these mountains years before. The notes had been my only clues to finding their families in remote villages accessible only by foot.

      Behind a crumpled, rain-stained map, my hand touched two tangerines—the last of our food. I passed them to the two porters.

      I wondered how things would have been different if I hadn’t gotten hurt. Or if I hadn’t split from my team, or if I hadn’t decided to wait on that mountain for a helicopter that never came. It didn’t matter now. What did matter was figuring out how we would get through the night.

      Part I

       THE LITTLE PRINCES

       November 2004—January 2005

      Chapter One

      THE BROCHURES FOR VOLUNTEERING in Nepal had said civil war. Being an American, I assumed the writers of the brochure were doing what I did all the time—exaggerating. No organization was going to send volunteers into a conflict zone.

      Still, I made sure to point out that particular line to everybody I knew. “An orphanage in Nepal, for two months,” I would tell women I’d met in bars. “Sure, there’s a civil war going on. And yes, it might be dangerous. But I can’t think about that,” I would shout over the noise of the bar, trying to appear misty-eyed. “I have to think about the children.”

      Now, as I left the Kathmandu airport in a beat-up old taxi, I couldn’t help but notice that the gate was guarded by men in camouflage. They peered in at me as we slowed to pass them, the barrels of their machine guns a few inches from my window. Outside the gate, sandbagged bunkers lined the airport perimeter, where young men in fatigues aimed heavy weapons at passing cars. Government buildings were wrapped in barbed wire. Gas stations were protected by armored

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