I stepped to the door and asked Laura to order in from the coffee shop for both of the girls. Neither one looked like she’d been fed well in a long time.

“How old are you, Olena?”

The answer was too long to have been her age.

“What will become of her, she wants to know,” Simchuk said. “She says she won’t answer questions until you tell her that.”

I had no idea what would become of her. She seemed to sense that in my hesitation.

“What would you like to do, Olena? Of all the things you could choose, what would you like to happen to you now that you’re here?”

Simchuk translated and the girl shrugged her shoulders.

“Do you want to go home? Do you want to go back to Ukraine?”

Her eyes widened and the vehemence with which she responded was a universal no.

I asked questions and still I got nowhere. “Why did you want to come to America, Olena? Did you know anyone else on the boat? Was someone you know supposed to meet you here?”

They were all met by a stony silence and a scowl more serious than the teenage pouts that regularly confronted me in my office.

“Tell her this, Ms. Simchuk, if you would.” I explained what the district attorney’s office is and how it functions. I told her about the creation of our unique unit, and the pioneering work we had done since the 1970s, to address the terrible epidemic in our own country of violence against women and children. Olena wouldn’t make eye contact with me at first, but began to pay attention when I told her specifics of some of the cases that I had handled involving girls who were roughly her age.

The food was delivered and we left her alone for fifteen minutes, as Nan left her shipmate, so that they could see that we hoped they would relax, that we would continue to respond to their needs, and that we wanted them to be comfortable in our offices.

“How far have you gotten?” I asked Nan.

She held up her thumb and forefinger in a circle. “Goose egg. She’s not talking until I tell her what we’re going to do with them,” Nan said. “And I don’t mean this weekend, I mean next week and the week after.”

“They must have made a pact not to talk.”

“Well, we certainly can’t lie. They’ve had enough of that to last a few lifetimes.”

Laura signaled to me that Olena had come out to discard her garbage.

“Round two. I’m trying to tell her about other girls who’ve been saved from this awful trafficking life. I’ll let you know if it works.”

I told a few more stories about teens who’d been forced into prostitution, which seemed to impact Ms. Simchuk more than it did Olena.

“Where these girls live now?” Simchuk asked me.

“That’s you speaking, or Olena?”

“Olena.”

The conversation picked up and within the next half hour, the interpreting became far smoother as I tried to answer questions that the girl wanted to know. She was beginning to open up a bit.

“Where they live and what they are doing now depends on their age in some cases. Depends on how willing they were to cooperate,” I said. “Young ones have been adopted here by families from their own countries. Others have gone to school to study, to learn a trade.”

“Tell me about detention centers.”

I looked at Olena while I spoke, letting Simchuk describe the impossible dilemma the government often faced when dealing with large groups of illegals who’d been smuggled into the country.

“We can try to get you asylum,” I said. “There are organizations, good people who will fight for you.”

Olena picked up her head. “Will you fight for me? I want to know if you will fight for me.”

“Of course I will. I’ll do everything I can to make you safe.”

Her head dropped to her chest again and she spoke to Ms. Simchuk, who gave me the answers. “Sixteen. She wants you to know she is sixteen years old.”

I was poker-faced. Olena was getting ready to disgorge to me the ugly facts of her young life. Any sign of shock that I displayed might be off-putting to her, so I prepared to listen to her story while she was in the mood to tell it.

“Be precise, please,” I said to Ms. Simchuk. “Speak exactly the words she tells you. Nothing more, nothing less.”

“Certainly.”

It was well over an hour after we started, and now I would be hearing Olena’s story through the voice of another woman.

“I was fourteen when I ran away from home. My father was an alcoholic who had a girlfriend and my mother beat me. He was never home, and she was cruel. Not to my brothers, but to me.”

Olena described life in her small town and her dreams of escaping it. The fall of the Soviet Union caused many of the small satellites formerly in its grasp to suffer economic collapse. I knew that its borders had become porous, and that human rights activists estimated that as much as 10 percent of the female population of countries like Ukraine had been sold into prostitution.

Ms. Simchuk continued to narrate. “A neighbor in the village-this is very poor village, you understand-told my mother she could have money, maybe five hundred dollars-from guy who was coming to find wife for a man in Italy. I heard them talking. My mother agreed this is good idea.”

Olena paused and took a long drink of water. “Next day, instead of going to school, I ran away and I hid in the forest.”

“By yourself?”

“Yes, alone.”

“For how long?”

“Three days. Till I was so hungry I couldn’t stand it. Went back to my town. Me and my friend decided to leave Kotovs’k. She knew guy who would take us to new life. Would pay us the money, not my mother.”

“To get married?”

“No. I’m too young to get married,” Olena said to Simchuk, with the hint of a wistful smile. “Pay us seven hundred dollars each to work in kafane. To be a waitress there. Sometimes to dance with the boys who come in.”

“Kafane? What’s that?” I asked. “A place?”

“No, no. Is word. It means a café sort of bar,” Simchuk said. “They often operate as brothels in many towns. That’s why I was surprised. Forgot to make translation.”

“Try not to show your own feelings to Olena,” I said. “She’ll shut down if you make judgments about what she did.”

“I understand. It just happened, is all.”

“This place was in your town? In Kotovs’k?”

“No, no. Is far away.”

“Who made the promise to you?”

Olena looked up and fixed on my eyes. “Why?”

“Do you know the man who made the promise to you? To give you that money?”

“I didn’t see him till we get there. My friend Karyn tell me. She come too.”

“Did you learn his name?”

“You want name?” There was a defiance in Olena’s voice as she said that to Simchuk.

“Yes, please.”

“Name is Zmey,” and as Simchuk said that to me she giggled nervously.

“You’re laughing now?” I said to the interpreter. Olena didn’t seem any more pleased about that than was I.

“Sorry. I wasn’t expecting that. She says his name is Dragon. In Ukraine, Zmey is a dragon who is green, with three heads, and spitting fire all the time.”

“You said you met Zmey when you got ‘there,’ Olena. Where, exactly?”

“Why is important this, she wants to know? Was two years ago.”

“I think it will help explain to me why you are here today. It lets me know the kind of care we need to give you.” It might also let me understand the level of desperation that had fueled this tragic voyage she undertook at such a tender age.

Olena’s back hunched over as she went on with her story. “They took us to Macedonia. To a town called Velesta.”

My heart sank. Trafficking was the only industry in that small town, which international police agencies had long considered one of the most dangerous places for young women introduced to the sex trades.

“I know Velesta,” I told her. “I know what goes on there. Did you have papers of any kind? A passport?”

Olena looked at me as though I was stupid to ask the question. “What for would need papers? Karyn and me, we traveled in the trunk of a car, of a boy from Kotovs’k. Don’t need papers in car trunk.”