Not Even Bones Read online

  If the kidnapping wasn’t random . . . that would be bad. For them to have found her at the hotel, it meant they’d been watching Nita’s apartment, tracked her to the hotel, and waited until her mother had gone. That implied some knowledge about who Nita and her mother were, and whatever these people wanted, they’d be suitably careful with Nita’s mother involved.

  A nasty thought tickled Nita’s brain. What if this is Mom’s punishment?

  Nita shied away from that idea, not wanting to believe her mother would go that far.

  There was a click of plastic against concrete, followed by a scraping sound. Nita forced herself to lift her head and locate the source. It was hard to focus, with everything splitting into two and combining all the time.

  She managed to locate a water bottle a few feet away and crawl over to it. She unscrewed the sealed cap and then paused, wondering if it was drugged.

  “Why aren’t you drinking?” asked a voice. Female, with an unfamiliar accent to her Spanish.

  Nita blinked, attempting to focus her vision on where the voice was coming from. There was a glass wall in front of her, and then there was another glass wall and there was a blurry pink-gray person on the other side. Nita closed her eyes and opened them again, hoping that would clarify things. It didn’t.

  Nita’s voice was scratchy and hoarse. “Drugged?”

  The girl snorted. “They don’t bother.”

  Why? And who are “they”? Nita wanted to ask, but at the moment she had more important concerns. She was thirsty, and the confirmation that the water was safe was enough for Nita to start chugging immediately. After it was gone, she was still thirsty.

  The water helped clear her mind where her ability couldn’t, and her vision settled a bit. Nita was pleased that while a little blurriness remained, in general her sight was much improved. She was in the equivalent of a glass box, about six feet by six feet, with an eight-foot-high ceiling. One wall, the farthest one, was concrete instead of glass. Someone had painted it white, but running her hands across it, Nita was easily able to chip chunks of paint off. She knocked against the concrete. It was solid.

  There was another girl in a similar glass box across from Nita, and there were several other empty glass boxes in the room.

  The girl’s skin was a grayish-pink that didn’t look entirely human, but other than that she seemed normal enough on the outside. Her hair was long and straight, and the same color as her skin, as were her eyes. She had a small, flat nose and a square face with strong cheekbones.

  “Who are you?” Nita asked.

  “I’m Mirella. And you are?”

  “Nita.” Nita squinted at the other girl. She was wearing shapeless sweatpants and a baggy T-shirt, so it was hard to tell, but her voice sounded young. “How old are you?”

  “Sixteen. You?”

  Nita licked her lips and ignored the question. “What’s happening here?”

  “We’re prisoners.”

  Well, duh. Nita resisted the urge to roll her eyes. This was why she hated people.

  She continued her examination of the room while Mirella watched. It was good to move. Moving, doing things, analyzing her situation kept her calm. She felt like if she sat down and let her thoughts percolate more, she’d start to descend back into panic.

  Panic wasn’t productive. She needed to keep it at bay. If she’d been at full strength, she could have just suppressed all the chemical impulses that stimulated it, but she wasn’t. So she had to do it with sheer willpower.

  But her hands wouldn’t stop shaking, no matter how she tried.

  Focus on the room, Nita. Look at it. Can you escape? Can you use anything?

  There was a mattress on the floor, with a single blanket on it. The floor sloped to a drain, and a ceramic squat toilet sat against the wall. Nita looked up. A showerhead stuck out of the ceiling, too high for Nita to reach. A white plastic tarp hung on a hook that had been drilled into the wall. Nita picked it up and looked at it.

  “It goes around and hangs on the hook on the other side. It’s like a shower curtain.”

  Nita turned to Mirella with a bitter smile. “It’s awfully nice of them to give us privacy.”

  “Yeah, right.” Mirella laughed. “It’s so you don’t get the futon wet. They grow mold super fast.”

  “I see.”

  Nita walked over and pressed her fingers against the glass in the front of her cage. It was cool to the touch, which made sense, since now that she was thinking about it, she could feel the air conditioning on full blast. She tapped it, but it felt solid. Then she rammed her whole weak, still-drugged body into it, and it felt even more solid.

  Bruised and feeling a little stupid, made worse by Mirella snickering in the background, Nita sat down and examined where the water bottle had come from. There was a ceiling-high door in the glass wall, though there was no handle on Nita’s side. Beside it was another, smaller glass door in the wall that connected to a box on the other side. It reminded Nita of prison movies, where they slid food in through little holes in the door. Except everything here was clear or white, not gray, like in prisons.

  Sitting back, Nita felt another trickle of unease slide through her. This was a state-of-the-art facility—not the kind of thing she’d expect from random kidnappers. This felt more like the kind of prison you found in Bond movies or spaceships. Not real.

  The point was—it looked expensive to build. That was a bad sign.

  Nita clenched her muscles, trying to stop the shaking that had started in her hands and crawled up her arms and now spread through her body like a disease.

  On the other side of the room, Mirella watched Nita. “There’s no way out of the cage.”

  Nita ignored her. She could hear something. Voices? People, lots of people. It was muffled by the concrete walls, but it was there. It sounded like there was a gathering outside.

  “Hey!” Nita screamed, banging on the concrete wall. “Let me out! Can anyone hear me!”

  The voices didn’t even pause in their conversations.

  Nita took a deep breath to yell again, but Mirella interrupted. “You’re wasting your breath.”

  “Why?” Nita spun around. “They can’t hear me?”

  Mirella looked at Nita like she was an idiot. “Of course they can hear you. They just don’t care.”

  Nita paused, a slow, horrifying thought coming to her mind. “Mirella. Where are we?”

  “You don’t know?” Mirella looked baffled. “Everyone else who’s come through here has always known.”

  Nita glanced at the empty cages, and wondered what had happened to these everyone elses.

  No. Not a good thought. It made the shaking worse.

  “Mirella.” Nita’s voice dipped cold, a subconscious imitation of her mother. “I have been unconscious for God only knows how long. I know nothing.”

  Nita didn’t like the way Mirella’s face twisted into an expression of pity and guilt.

  “I’m sorry.” Her voice was a whisper, and she wrapped her strange pink-gray arms around her knees. “We’re in Mercado de la Muerte. Death Market. The biggest market for unnatural body parts in the world.”

  Nine

  DEATH MARKET.

  Nita had heard stories, and not just from her mother. While her family operated mostly online, many of the older, more established black market families still clung to the physical market structure. They were of the opinion that you had to see a product in person to ensure its quality. Especially the people who sold living unnaturals—it was hard to ship living people in the mail.

  The biggest physical market in the world used to be on the East Coast of the United States. Nita had gone there as a child, closely supervised by her parents. An INHUP raid a few years ago had caused it to move, and she’d heard it was somewhere in the Midwest now.

  Death Market was somewhere along the Amazon River, though Nita wasn’t sure where. Definitely on the Peruvian side, but close to the Colombian and Brazilian borders. People would fly in to
small airstrips in Colombia and Brazil and boat down the river, crossing the border to visit the market for the day. Or the night. Supposedly, the market offered a lot more than body parts.

  Nita swallowed. This was bad. Really, really bad.

  Nita was on the wrong side of the cage in a market famous for selling body parts of people like her, hundreds of miles away from anywhere familiar. How long did she have before they started cutting her up?

  “There must be some people not part of the black market here.” Nita’s voice ticked higher as she spoke. “Police? A nearby town?”

  Mirella snorted. “No, this town was constructed specifically for the black market. I’ve heard the market tried to settle in other places all over Latin America. People think they can just come to Peru or Brazil or wherever and throw their money around and do anything they want. But we won’t put up with that. I heard last time, the market bribed the local governments and police so it could set up in the Andes, but a small farming town nearby found out what was happening and snuck in during the night and burned it all down.”

  Nita couldn’t imagine it—people would never take action like that in the US markets. There, after the dealers bribed the shit out of the authorities, the locals just looked away and pretended nothing was happening. They didn’t want to see the darkness, refused to believe that their country could have such an ugly underbelly.

  They thought because the US was a “first-world country,” they didn’t have black markets or human trafficking.

  Idiots.

  Mirella waved her hand. “This town? The reason it’s this far out is so no locals can get to it to drive it away like before. And in Peru, if you clear the land in the Amazon and settle it, you own it. The market owns this town.” She frowned. “This place isn’t a town—I shouldn’t call it that.”

  Mirella tilted her head, considering. “It’s a shopping mall. And the only people here are the buyers, the sellers”—she met Nita’s eyes—“and the products.”

  Nita opened her mouth to respond, then closed it.

  She was so screwed.

  A door opened somewhere nearby, and Nita paused, listening. The creak of the door ushered in the noise of the market outside, the crowded chatter of people, interspersed with laughter and shrieks. Underlying it, she could also hear other sounds, sounds she didn’t recognize. A plop, like someone had dropped a raindrop on a megaphone. Caws of birds and a hum of what she thought might be cicadas.

  Then the door closed with a clunk, and the sounds became muted. They were replaced with a new sound.

  Footsteps.

  Mirella’s eyes widened, and her body seemed to shrink as she wrapped her blanket around her shoulders. Her long hair fell over her face, making Nita think of an ostrich sticking its head in the sand. If you can’t see them, they can’t see you.

  Voices echoed against the concrete, one male, one female.

  “That’s my point.” This from the male voice. “How am I supposed to do any of those things when I don’t speak Spanish?”

  “You’ll manage.” The woman’s voice was clipped and cold.

  As they approached, Nita startled, realizing that they were speaking English, both with American accents. The man’s had a hint of something East Coast in it, and the woman’s had that slight upward tick that Nita sometimes heard in eastern Canada and parts of the Midwest.

  There was a frustrated sigh from the man as they came around the corner and into Nita’s view. They both stopped to appraise Nita, who stared right back at them.

  The woman was wide. Not in the sense that she was fat—she wasn’t, but she had broad shoulders and an hourglass figure just beginning to thicken with age. Gray streaked her severely tied-back brown hair, and her face was the mayonnaise-white that made it clear this woman rarely saw the sun.

  In contrast, the young man standing beside her looked no older than his early twenties. He had warm brown skin, a wiry frame, and dark hair and eyes. Shorter than the woman beside him, and probably an inch or so shorter than Nita, there was something about the way his eyes flicked around the room, the way his mouth twitched like it wanted to half smile that felt wrong in some way.

  “Well.” The woman spoke, her expression remaining somewhere between neutral and bored. “It’s awake.”

  Nita rose and tried to keep her chin high to hide her fear. She ruthlessly stopped the trembling her muscles were attempting and tried to limit the adrenaline, cortisol, and other fear hormones breeding like horny rabbits. She quickly gave up the task as futile. She let her hands shake.

  The woman turned to the young man. “Go on then, Kovit.”

  The young man—Kovit—turned to Nita, and she took an involuntary step back. His eyes were dancing, and the smile that crossed his face was too excited, too happy, too crooked. He snorted when he saw her move and then rolled his eyes. “Relax, it’ll be over soon.”

  He sounded disappointed about that.

  The woman pressed a button, and there was a soft click as the door unlocked. Nita’s eyes widened as Kovit approached.

  “What are you doing?” Nita finally managed to squeak. Her voice was weak and stringy, full of terror.

  No one bothered to respond to her.

  Sighing with anticipation, Kovit pulled a switchblade out of his pocket. His eyes were soft, mouth slightly parted in a smile.

  Nita didn’t like that expression one bit.

  He opened the door and watched as Nita took another involuntary step back. Behind him, the woman had pulled out and loaded a gun. She clicked the safety off, and then held it loose in her hand, waiting. Probably in case Nita tried to rush Kovit and escape.

  She considered that option. The door was open. If she could get past Kovit and his knife somehow, and then dodge the bullets from the woman’s gun . . . no. But what if she got the knife from Kovit and then threatened to kill him with it? Could she do that? Nita glanced at the woman’s cold, bored expression and wondered if she would just shoot Kovit if it came to that.

  This was all assuming Nita could overpower Kovit and steal his knife. Which was about as likely as Nita winning the lottery without a ticket, given both her complete lack of training and the drug still working its way out of her system.

  Kovit took a step into Nita’s cell, so his body blocked the door. He gave her a lopsided grin and twirled his knife, eyes never leaving her face. He looked . . . hungry.

  Nita’s throat closed up, leaving her lungs burning for air.

  Oh, God. What was he going to do?

  One moment, Kovit was giving her a warped smile from a pace away; the next, he moved, snaking forward with an athlete’s speed. Nita raised her arms to protect her face out of instinct more than anything else as she stumbled back. The knife lashed out, slicing into her arm and turning, so instead of going deep, it went wide. Like she was being skinned.

  And it hurt.

  Kovit gasped, whole body shuddering, a twisted smile of pleasure crossing his face. His knife moved forward, ready to strike again.

  Shrieking, Nita immediately disabled all nociceptors and shut off her ascending pain pathways for good measure. The pain vanished—or at least, her ability to perceive it did. Nita’s mother had told her how to stop pain when she was seven years old, and her father had told her it was better to turn off her pain receptors only in emergencies. Pain was there for a reason, and it shouldn’t be ignored.

  Nita fell on her butt and scrambled backwards, fingers scraping the cement in an effort to put as much distance between herself and Kovit as possible. Her whole body was rigid, waiting for the next attack, but it didn’t come. Kovit was standing there, frozen. His grin had fallen, and his face had transformed. He no longer looked cruel—he looked scared.

  “You stopped it.” His voice was stunned.

  Nita swallowed, her breath still choking her. She clutched her arm, heart pounding in her chest like it was trying to break out and flee on its own. Blood spattered onto the floor. A chunk of skin hung from Kovit’s knife. She redoub
led clotting efforts. Her head throbbed in protest—she’d overused her ability today, and she still wasn’t at full strength.

  “Stopped what?” Nita asked, voice trembling.

  Kovit’s eyes were large and worried, his face tilted at an angle so that only she could see him. His voice was barely louder than a whisper. “You stopped the pain.”

  How the hell could he know that? Unless . . . “You’re a zannie.”

  He scowled. “I hate that word.”

  She noticed he didn’t deny it. Nita licked her lips, searching for an appropriate response. It didn’t come.

  This situation had gone from bad to worse. One of her kidnappers was a pain-addicted torturer. And it seemed like the woman was Kovit’s boss.

  Nita was so fucked.

  Nita had almost forgotten the woman until she spoke. “Come out now, Kovit. You can play with it later. We have what we need.”

  Kovit backed out slowly, never taking his eyes off Nita, who lay curled on the floor. The door closed behind him, and the automatic lock bolted her cage closed.

  The woman seemed pleased. “Look at how fast that wound clotted. It looks days old already. Exactly as promised.”

  Blinking, Nita looked down at her arm. She’d been repairing it as she watched the two of them, and indeed, it had scabbed over quite thoroughly. It was at the scaly, flaky stage of scabbing. A few more hours, and she’d be ready to start growing some new skin over it.

  “Good job.” The woman nodded at Kovit. “The angle is exactly what we needed. It’s all on the camera.”

  Nita looked up at the small black ball with blinking red light in the top corner of her room. It would have had a perfect view of the attack, but never captured Kovit’s face.

  Kovit nodded, but his hair fell in front of his face, obscuring his eyes. Then he took a short breath, as though collecting himself, and turned to the woman with the wide, twisted smile Nita had seen earlier. “Oh, Ms. Reyes, it was my pleasure.”

  The woman—Reyes—twisted her face in disgust. “I’m sure it was.”

  Then she turned and left the room, leaving Kovit smiling at her back. When she was gone, his face resumed the thoughtful, anxious expression he’d worn earlier. He appraised Nita for a moment with dark eyes before following Reyes out.