Not Even Bones Page 8

  She rested her head against the glass, and focused on healing her body. First, she welded the bones in her fingers together, knitting them until the breaks were fully fused—they weren’t healed, per se, but more like three weeks along in the healing process instead of eight hours. The tendons in her wrist were trickier, but when she was done, they were mostly healed. And she got her body to start growing new skin on her cut.

  Nita rose. Now that her body had been taken care of, she’d slept, and she’d eaten, she could start thinking of a real plan to get the hell out of here.

  She wasn’t planning to get out through the glass walls now—she’d learned her lesson. It might have been possible for her to get out that way by enhancing her strength, but she simply didn’t have the training to know how to make proper use of that strength.

  The food door was too small to crawl through, even if she could make it open on the other side. The walls of her prison went up to the ceiling, which was around eight feet high.

  So the only way out was through the door that opened from the outside.

  If they opened her door again, did Nita have anything she could fight them with? She glanced around. A cot. A towel. A blanket. Could she strangle them with the towel?

  Nita snorted. Not likely. How would she even get it around their neck?

  She sank down, restless and bored. There was a weird sense of tension. She knew something was going to happen soon—she could feel it—but until it happened, she just had to wait. And Nita hated waiting.

  She supposed she could talk to Mirella.

  Ugh.

  As if on cue, the girl stirred and woke. “Morning.”

  “Is it?”

  “I dunno.”

  Nita sighed. Was there anything useful she could get out of Mirella?

  “How long have you been here?” Nita finally asked.

  “Around two weeks, I think.” Her voice was soft.

  “And have there been other prisoners?”

  Mirella stiffened. “Yes.”

  Nita waited for her to elaborate. When nothing came, she prompted. “What happened to them?”

  Mirella looked away. “Can we change the subject?”

  Nita didn’t like that response. Not at all.

  “Have you ever been to Iquitos?” Mirella jumped in before Nita could press the issue.

  “No. Where’s that?”

  “Upriver. Northern Peru.” A small smile crossed her face. “It’s my home. It’s the most beautiful city in the world. My brother thinks it’s backwards and wants to move away, but I wouldn’t trade it for anything.”

  Nita blinked. “Brother? Is he . . . like you?”

  “No, I’m the only one”—she waved an arm, gesturing to herself—“like this. My mother says my great-grandfather was too, but he’s been gone a long time. My cousin was also like me, but she disappeared when I was young.”

  “Ah.” She’d never considered the idea that Mirella had a family. It seemed an obvious thing, but for some reason, Nita was surprised.

  Mirella wrapped her arms around her legs. “I miss my family. My parents. My cousins. My grandparents, especially my grandma. Her family, the side with the dolphin genes, they’re from the Brazilian part of the Amazon. She always wanted us to take a barge back to her hometown for a visit, but we never have . . .” She blinked a few times and smiled softly. “I even miss my stupid older brother. He’s always showing me all these pictures of other cities he wants to move to. I think he can recognize any city in South America now, even though he’s never left Iquitos.”

  Nita cringed as Mirella hid her face in her hands. She was glad for the glass barrier between them, otherwise the other girl might expect her to hug her or something equally unpleasant.

  Nita sighed and wondered what it would be like to have a family like Mirella’s. She didn’t actually want one—she’d seen enough telenovelas and sitcoms to be glad she didn’t have to deal with that. But sometimes she wondered about her parents.

  Her father had told her he was from Chile, but he’d never say where. When she was younger, it had been a challenge to figure it out. Spanish had such intricate regional dialects she’d been sure she could narrow it down by how he spoke. Nita recorded every idiom, every turn of phrase, hoping one day she could take these fragments of pieces to build an outline of the puzzle that was her father’s origins.

  It hadn’t worked. There just wasn’t enough information. His accent was too influenced by his years in Madrid. He’d never told her bedtime stories that weren’t from Barnes & Noble. He never took her to church, even though he went himself every Sunday.

  She’d always wondered why he hid his life from her. When she Googled the history of Chile, she found a sea of disturbing information about the years he was growing up, after a CIA-sponsored coup d’état put a dictator in power. She wondered if something so awful had happened he couldn’t talk about it.

  As for her mother . . . Nita always had the impression she’d just sprung out of thin air fully formed. And if her mother had a family, Nita wasn’t sure she ever wanted to know.

  Shuddering, she turned away from her thoughts and the quietly crying girl in front of her. Lying back, she looked up at the blinking security camera.

  “Mirella.”

  “Yeah?” Her voice was soft.

  “Do you know who watches the security camera?”

  She shivered and whispered, “Kovit.”

  Nita raised her eyebrows. “All twenty-four hours a day?”

  “I dunno.”

  Useless.

  Nita looked up at the security camera again, considering. Then she rose and began waving wildly, gesturing for someone to come.

  The light blinked steadily on.

  “What are you doing?” Mirella yelped.

  Nita ignored her. Heart racing, she waited.

  She wasn’t really sure why she’d done it. But there was something about the way Mirella had mentioned Kovit being on a tight leash and the implication that he was always on security duty that made Nita wonder how much freedom he had. And, more importantly, how bored he was.

  On the one hand, having a zannie—especially a bored zannie—around was not ideal. However, he knew she could turn her ability to feel pain off now, so he probably wouldn’t hurt her when he was hungry—but if he just liked to hurt people even if he didn’t get food, she was screwed.

  On the other hand, if he was bored, maybe he’d be willing to talk and she could fish for information.

  Besides which, if she kept her requests small and innocuous, maybe she could keep getting things. A book and a towel by themselves were harmless. But a book wrapped in a towel was like a brick in a purse—a decent weapon.

  He didn’t come.

  Nita told herself she should be relieved. It would be creepy if he were sitting there, watching her on the security camera all day. That wasn’t something she wanted. She should take it as a good sign. Unless he was just ignoring her.

  Sighing, she sank back on the bed, frustrated and bored.

  Mirella hid under her blanket.

  A soft scuff was the only warning she had before Kovit walked into the room. He tilted his head and raised his eyebrows at her in amusement. “Did you want something?”

  Nita blinked. “Um.”

  He put his hands in his pockets and watched her. She opened her mouth and closed it a few times.

  “Did you wave me down here to admire me?” He laughed, and his smile turned into something mean and playful at the same time. “Or something else?”

  Nita didn’t like that smile one bit. It sent her heart skittering in fear and her hands twitching for her scalpel. She swallowed, trying to find the words to speak. They wouldn’t come.

  Kovit sighed and turned to leave, and Nita finally spoke. “Were you watching me on the camera?”

  He snorted. “Someone always has to be watching the damn camera.”

  Nita wasn’t sure if that was a lie or not. Probably not. But it being Kovit all day wa
sn’t believable. So more than one person watched the camera. Good to know.

  She held an image of her dissection table in her mind, using it as an anchor to calm her breathing and stay focused.

  “I’m bored.” Good, her voice didn’t crack in fear too much.

  Kovit glanced over at Mirella, cowering under the blankets. “You have company.”

  “She’s—” Nita paused before she could say something rude, then something occurred to her. “Does she speak English?”

  Kovit snorted. “Not a word. It’s very annoying, since I don’t speak Spanish.”

  “Ah.” Well, that meant she couldn’t understand Nita and Kovit’s conversation. “Well, she’s not exactly great company.”

  Kovit laughed, sharp and cruel. “And you want me to, ah, do something about that?”

  Nita did not like the way he said that, full of dark and twisted implications. His eyes seemed to laugh at her, as though he could read her mind and knew exactly where her thoughts had gone, and he approved.

  “No. I was wondering if you had anything to read.”

  “Nothing good.” Kovit ran a hand through his hair and gave her one of his crooked smiles. Nita couldn’t pinpoint what was wrong with the smile. It wasn’t that he didn’t look human, and it wasn’t that the movement of the muscles in his face was altered, but there was something just . . . wrong in the way he smiled.

  It creeped her out.

  Nita licked her lips. “What about board games? Cards?”

  He shook his head.

  “Well, I guess a bad book is better than no book, then.” Nita gave him a shaky smile.

  He gave her a long look. “I’m not sure you’ll say that after you’ve read it.”

  “I like to form my own opinion. I try not to judge before I read.”

  “Everyone judges.”

  “Fine. If I go in thinking it’s bad, I’ll be pleasantly surprised when it’s decent.”

  He laughed, a short, surprisingly light sound. Then he shrugged. “All right. Sure. I’ll bring it over.”

  “Thanks,” Nita said, but he was already gone.

  He came back five minutes later and slid a small, beat-up paperback into her food tray. Nita pulled it out and checked the blurb. It was one of those theory books on unnaturals, and supposedly provided in detail explanations of all the leading ideas.

  “It doesn’t look too bad.”

  “That’s what I thought. Then I read it.”

  “Ah.”

  Nita put the book down, silent. Kovit lingered for a moment, watching her. He shoved his hands back in the pockets of his jeans.

  Swallowing, Nita made a gamble. “You look like you want to ask me something.”

  He tilted his head so a few strands of his bangs fell in his eyes. It looked charming. Nita wasn’t fooled. “I was wondering about the pain. You turned it off.”

  “Yes.” Nita raised her eyebrows. “Wouldn’t you have done the same in my situation?”

  “Absolutely.”

  His answer was much faster and more decisive than Nita expected. He saw her surprise, and the corner of his mouth twisted upward. “I do know what pain feels like, you know.”

  “I’m sure you know exactly what it feels like,” Nita agreed easily. Wasn’t that the point? Zannies could feel other people’s pain and eat it. She imagined it felt slightly better for them than it did for the person they were torturing.

  Kovit rolled his eyes. “You do know zannies can’t feed on their own pain, right? It just hurts us, like normal humans.”

  Nita hadn’t known that, but she just gave him a long, cool look. If he was trying to look sympathetic, he was failing. There was plenty of pain in the world already—he could just go sit in a hospital emergency room to find it.

  “Well, it makes them all the more monstrous, then.” Nita was surprised how even her voice was. “After all, if they know exactly how it feels to be in pain but they still choose to inflict it on others for their own pleasure . . . well, that’s worse than if they didn’t feel pain at all, isn’t it?”

  She didn’t expect Kovit to laugh. But he did, and it was long and light, almost like a child’s laugh. He treated her to one of his too wide, crazy smiles as he said, “I completely agree.”

  With that, he turned on his heel and left.

  Nita stayed where she was on the floor, trying to convince her body to move. But something about his laugh, his smile, had frozen everything in fear. Instead of the fight-or-flight response to terror, Nita had gotten the freeze response.

  After a long mental session at her dissection table, she managed to crawl over to her bed with the book.

  Kovit was right. It was awful.

  Twelve

  NITA PUT THE truly awful book down. She was only halfway through, even though she’d received it yesterday and had nothing better to do than read. It was because she kept flinging it away in disgust, then getting desperately bored and reading another chapter, only to fling it away again.

  It had started out fine. It was going to outline a history of how unnaturals were explained at different periods in time. It talked about how the Catholic Church had coined the term “unnatural” in the eleventh century because they thought unnaturals were the spawn of demons breeding with humans. Which of course was ridiculous, and the book acknowledged that.

  And it covered the Church of the Resurrection, a modern spinoff of Christianity that believed Jesus had been a vampire, and was still alive and would return to save them. They had a very literal version of the Eucharist.

  But then the book decided to explain its theory: alternate realities. The book was trying to tell Nita unnaturals had come from another world and then interbred with humans.

  Aside from the obvious questions—How would something from another world be genetically compatible with people from this world? How did they cross between universes? And where the fuck was any evidence of this shit?—Nita wanted to know who this book was funded by. These things were always advancing someone’s agenda.

  She’d heard about a big lawsuit recently, where a major fur company had paid researchers to publish scientific papers claiming chinchillas were unnaturals. They were hoping it would reduce public backlash on chinchilla fur farming.

  Nita looked down at the next chapter. It was all about the ghoul controversy. Ghouls, who needed to eat human flesh to survive, had been flagged as a possible species for the Dangerous Unnaturals List. Until a major incident three years ago where a family of ghouls had been stealing bodies from a crematorium—not killing people, the media liked to point out. The son of a person “cremated” found out what was going on and took a machine gun to the whole family while they were eating his dead father for dinner. The court case was a mess.

  But ghouls hadn’t ended up on the list. Because that one well-publicized family had proven that they could live without killing people and that there were ghouls doing exactly that.

  They were the opposite of kappa in the media.

  A string of prominent murders, mostly of children, in rural Japan decades ago had thrust river-dwelling kappa into the world’s eye. At the time, it had just been another unnatural murder, not worthy of too much publicity. But a few years later, the story was made into a popular horror movie, Watering the Kappa. Suddenly, kappa were a thing. Everyone knew about them. People put pressure on INHUP, and next thing anyone knew, kappa had made the Dangerous Unnaturals List.

  Nita had done quite a bit of kappa study and dissection and wasn’t sure she entirely agreed with that assessment. Yes, kappa lived on human organs. Their saliva contained a chemical that liquefied organs, which they would then slurp up like a soup. But nothing in their biology that Nita had discovered indicated that they couldn’t eat cow, pig, or any other kind of organs either.

  They just chose not to.

  The creak and clunk of the door opening to outside distracted Nita from her thoughts. The sounds of the market filtered through, the hum of voices, punctuated by sharp laughs and shrieks
. The caws of an angry bird rose as though it were approaching the open door and then faded as it passed by.

  Nita paused, edging closer to the glass wall of her prison. There were voices—multiple voices, mixed in with the clomp of boots and the thunk of a heavy door closing. A gravelly laugh, a nasal snort. Definitely not Kovit or Reyes.

  Nita listened as the footsteps drew closer, and felt slightly uneasy. That was a lot of footsteps. What did this mean? What was happening?

  Across from her, Mirella pressed herself into the corner of her cage, her fingers curled against the floor.

  “Mirella?”

  But the girl didn’t respond, her blanket wrapped tightly around her body.

  Nita edged to the back of her cage.

  “This way.” Reyes’ voice, short and clipped.

  The clack-clack-clack of boots on the cement flooring felt like a drumroll as a tall man rounded the corner. For a moment, the silhouette looked like her father, and Nita licked her lips, wondering if he’d come to rescue her.

  Then the man turned and she got a good look at him—pale, dark blond hair, mild sunburn. Definitely not her father.

  She pushed away the rush of disappointment. How long did her mother plan to leave her here? Nita was beginning to have a fluttery feeling whenever she thought of her mother, like the butterflies in her stomach got caught in her throat when they tried to escape and choked her. It was fear, not unlike the way her heart skipped in terror when Kovit walked into the room.

  A fear that this was permanent. That her mother had no plans to save her. That Nita had finally pushed her too far, and the only purpose Nita had left was to make her mother some money to atone for the fortune she’d lost freeing Fabricio.

  But even though the little voice in her head kept hissing that she’d been abandoned, Nita was reluctant to believe it was true. Not out of any logical reason, but just because she didn’t want to believe it.

  Nita was very good at ignoring truths she didn’t want to see.

  Reyes walked beside the blond man, trailed by two men in identical white shirts and slacks. Sweat stains under their armpits attested the reason for the constant air conditioning. One of them was tall and sniffling, and kept touching his cheek and then looking at his fingers. The other was short and square, as though his whole body had been built around Legos.