Not Even Bones

by Rebecca Schaeffer

  You actually did it. Nita’s inner voice sounded shocked.

  Nita’s heartbeat smashed in her chest.

  Kovit didn’t move, and Nita’s throat began to tighten, making it hard to breathe. She hadn’t wanted to kill him.

  She peered closer. Her shoulders loosened and her chest unclenched. Kovit was breathing. His chest rose and fell in the slow, deep rhythm of sleep.

  She closed her eyes, swamped by relief. She wasn’t a murderer yet. But then again, if he were dead, she could have dissected him.

  “Hello? Nita.”

  Nita spun around. Mirella’s whole body was pressed against the glass as though she could push through it like a ghost. Her pink-gray hair was tousled, and she was licking her dry, cracked lips. Her eye was bloodshot, and combined with her pink iris, made her eye look like it was bleeding color, like a runny watercolor painting.

  “Are you going to let me out or not?” she rasped.

  “Oh, right.” Nita went to the control panel she’d seen Reyes use to release the locks before. There was a line of buttons, small and black, with numbers beside them. She found a small white number painted into the concrete beside Mirella’s cage and pressed the corresponding button.

  The cage door clicked open, and Mirella slipped out. She padded over to Nita’s cage, leaning heavily on one leg, and looked in. “Is he dead?”

  “No.”

  “Good.”

  Nita raised her eyebrows. “Why?”

  Mirella turned and gave Nita a twisted look, mouth curling somewhere between a sneer and a snarl. “Because I want Reyes to find him. I know however Reyes chooses to kill him, it will be worse than anything we could do.”

  Nita just blinked, and Kovit stirred in the cage. “Reyes will kill him?”

  Mirella spat on the floor in his direction. “Definitely.”

  Well, that wasn’t Nita’s fault, was it? And she’d be gone by then anyway, so it didn’t matter.

  Nita took a breath and put Kovit’s impending demise from her mind. She turned to Mirella. “Come on. Let’s go.”

  Nita’s body resisted, still high on adrenaline and panic. Part of her wanted to sit in a corner and cry tears of relief. But the rest of her wouldn’t let that happen. She wasn’t out yet, and she couldn’t afford to stop now. So she pushed everything away and focused on her escape. When she was far away, when she was safe, she’d let herself feel every moment of fear, but right now, she needed to stay calm and focused.

  The end of the hall had three doors. Mirella limped to the largest one, but Nita held her back.

  “You’re limping.”

  Mirella leaned against the wall, panting, and Nita stepped forward, reaching out to see the extent of Mirella’s wound.

  Mirella pushed her hand away. “I’m fine.”

  Nita looked away, secretly relieved. She didn’t actually want to know what had been done.

  Mirella was leaning heavily against the wall, and Nita cast a critical eye over her. She wasn’t going to be able to walk without help. She was going to slow them down.

  Nita glanced to the doors, torn. She wanted to rip through them, but she needed to be practical. Mirella was a problem.

  “What’s behind there?” she asked, gesturing to the door Mirella had been heading toward.

  “Escape.” Mirella’s voice was sad. Nita would have expected the younger girl to be more excited or scared, but she just seemed small, eye glassy and distant.

  “The market?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Okay.” Nita frowned. “What about those doors?”

  “I don’t know that one.” Mirella pointed to the door open a crack, before shifting her attention to a closed one, then quickly turning away. “But that one is . . . there’s nothing helpful in there.”

  It took Nita a moment to clue in. That must be the “workroom,” where Mirella had just been tortured. Nita had a feeling Mirella wouldn’t be too keen to explore it, so Nita resisted the urge to peer in and let the white walls and surgical implements calm her. There were more important things to do.

  Nita pushed the other door open and peeked in, body tense, waiting for someone to jump out at her, but the room was empty. Her shoulders relaxed, but her heart rate remained high.

  “Mirella, find something to help you walk.” Nita eyed the other girl’s pink hair and gory shirt, stained from the blood that periodically dripped down the side of her face from where her eye had once been. “And change into something less conspicuous.”

  The security camera feed from the room with her and Mirella’s cages was displayed on a screen on the far wall. There were no other screens with security footage. Did that mean they had no other security cameras? That seemed a little unlikely, given that this was clearly a pretty sophisticated compound. But maybe there was a general security room, and this was just for whoever was watching the prisoners?

  “Do you know how many other rooms are in this building?” Nita asked.

  “None.”

  Nita blinked. “This is it? Where do Reyes and the guards stay?”

  Mirella shrugged, and Nita rolled her eyes. Well, at least they were alone here. For now.

  She wasn’t sure how long that would last. She just needed to grab things and go. She wanted a weapon.

  The room was unpleasantly small and cramped. An air conditioner and mini fridge were crammed against one wall, and a single chair had been used to anchor a line of laundry (probably Kovit’s) to the mini fridge. A few of the pieces were on the floor, having fallen from the line. There was a small cot on the far side of the room, with rumpled sheets and blankets, and another basket of dry clothes.

  Mirella hobbled in and started fishing through the basket of dry clothes, shoving aside jeans and underwear. She pulled out a reddish-brown T-shirt, and started wrapping her far-too-conspicuous hair in it.

  “Does Kovit stay here?” Nita asked, eyeing the cot.

  Mirella’s voice was indifferent. “Does it matter?”

  Nita sighed. “Of course it matters. If he’s staying here, his money has to be around somewhere, right?”

  That made Mirella pause and look around. “Good point.”

  Nita resisted the urge to roll her eyes again.

  Before she started searching, Nita took one of Kovit’s wet shirts and covered the screen. She didn’t care about supervising her newfound prisoner—she just didn’t want to see Kovit wake up and realize Reyes was going to kill him. If Nita didn’t see him, she wouldn’t have to think about the part she’d played in his death.

  He’s a monster. He deserves whatever’s coming to him.

  That may be true, but she covered the screen anyway.

  Just below the screen was a small table with a power outlet. There was a shitty, dinosaur-age flip phone charging in the dock. Kovit’s, she presumed.

  She picked it up and checked. The signal was strong.

  “There’s nothing here.” Mirella leaned against the fridge, her breathing still too fast and sharp.

  She’d wrapped her pink hair in a T-shirt, like a terrible rusty toque, and had swapped her bloody sweatpants and T-shirt out for jeans and a different T-shirt. She looked even more conspicuous than before, if that was possible. But at least she didn’t look quite so noticeably physically different. People would be too busy staring at that weird toque to notice how gray Mirella’s skin was. Though there was nothing to be done about the eye patch.

  “There’s no point calling INHUP.” Mirella noticed the phone in Nita’s hands. “We’re on the wrong side of the border. They have no power here.”

  “I know that. We can’t call until we’re in Brazil.” Nita pocketed the phone and crossed the room to Mirella.

  Mirella went to the door. “Are you coming?”

  Nita hesitated. “Money?”

  “I didn’t see any. Who knows where he hid it. For all you know, it’s in his pocket.”

  Nita nodded, trying to calm her racing heart. Why should taking that final step out of the building be
any scarier than staying? She didn’t know, but somehow it was.

  Mirella was staring at her, and Nita took a deep breath. She’d delayed them long enough. They had no idea when Reyes or her guards were coming back. Money or no money, they needed to get out of here. They’d figure it out as they went.

  “Okay.” Nita turned to the front door. “It’s time.”

  She pulled back the deadbolt, took a deep breath, and opened the door.

  Seventeen

  NITA STUMBLED BACK as she slammed into a wall of humidity. She blinked, suddenly sweating despite the air conditioning at her back. She barely noticed, too caught up in staring at the spectacle in front of her.

  Buildings made of wood and mosquito netting squatted in rows down the street. Interspersed blocky concrete structures with—was that woven giant reeds on the roof?

  There weren’t many people on the street, though she could hear them, the babble, the incessant chatter, from close by. She was probably on a side street.

  A monkey sat on one of the roofs, watching her. It was soon joined by another monkey. And then a third. They stared at her for a while before one of them jumped, whole body spread-eagling as he leapt into the forest behind him.

  No, the jungle behind him.

  The whole market—or at least, the part that Nita could see—was surrounded by rainforest. The trees were huge, towering up into the sky. The area around Nita had been cleared, and she felt like she was looking through a long wooden tube at the blue sky above. There were no clouds.

  The trees were draped with wooden vines—were all vines wood? In movies, when she’d seen people swinging on them, she’d always thought of them as sturdy green plants, like giant dandelion stems. But these looked more like trees that had gained the power of movement, wrapping and weaving and choking the other trees in a throttle, wooden boa constrictors.

  Smaller trees with huge leaves, shrubs, and sticks packed the area closer to the ground. It looked impassable, like the thorns around Sleeping Beauty’s castle. Except with more spiderwebs and giant bugs.

  Beads of sweat trickled down Nita’s forehead and into her shirt. Sweat stains began to appear under her armpits.

  Mirella pushed past her, unaffected by the surroundings. “The pier is this way. I remember from when we arrived.”

  Nita took a step outside and then realized she was barefoot. The ground was littered with rocks and tree roots, and she thought she saw pieces of glass from shattered bottles.

  “We need shoes.”

  Mirella paused. Then she began to shake, her whole body trembling like the beginning of a seizure. “I’m not going back in there.”

  Nita’s shoulders tightened, and she found herself agreeing with Mirella, stupid as it was.

  Mirella turned back to her with large pink eyes. “The only pair of shoes in there is probably on Kovit’s feet.”

  Good point.

  Mirella crunched across the gravel. Her tiny feet left small droplets of blood behind with each step. Sighing, Nita followed. She started killing and layering the skin on the bottom of her feet, trying to create a thick callus. She hoped it would be enough.

  Since Mirella actually remembered her journey here, Nita was inclined to trust that she had a better idea of where to go.

  “You mentioned a pier.” Nita trotted to catch up with Mirella. She was moving faster than Nita would’ve thought possible, considering her limp. “Any other way out?”

  Mirella shook her head. “No. It’s too hard to carve paths through the jungle for cars for long distances. Same with airplane landing strips.”

  Too bad. Though stealing a boat might be easier than a car. “Do you know how to operate a boat?”

  “No.” Mirella shrugged, then winced. Her voice went a little too high. “How hard can it be? You just row, right?”

  Nita didn’t respond, mostly because she didn’t actually have any more knowledge than that either.

  They crunched around a corner, and all thoughts fled as Nita stared at the scene in front of her.

  There were hundreds of people. Nita hadn’t really understood the sheer scale of the market before.

  Small huts and two-story wooden buildings lined the street, but most wares were set up on tables in front of the buildings. Jars with eyes and tongues in formaldehyde sat next to slabs of meat. Little bags of powdered unicorn bone and bundles of phoenix feathers dangled from the woven-reed roofs of the makeshift shops like tassels from graduation caps.

  Other stores had cages with live creatures in them. A large sheeplike creature with fangs gnashed at the bars of its cage. In another, a small fluffy animal huddled into itself, puffy black fur twitching when people got too close. One pen held a massive serpent with horns like antennae. It watched as people passed, tongue flicking in and out, tasting the air.

  But what gave Nita pause was that most people seemed to be speaking English. She caught American accents as well as British. There was Spanish in there too, but the sea of faces throughout the market was more white than brown.

  Not that there weren’t white people in South America. The demographics were actually pretty similar to the States, with large white, black, indigenous, and Asian populations. And like the States, the majority of the ultra-rich—the type of people who could afford the delicacies the market had to offer—were middle-aged white men. So seeing a lot of rich white people in a market like this wasn’t surprising.

  But the amount of English being spoken was.

  Nita had made the very stupid assumption that because she was in Peru, the dealers and the buyers would mostly be from Latin America.

  They weren’t.

  They were from everywhere, and the universal thing they had in common was money. It showed in their tailored clothes, bleached smiles, and the sharp-eyed bodyguards flanking them. These were the exploiters, the people who felt like they could come into a country and do whatever they wanted.

  Conquistadores in suits.

  “Come on.” Mirella tried to take Nita’s hand and pull her forward, but Nita shifted subtly away.

  “Yeah. Coming.” Nita swallowed, eyes still absorbing the scene before her.

  Mirella strode down the street, stumbling through the crowd. A fine layer of sweat covered Nita’s whole body, and glued itself to other people she brushed past like Velcro; when she peeled herself off, there was a wet smacking sound.

  Ugh.

  The whole place smelled like rotting fruit, but also faintly of formaldehyde, which she found comforting. Food shops offered lunch and fresh fruit, but they often smelled worse than the body parts for sale, which was never a good sign.

  Nita kept her head down as she walked. Not too far down—that would be suspicious—but she avoided meeting the gazes of other people in the market. She was hoping to avoid attention, but it would be hard with Mirella and her pink skin, red toque, and limp. Nita almost wished she’d left Mirella to fend for herself. But that wasn’t a nice thought, so she tried not to have it.

  They passed one group of tourists, with large floppy sun hats and cameras hanging around their necks. It made her feel sick. This place wasn’t some side spectacle you could watch and then go home and tell your family about like it was a great adventure.

  As Nita and Mirella got closer to the pier, the towering trees disappeared to reveal blue sky.

  Stumbling down the path to the pier, Nita caught her first glimpse of the Amazon River.

  She’d never been more happy to see a body of water. It promised freedom, a way out of this corrupt market and back to the real world. She imagined getting in a boat and rowing all the way home to Lima. Which was ridiculous, because the Amazon didn’t go anywhere near Lima.

  A wooden pier stretched out into the river, with several stairs scattered at different intervals to get down to the boats. Nita assumed that was in case the water levels rose during rainy season, and she wondered if the market ever flooded.

  Guards were stationed along the pier, most of them wearing camo pants and T-s
hirts or tanks. In their arms, they cradled large, mean-looking guns. Not the little handguns her mother favored, but the long, military ones that looked like they belonged in a terrorist compound. Was that what a machine gun looked like? Or a submachine gun? What was the difference between those anyway?

  Behind them, the boats were tied at the dock. While a few were wooden, more rowboats than anything else, most of them were made of fiberglass and metal, their surfaces stained from the dirty water and years of use. Even from here, Nita could see their engines. And where there were engines, there were usually keys. Or she thought there were. She’d never actually been in a boat—except, she assumed, when she’d been brought to the market, unconscious. At any rate, hot-wiring was not one of Nita’s skills.

  Her hand moved against her leg, trying to make a Y incision with a nonexistent scalpel.

  Maybe the boats didn’t need keys. Engines didn’t necessarily mean keys, right? And those wooden ones with the paddles would work regardless—but if she ran off with one, she would bet the fiberglass ones could catch up in minutes. Not much of a getaway boat.

  She swore, then turned to Mirella, who was eyeing the guards nervously.

  Nita pursed her lips. “Do you know how far Brazil is? Can we swim?”

  “No way.” Mirella’s body was hunched, as though curling up while standing would somehow alleviate whatever wounds lurked under her clothes. “It’s a four-hour motorboat ride. Swimming? It’d take you days. And there’re snakes in the water. Piranhas too, though those won’t be too dangerous in the river itself; they’re fairly well fed. It’s the isolated ones trapped inland by the dry season you have to watch out for.”

  Nita massaged her temples. “All right. What about going through the forest itself?”

  “Are you kidding?” Mirella gave Nita an appalled look. “You need a machete just to hack a trail through the underbrush. There’re spiders in there that eat birds. We wouldn’t last a day, especially with no supplies.”

  Nita clenched her jaw. Out of one cage and into a bigger one.

  The smartest thing to do would be to simply buy passage. If there was anything else she needed, she could bribe the guards into ignoring it. Money solved all problems in the black market.