Not Even Bones

by Rebecca Schaeffer

  But there was no lie to be found.

  She turned away, suddenly aware how close they’d been.

  He swallowed and looked away as she pulled back. His voice was slightly unsteady. “Why, then? Why go to INHUP?”

  Nita pulled the list of corrupt INHUP agents from her pocket. It was a soggy mess, and the ink had run something terrible. She spread the list out and hoped it would dry. A few names were still legible. Sort of. Maybe.

  “Plane ticket.” She swallowed, trying to moisten her dry throat. She never could have imagined a day she would willingly go to INHUP, yet here it was. How times had changed. “I have no money. I don’t know what’s happened to my parents. INHUP will at least get me out of here.”

  Her mother had to know what had happened to Nita. She would have seen the video, would have known exactly where Nita was.

  And she hadn’t come.

  Initially, Nita had assumed this was because her mother was the one who sold her. But now she wondered if something hadn’t happened to her.

  “I see.” Kovit’s voice was soft. He licked his lips, and then looked down at her. “I . . . well, I mean, you have another option.”

  “What?”

  He stopped rowing, and folded the oars on his lap. Nita sat up on her elbows, wondering why he had paused.

  Finally, he raised his eyes to hers. “You could come with me.”

  She stared, unsure how to respond.

  She was tempted, more than she’d thought she would be.

  But she didn’t want to go underground. She didn’t want to spend her whole life hiding, fearing the black market kidnapping her in the night.

  In a way, she was still trapped in a cage. Except this one was the size of the planet, and the only way to escape would be to somehow scrub her face from the internet. Which was impossible.

  If she ever wanted to be truly free, she couldn’t spend her life living in fear.

  She imagined life on the run with a zannie. She imagined the screaming, a million voices echoing through her life as she went deeper and deeper into hiding. The constant fear of being captured, by INHUP, by rivals, by whoever.

  “Do you even have money for that?” she asked, avoiding an answer.

  “Some. Not much,” he admitted. “If we get to somewhere with internet, I can access my account. I can check. Maybe a thousand dollars.”

  Enough for one ticket back to North America. If that. Not enough for Nita to come too.

  “Thank you for the offer, Kovit. It means a lot.”

  “But you want to go with INHUP.” He swallowed and bowed his head so his hair obscured his face for a moment before he put the oars back in the water and started paddling again.

  “I want their plane ticket.” Nita was blunt. “You don’t have enough to take us both back to the States. And I want to see my father again.”

  Nita was worried he might be offended by her decision, but he just grinned and winked at her.

  “The offer is open-ended, Nita. There’s no expiration date.”

  For some reason, that made her feel tight in her chest. It kind of hurt.

  A short while later, the boat thunked against something, and Nita lifted her head to find they were at a dock. They were at the far end of a large port. Dozens of docks were scattered down the coast, anchoring riverboats, ferries, small motorboats, and other rowboats. The water had clearly swamped the dock many times over the years and stained the wood darker, giving it a permanently wet look.

  Around the dock, there was a combination of small tiendas, restaurants with large, brightly colored umbrellas, and larger port-related buildings. Motor taxis buzzed down the streets like motorized rickshaws, small and nimble as they bumped their way over the pavement and wove in between cars. The green and yellow flag of Brazil was painted on a wooden building nearby.

  “We’re here.” Kovit dropped the oars and leaned back.

  Nita drank the sight in. The people walking around in shorts and flip-flops, the hawkers in the distance trying to drum up customers for their boat, or their store, or who knew what. Signs around were mostly in Portuguese, though she saw some Spanish too. The riverboats disgorged people and products, like miniature cruise ships.

  Finally she turned back to Kovit, reluctant to say goodbye. “What will you do now?”

  He stretched his arms high above his head, and something popped in his back. Then he swore and clutched his side. His fingers were bloody. He gave her a warped grin. “Go to the hospital, I think.”

  Nita leaned forward to look at the wound, cursing herself for forgetting about it, but he shifted away.

  “It’s silly, but I almost forgot it was there.” He shook his head. “I haven’t felt pain since we left the market.”

  Right. Because his pain was proportional to his feeding. She hoped he didn’t have blood poisoning from falling in the river with an open wound. “That’s probably not a good thing.”

  He waved her concern away. “I’ll be fine. We’re here, after all.”

  Nita was more worried than she cared to admit. But she kept her tone light, trying to make the feeling go away. “And where to after the hospital?”

  “I don’t know.” He grinned and shaded his eyes against the sun. “You know, I’ve spent most of my life in the mafia. I don’t really know who I am outside it. But”—he met her eyes—“I want to find out. I want to try something different. See if I can. See who I am in a different life.”

  Nita huffed a small laugh and looked down. She found something amusing about the fact that a zannie wanted to get out of the criminal underworld. It was just so contrary to expectations. She wondered what kind of alternative life he was thinking of. Would he still torture people? Was that something that mattered to him? Nita didn’t know.

  There was a lot she didn’t know about Kovit.

  “I’ll go somewhere I can speak the language, to start.” He considered. “Somewhere it’s not hot.”

  “I second that.”

  “I’d like to find my sister too.” His smile was sad. “I haven’t seen her since INHUP took her ten years ago.”

  “Oh.” Nita blinked. “How will you find her?”

  He shrugged. “I don’t know yet. I’ll figure it out as I go, I guess.”

  They were silent for a few minutes before Kovit rose. He stepped onto the dock with a wince and pulled the boat in closer, looping a nearby rope around it.

  Nita approached, hesitant. He stood up, rope tied, and Nita realized she’d misjudged the distance and they were barely an inch apart now.

  Kovit looked at her pocket, and she could feel his breath tickling her skin. “Do you have Reyes’ phone?”

  “It’s probably dead. I jumped into the water with it.”

  “Ah. Well, then.” He leaned forward, so close she thought he was going to kiss her. Her heartbeat skyrocketed, and she couldn’t seem to move. Then he leaned past her face, cheek almost brushing hers before he whispered an email address in her ear. The hairs on the back of her neck rose. “If you want to get in touch with me.”

  Heart slamming in her chest, Nita nodded, voice catching in her throat. “Thanks.”

  He took a step back and grinned. She wondered if he was playing with her the mocking way he played with other people. Or if this was something else entirely.

  She looked up, and their eyes met. His were dark, thickly lashed, and sad. It was strange to see them sad. She’d always thought of them as happy, dancing with the screams of the people he tortured.

  “Good luck, Nita.” His voice was soft.

  She nodded, heart still pounding, chest still tight. “You too.”

  He extended his hand to help her out of the boat. She took it, and with one step, suddenly they were both on the pier.

  She gave him one last smile and then turned away before she could change her mind. As she walked, she tried to recall Mirella’s screams as Kovit tortured her, because she couldn’t let herself get sentimental about a monster. But the only screams she could pull
up were the people in the market, as Nita burned them alive.

  Forty

  NITA RESTED HER head against the window of the car. Bogotá whipped by her, districts she’d never heard of. Rebar stuck out from the tops of houses in some places, roofs unfinished. Signs for tiendas or bodegas intermingled with boarded-up houses that seemed to be collapsing in on themselves.

  Then they crossed some invisible line, and it looked like she was somewhere in Florida, with drooping palm trees, clean plazas with elaborate fountains or monuments in them, and wide, well-paved streets. Nita didn’t understand the logic. The rich districts next to the poverty-stricken ones. But then again, American cities were just as divided.

  The car stopped in front of a ten-story modern glass building beside a group of other modern glass buildings. Nita had a moment of heart-stopping terror. This was INHUP. It was to Nita what the boogeyman was to other kids. She’d always expected that if ever she went into INHUP, it would be in handcuffs.

  But really, she could never have predicted any of the past week.

  A tall woman in a suit gestured for Nita to enter. Letting out a breath of tension, she did.

  Nita had showed up at the office in Tabatinga, dripping wet, with not a cent or piece of ID to her name. Normally, a place as small as Tabatinga would never have had such a well-staffed INHUP office, but so many unnatural body-parts bootleggers frequented the town it was a great place to nab them before they crossed the border. Hence, office.

  Nita had squelched into the lobby and said, “Mercado de la Muerte has been burned down. I escaped. I was a prisoner there. Help me.”

  She was quietly led to a room, given a bottle of water, and told to wait.

  She used the time to sleep.

  She was woken several hours later and told she was being taken to the continental INHUP headquarters in Bogotá, Colombia. Nita would have thought Rio for headquarters, or maybe Buenos Aires, but what did she know?

  A helicopter was sent, and Nita was flown to a larger airport, where she was transferred to a plane that took her to Bogotá.

  She spent the plane ride watching the Amazon River twist below her like an uncoiled rope. Around it, treetops covered the ground like a forest of broccoli heads. As they were taking off, she thought she saw a macaw.

  And now Nita was taking her very first steps into a place she never thought she’d be. INHUP headquarters, Bogotá.

  Her fingers twitched for her scalpel.

  She was led to a small white room. Her first thought was that it would have made a great dissection room. It didn’t have one-way mirrors, but it did have a blinking security camera in the top left corner. Nita watched the security camera watching her.

  The INHUP agent sat down. “Nita.”

  Nita looked up, startled at first that the woman knew her name, and then remembered that she’d asked ages ago. What was the agent’s name? She had buzzcut black hair, a square face, and medium-brown skin. Her suit was sharply pressed, and the white shirt beneath it pristine.

  She looked a lot like Nita’s father, enough that they could have been mistaken for siblings. Nita’s heart tightened at the thought, and she swallowed. Soon. She’d be home soon.

  “Nita,” the INHUP agent repeated, and the name finally dredged itself up from the back of her mind. Agent Quispe. Quispe was a Quechua name; the language of the Incans.

  Nita blinked and focused her wandering mind.

  “Nita, can we talk a bit? I promise, you can go have a shower in a few minutes, but I want to ask you some questions first.” She spoke slowly, as though uncertain of Nita’s Spanish comprehension.

  Nita nodded, then licked her lips. “All right.”

  Agent Quispe leaned in. “Firstly, is there anyone you want us to contact for you? Family? Your parents, perhaps?”

  Nita nodded, then hesitated. Her father’s phone was in police custody. He might have been arrested for his crimes selling unnatural body parts.

  But the more she thought about it, the stranger it seemed that it was in the Chicago PD’s custody and not in INHUP’s. There was something she was missing there.

  Well, there was no point thinking about it. She’d come here for a plane ticket and a way home, and she wasn’t going to get it without telling them who she was.

  “My father’s name is Enrique Leonardo Sánchez Roca.” Nita looked around for a pen, but there was nothing in the room. “If you give me a pen and paper, I can write down his phone number and address and such.”

  Agent Quispe went to the door and called something into the hall. A moment later, pen and paper were brought. Nita wrote down the details, and then the paper was whisked away to someone outside, who was presumably going to track her father down.

  “Now, Nita.” Agent Quispe sat down and pulled a phone out of her pocket. “Is this you?”

  She played a video. Nita stood, frightened, at the back of the cage as Kovit advanced and skinned part of her arm. His ecstatic shudder cut off abruptly as the video stopped, then focused in on Nita, ignoring Kovit. Nita closed her eyes. It felt like so long ago that the video had been made, when she was a different person.

  “Yes. That’s me.” Nita watched as, on screen, her wound started healing.

  Agent Quispe took the phone away. “I’m sorry you had to relive that.”

  “It’s fine.” And it was. Nita didn’t really feel anything about the video. She’d got cut, she’d been scared. But so much had happened since then that the fear at that moment lost all power over the girl in the present, sitting in this room.

  “Can you tell me what happened?”

  “In the video? You just watched it.”

  “No.” Agent Quispe frowned at Nita’s evasion. “From the beginning. How did you get to be there?”

  Nita looked down at her hands, folded on the table. “I was kidnapped. Someone injected me with something, and I passed out. And then I woke up in that cage.”

  “Were you alone when you were taken?”

  Nita made a quick calculation. She was seventeen, and the likelihood she was living alone in a foreign country was close to zero. Then they’d start asking questions, dig into her parents. And that could cause problems—especially given her mother. So Nita decided to nip it in the bud, just in case.

  “No.” Nita clenched her hands. “My mother was there. I didn’t see what happened to her. But later on, Reyes—my captor—implied she was dead.”

  Agent Quispe leaned forward, brows knitted with sympathy. “Continue.”

  Nita shrugged, uncomfortable. She wasn’t going to admit to multiple homicides in front of a police officer. Reyes. Boulder’s guards. Nita couldn’t even remember what they looked like. That’s how insignificant her mind had classified them. And she’d snuffed them out.

  It was scary that a life could be so unimportant.

  And she’d killed a whole market full of people with fire.

  She felt surprisingly numb about it all now—maybe the panic attack would happen later? Maybe it was all a delayed reaction? Or maybe she’d had all the reaction she was going to, and she’d emotioned herself out.

  Whatever the reason, her numbness made it easier to lie. “I stayed in the cage. Sometimes Reyes brought potential customers to see me. One of her customers bought me last night. When he led me out of the cage, we saw the fire starting. I ran away, down to the harbor, got in a rowboat, and made my way to Tabatinga.”

  The end. Nita would make a master storyteller.

  “How did you get away?”

  “I shoved him.”

  “You weren’t chained?”

  “No.”

  “And did you see anyone else escape?”

  “No.” Nita’s voice was cold. “They all burned. They’re dead.”

  Agent Quispe watched Nita with a cool intensity, and Nita returned her gaze with a tired, are-you-really-going-to-interrogate-me-after-all-I’ve-been-through look.

  “Can I have a shower?” Nita asked, plucking at her sweat- and bloodstained T-shirt.
She had no idea what her face looked like. Her dunk in the river had probably washed some of the blood off, but she hadn’t healed the vicious gash across her cheek, and she knew there must be blood pooling under her eyes from her broken nose.

  Agent Quispe gave her another long look and then a tight nod. “Of course.”

  Nita was led to a small private bathroom with a glass shower. Someone had placed a folded towel, a pair of baggy gray sweats, and a white shirt next to it. Nita itched. Her skin was flaking from all the dried sweat and blood.

  Agent Quispe gestured to the shower. “Here. We can continue to talk afterward.”

  The door closed, and Nita slumped against the wall. She lay there, finally letting herself relax.

  It’s okay to cry now, if you want, she told herself. You’re finally safe. You can cry from relief, or grief, or whatever you want.

  But the tears wouldn’t come. She just leaned against the wall, breathing hard, willing herself to get her meltdown over with. She always felt better after letting her emotions out.

  But nothing happened, so she stripped and had a shower. The water felt good against her skin—warm, almost hot—but she had to scrub to peel the layers of blood and sweat off. Afterward, she slid on the oversized clothing they’d provided, reveling in how clean she felt.

  She was led back to the white room—really, to be fair, it was an interrogation room—and Agent Quispe sat down opposite her again. She slid a photo across the table to Nita.

  “Have you ever seen this man before?”

  Nita expected it to be a picture of Kovit, but it wasn’t. It was Zebra-stripes the vampire, wearing a trench coat and hat like a ’30s-style gangster.

  Nita pushed the picture back. “He was one of the potential customers Reyes brought in.”

  “Was he?” Agent Quispe’s voice went dangerous. “Did he say anything? Do anything out of the ordinary?”

  Do anything out of the ordinary? Like start asking Nita questions about finding her mother? That kind of out of the ordinary?

  “No,” Nita lied. She definitely did not want to go down the line of questioning where her mother got involved. Too dangerous. Nita couldn’t let her own involvement in dissecting and dismembering unnaturals be known. She’d never get out of prison, and that was not Nita’s intention. “No, he didn’t speak. He watched them cut me, watched me heal, and then he left.”