The Body Market

by Donna Freitas

  No. Who was I kidding?

  Rain wouldn’t feel like he had lost me for good, but that they’d lost me for good. His cause and everyone involved in it. I’d originally thought I was part of their rebellion, that I would have an important role in it. But Rain had kept so much from me, he’d lured me in and played me so well, like he’d been gaming me forever. And I just let him. I let my guard down because of a stupid crush.

  Stupid.

  Even more pathetic, I was trapped by some bounty hunter while my sister got ready to sell my friends, I had no idea where my mother was, and I was still mooning over Rain Holt like some pathetic jilted girlfriend.

  I got up and went to the window for the tenth time in the last hour.

  The storm had grown even fiercer, the sky darker. From the little I could see, it whipped the ocean into a frenzy, great waves rising up and crashing closer and closer to shore, the water nearly white with churning, the surface covered in an angry swirling foam.

  Jude must be livid. I’d spoiled her plans once, and now the weather was conspiring to do the same. I bet the Body Tourists were stranded in their hotel. Would the market be shuttered until the snow subsided? That would be at least one small consolation. But then, where were Inara and Sylvia now? Had they been spirited away to somewhere safe? Had the others, too? Or would they lie there freezing, snow drifting across glass boxes and lush red carpet?

  There was a rustle to my left and I looked up.

  The boy appeared in the doorway of his room. His dark hair stood up on top of his head, the sides short, nearly shaved all around. He wore jeans and a thick braided sweater like the one he’d given me and no shoes, but the checked scarf, worn and nearly in tatters, still encircled his neck. Maybe he slept in it. He stretched his arms high and yawned.

  I glared. “You kidnap me in the middle of a storm, and then nap all afternoon?”

  “Are you hungry?” was all he replied.

  I was. My stomach had been growling for the last two hours. But I crossed my arms and turned my back on him, the fire roaring and crackling next to me. “No.”

  He let out a loud breath. “Fine,” he said. “Have it your way.”

  In bare feet, he padded across the carpet, then scuffed along the wooden floor, until he reached the kitchen. I watched as he took out a big silver pot and filled it with water, then put it on the stove to heat. Next to it was a block of cheese, which he grated, and what looked like a slab of bacon, which he sliced thinly before chopping it up and throwing it into a saucepan. The smell of it sizzling soon filled the cottage, the comfort of something so basic and elemental as cooking combating the sounds of the storm. Between the warmth of the fire and the anticipation of something delicious to eat, the cottage almost seemed . . . cozy.

  If I hadn’t been kidnapped, I could even see myself liking it here.

  Pasta bubbled in the pot.

  My mouth watered.

  The boy glanced at me, his strange eyes flashing, that half grin curling up the side of his mouth. This time it seemed less menacing. “I made enough for two. You should eat. Besides, I’m a good cook and you look . . . so very hungry.”

  I left my place at the window and walked over to the couch, sat down in a heap, and tried to block out the smells of the food. The sky had grown completely dark, and now that I wasn’t near the stove, I grew cold. I grabbed the blanket hanging over the arm of the couch and pulled it around me. I thought back to my first days in the Real World, when I’d woken up in the Keeper’s house, when she’d cooked for me, how I wasn’t allowed outside then either. But the Keeper wanted to protect me, unlike this boy, who planned to turn me over to the one person in this world who hated me most. I was so lost in these thoughts that I didn’t hear him approach, didn’t notice his proximity until his face was bent close, peering straight into mine.

  “Come and eat,” he said.

  I stared back at him. “Not unless you answer some questions.”

  “It’s going to get cold.”

  “I don’t care.”

  “Fine,” he said. He stood there, watching me, that unreadable look on his face, that scarf of his still circled loosely around his neck. “Ask away.”

  I blinked. “Are you a New Capitalist?”

  “No.”

  “Were you ever?”

  “No.

  “What about a Keeper of bodies?”

  “No.”

  “A Keeper of something?”

  “No.”

  “So a bounty hunter. That’s all. Nothing else? That’s who you are in this world?”

  “Yes.”

  I sighed. “Do you ever give more than one-word answers?”

  His eyes flickered a little, and he shifted his head toward the kitchen. He was trying not to smile. “Is that it?”

  I got up from the couch and stood in front of him, so we were eye to eye, and his eyes went vacant again, as though he could retreat behind them and disappear at will. I wanted to show him I wasn’t afraid. “If you’re a bounty hunter, then why take me here? To where you live?”

  “This wasn’t exactly the plan,” he said. “I didn’t intend to entertain you as a guest for a few days. But opportunity struck when I saw you there and it happened to strike at the beginning of a blizzard. So I improvised.” His fingers stretched at his sides, then relaxed. “I’m going to eat. You can join me or starve.”

  He walked into the kitchen and piled pasta into a chipped white bowl. It was still hot enough that steam rose from it. My body reacted in that involuntary way that virtual selves never do, that way I was still getting used to, my stomach growling. Each time food enticed me I couldn’t help but think of the Sachs family and one of the last conversations I’d had at their dinner table.

  And Inara. Inara most of all.

  “I can hear your stomach,” the boy said.

  But I refused to move.

  He was already eating, lustily slurping the spaghetti, when I finally gave in, heading to the kitchen and filling my own bowl. I didn’t sit with him at the table. I picked up my food and sat on the couch again, my back toward him, and ate hungrily.

  Once in a while, though, I could feel his eyes.

  My instincts, awake again, alert and watchful, told me this.

  By the next morning, the storm had grown worse.

  I stretched my arms high, my body still heavy with sleep. The wind moaned and whistled and the cottage groaned and creaked in response. The fire had died during the night and the air had cooled so much I could nearly see my breath. I rose from the couch, pulling the blanket around me, and walked over to the iron stove. There was a pile of wood stacked in the corner of the kitchen and I grabbed one of the thick split branches and added it to the embers still smoldering orange. I’d seen the boy stoking the fire with the long metal rod that leaned against the wall and I did this now, poking at the wood until it started to burn. Soon I felt the warmth and relief of it.

  I stood there, holding out my hands.

  And I realized something.

  I wasn’t afraid. There was a kind of peace about being here during a storm, this place in the middle of nowhere.

  And for once, nothing was required of me.

  There wasn’t a revolution to wage or someone I needed to run from or to or anything I had to fix right this minute. There was literally nothing else I could do aside from just being, just existing. I couldn’t even attempt to escape. The blizzard forbade it. There was only the waiting out of things, until the storm subsided and let us slip from its cold and firm grasp, back to the way things were, the way they are, to the reality as icy and harsh and unforgiving as this weather.

  But that time was still a ways away.

  It was strange to notice how glad this made me. I hadn’t realized until this moment that I’d needed a vacation from this world and the responsibilities it had handed me ever since I’d unplugged. I almost laughed for having applied the word vacation to my situation, but it was true, it kind of felt like one. That the force of
the weather stopped all things, revolution, resistance, maybe even the commerce of the Body Market, was stunning to contemplate.

  I almost wanted to give thanks.

  I glanced up from the stove toward the boy’s bedroom. He was still asleep, I supposed. His door was shut, and I didn’t hear any movement behind it. As the wood snapped and shifted, I wondered about him, the way he lived alone out here, about his choice of profession, whether it really was a choice or if, like for so many people in this world, it was something he did merely to survive and because there were few, if any, other options. Where was his family? How long had he been by himself? How does a boy nearly my own age go from being only a boy to becoming a bounty hunter? How do any of us go from being children to becoming the axis around which a revolution in two worlds is turning?

  The door of the cabin seemed to bend with the pressure of the snow and wind, grunting and sighing. I went to it, decided to open it a crack, just to see what the outside world was like, if it was really as bad as it sounded. The urge to be in the middle of that kind of natural power, a force that was real and had nothing to do with an App, was irresistible.

  I slid aside the bolt. Turned the knob.

  Big mistake.

  Snow and ice, a shocking amount of it, blew inside the cottage, the harsh wind slicing through the opening, angry and wild. The door flew wide despite my efforts to push it back, using all my strength to try and shut it. I stepped away in shock.

  “What are you doing?”

  Suddenly the boy was in the room, staring at me like I was crazy. He flew to the door and threw all of his weight against it. When the latch clicked, he bolted it shut. His hair was disheveled, sticking up at odd angles, his clothes crumpled, his T-shirt slightly askew. Ice covered one of his arms.

  And he was glaring. At me.

  “I just . . . ,” I started, and stopped. I took a step back. There was something about the look on his face that made me remember our reality: he’d kidnapped me, I was imprisoned here, he was willing to end life as I knew it by handing me over to my sister. The beauty and power of the storm had lulled me into a comfortable stasis, but now my heart skidded frantically. If he decided to hurt me, there was nowhere I could run, nothing I could do but fight back—and a fight in this small space would be ugly. Bloody. Maybe even deadly. I took another few steps away from him, mentally going over where I’d seen the kitchen knives.

  The boy’s expression softened. “I told you,” he began. “I’m not going to hurt you. I’m really not.” He ran a hand through his dark hair, taming the spikes. “You were saying something. You just . . . what, Skylar?”

  My heart slowed, or at least it began pounding out something else, something unfamiliar. “I was just curious. About the storm. I only wanted to see what it was like to be in it. It’s so . . . real.”

  The boy stared a bit longer, then he started to laugh. He threw back his head with it, his whole body shaking, like he’d been waiting for just the right moment to finally release all of this emotion. “And what did you discover?”

  I walked over to the mess on the floor. There was a slanted pile of snow, a triangular arch that nearly reached the dark wooden legs of the couch, and I bent down to touch it. “That it’s cold and icy and strong and violent.” I looked up at the boy again. Traces of laughter still graced his lips and eyes. He was a different person with so much expression, someone I could see myself liking, who might become a friend, like Adam. I hadn’t seen someone laugh like that since I had left the App World, well before Jonathan Holt announced he was closing the borders. But then I remembered how this boy had grabbed me off the street, and I remembered the cold I saw in his eyes sometimes. I was still staring at him when I spoke again. “Kind of like you,” I added.

  The expression on his face went dormant. “The storm is dangerous. We need to protect ourselves from it. Not invite it inside.”

  I stood, passing him on my way to the kitchen looking for something to clean up the snow and the puddle it was making on the floor. It was melting fast now that the wood in the stove was burning brightly and filling the cottage with heat. I found a bucket and a pile of washcloths. “Danger doesn’t frighten me.”

  “Lucky you.” He extended a hand and lifted one of the washcloths from my arm. “It frightens me.”

  I glanced at him while I mopped up the icy water. “You don’t seem like someone who’d admit that.”

  He pressed a towel into the floor. “Fear is a normal part of living in the real body. It’s healthy to feel it. It’s part of how we survive.”

  The two of us worked piling snow into the bucket. We crouched close, our knees almost touching, arms moving. Goosebumps covered my skin. “But fear can paralyze us,” I said. “Instincts, good ones, are essential, much more so than fear, I think.”

  He stopped sopping the mess and looked at me. His elbow rested on his knee, hand outstretched, like he was hoping I might take it. “I saw you on the cliff that day when you woke up. I saw your escape.”

  Was I always going to come up against this? Would that day and what happened since always define me? Would my introduction to everyone forever be as the girl meant to open the Body Market?

  I curled a little further into myself. Away from the outstretched hand of the boy. “You and everyone else.”

  “It was pretty amazing,” he said softly.

  My knees pressed deeper into my ribs.

  “I thought you’d be harder to take,” he went on, and I could hear a faraway tone enter his voice, a distant pride, as he spoke. “But then there you were yesterday on the street, so lost in thought, so unaware and unprotected. All I had to do was reach out and suddenly I had you.” His fingers stretched wide, nearly grazing the skin of my upper arm.

  I flinched.

  He snatched them back.

  I stood, leaving the pile of wet towels in a heap on the floor. “You lied before.”

  He looked at me. His eyes weren’t impassive now, but I couldn’t read them either. “What are you talking about?”

  “You said you weren’t going to hurt me, but that isn’t true.”

  “It is—” he started, but I didn’t let him finish.

  “You forgot to add yet. That you’re not going to hurt me yet.” I went to the couch and picked up the blanket again, pulled it tight around my shoulders so it engulfed my body. “But the minute you hand me over to my sister you’ll be hurting me. So let’s not pretend this is anything else than what it truly is. All right?”

  I’d meant my question to be rhetorical.

  Then he spoke. “All right,” he whispered in agreement.

  But his words, they sounded pained.

  5

  Rain

  the high price of betrayal

  “I NEED YOUR advice.”

  Skylar’s Keeper looked up from her reading. I stood in the doorway of the room where she was staying. She’d gotten caught here in the storm and couldn’t yet return to the mansion. We were all caught at the moment, stuck inside, stir-crazy already. She patted the spot next to her on the couch. A small lamp threw light onto half of her lined face. “Come and sit.”

  I did as I was told. The Keepers were gentle in voice, but commanding all the same. In just a few days she’d made these rooms her own by fetching a blanket from one place, a few books from another, and nearly always having a pot of tea brewing and a kettle at the ready on the stove.

  “You’re worried about Skylar,” she said.

  I didn’t move. Didn’t confirm or deny this.

  “You need to be smart, Rain,” she said. “You can’t go looking for her in this storm.” She laid her book facedown on the coffee table, open to the page where she’d left off. “Skylar will be all right. She’s a survivor.”

  I leaned forward, clasping my hands, elbows digging into my knees. I couldn’t sit still, yet the Keeper was like a statue. “What if it’s not just the storm that’s keeping her away?”

  “You’re worried that Jude has her again.”
>
  My eyes raked over the Keeper’s face, searching for signs that she worried about this too, but her expression gave away nothing. “How could I not? The last time Skylar disappeared she was gone for weeks.”

  “She made it out alive, though.”

  “Yes,” I said, frustrated. The Keeper was being too literal. “But she was never the same afterward.”

  The Keeper got up and crossed the room to the stove. She turned the flame on underneath the kettle. “Skylar was grieving—is grieving. Grief takes a long time to move through us, and she’s lost so much.” A shadow crossed the Keeper’s face, the first sign I’d seen of worry. “We only added to her pain by betraying her trust.”

  I joined the Keeper in the little kitchen. The light was dim, and the anonymity it provided was a relief. “I didn’t betray her outright.”

  “That’s not how she sees it,” the Keeper said. “Withholding the truth is its own betrayal, and we withheld the biggest truth of all.”

  I hooked my hand onto the back of my neck and pressed it hard into my skin. “It was for her own protection.”

  The Keeper eyed me skeptically. “You’re still telling yourself that?”

  “But it’s true,” I tried again.

  “Rain Holt, Skylar was a pawn in your father’s game and then in our own—she was a pawn until she proved that she wasn’t.” The kettle began to shake as the water neared boiling. “Maybe she’ll begin to forgive you only after you admit your betrayal openly. Maybe that’s what she’s been waiting for all of this time.”

  I stared at the Keeper. Gone was her stillness, replaced by a fiery righteousness as hot as the flame on the stove. I could feel it rolling off her. Could she be right? Could it be that simple, gaining Skylar’s forgiveness? “I won’t try to find her,” was all I said.

  “Good.”

  “I have other things to worry about here,” I went on.

  “You do.”

  “That’s what I came to discuss,” I said, lying once more.

  “Of course,” the Keeper said, agreeing with me yet again.

  We stared at each other in the darkness for a long time, our eyes telling the only truths in the room.