Only Ashes Remain

by Rebecca Schaeffer

  “You did.” His shoulders slumped. “And I’m not my father.”

  No, you’re much worse.

  Nita didn’t reply, just looked at the flower. Fabricio was the same. Beautiful and gentle on the outside, hiding a toxic inside.

  Fabricio’s jaw was tight and his gaze angry. “Is this why you’ve been so cold to me? You think I’m just another money-grubbing asshole like my father?”

  She shrugged, playing it nonchalant. “I don’t know. I don’t know you.”

  “I’m not. I’m nothing like him.” His voice was bitter. “And I never want to be. I don’t want anything to do with him or his business. All it’s ever brought me is pain.”

  “And money. I hear someone of your standing lives quite well.”

  “I’d rather have my ear back.”

  Nita raised an eyebrow. “What does your ear have to do with your father?”

  “You didn’t really think your mother kidnapped the child of one of the most notorious men on the black market to sell his body on the internet, did you?”

  Nita’s stomach dropped. “What?”

  His lips pressed together into a thin line. “Your mother was sending me back to my father, piece by piece, every time he refused a demand.”

  Nita swallowed. Fabricio could be lying, but it made sense in a way. Why would her mother kidnap the child of someone so important just to make a few bucks online? No, blackmail was far more her mother’s style.

  “Are you even an unnatural?”

  He sighed. “I’m exactly what she said I was. Pieces of me would make money.”

  Nita nodded slowly. “But?”

  “But . . .” He looked away. “I’m more afraid of who I am than what I am. No one would go to all the trouble she did to kidnap me just to sell me. But to blackmail my father? The sky is the limit.”

  Uneasiness coiled in Nita’s stomach. She’d wanted power to protect herself—to make Fabricio’s reality hers. Everyone wanted her for what she was, and in order to avoid looking over her shoulder her whole life, she wanted to make them afraid of who she was.

  Now she wondered if that was such a great idea.

  “Why?”

  He blinked. “Why what?”

  “Why was my mother blackmailing your father in the first place? I mean, there are far easier targets if it was simply about money.”

  He shook his head. “I don’t know.”

  No, this didn’t make sense anymore. Something in this picture wasn’t right.

  “One good thing that’s come out of all this.” A half smile flitted across his face. “Now I can be a nameless refugee that INHUP will protect. I gave them a fake last name. No one needs to know who I am. I can start over.” He looked at her. “I suppose I should thank you and your mother for that. If no one here knows who I am, no one can leak that information or try and use me for my father’s connections.”

  Nita gave him an incredulous look. He was one of those every-cloud-has-a-silver-lining people. She supposed if he were in her shoes, he’d say that her experience in Mercado de la Muerte—“Death Market”—had given her much-needed industry perspective.

  Ugh. She hated people like that.

  A warm wind slunk through the garden, and Nita realized her nose had started to burn under the hot noon sun, and she healed it before it could progress. She’d been so distracted she hadn’t noticed. She wiped her forehead and jerked her head to Fabricio.

  “Let’s go back inside.”

  He smiled tentatively. “It’s hot out here. They need air-conditioning for outside.”

  Nita didn’t smile back.

  As they approached the building, Nita stopped and turned to Fabricio. “Let me make one thing clear.”

  He paused, smile falling. “Yes?”

  “If you in any way reveal who my mother is, or our connection, I will tell INHUP about your father. You’ll be sent home, and your little escape plan will be ruined.”

  His eyes narrowed, flint and steel, and Nita finally caught her first glimpse of the real person beneath the friendly facade. “If you say anything to compromise my protection and put me in danger, I’ll tell them about your mother. And your complicity.”

  Nita pursed her lips. “Then we’ll both have to stay quiet, won’t we?”

  They held each other’s gaze for a long moment and then, as one, turned and reentered the building in silence.

  Nita shoved the floripondio flower in her pocket as she went, a poisonous promise to herself.

  Two

  NITA RETREATED TO HER ROOM. More white walls, white pillows, white sheets. The only spots of color were the blue blanket and the gray foldout chair in front of a white desk.

  She locked the door and looked down at her hands. She’d managed to cut her finger on the stem of the floripondio flower at some point.

  Nita concentrated, increasing blood clotting factor, accelerating cell growth. The veins repaired, and the cut closed over. She wiped away a small speck of blood, all evidence of an injury gone.

  She flopped down on the bed, which sagged in the middle, and closed her eyes, turning over Fabricio’s words in her mind. She replayed the scene, stalling on the part where he claimed her mother was blackmailing his father. It felt like the truth, but not the right piece of the truth.

  No, Fabricio was a master of mixing truth and lies to make himself the most sympathetic person possible. He’d known exactly how to manipulate her into letting him out of her mother’s cage, despite Nita’s sense of self-preservation. He’d let her believe her mother’s lies, because she might have hesitated freeing him if she’d had any inkling he’d been involved in the black market.

  And Nita would have hesitated. Any potential stain on his character, and her mind would have supplied her with a million justifications for why it was okay to kill him, take him apart piece by piece like her mother wanted.

  So he’d been very careful to act the perfect, tragic innocent.

  Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me.

  Nita carefully pulled the crumpled flower from her pocket and turned it around in her hands.

  Small and deadly. She could end him in a moment.

  But a part of her wasn’t sure that was the best course of action. Wasn’t sure that killing Fabricio would solve more problems than it created.

  She tried to put herself in Fabricio’s shoes, figure out why he’d sold her. He didn’t need the money, his father was rich. He was already on a bus to INHUP, so it wasn’t like he needed money to escape either, if he couldn’t access his father’s money.

  For a brief moment, Nita wondered if Fabricio had sold her because she’d told him her father was Chilean and Fabricio was Argentinian. The relationship between the two countries had been strained for a long time. It got worse in the eighties, after the Falklands War between Argentina and the United Kingdom, when Chile was the only South American country to side with Britain.

  But the more she thought about it, the more unbelievable it sounded. Selling a person on the black market because of events in a war that happened before they were born, especially after that person had saved him, was just absurd.

  Not that his reasoning mattered. There was no excuse that could justify what he’d done.

  A knock interrupted her musings.

  Nita hurriedly tucked the flower away and opened the door.

  Agent Quispe stood in the entranceway, her smile friendly and professional. “Nita, I hope I didn’t catch you at a bad time.”

  Nita shook her head. “No.”

  “Good. I just wanted to let you know that your new passport came.” Quispe held it out to her. “We’re booked on a flight to Toronto in two days. We can’t fly you straight to the US for legal reasons, so you’ll go through some processing in Canada, and then we can fly you home.”

  Nita swallowed and nodded, even though her heart sank. After Toronto processing, she was supposed to go home, to that suburban house in Chicago. The house she hadn’t seen since she left when sh
e was twelve, dragged around the world by her mother, hunting unnaturals to sell.

  To her father, who she hadn’t seen in person since she was twelve.

  She’d imagined a grand reunion, running into his arms. If she closed her eyes, she could still feel the warmth of his embrace, the way he’d stroke her hair, the gentle timbre of his voice.

  But her father wasn’t there anymore. There would be no tearful reunion, no warm hug, no sinking into his arms and letting herself believe that somehow, someday, everything would be okay.

  Her father was dead.

  Her eyes began to water at the thought, and she shoved the rising tide of emotion away ruthlessly. Now was not the time.

  Quispe seemed to realize what was happening. As she should, she’d been the one to tell Nita about her father’s murder a few days ago. And to show her the picture of her father’s murderer, a vampire on the hunt for her mother.

  Quispe’s eyes softened. “Have you contacted any other family members yet?”

  Nita shook her head. “I’ll email some people. I’ll let you know more tomorrow.”

  Quispe hesitated a moment. “I’m sorry about your father.”

  Nita’s face almost cracked, everything leaking out and onto the floor, the grief like a demon trapped in her skin, just waiting for Nita to lose her strength so it could break free and leave only tatters of her skin shell behind.

  She shrugged and looked away, trying to hide her face from Quispe. “It’s fine.”

  “If you want to talk—”

  “I don’t.”

  There was a short pause, and Quispe sighed. “All right. If you need anything else, let me know.”

  “I will.”

  Nita slowly closed the door, hesitant at first, in case Quispe had something else to say, then quickly when she realized it really was the end of the conversation and slowly closing the door looked super awkward.

  Nita ended up slamming the door in the INHUP agent’s face, which was, of course, more awkward.

  Her body shook slightly, and she leaned against the door. She swallowed and looked down at the stiff material of her American passport. She thumbed through the pages, each covered in washed-out images of national monuments. She flipped to the picture page, and looked down at her photo, taken by INHUP. Her frizzy brown curls were pulled back, and their slight orange tint was even more pronounced in the passport material’s shine. The freckles across her nose and cheeks looked like blood spatter in the harsh light, and her brown skin looked grayish with exhaustion. She stared into the camera with too-intense eyes, like she was challenging the photographer.

  Her first passport she didn’t remember, but her second she’d gotten when she was ten. Her father took her to get the pictures, and he’d made funny faces at her from behind the photographer that made her laugh and ruined every take. When the photographer turned around, her father stood there, stoic and stern, one eyebrow raised as though to ask the photographer if there was a problem.

  It had taken nearly half an hour to get a decent shot, and afterward they’d gone for ice cream. She’d gotten a waffle cone with sprinkles around the edge, and sat there giggling at her father’s ice cream mustache as he did impersonations of the teachers in school she didn’t like.

  Grief swamped Nita, crashing through her like a tidal wave, all the stronger for those few moments she’d managed to hold it off while Quispe was there. It smashed against her ribs, rattling them, before retreating and pooling in her empty chest cavity, like a lake of tears waiting to be shed.

  Her father was dead.

  No more goofy faces. No more ice cream.

  Nita leaned against the wall, then slowly slid down to the floor, fingers clenched around her new passport, her eyes tightly closed, trying to stop the tears before they started. Because once they started, they took ages to stop.

  Nita had been walking down the hall yesterday and seen someone with the same pair of glasses as her father. That had been enough to set her off, crying into flower bushes and hiding in her room for the rest of the afternoon.

  Part of her just wanted the pain to go away. She wanted to stop feeling awful all the time. She wanted to skip to the part where she was over it, where the grief was nothing but a distant memory.

  Even as she thought that, it felt disloyal to her father. He deserved to be cried over. He was the only good person in her life, he had always been her friend and ally when her mother took things too far. How dare she try to avoid thinking about him to avoid pain?

  She didn’t know if it was selfish to not want to face the pain, or if it was like an open wound, where she had to wait for it to scab over before she could poke at it without making it bleed again.

  Nita curled on the floor for a few minutes, trying to get control of her tears. When she finally rose, she went into the bathroom and blew her nose. She splashed her face with cold water and let out a short huff of breath.

  Her reflection stared back at her, haunted and angry. She tightened her jaw until her reflection didn’t look sad anymore, just determined.

  She nodded to herself. She was in control.

  She flopped onto her bed and closed her eyes. The tears had given her a pounding headache, and all she wanted to do was fall asleep and forget for a while.

  Reluctantly, she opened her eyes and pulled out her phone. Quispe had reminded her of the one thing she had to do before bed.

  Quispe had only returned Nita’s phone right before they met Fabricio. Nita hadn’t had a chance to see if it still worked after taking a dunk in the Amazon River. Soaking it in rice was supposed to fix it, but who knew.

  She ran her finger over the screen, thinking of her captor, Reyes, the first owner of this phone. Nita could still see her cold eyes. How she’d worn the same expression talking about money that she’d worn ordering people tortured. Blank. Empty.

  Nita shivered and pushed the image from her mind. Reyes was dead. Nita had killed her. And that was one death she’d never regret.

  Huffing, Nita unlocked the phone and logged into her “safe” email, hands trembling, not sure if she wanted to see what awaited her or if she wanted to be ignorant forever.

  Her heart raced, and her fingers trembled slightly as she checked her messages.

  There was one new email from her mother. She clicked it open.

  Nita, answer your phone.

  That was it. It was dated the same day Nita had been kidnapped. Her mother couldn’t have known Fabricio had her phone.

  Nita clicked reply, but hesitated, not sure what to say. If her mother was alive, why hadn’t she come to rescue Nita? Nita’s picture and location were all over the darknet—there was no way her mother hadn’t seen. But she hadn’t come.

  Unease coiled in Nita’s stomach. What if she was dead?

  What if she wasn’t? What if she just hadn’t cared enough to save Nita?

  Finally, annoyed with her whirling thoughts, she answered, I’m with INHUP. They’re flying me to Toronto for processing.

  She sent the message and was about to log out of email when she paused.

  Kovit.

  Her heart skipped a beat, and before her thoughts caught up with her fingers, she’d typed the email address he’d given her into a new message.

  She hesitated. What could she say?

  Hey, how’s your bullet wound? Tortured anyone lately?

  She sighed. Why was she even entertaining this? Kovit was a monster. He literally tortured people for food—and he liked it. A lot.

  But he was also her friend, strange as that sounded. Nita had never imagined herself having friends, but if she had, they wouldn’t have been psychopaths who worked as mafia torturers.

  But he might be the only one in the world she could truly trust.

  She closed her eyes and pictured his smile, dark with promises of pain on their enemies, and something in her chest tightened. She missed him.

  Before she could second-guess herself, she wrote How are you? And sent it.

  She watched
her email for a long time, waiting for a reply, before clicking the phone off and curling up in bed, listening to the hum of the air conditioner until sleep overtook her.

  * * *

  Nita stood in a dissection room. Everything was white and sterile and wonderful, and she was taking a body apart. She had a scalpel in one hand, and in her other, she held a still-beating heart. It thumped in her latex-gloved palm, and in the way of dreams, this seemed completely normal.

  The heart was blackened, and as she watched, it grew blacker, inky tendrils of disease spreading through it. The ink spread to her hand and she ripped her gloves off to dislodge the black threads, dropping the heart. It shattered on the floor like glass, and suddenly Nita was back in Death Market.

  The glass from the heart had transformed into the glass from when she and Kovit had broken out of the cage.

  In the background, someone was screaming.

  Mirella.

  Mirella, Nita’s fellow captive, had been tortured by Kovit as punishment for fighting against their captor. Trapped in her cell, Nita had listened to those screams until they burned into her memory.

  They were burning now. Each scream sent a streak of flames down the corridor, and Nita found herself running toward the sounds until she encountered a closed door.

  She threw it open. Death Market was on fire.

  All of the buildings around her had been engulfed in flames. People screamed as fire charred their bodies, and someone ran down the street, toward the river, clothes and skin alight. She almost caught the memory of a scent, but it was gone before it was formed.

  She turned around, refusing to look at the scene, and stood face-to-face with Kovit. His hair, black and silky, was brushed out of his face, and his dark eyes regarded her. A small smile twitched at the corner of his mouth, and an answering smile spread across her face.

  He took a step forward, until they were nose to nose, and suddenly they weren’t in the market anymore, they were on the dock in Tabatinga, Brazil, where they’d parted ways and he’d leaned forward to whisper his email address in her ear.