“I considered it,” Kovit whispered. He lay back and looked up at the ceiling, his eyes far distant. “I wasn’t really happy. But it was a comfortable sort of unhappy.”
“Comfortable?”
“Yeah. I knew how to act and what to do and who to be to stay alive and be myself. I had my online friends when it became too much. And I had Matt for the day-to-day. They fed me. I never had to worry about being arrested for my . . . dietary requirements.”
Nita shivered.
He ran both hands up his face and pushed his hair from his forehead. “And I just didn’t know what I’d do outside of it. I didn’t want to join another criminal organization—that was just exchanging one life for more of the same, except without all the good parts. And I couldn’t fathom what else I would do.”
Nita blinked. “You could have gone to university?”
“And paid with what money? To study what?” He shook his head. “I don’t even have a proper education.” He shrugged. “And even if I did, what’s the point? I’ll just end up outed as a zannie at some point and killed. Any job I get, if there’s people, there’s pain, and someone will connect the dots eventually.”
“Not necessarily,” she protested, but it sounded false even to her own ears. His words rattled around in her head, both fatalistic and undeniably true. What was the point of planning a future if any path you chose ended with you murdered?
It was the same thing Nita struggled with now—she couldn’t pursue her own dreams without risking kidnapping and murder. For Kovit, he’d have to literally change INHUP’s laws.
They both walked along a high wire, and any false step could send them plummeting to their deaths.
He closed his eyes. “I think, more than anything, I was just young. And I didn’t want to deal with the real world. It was simpler to stay where I was. Easy.”
“You have to deal with that now, though,” Nita whispered.
“I know.” His hands fell to his sides, and he stared at the ceiling. “But I feel like nothing’s changed. I still don’t know who I am when I’m not part of the Family.” He hesitated. “And I don’t know what kind of person I want to be.”
She opened her mouth. She wanted to say something profound, something that was wise, that would make him feel better, that would help him discover himself.
But no words came.
So she just lay down beside him, curling close to his body, and rested her head on his chest. He was warm, and her body tingled softly against the heat. His arm wrapped around her shoulders, pulling her close, and the rise and fall of his chest was slightly erratic. She placed her hand over his heart to still it.
Slowly, his breathing evened out. Nita let her eyes drift closed, and eventually, they fell asleep.
Fifteen
THE NEXT MORNING, Nita woke up with bleary eyes and a soft moan. She pressed her hands over her eyes as shattered pieces of sunlight broke into the room and scattered across the floor like a spreading disease.
The sound of the shower water drumming against the tiles echoed even through the closed bathroom door, and Nita rolled over sleepily. She reached for her phone before remembering it was compromised and she couldn’t use it.
She bit her lip. She really wanted to take Kovit’s phone and download a browser that could connect her to the darknet. She needed to know what kind of chatter was happening.
The internet was not anonymous. Oh, sure, for the average person it was. But to the government, it most assuredly wasn’t. Nor to hackers. Or internet providers. There were a lot of people who had the capability to know what you were doing.
That was how the dark web was formed. Initially, Nita had heard it was designed for journalists to communicate with sources without being traced. She’d even heard that it was designed by the FBI for anonymity. But it wasn’t long before pedophiles, black market dealers, and everyone else who didn’t want the police looking too closely had joined in the fun.
Estimates about how big the dark web was varied wildly—some said less than ten percent, some said more than ninety. Whichever it was, it was true that only a portion of the internet was accessible with Chrome or Safari.
On the dark web, money couldn’t be traced. Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies were used, and with them, you could buy anything your heart desired. Including Nita’s location.
She looked around for Kovit’s phone and found it charging in a corner. Nita couldn’t look at the darknet without downloading the correct browser, but she tried a few Google searches. As she suspected, nothing useful without darknet connections.
She checked her safe email and found one new message. It was from her mother.
Nita, your location has been compromised. You need to come home so I can protect you.
That was it. No explanation, no other relevant information. The way she always did. Keeping Nita ignorant to stay the powerful one in the relationship.
She deleted the message.
Then she looked at the message from Quispe containing Fabricio’s veiled threats, and smiled. She decided to compose her own.
I’m so happy to hear Fabricio is doing well. Can you pass this response on to him?
Then Nita paused, fingers lingering above the keyboard.
Thank you for your kind words about friendship. Indeed, I have met some friends here, and I’m enjoying my time with them as much as I enjoyed my time with you. This afternoon will be my first step toward my new life, and I’m sure you’ll hear all about it soon. Please look forward to it.
Then she smiled and pressed Send.
She plugged Kovit’s phone back in just as Kovit came out of the shower, hair damp, still wearing yesterday’s clothes. He shivered as he walked.
“Cold?” Nita asked, looking for the thermostat.
He sat down on the bed and shook his head. “No. It’s fine. Someone in the building next door fell down the stairs while I was in the shower and twisted their ankle.”
“Oh.” Nita wasn’t sure how to respond to that. “I guess it’s free food.”
He snorted. “I wish. It’s just annoying.”
Nita tilted her head in a question.
He sighed. “Cities are hard. They’re full of small pains. Thousands at any time. I can’t eat that, but I can feel it. It’s like I’m always being rained on, each tiny pain a small drop that hits me. In an area with a small population, it’s just a sprinkle, easily ignored. But cities are a downpour, I’m constantly soaked with pain.”
“But you can’t eat it?”
He shook his head. “It’s not enough. I don’t know how to explain.” He frowned, eyes searching the room until they settled on one of the tall wooden beams in the wall. “It’s like my hunger is a giant tree. If I want to sate it, I need to chop the tree down. Small, insignificant pains are pins. You can stick hundreds of thousands of pins in a tree and cover it like a pincushion, but it won’t do anything to chop the tree down.” He licked his lips. “If you want to cut it down, you need a chainsaw. And not just for a few seconds, that tree is large, it’ll take you all afternoon to cut something like that down, even with the chainsaw.”
Kovit ran a hand through his hair and gave her a self-deprecating smile. “I’m not sure that even made sense.”
“It did.” Nita had already known that zannies couldn’t survive without severe pain, the kind only found in torture, but she hadn’t really thought about the mechanics of it that way before. “How often do you need to eat like that?”
He shrugged. “Whenever I get hungry.”
She let him have his evasive answer. He was pulling away, toweling off his hair, and she got the sense this line of questions was making him uncomfortable. She let it drop.
He pulled a bottle of pills from his pocket and popped one.
“Antibiotics?” Nita asked.
He nodded. “Four more days of them.”
“How’s your wound?”
“All right.” His hand hovered over his side. “I got lucky. Really lucky.”
“Painful?”
“Not so bad. I’ve been eating frequently, so my pain levels are pretty low.”
Nita knew he wasn’t talking about eating pizza. The more pain he ate, the less he felt himself. The longer he went without eating, the stronger he felt his own pain. If he went too long without eating pain, he’d die. He would begin to feel the phantom pain of the person he’d last consumed, stronger and stronger, worse than any actual pain he’d inflicted, until his heart failed from the shock.
So Kovit ate frequently. She didn’t blame him, but she also didn’t ask who he’d hurt to get his pain, or if they survived. Nita accepted what he was, but that didn’t mean she wanted to hear the gory details.
A clatter downstairs distracted her. Both she and Kovit sat up.
A woman’s voice trailed up the stairwell. “That hurt! Adair, you put that chair there on purpose to trip me!”
“Would I do something like that?” Adair’s voice was faux-innocent.
“Yes.”
Adair’s laugh trickled up toward them, and the woman kept crashing into things as she maneuvered through the shop.
Kovit raised his eyebrows. “I suppose that will be the hacker.”
The clatter stopped, and Nita could hear them in the stairwell.
“I’m keeping them in the basement—”
“I lived here for three months, Adair, I know where the guest room is. And it’s not in your sketchy murder basement.”
Well, at least Nita had her answer about their room’s previous occupant. Alive and grumpy.
“How do you know it’s a sketchy murder basement? Perhaps you’d like to come down and see for yourself?”
“Dammit, Adair, it wasn’t funny the first ten times, it’s not going to be funny now!”
“It’s always funny.”
“Murder jokes are never funny.”
“Who says it was a joke?”
The door to the room burst open, and a flustered woman—girl—entered. She was probably around Nita’s age, maybe even a year younger, with long dark brown hair pulled into a ponytail, and light brown skin. She wore ratty jeans with holes in the knee, and black T-shirt pulled over a long sleeved purple turtleneck.
Adair entered behind her, grinning. Now that Nita was rested, she felt like she could see even more clearly, and his smile kept switching back and forth between the long, thin million teeth and the normal human ones. The more she stared at it, the more of a headache it gave her, so she tried not to focus on it, and let the illusion do its work.
“Ah, Nita, Kovit.” Adair swept into the room and stood to the side, arm raised like he was welcoming a red carpet celebrity. “I’d like you to meet my hacker, Diana.”
Diana rolled her eyes, but she was also trying and failing to suppress a smile. Nita would have cringed from the spectacle of that entrance, but Diana seemed accustomed to his behavior.
She gave Nita and Kovit a tentative smile. “Nice to meet you.”
Nita didn’t respond, because she was staring at Diana’s teeth.
They were fake.
A white retainer, like people used to sleep at night to prevent TMJ. But there was only one reason someone would be wearing something like that during the day—to hide their real teeth.
And there was only one species Nita knew of that looked completely human on the outside except for their teeth.
Nita blinked at her. “You’re a ghoul.”
Diana stiffened and turned to Adair. “What did you tell them?”
He held his hands up, palms out. “Nothing!”
“It’s your mouth guard,” Nita clarified.
“Oh.” Diana’s hand went up to her mouth and lowered. “I’ve been meaning to get a new one.”
“I think it looks fine, Diana. They look like real teeth,” Adair chimed in.
Diana sighed. “Then why could she tell they were fake at first glance?”
They continued bickering like an old married couple, but Nita just stared. How did she keep getting herself in these situations? She was with the two species of unnaturals that actually had to eat human flesh to survive, and here she was, one of the most coveted pieces of flesh around.
Her mind flashed back to Boulder popping her toe in his mouth and swallowing it, and Nita pushed the image away. She was out of the cage. No more pieces of her would be cut off and eaten.
Kovit leaned against the wall, his creepy smile back in place, wielded like a defensive weapon. “Well, I see how you two came to connect. Did you bond over a murder victim you were both eating?”
Adair laughed, but Diana stiffened. “I’m not a killer.”
Kovit raised his eyebrows. “That meat comes from somewhere.”
“It comes from Adair.”
“Ah, I see, so Adair murders them so you don’t have to.”
Diana flinched. “Adair doesn’t murder anyone for me.”
But she didn’t sound certain.
Adair smiled gently, in a way that made Nita quite certain he had murdered people to feed Diana and he was simply indulging her strange dislike of murder. “Of course, Diana. But let’s not talk about that. Let’s talk about the phone.”
Nita took the pieces out of her pocket and handed them over to Diana. Her fingers were warm, warmer than a human’s would be. It wasn’t by much, but Nita could feel the heat radiating off the girl’s skin. She wondered, if she touched it, would she burn?
Diana examined the phone the same way Nita and Adair had, turning all the parts over, looking for physical tampering.
After a long moment, she said, “There’s no physical bug.”
“Yes, we know that.” Adair’s voice was crisp. “Can you get the information off it or not?”
“Without triggering the GPS beacon?” Diana chewed on her lip with her fake teeth. “I’m not sure. It’s a software bug, but I don’t know what kind.” She looked up to Nita. “Do you know anything about it?”
Nita shook her head. “No. I thought I was careful.”
Diana frowned. “How long have you had the phone?”
“A few days.”
“It was probably bugged before you got it, then. Someone just activated the tracking on it.”
Nita shook her head. “I checked it right after I left INHUP. I’m pretty sure there were no background programs running.”
“Did you connect to Wi-Fi at all after that?”
Nita nodded. “I used the Starbucks Wi-Fi.”
“It’s possible it was activated then. It’s hard to say.” Diana chewed her lip with her fake teeth. “Sorry, phone bugs aren’t my specialty.”
Nita waved it away, frowning. “So it’s possible INHUP might not have bugged me. Someone else might have bugged the phone months ago.”
“Possibly,” Diana said, still turning over the phone and frowning.
“All of this is lovely,” Adair said in an impatient voice. “But can you get the information off?”
Diana bit her lip. “Maybe.”
She pulled a laptop out of her bag and sat on the dusty wooden floor. It groaned as she shifted position, and she ignored it. Her converse shoes were black with little red strings of DNA stitched all over them. Nita looked down at her own formerly white, now mud-colored INHUP-issued sneakers and wondered where she could get a pair like Diana’s.
“I can’t turn it on or risk the bug sending out our location.” Diana’s eyes were glued to her computer as she typed something in. “But I might be able to retrieve data without actually turning it on.”
She plugged it in, and Adair leaned closer. Nita stayed where she was, and Kovit leaned against the wall, watching everything with a tight, cold gaze.
Diana pulled it up with a grunt. “There’s some files, but they’re encrypted.”
“Can you decrypt them?” Adair asked.
She sucked on her fake teeth. “Maybe. In time.”
She unplugged the phone after the files had downloaded and handed the pieces back to Nita. Nita shoved the pieces in her pocket.
Adair sat down beside Diana while she typed. She turned to him. “You hovering won’t make it go faster.”
Adair smiled. “It won’t make it go slower, either.”
Diana rolled her eyes.
Nita turned to Kovit and nodded to the door. She picked up the keys from on top of the mini fridge on her way out.
“We’ll be back later,” she called.
Adair raised a hand and waved goodbye. His smile flickered softly, back and forth, back and forth, between human and monster.
Nita turned away and didn’t look back.
She made her way down the narrow stairwell and through the cluttered shop, Kovit not far behind. She tripped on a table leg and crashed into a cardboard cutout of a life-size clown.
From above them, Adair called, “You break it, you buy it! I know where you live!”
Nita’s scowl deepened as she pulled herself off the cardboard clown, which was no worse for wear. “He’s insufferable.”
Kovit grinned and held out his hand. “I actually thought that one was kinda funny.”
Nita sighed, accepting his hand and letting him pull her to her feet.
Once they were out of the shop, they headed back toward the station. In the light of the day, the area wasn’t nearly as ominous as it had seemed at night. The street was wide and the sidewalks well paved. A pair of college students walked past speaking Polish.
As they approached the streetcar station, Kovit took her arm and pulled her aside, into a narrow alley. “Nita, wait, where are we going?”
Nita raised her eyebrows and gave him a small, wicked smile. “We’re going to show those black market dealers I’m not someone to be messed with.”
Sixteen
NITA RAN HER HANDS over the polished fake marble countertop in the show apartment she stood in. The kitchen was pristine and empty, never touched by food. The only things in it were meant to model the possibilities for whoever moved in—a single small jar of salt on the spice rack, a plate in the dish rack, and a cheese grater and potato masher in a series of small wooden cubby holes along one wall.
It hadn’t taken too long to find a building that suited Nita’s needs. This one was completely empty—most of the apartments had been purchased ages ago, but construction had only just finished, and move-in dates weren’t until next month.
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