Nita raised her eyebrows. Her mother knew every unnatural. It was her job. This one must be something really rare.
“Well, anyway.” Her mother sat down beside her. “It wasn’t even so bad getting him. Security wasn’t too much of an issue, easily dealt with. The problem was getting him back.”
Nita nodded. Airlines usually frowned on stuffing dead bodies into overhead bins.
Her mother gave her a conspiratorial wink. “But then I thought, well, why don’t I just pretend he’s a traveler? So I put him in a wheelchair, and the airline never even guessed.”
“Wait, a wheelchair?” Nita scowled. “But wouldn’t they notice that he didn’t, well, move or breathe or anything when they were helping him to his seat?”
She laughed. “Oh, he’s not dead. I just drugged the hell out of him.”
Nita’s fingers twitched, then froze. Not dead.
She gave her mother a sickly smile. “You said you put him in my room?”
“Yes, I spent the morning installing the cage. Bugger of a thing. You know they don’t make human-size cages anymore? And I had to get the handcuffs at a sex shop.”
Nita sat there for a long moment, smile frozen like a rictus on her face. Then she rose and began making her way through the crates to her dissection room.
Her mother followed. “This one’s a little different. He’s quite valuable, so I’d really like to milk him a bit for blood and such before we harvest the organs.”
But Nita wasn’t listening. She had opened the door to see with her own eyes.
Part of her beautiful, sterile white room was now taken up by a large cage, which had been bolted to the wall. Her mother had put a padlock and chain around the door. Inside the cage, a boy with dark brown hair lay unconscious in the fetal position. Given the size of the cage, it was probably the only way he could lie down.
“What is he?” Nita waited for her mother to list off the heinous things he did to survive. Maybe he ate newborn babies and was actually five hundred years old instead of the eighteen or nineteen he looked.
Her mother shrugged. “I don’t know if there’s a name for what he is.”
“But what kind of unnatural is he? Explain it.” Nita felt her voice rising and forced it to calm down. “I mean, you know what he does, right?”
Her mother laughed. “He doesn’t do much of anything. He’s an unnatural, that much I’m sure of, but I don’t think you’ll find any external signs of it. He was being kept by a collector in Buenos Aires.”
“So . . . why do we want him?” Nita pushed, surprised at how much she needed an answer, a reason to justify the cage in her room and the small, curled-up form of the boy. His jeans and T-shirt looked like they were spattered with something, and Nita wondered if it was blood.
“Ah. Well, he’s supposedly quite delicious, you know. Something about him. That collector had been selling vials of his blood—vials, not bags, mind you—for nearly ten thousand each. US dollars, not soles or pesos. Dollars. One of his toes went up for auction online last year, and the price was six digits. For a toe.”
Her mother had a wide, toothy grin, and her eyes were alight at the prospect of how much money an entire body could make. Nita wondered how soon the boy’s time would be up. Her mother preferred cash in hand to cash in the future, so Nita doubted the boy would be prisoner for long.
“I already put him up online, and we have a buyer for another toe. So I took the liberty of cutting it off and mailing it while we were in Argentina.”
It took a few moments for Nita to register her mother’s words. Then she looked down, and sure enough, the boy’s feet were bare and bloody. One foot had been hastily wrapped in bandages, but they’d turned red as the blood soaked through.
Her mother tapped her finger to her chin. “The only problem is, his pieces need to be fresh—well, as fresh as we can get them. So we’ll sell all the extremities first, as they’re ordered. He should be able to survive without those, and we can bottle the blood when we remove them and sell it as well. We’ll do the internal organs and such later, once we’ve spread the word. Shouldn’t take too long.”
Nita’s mind spun in circles, not quite processing what her mother was saying. “You want to keep him here and cut pieces off him while he’s still alive?”
“Exactly.”
Nita didn’t even know what to say to that. She didn’t deal with live people. Her subjects were dead.
“He’s not . . . dangerous?” Nita asked, unable to tear her eyes off the bandages around the missing toes.
Her mother snorted. “Hardly. He got unlucky in the genetic draw. As far as I can tell, everyone wants to eat him, and he has no more defenses than an ordinary human.”
The boy stirred in the cage and tried to twist himself around to look at them. Nita’s heart clenched. It was pathetic.
Her mother clapped her on the shoulder before turning around. “We’re going to make good money off him.”
Nita nodded, eyes never straying from the cage. Her mother left the room, calling for Nita to help her organize the crates in the kitchen so they could start packing the zannie parts.
The boy lifted his head and met Nita’s eyes. His eyes were gray-blue and wide with fear. He reached a hand up, but it stopped short, the handcuffs pulling it back down toward the bottom of the cage.
He swallowed, eyes never leaving Nita’s.
“Ayúdame,” he whispered.
Help me.
Two
NITA WAS NOT a heartless, murdering, body-part thief.
That was her mother.
Nita had never killed anyone. Her plan was to keep it that way.
Why couldn’t Mom have killed him before she came back? If she’d killed him before coming home, Nita wouldn’t have had to see him like this. She could have just pretended he died naturally. Or blamed her mother and chalked it up to another of those well, too late to do anything now cases. But now he was alive, and in her apartment, and she actually had to think about this.
About the living, breathing person her mother planned to kill.
And have Nita dissect. Alive.
What would it be like to cut someone up while they were screaming at you to stop?
“Nita?” Mom came around the corner from the kitchen, and Nita realized she’d been standing in the hall staring off into space for the past few minutes. “Something wrong?”
Nita hesitated. “He’s alive.”
“Yes. And?” Mom’s eyes were as tight as her voice. Nita had a sudden feeling she was treading on very dangerous ground.
“He talks.” She shifted her shoulders in unease, more so from her mother’s look than anything else.
Her mother’s face relaxed. “Oh, don’t worry about that, sweetheart. He won’t be around for long. He’ll be on your table shortly, and no one talks back to you there, do they?”
Nita nodded, appreciating her mother’s efforts to quell her anxiety even as her nausea rose. “Yeah.”
Her mother gave her an appraising look. “You know, if you want, I can go cut his tongue out now. I have some pliers—I can pull it right out. Then you won’t have to worry about him talking.”
“That’s okay, Mom.” Nita forced a smile. “I’m fine.”
“If you’re sure . . .” Her mother gave her another searching look before sighing. “All right. Shall we start packing some of those zannie parts?”
Nita nodded, glad for the change in subject.
They spent the rest of the afternoon filling up crates. Her mother had arranged the bribes to get them back to the family warehouse in the States. Her father would handle them from there. He dealt with the online sales, storage, and shipping of the body parts, while her mother dealt with the retrieval. Her father was also their major cover, if INHUP ever came sniffing. Nita was sure her mother had a record a mile long—her stack of foreign passports, driver’s licenses, and credit cards was probably two feet high. That sort of thing usually came with a record, in Nita’s opinion.
Her father, though, was squeaky clean as far as Nita knew. By day, he worked as a legal consultant in Chicago, and by night, he sold body parts on the internet. Nita missed him, and their home, and their shitty Chicago suburb that was actually a two-hour drive from Chicago. She hadn’t been home since she was fourteen.
She wondered what her father would say about this situation. Would he be unhappy her mother had brought a live unnatural home? And moreover, a harmless one?
It was one thing when her mother dumped a zannie or a unicorn on Nita’s table. For one, they were monsters who couldn’t continue to live without killing other people. And the world agreed—that was why there was a Dangerous Unnaturals List. It wasn’t even a crime to kill them. You were saving lives.
But someone like the boy in the other room? How could she justify that?
Sighing, Nita wiped the sweat off her forehead as they closed another crate. No matter how she thought about it, she couldn’t find a way to justify murdering that boy.
Well, except money.
“It looks like we’re going to need a few more shipping crates.” Her mother ran a hand through her hair. Her manicure caught the light, black and red and yellow, like someone had tried to cover a fire with a blackout curtain.
Nita poured a glass of juice. “Probably.”
“I think we deserve pizza now. How about you?”
Nita heartily agreed.
After dinner, they realized they were low on bottled water. Tap water wasn’t drinkable unless boiled, and Nita’s mother didn’t like the taste. She’d been promising they were going to get a UV light for purifying water since they arrived a few weeks ago, but it hadn’t happened yet.
Her mother sighed and got up, dusting pizza crumbs off her lap. “I’ll go down to the store and get a seven-liter bottle. I’ll start on the boy when I come back.”
“Start what?”
Her mother grinned. “I sold his ear an hour ago.”
Nita stiffened. “You’re going to cut it off tonight?”
“Of course.”
Nita swallowed, looking away. “But you can’t mail it until tomorrow morning. It makes more sense to cut it off tomorrow. If freshness is important, like you said.”
Her mother’s eyes narrowed. Nita tried to resist the urge to shift in place, but failed.
Finally, in a small voice, Nita whispered, “I don’t want to hear him screaming all night. I won’t get any sleep.”
Her mother laughed, throwing her head back, then came over and clapped Nita on the back. It was just a little harder than it should have been, and Nita stumbled forward a step.
“You’re absolutely right, Anita.” Her mother grinned as she walked back to the door. “We’ll do it tomorrow morning.”
Nita stood there, trembling, as the door closed with a thud and a click. She remained in place for a few minutes, calming her breathing before picking up a slice of pizza and walking back to the dissection room.
When she opened the door, she found the boy sitting cross-legged in the cage, watching her. She approached with caution, and as she got closer, she was able to discern that yes, those stains on his clothes were definitely dried blood.
She put the pizza close enough to the bars that he could wiggle his fingers through and pull pieces off. She skittered back, afraid if she got too close he would leap at her. Not that he could do much, chained to the cage, which was chained to the wall. But she was careful anyway.
He looked down at the pizza and licked his lips. “Gracias.”
“De nada.” Nita was surprised at how hoarse her voice was.
She stood there for a long moment, awkward, not sure what to do next. Logically, she knew better than to talk to him. She didn’t want to know anything about him if—when—she had to dissect him. But she also felt weird just giving him food and leaving.
This was the part where she could really have used more social skills practice. Was there etiquette for this kind of situation?
Probably not.
He wormed his fingers through the bars and ripped off the tip of the pizza. His hands wouldn’t reach to his mouth because of the handcuffs, so he had to bend his head over to eat. He chewed slowly, and after one bite, just sat, looking at the pizza but not eating. She wondered if he didn’t like pepperoni.
“Cómo te llamas?” he asked, still not looking up. His accent was clearly Argentinian, his y sounds blurring into sh, so it sounded like “cómo te shamas?”
His accent wasn’t too hard to understand, unlike Nita’s. Her father was from Chile, and she’d lived in Madrid until she was six, so Nita’s Spanish was a hopeless tangle of the two accents. Sometimes the Peruvians in the grocery store couldn’t understand her at all.
“Nita.” She hesitated. “Y tú?”
“Fabricio.” His voice was soft. “Fabricio Tácunan.”
“Fabricio?” Nita couldn’t keep the incredulity out of her voice. “Is that from Shakespeare or something?”
He looked up at her then, and frowned. “Pardon?”
Nita repeated slowly, trying to make her accent less pronounced.
This time he understood. He raised his eyebrows, voice pitched slightly differently. More curious, less sad, his Spanish soft and barely audible. “Who is Shakespeare?”
“Umm.” Nita paused. Did they teach Shakespeare in Latin American schools? If the boy—don’t think of him by name, you’ll get too attached and then where will you be?—had been a captive of a collector, had he even gone to school? “He’s an English writer from the fifteen hundreds. One of his characters was named Fabrizio, I think. It’s . . . I guess I thought it was kinda an old name.”
He shrugged. “I don’t know. I think it’s fairly common where I’m from. One of my father’s employees has the same name. But he spells it with a z, Fabrizio. The Italian way.”
Fabricio looked down at his shirt, crusted with dried blood and swallowed. “He spelled it with a z.”
Oh.
Nope, too much information. Nita didn’t want to hear about this.
Why did you even talk to him, then? she scolded herself. This was going to make everything worse later.
Nita turned to leave, but he called her back. “Nita.”
She paused, wavering, before glancing over her shoulder at him. “Yes?”
“What’s going to happen to me?”
She watched how he strained against the handcuffs, leaning forward in the cage. His face was tense, fear shining through in the angle of his head, the crease on his forehead, and the wide blue eyes.
She turned away. “I don’t know.”
But that was a lie. She just didn’t want to admit it to him.
Three
HEADING BACK INTO the kitchen, Nita found her mother waiting for her.
There was no water.
Nita paused when she entered the room, uncomfortable. Her mother was watching her with cold eyes, hand resting near her gun. Casually, not on purpose. Not that her mother had ever needed a gun. She preferred poison.
“You weren’t talking with him, were you, Nita?”
Nita shook her head, looking at the floor. Her shoulders hunched as her body instinctively tried to curl into itself. Nita’s mother had an aura around her, an unspoken sense of coiled menace when she was angry. Nita would never admit it to either of her parents, but she was secretly terrified of her mother. She’d only stood up to her once in her life.
When Nita was twelve and they’d been living and operating near Chicago, her mother had tried to get into the dact fur business. Dacts, small fluffy balls of adorableness people kept as pets, were totally harmless. Her mother would come home with groups of them in cages, never saying where they were from. And every night, after her parents went to bed, Nita would sneak down to the basement and take the cages to the twenty-four-hour emergency vet clinic and ask them to give the dacts to the SPCA or shelter. A few times they’d scanned the dacts for microchips and found they’d been stolen from someone’s backyard.
Nita
’s mother had not been impressed. She’d come home one day with a cage of dead dacts instead of live ones, and Nita had responded by flushing five pounds of pure powdered unicorn bone down the toilet (that stuff sold better than cocaine and was more addictive by far). She took the dead dacts’ bodies to the emergency vet clinic anyway.
Nita’s mother hadn’t appreciated Nita’s discovery of morals. After her father calmed everyone down and ended the plan to sell dact fur, Nita’s mother still hadn’t been satisfied. So she’d poisoned the dact food in the pet store, and every single dact in their suburb had died. Her mother, knowing Nita’s propensity for ignoring things that weren’t right in front of her nose, took to putting the corpses in Nita’s bed for a week.
It had only ended when Nita broke down crying on the front step, begging her mother to stop. Her father had agreed and told her mother it was affecting their profit margin—by that time Nita was dissecting most of the bodies coming through, and she was such an emotional wreck she hadn’t worked in a week. Money convinced her mother to stop when nothing else had.
But there was an unspoken promise: if Nita ever disobeyed her mother again, the punishment would be far, far worse.
Nita swallowed and tried to push away the memories. “Why would I talk to him? What would I even talk about?”
“Of course you weren’t talking to him, you’re socially incompetent.” Her mother took a step forward, and Nita nearly flinched. She kept herself in check. Barely. “Because, if you were trying to talk to the boy, you might develop sympathy. I don’t need that. And I can promise you”—a sharp, mean smile—“you don’t want that.”
Nita shrugged, trying to play it nonchalant when every nerve screamed at her to run, run far and fast and never ever look back. “I gave him his food. He said thanks. I said you’re welcome. Then I left.”
Her mother gave Nita a long, searching look before bestowing a condescending smile on her. “That’s good. It’s always appropriate to be polite.”
Not Even Bones Page 2