The Body Market

by Donna Freitas

  I studied him. “You’re talking about her in the past tense. Did she . . .” I trailed off.

  “She’s not dead,” he said, answering my unfinished question and wincing a little. “She’s in the App World.”

  “She plugged in?”

  He nodded. “That she did.”

  “Did she go there to be with your parents?”

  Kit was silent a long time before answering. “I’ve wondered if she’s sought them out, though I’m not sure they wanted to be found. But when Maggie plugged in, she did it for herself. She wanted a virtual life so badly.”

  “So Maggie abandoned you too.”

  “Everyone does in the end, don’t they?”

  I didn’t answer, didn’t want to think through whether or not what Kit said was true. He was shivering alongside me now, and I offered him some of the blanket. I was almost surprised when he took it. As I watched him, I couldn’t help but see the face of a boy, one far younger than his years. His vulnerability was striking when it appeared, made all the more so because he typically seemed so hard and cold to everything around him. Something still didn’t add up about his sister plugging in, though. “How did she afford it?” I asked. “How did she pay for her passage to the App World?”

  Kit shrugged. “Why do you think I became a bounty hunter?”

  My jaw fell. “You did it for her.”

  “I did it for us,” he corrected. “Well, that’s the lie I sold her. All along it was supposed to be for the two of us. We would save enough and both of us would plug in and be reunited with our parents. She would go first and then I would join her.” Kit took a sip of his whiskey, closing his eyes against the burn of it. “But I was never going to join her. I didn’t want a virtual life and I never wanted to see our parents again. Besides, it would take forever to save enough money for the both of us, no matter how much we scrimped.”

  “So you lied to her about that, too.”

  Kit tried for a grin, but his eyes were hollow. “I’m an excellent liar, Skylar.”

  “I thought you said she hurt you,” I said, ignoring his comment.

  “She did. I think she knew all along that I was never going to the App World. She was fragile and sweet, but she wasn’t stupid. She could do the math. But she went anyway. Left me here all on my own. When she said good-bye, right before plugging in, I could see it on her face. She knew we would probably never see each other again.”

  My throat felt thick and knotted. “I’m so sorry.”

  “Yeah, well, don’t be too sorry for me or for her.”

  Kit picked up the bottle and offered to pour some into my glass. It was empty, so I let him. “Why not?”

  “That’s why I took you, Skylar,” he said. “A body for a body. Yours for my sister’s.”

  I gaped at him. “What are you talking about?”

  “My sister was beautiful—is beautiful. She plugged in, and now she’s one of the prize wares for sale at the Body Market. It would cost a king’s ransom to get her back, but get her back I will.” He eyed me. “That’s where you come in.”

  My hand tightened around my glass until my knuckles grew white. “So you give me up to my sister, take the money, and buy your own sister back.”

  Kit looked away. “Yes. It’s all very simple.”

  “Not if you’re me.”

  He sighed. “No, I suppose not.”

  I shifted underneath the blanket, pulled it tighter, just for something to do. Kit got up from the chair and headed into his bedroom. He returned with another bottle from the stash under his bed. I looked at the one that sat atop the stove, surprised to see that we’d drunk the entire thing.

  Then I held out my glass to him and started to laugh.

  The corner of Kit’s mouth twitched as he filled it. “What, Skylar?”

  “The last time I drank, it was the calm before the storm,” I said, still laughing, louder now, remembering my first night at the mansion on the beach with everyone, the night before I was taken by Jude’s people. “But it’s storming out now. Do you think that means this is the storm before the calm? That would be so nice.” Kit met this with silence, so I spoke again to fill it, and because somehow a tiny bit of hope had found me in the middle of all this frigid air. “Maybe there’s another way,” I found myself saying.

  Kit’s smile vanished. “Don’t forget what happens next, Skylar.”

  The laughter died in my throat. “I didn’t,” I told him. “How could I? You’ve made it all very clear.”

  “Good,” he said, his voice sounding so sure.

  But his eyes, they weren’t sure at all.

  9

  Rain

  reciprocity

  “AT LEAST YOUR father cares about you,” Lacy said.

  I looked at her, sitting there on the floor in the dark, her eyes reflecting the glow of the lit glass boxes all around us. They were full of sadness. When Lacy showed this side of herself, how lost she’s been all her life, how alone she still was, I couldn’t help thinking that what she said was true: she and I are the same.

  “My father only cares about me insofar as what I can do for him,” I said. “For the Holt family, for our famous and important name in both worlds. He’s as bad as Emory Specter, he’s so desperate to hold on to his power. It’s just that the result of my father’s desperation will have a better outcome for everyone than Emory’s.”

  Tiny beads of water clung to Lacy’s eyelashes. One of them slipped to the edge and fell onto her freckled cheek. “Maybe. But it’s difficult when your only use to people is, well”—she laughed bitterly—“to be used and to use others. It teaches you to be cruel to everyone. Cruel and mean. I’ve been cruel and mean ever since I was a little girl. Those are hard skills to unlearn, you know?” She sniffled.

  It almost made me want to lean forward and kiss her sadness away.

  Almost.

  I held back. Was this Lacy the actress, or the real Lacy? The App World Lacy never cried, never would even scrunch up her nose so unselfconsciously. The App World Lacy was fiery perfection at all times, ready to burn anyone who came near. Except when she was around me. “Don’t cry,” I said, deciding to believe her display was real.

  She wiped her eyes. “Sometimes I’m so alone, you know? And sometimes I wish I could go back and tell your father no.” She laughed bitterly again. “Tell my father to go to the Real World to his face instead of behind his back.”

  I nodded. Go to the Real World for people at home was basically the same as go to hell used to be in this one. “Sometimes I wish I’d done that with my father, too.”

  This made Lacy smile a little. “See? We are the same.”

  “Maybe,” I admitted. This made her smile brighter. “My father should never have taken advantage of you like that.”

  She eyed me. “Rain, you and I both know that Jonathan Holt came to me because you told him how much I hated my parents. He knew if I had the chance to hurt my father I would, and that my father is on Emory Specter’s side.”

  I grimaced. “I’m sorry, Lacy.”

  She shrugged. “Why?”

  “For telling my father your secrets. For giving him the ammunition to get you involved in this situation. It wasn’t his business to know your feelings, that you’d be willing to go against your parents out of . . . revenge. I wish I could undo it.”

  Lacy stared at me. “I go back and forth about being stuck in this world. Sometimes I hate it.” She paused. Then she reached out her hand and took mine. “But sometimes I’m glad,” she added, her voice barely a whisper.

  In the quiet, the wind howled through the caves that led to the ocean. The way the storm held us here, the force of it, made it seem like all that lay ahead might never happen, like the Body Market was all a dream, like there was nothing else we needed to do in this world aside from being and living. I looked at Lacy’s long fingers, the way they were intertwined with mine. Her real hands were so delicate. Fragile. And here she was, entrusting them to me. Lacy was full of cont
radictions and I was finding it difficult to wrap my head around whether this was a good thing or a bad thing overall.

  What was I supposed to do here? Should I take my hand back and tell her I didn’t want the same thing from her as she wanted from me?

  Or did I?

  I raised my eyes to meet Lacy’s, and as I did, I remembered the first night that Skylar spent with us on the beach, when I’d almost kissed her before she went into her room to sleep. What if I had? Would things have happened differently? Would the fact that I’d lied seem a lesser offense when she found out the truth, or would it have been even worse? I would never know, because that’s not what happened. There was no going back.

  But here I was now, with a chance to do things differently. Lacy wasn’t Skylar, yet she and I had our own history, and it was worth something. Maybe more than I’d ever admitted until now.

  Lacy’s eyebrows were a high arc of feathery red against pale skin. “Rain,” she said wonderingly, like she already knew the thoughts flying through my mind.

  Before she could say anything else, I kissed her.

  10

  Skylar

  playing hearts

  MY HEAD SWAM.

  The whiskey, or whatever it was Kit had in that bottle, was doing a number on my senses. But he was right that it warmed a person through, or at least tricked the body into thinking it was warm. The cottage was so cold by now that when Kit and I spoke, we could see our breath crystallized in the air, our words turned to ice.

  Though the mood between us had grown anything but icy.

  The colder it got, the more things seemed to thaw, even after the uncomfortable reminder Kit offered about the reality of our situation. Or maybe it was just the drink that was having this effect on us, the way it made everything looser, including our tongues. Well, mine, at least. My tongue and my limbs.

  “You have the strangest eyes I’ve ever seen,” I told Kit, and touched the side of his face, as though I needed to emphasize my meaning by physically pointing this out. I could hear him inhale sharply when my fingers met his skin, but I didn’t retract my hand. “Has anyone ever told you that?”

  “Skylar,” he said, but didn’t go any further than my name.

  “Kit,” I said, trying to sound serious but failing. I started to laugh.

  He reached up, encircling my wrist. “You’re drunk.”

  “So this is what it’s like to be drunk in a real body,” I said, still laughing, but my laugh had changed, and my eyes, struggling to focus, somehow zeroed in on the place where Kit’s hand met my skin with perfect clarity. I was being reckless, the whiskey dulling my better judgment, but I didn’t care. For a moment, I let myself imagine Rain stumbling into the cottage to get out of the storm and finding Kit and me, Rain barging into this moment of intimacy—because that’s what this was, I realized, amid the swirl and wooze of my mind. Would a sharp stab of jealousy sting at Rain’s middle, just as it had stung mine when I came upon him and Lacy? “I can be vengeful sometimes,” I said out of nowhere.

  Kit cocked his head, alert. “How so?”

  My eyes widened. “Wait, did I say that out loud?”

  “You did.”

  “Oh. I didn’t mean to.”

  He watched me, eyes steady. “Why don’t you explain, now that you have.”

  His fingers pressed into the skin of my wrist, and my hand was still at his temple. Everything seemed to pulse, the blood in my veins, the air in the room, the words as they floated back and forth between us. What came next? How did I answer? Did I tell Kit the truth or did I make up a lie? We seemed poised on the edge of something, maybe the very edge, where I made Kit see me not as someone to trade but as someone essential to the inner workings of his own heart, impossible to give away, impossible to live without. I needed to change his objectives here—his objectives about me.

  I should kiss him.

  That’s what Lacy would do in my position. Happily, lustily, and easily.

  The floor seemed to rise up and I shied away from it. The drinks were playing tricks on my mind. Or maybe it was Kit I wanted to shy away from. Instead, I leaned a little closer, noticing once again the long, dark lashes that framed his watchful eyes, seeing something unexpected in them. Hope. That Kit was a boy as vulnerable as anyone else.

  A sober sensibility overtook me.

  No. I wouldn’t kiss Kit.

  I sat back in my chair. I wasn’t Lacy. I’d never be Lacy. I might be able to wield a knife, but my heart was another matter. I didn’t like how Rain had played with mine and I wouldn’t do it to another person, even if it served me to do so. Moments were fleeting and hearts beat for a lifetime. Playing hearts was too risky a business over the long term. If I was to win Kit over, I would do it without this sort of trick. I would do it for real.

  Kit sat there, still, waiting for whatever came next.

  “There was someone—is someone,” I corrected. “Who I care about, who lied to me about a great many things, including his feelings.” I drew in a deep breath, daring a glance at Kit. He seemed disappointed with the turn in conversation, as though I had struck him with my hand instead of giving him the kiss he was sure was on the way. I continued, regardless. “I was just imagining that if he came upon us, he might feel jealous. And I was thinking about how his jealousy would make me feel satisfied. That I’d like to make him jealous if I could.”

  He raised one eyebrow. “And why would you and I, sitting here, make your . . . friend . . . jealous?”

  I let out a long breath, thinking to myself, stupid, stupid Skylar. In telling Kit the truth about Rain, or at least some of it, I’d revealed the direction of my thoughts about Kit, or rather, my feelings. That they might be interpreted by Rain as romantic meant that they might be interpreted by Kit as romantic, too. I got up from the chair quickly, the blanket falling away and reminding me of the fierce chill in the air. I shivered and stumbled, then righted myself and managed to make it across the room.

  I kept my back to Kit when I gave him my answer. “You and I are alone in a cottage in the middle of a storm, sitting so close together and drinking . . . whatever is in that bottle. Anybody might assume there was . . . something more going on between us.”

  “We’re no longer sitting close, though,” Kit observed, and I nearly wanted to slap him. “Come back here. You’re shivering.” When I didn’t move, he went on. “I’m serious, Skylar. You need to stay as warm as you can or you’ll get sick. And I know you don’t want that.”

  I relented, but before I returned to my place next to Kit, as cozy a spot as I would find in this house under that shared blanket, I spoke again. “Of course, it wouldn’t take long for the assumptions someone might make about us to be proven wrong. It would happen easily and quickly and with a mere few words.”

  Kit eyed me warily. “Oh?”

  “You would explain that you are a bounty hunter and I am your captive. That we got caught in a storm and simply decided to do what was necessary to survive it. Nothing more.” I returned to my chair and tucked myself under the blanket. “We would only have to tell them the truth,” I finished, and Kit looked away.

  The night continued, colder and colder.

  Every few minutes, one of us would eye that last lonely piece of wood on the floor. Finally, after what must have been dozens of longing glances, Kit got up and grabbed it. He opened the door to the iron stove and placed the wood gently inside of it, as though it were something precious. The two of us stared at it a moment, grateful it existed, that it was one of the bigger pieces that had been in the pile. This meant it would provide us some heat for longer than usual.

  Kit went to work lighting it.

  Soon it caught.

  Soon it was burning bright.

  We drew closer to it.

  We drew closer to each other.

  We held our hands over the heat emanating outward.

  I felt my interest in Rain slipping away, like a wave receding.

  Was I so very fickle? Or was it tha
t betrayal is nearly impossible to overcome, to replace with a newfound trust? Does it chip away at our feelings until they are only dust?

  “What are you thinking?” Kit asked.

  I looked at him. He’d been watching me, without my realizing. I shook my head. Then I spoke. “I was thinking that this warmth is delicious. Too bad it won’t last.”

  “That’s not what was on your mind,” he said quietly.

  His eyes remained steady. I would almost say they were pleading. Kit longed for something. Was it just from me that he wanted it? Or from anyone? Seeing it there made me want to be the only one who could fulfill whatever it was. Once again, I gave him the truth. “No, it wasn’t. But I don’t want to tell you what I was thinking either. Is that all right?”

  He stared at me a beat longer, then nodded. He seemed satisfied with my answer, satisfied that I’d rather withhold my thoughts than reveal them. Maybe this told him just as much as a reply might.

  He filled my glass again. The night was passing, full of drink and talk. The wood burned until half of it was ash.

  “I would like to call in my favor,” I said.

  Kit’s lips parted with surprise. “Now?”

  I sighed. Was this the right time? “Yes,” I said, answering my own question and his.

  He shifted, wincing with the movement. Even the whiskey couldn’t erase a knife wound that festered.

  I leaned forward, my hand poised over his shoulder. “You’re in pain.”

  “No,” he said.

  “You’re lying,” I said.

  The right corner of his mouth ticked up. “Maybe. Ask your favor, Skylar.”

  I returned my hand to my lap. Thought about the jar of smooth blue glass in Kit’s room and drew courage from this. There was more to him than he gave off. “I said before there might be another way for us . . . to move forward. And the favor is that you consider an alternate plan to your own. For me, I mean. And your sister.”

  Kit’s right brow ticked upward now, to match the corner of his mouth. “Consider but not commit to?”