She managed to locate a water bottle a few feet away and crawl over to it. She unscrewed the sealed cap and then paused, wondering if it was drugged.
“Why aren’t you drinking?” asked a voice. Female, with an unfamiliar accent to her Spanish.
Nita blinked, attempting to focus her vision on where the voice was coming from. There was a glass wall in front of her, and then there was another glass wall and there was a blurry pink-gray person on the other side. Nita closed her eyes and opened them again, hoping that would clarify things. It didn’t.
Nita’s voice was scratchy and hoarse. “Drugged?”
The girl snorted. “They don’t bother.”
Why? And who are “they”? Nita wanted to ask, but at the moment she had more important concerns. She was thirsty, and the confirmation that the water was safe was enough for Nita to start chugging immediately. After it was gone, she was still thirsty.
The water helped clear her mind where her ability couldn’t, and her vision settled a bit. Nita was pleased that while a little blurriness remained, in general her sight was much improved. She was in the equivalent of a glass box, about six feet by six feet, with an eight-foot-high ceiling. One wall, the farthest one, was concrete instead of glass. Someone had painted it white, but running her hands across it, Nita was easily able to chip chunks of paint off. She knocked against the concrete. It was solid.
There was another girl in a similar glass box across from Nita, and there were several other empty glass boxes in the room.
The girl’s skin was a grayish-pink that didn’t look entirely human, but other than that she seemed normal enough on the outside. Her hair was long and straight, and the same color as her skin, as were her eyes. She had a small, flat nose and a square face with strong cheekbones.
“Who are you?” Nita asked.
“I’m Mirella. And you are?”
“Nita.” Nita squinted at the other girl. She was wearing shapeless sweatpants and a baggy T-shirt, so it was hard to tell, but her voice sounded young. “How old are you?”
“Sixteen. You?”
Nita licked her lips and ignored the question. “What’s happening here?”
“We’re prisoners.”
Well, duh. Nita resisted the urge to roll her eyes. This was why she hated people.
She continued her examination of the room while Mirella watched. It was good to move. Moving, doing things, analyzing her situation kept her calm. She felt like if she sat down and let her thoughts percolate more, she’d start to descend back into panic.
Panic wasn’t productive. She needed to keep it at bay. If she’d been at full strength, she could have just suppressed all the chemical impulses that stimulated it, but she wasn’t. So she had to do it with sheer willpower.
But her hands wouldn’t stop shaking, no matter how she tried.
Focus on the room, Nita. Look at it. Can you escape? Can you use anything?
There was a mattress on the floor, with a single blanket on it. The floor sloped to a drain, and a ceramic squat toilet sat against the wall. Nita looked up. A showerhead stuck out of the ceiling, too high for Nita to reach. A white plastic tarp hung on a hook that had been drilled into the wall. Nita picked it up and looked at it.
“It goes around and hangs on the hook on the other side. It’s like a shower curtain.”
Nita turned to Mirella with a bitter smile. “It’s awfully nice of them to give us privacy.”
“Yeah, right.” Mirella laughed. “It’s so you don’t get the futon wet. They grow mold super fast.”
“I see.”
Nita walked over and pressed her fingers against the glass in the front of her cage. It was cool to the touch, which made sense, since now that she was thinking about it, she could feel the air conditioning on full blast. She tapped it, but it felt solid. Then she rammed her whole weak, still-drugged body into it, and it felt even more solid.
Bruised and feeling a little stupid, made worse by Mirella snickering in the background, Nita sat down and examined where the water bottle had come from. There was a ceiling-high door in the glass wall, though there was no handle on Nita’s side. Beside it was another, smaller glass door in the wall that connected to a box on the other side. It reminded Nita of prison movies, where they slid food in through little holes in the door. Except everything here was clear or white, not gray, like in prisons.
Sitting back, Nita felt another trickle of unease slide through her. This was a state-of-the-art facility—not the kind of thing she’d expect from random kidnappers. This felt more like the kind of prison you found in Bond movies or spaceships. Not real.
The point was—it looked expensive to build. That was a bad sign.
Nita clenched her muscles, trying to stop the shaking that had started in her hands and crawled up her arms and now spread through her body like a disease.
On the other side of the room, Mirella watched Nita. “There’s no way out of the cage.”
Nita ignored her. She could hear something. Voices? People, lots of people. It was muffled by the concrete walls, but it was there. It sounded like there was a gathering outside.
“Hey!” Nita screamed, banging on the concrete wall. “Let me out! Can anyone hear me!”
The voices didn’t even pause in their conversations.
Nita took a deep breath to yell again, but Mirella interrupted. “You’re wasting your breath.”
“Why?” Nita spun around. “They can’t hear me?”
Mirella looked at Nita like she was an idiot. “Of course they can hear you. They just don’t care.”
Nita paused, a slow, horrifying thought coming to her mind. “Mirella. Where are we?”
“You don’t know?” Mirella looked baffled. “Everyone else who’s come through here has always known.”
Nita glanced at the empty cages, and wondered what had happened to these everyone elses.
No. Not a good thought. It made the shaking worse.
“Mirella.” Nita’s voice dipped cold, a subconscious imitation of her mother. “I have been unconscious for God only knows how long. I know nothing.”
Nita didn’t like the way Mirella’s face twisted into an expression of pity and guilt.
“I’m sorry.” Her voice was a whisper, and she wrapped her strange pink-gray arms around her knees. “We’re in Mercado de la Muerte. Death Market. The biggest market for unnatural body parts in the world.”
Nine
DEATH MARKET.
Nita had heard stories, and not just from her mother. While her family operated mostly online, many of the older, more established black market families still clung to the physical market structure. They were of the opinion that you had to see a product in person to ensure its quality. Especially the people who sold living unnaturals—it was hard to ship living people in the mail.
The biggest physical market in the world used to be on the East Coast of the United States. Nita had gone there as a child, closely supervised by her parents. An INHUP raid a few years ago had caused it to move, and she’d heard it was somewhere in the Midwest now.
Death Market was somewhere along the Amazon River, though Nita wasn’t sure where. Definitely on the Peruvian side, but close to the Colombian and Brazilian borders. People would fly in to small airstrips in Colombia and Brazil and boat down the river, crossing the border to visit the market for the day. Or the night. Supposedly, the market offered a lot more than body parts.