She shivered with anticipation. Sometimes she scared herself.
Her mother looked at Nita out of the corner of her eyes. “I have to say, this one was tricky to get.”
Nita removed her food from the microwave and sat down at the kitchen table. “Oh, do tell?”
Her mother smiled, and Nita settled in for a good story. “Well, it wasn’t hard at the beginning. Buenos Aires was lovely, and hunting down my tip was easy. Even acquiring our new . . . I don’t even know what to call him.”
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?”