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.”
Nita tried to force a smile, but it wouldn’t come. “I’m tired. I kinda want to go to bed. If you don’t mind?”
Her mother waved her away. “After you pick up some water. I decided I didn’t want to go myself after all.”
So her mother didn’t trust her. She’d just sat there, eavesdropping, and knew Nita had lied to her.
Great.
“Okay.”
It was always best to obey her mother.
Nita grabbed her sweater and a bag on her way out, making sure to lock the door behind her. She took a deep breath, leaning her head on the door and closing her eyes. She felt like she was walking a tightrope. One wrong step, and she could fall to either side. The problem was, she wasn’t sure what exactly she’d be falling into, except that it would be bad.
Would her mother kill Fabricio while she was out so Nita couldn’t interfere?
No. Of course not. But she might start cutting off pieces.
Nita swallowed, hands clenched at her side. Would that be so terrible? It wouldn’t be Nita’s fault then—she wouldn’t be here; she couldn’t do anything about it. She could just brush it aside.
But she’d still have to dissect him when it was all over. Scoop out those scared blue eyes and put them in a jar.
Nita let out the breath she’d been holding. It would be a waste to start cutting pieces off Fabricio now.
She walked down the hall and to the stairwell, heading for the store.
Outside, it was dark and hazy, but the streetlights kept things moderately well lit. Nita lived in a nice part of Lima, right in the heart of Miraflores district, and she wasn’t too concerned about safety at night.
The heat of the evening settled comfortably on her skin, and a gentle breeze brought her the scent of something spicy in a nearby restaurant. She’d only been in Lima a month, but she liked it a lot so far. It was one of the nicer places they’d set up shop.
Nita and her mother moved around a lot. They would move to a central location on a continent, and her mother would target all the nearby countries, hunting for unnaturals she could kill and sell. They’d spent years doing this in the US before they’d moved on to Vietnam, Germany, and now Peru.
She passed by the open door of a restaurant and saw a pair of American tourists snapping at a waiter. The woman was snarling something in English, and the waiter just stared at her, smile frozen on his face while shaking his head and trying to tell her, in a mix of broken English and Spanish, that he didn’t understand.
“Well, find me someone who does!” snapped the woman, and then she turned to her husband. “You’d think they could hire people that speak English.”
Nita rolled her eyes as she passed. Why was there this obsession Americans had that others should learn their language to accommodate them? They were in Peru. Why didn’t those American people learn Spanish?
She saw it everywhere, the weird entitlement. Tourists who stole pieces of pottery and coins from German castles because they could. Rich men who flew in to Ho Chi Minh thinking they could buy anyone they wanted for a night and do anything they wanted to them, laws of the country be damned.
Nita kept walking past the restaurant and down the street.
Her footsteps slowed just beneath a plaque commemorating a battle against the Spanish. She thought about the Spanish conquistadores five hundred years before, who’d swept through South America and painted the whole continent red in their hunt for gold.