Huffing, Nita unlocked the phone and logged into her “safe” email, hands trembling, not sure if she wanted to see what awaited her or if she wanted to be ignorant forever.
Her heart raced, and her fingers trembled slightly as she checked her messages.
There was one new email from her mother. She clicked it open.
Nita, answer your phone.
That was it. It was dated the same day Nita had been kidnapped. Her mother couldn’t have known Fabricio had her phone.
Nita clicked reply, but hesitated, not sure what to say. If her mother was alive, why hadn’t she come to rescue Nita? Nita’s picture and location were all over the darknet—there was no way her mother hadn’t seen. But she hadn’t come.
Unease coiled in Nita’s stomach. What if she was dead?
What if she wasn’t? What if she just hadn’t cared enough to save Nita?
Finally, annoyed with her whirling thoughts, she answered, I’m with INHUP. They’re flying me to Toronto for processing.
She sent the message and was about to log out of email when she paused.
Kovit.
Her heart skipped a beat, and before her thoughts caught up with her fingers, she’d typed the email address he’d given her into a new message.
She hesitated. What could she say?
Hey, how’s your bullet wound? Tortured anyone lately?
She sighed. Why was she even entertaining this? Kovit was a monster. He literally tortured people for food—and he liked it. A lot.
But he was also her friend, strange as that sounded. Nita had never imagined herself having friends, but if she had, they wouldn’t have been psychopaths who worked as mafia torturers.
But he might be the only one in the world she could truly trust.
She closed her eyes and pictured his smile, dark with promises of pain on their enemies, and something in her chest tightened. She missed him.
Before she could second-guess herself, she wrote How are you? And sent it.
She watched her email for a long time, waiting for a reply, before clicking the phone off and curling up in bed, listening to the hum of the air conditioner until sleep overtook her.
* * *
Nita stood in a dissection room. Everything was white and sterile and wonderful, and she was taking a body apart. She had a scalpel in one hand, and in her other, she held a still-beating heart. It thumped in her latex-gloved palm, and in the way of dreams, this seemed completely normal.
The heart was blackened, and as she watched, it grew blacker, inky tendrils of disease spreading through it. The ink spread to her hand and she ripped her gloves off to dislodge the black threads, dropping the heart. It shattered on the floor like glass, and suddenly Nita was back in Death Market.
The glass from the heart had transformed into the glass from when she and Kovit had broken out of the cage.
In the background, someone was screaming.
Mirella.
Mirella, Nita’s fellow captive, had been tortured by Kovit as punishment for fighting against their captor. Trapped in her cell, Nita had listened to those screams until they burned into her memory.
They were burning now. Each scream sent a streak of flames down the corridor, and Nita found herself running toward the sounds until she encountered a closed door.
She threw it open. Death Market was on fire.
All of the buildings around her had been engulfed in flames. People screamed as fire charred their bodies, and someone ran down the street, toward the river, clothes and skin alight. She almost caught the memory of a scent, but it was gone before it was formed.
She turned around, refusing to look at the scene, and stood face-to-face with Kovit. His hair, black and silky, was brushed out of his face, and his dark eyes regarded her. A small smile twitched at the corner of his mouth, and an answering smile spread across her face.
He took a step forward, until they were nose to nose, and suddenly they weren’t in the market anymore, they were on the dock in Tabatinga, Brazil, where they’d parted ways and he’d leaned forward to whisper his email address in her ear.
Except this time, instead of telling her his email, he whispered, “I’m going to make you scream.”
Then he kissed her.
* * *
Nita bolted upright with a shriek, and her phone fell off her bed and clattered to the ground. Her face was sticky with sweat and her heart beat a staccato rhythm in her chest. Her body felt flushed with heat, almost feverish, and her skin was clammy. She swallowed, her throat dry, and put her hands to her lips where the dream Kovit had kissed her. Her mouth tingled at the touch.
What.
The.
Fuck.
Eventually, Nita lay back down, but it took a long time for her to fall asleep again.
Three
THE NEXT MORNING, Nita woke slowly, lying in her bed for several minutes, drifting in and out of dreams before she decided it was time to start the body modifications she’d been planning.
When Nita had arrived at INHUP, she’d decided she was going to be proactive instead of reactive when it came to the black market. They wanted to kidnap and cut her up because she had the ability to manipulate her own body.
So she had decided she was going to use that same power to prevent them from ever capturing her again.
Her whole life, she’d been cautious with her ability. She’d had a series of bad hospital experiences because she’d screwed around with things better left alone and didn’t know how to fix them. Since then, she’d taken things slow, made copious observations, and hadn’t done anything too drastic.
The time for caution was over. She needed to use all the tools available to her if she was going to survive.
She’d been weak from overusing her power when she first arrived, so she hadn’t done much complicated stuff. But now that she was recovered, the sky was the limit.
First, she completely stopped the production of myostatin in her body, a chemical that inhibited muscle growth. Next, she began modifying herself from the skeleton out. Bones, then muscles, ligaments, and tendons. She wasn’t changing her skin, because she hadn’t yet figured out how to toughen it without creating saggy joint jowls, like a rhinoceros.
She’d sink like a stone in water, but that was a small price to pay for the benefits of tougher bones and stronger muscles.
It was a long, laborious process, and she turned off her pain receptors for it. Nita decided to start from the bottom and go up, worried if she started at the top and reinforced her skull, her head would be too heavy for her neck.
She got up to her hips before she decided she was too tired to continue. She couldn’t shake the sensation that her legs were wearing huge, heavy boots, even though she had the muscles to cope.
She rolled over, picked up her phone, and checked her messages.
Sure enough, there was one from her mother.
I’ll pick you up in Toronto—T.
That was it.
Nita’s chest felt hollow, like she was a dissected cadaver, her organs long since ripped out and sold.
It’s not safe to send information over the internet. Especially with you in INHUP, she told herself, but that didn’t make her feel any better. Her mother hadn’t even said something simple like “I’m so glad you’re okay” or “I missed you.”
Nita lowered her eyes. If her mother wasn’t hurt, dead, kidnapped, or otherwise restricted—if she could answer emails overnight and meet Nita in Toronto—why hadn’t she rescued Nita from Death Market?