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HMH Teen Teasers: NOT EVEN BONES by Rebecca Schaeffer!

If you like your books a little bloody, prepare to devour this killer YA debut: NOT EVEN BONES by Rebecca Schaeffer is about a girl who dissects dead bodies for the magical black market...but soon enough finds herself the one in danger of being sold for parts. To save herself, she must unleash the monster within.

Keep scrolling to read the first FOUR chapters of NOT EVEN BONES!

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ONE

Nita stared at the dead body lying on the kitchen table. Middle-aged, and in the place between pudgy and overweight, he wore a casual business suit and a pair of wire-rimmed glasses with silver handles that blended into the gray at his temples. He was indistinguishable on the outside from any other human — the inside, of course, was a different matter.

“Another zannie?” Nita scowled at her mother and crossed her arms as she examined the body. “That’s not even Latin American. I thought we moved to Peru to hunt South and Central American unnaturals? Chupacabras and pishtacos and whatever.”

It wasn’t that zannies were common, but Nita had dis- sected plenty during the months she and her mother spent in Southeast Asia last year. She’d been looking forward to dissecting something new. If she’d wanted to cut up the same unnaturals as usual, she would have asked to stay with her dad in the States and work on unicorns.

Her mother shrugged, draping her jacket over a chair. “I saw a zannie, so I killed it. I mean, it was right in front of me. How could I resist?” Her black-and-red-striped bangs fell for- ward as she dipped her head and half smiled.

Nita shifted her feet, looking at the corpse again. She sighed. “I suppose you’ll want me to dissect and package it for sale?”

“Good girl.” Her mother grinned.

Nita went around to the other side of the dead body. “Care to help me move it to the workroom?”

Her mother rolled up her sleeves, and together they heaved the round, deceptively heavy body down the hall and onto a smooth metal table in the other room. White walls and fluorescent lights made it look like a hospital surgery room. Scalpels and bone saws lay in neat lines on the shelves, and a scale for weighing organs rested in front of a box of jars. In the corner, a tub of formaldehyde caused everything to reek of death. The smell kept sneaking out of the room and making its way into Nita’s clothes. She found it strangely comforting. That was probably a bad sign.

But, if Nita was being honest with herself, most of her habits and life choices were bad signs.

Her mother winked at Nita. “All ready for you.”

Nita looked down at her watch. “It’s nearly midnight.” “And?”

“And I want to sleep sometime.”

“So do it later.” Her mother waved it aside. “It’s not like you have anything to get up for.”

Nita paused, then bowed her head in acceptance. Even though it had been years since her mother had decided to illegally take Nita out of school, she still had some leftover instinct telling her not to go to bed too late. Which was silly, because even if she’d had school, she’d gladly have skipped it for a dissection. Dissections were fun.

Nita pulled on a white lab coat. She always liked wearing it— it made her feel like a real scientist at a prestigious university or laboratory somewhere. Sometimes she put the goggles on even when she didn’t need to just so she could complete the look.

“When are you heading out again?”

Her mother washed her hands in the sink. “Tonight. I got a tip when I was bringing this beauty back. I’m flying to Buenos Aires.”

“Pishtacos?” asked Nita, trying to hold in her excitement. She’d never had a chance to dissect a pishtaco. How would their bodies be modified for a diet made completely of human body fat? The promise of a pishtaco dissection was the only thing that had convinced Nita moving to Peru was a good idea. Her mother always knew how to tempt her.

Nita frowned. “Wait, there are no pishtacos in Argentina.” Her mother laughed. “Don’t worry. It’s something even better.”

“Not another zannie.” “No.”

Her mother dried her hands and headed back toward the kitchen, calling out as she went, “I’m going to head to the airport now. If all goes well, I should be back in two days.”

Nita followed and found her sitting, booted feet on the kitchen table as she unscrewed the top of the pisco bottle from the fridge and took a swig. Not cocktail-drink pisco, or mixed-with-soda pisco, just straight. Nita had tried it once when she was home alone, thinking it would be a good celebration drink to ring in her seventeenth birthday. It didn’t burn as much as whisky or vodka, or even sake, but it kicked in fast, and it kicked in hard. Her mother had found her with her face squished against the wall, crying because it wouldn’t move for her. Then Mom had laughed and left her there to suffer. She showed Nita the pictures afterward — there was an awful lot of drool on that wall.

Nita hadn’t sampled anything in the liquor cabinet since.

“Oh, and Nita?” Her mother put the pisco on the table. “Yeah?”

“Don’t touch the head. It has a million-dollar bounty. I plan to claim it.”

Nita looked down the hall, toward the room with the dead body. “I’m pretty sure the whole wanted-dead-or-alive thing ended in the Old West. If you just turn this guy’s head over, you’ll be arrested for murder.”

Her mother rolled her eyes. “Why, thank you, Nita, for teaching me such an important lesson. Whatever would I do without you?”

Nita winced. “Um.”

“The zannie is wanted for war crimes by the Peruvian government. He was a member of the secret police under the Fujimori administration.”

No surprise there. Pretty much every zannie in the world was wanted for some type of war crime. When your biological imperative was to torture people and eat their pain, there were only so many career paths open to you.

That reminded Nita — there was an article in the latest issue of Nature on zannies that she wanted to read. Someone who had clearly dissected fewer zannies than Nita, but with access to better equipment, had written a detailed analysis of how zannies consumed pain. There were all sorts of theo- ries about how pain was relative, and the same injury on two people could be perceived completely differently. The scientists had been researching zannies — was it the severity of the injury that fed them, or the person’s perception of how much it hurt?

They’d also managed to prove that while zannies could consume emotional pain, as well as physical, the effect was significantly less. Emotional and physical pain receptors over- lapped in the brain center, so the big question was, why did causing other people severe physical pain feed zannies, while causing severe emotional pain had less effect? Nita privately thought it was because physical pain had the added signals from nociceptors, but she was curious to see what others thought.

Her mother continued, oblivious to Nita’s wandering mind. “A number of interested parties have offered very large bounties for his head. They, unlike the government, don’t care if he’s alive to face trial.” There was a sharp flash of teeth. “And I’m happy to oblige them.”

She rose, put the pisco away, and pulled on her burgundy leather jacket. “Can you have him all packed up by the time I get back?”

Nita nodded. “Yeah, I think so.”

Her mother came over and kissed the top of her head. “What would I ever do without you, Anita?”

Before Nita could formulate a response, her mother was out the door. There was a creak and then a bang, and the house was silent. When her mother departed, sometimes Nita felt like she took more than just noise. She had a presence, a tangible energy to her that filled the house. Without her, it felt hollow. Like the life had left, and there was only a dead zannie in its place.

Which, really, there was. Nita turned back to her newest project and allowed herself a small smile. A pishtaco or a chupacabra would have been better, but she’d still enjoy a zannie.

The first thing she did was empty its pockets. An old- fashioned timepiece, some Brazilian reais (no Peruvian soles though, which was odd), and a wallet. Nita gazed at it a long time before putting it on the tray, unopened. Her mother would have already taken the credit cards and used them to get as much cash as possible before ditching them. The only other things left in the wallet would be identity cards, club memberships — things that would tell her about the person she was dissecting.

Nita had learned a long time ago — you don’t want to know anything about the person whose body you’re taking apart.

Better to think that it wasn’t a person at all. And really — it wasn’t. This was a zannie.

Nita took an elastic and tied her hair back in a puffy attempt at a ponytail. Her hair tended to grow sideways in frizzy kinks instead of down. In the glow of the fluorescent lights, its normally medium-brown color took on an orange tint. No one else thought it looked orange, but Nita insisted— she liked orange.

She put a surgical mask over her mouth, just below her freckle-spattered cheekbones, before putting the goggles on. After snapping on a pair of latex gloves, she rolled her tool set over to the metal slab where the body rested. She slipped her earbuds in and flicked on her Disney playlist.

It was time to begin.

Nita couldn’t remember a time when she hadn’t been fascinated by dead things — perhaps because her home was always full of them. As far back as she could remember, her parents had acquired the bodies of unnaturals and sold the pieces on the internet. The darknet, to be specific. Black market body part sellers didn’t just post their items on eBay. That was how you ended up with a short visit from the International Non- Human Police — INHUP — and a long stint in jail.

When Nita was younger, she used to run around the room, bringing her parents empty jars. Big glass ones for the heart, small vials and bags for the blood. Afterward, she’d label them and line them up on the shelf. Sometimes she’d stare at them, pieces of people she’d never met. There was something calm- ing about the still hearts, floating in formaldehyde. Something peaceful. No more beating, no more thumping rhythm and noise. Just silence.

Sometimes, she would look at the eyes, and they would stare back. Direct, open gazes. Not like living people, who flicked their eyes here and there while they lied, who could cram an entire conversation into a single gaze. The problem was, Nita could never understand what they were saying. It was better after people were dead. The eyes weren’t so tricky anymore.

It took Nita all night and the better part of the next day to finish with the zannie, put everything in jars of formaldehyde or freezer containers, and clean the dissection room until it sparkled.

The sun was up, and she didn’t feel tired, so she went to her favorite park on the cliffs overlooking the ocean. Tropical trees with large, bell-shaped flowers covered the benches like a canopy, and blue and white mosaics patterned the wall that prevented people from tumbling over the side of the cliff and into the sparkling waters below. Newspapers sat abandoned on the benches, from tabloids announcing Penelope Alvarez looks twenty at age forty-five. Good skin care or something more “unnatural”? to official news sources with headlines like Should Peru sign into INHUP? The advantages and disadvantages to an extraterritorial police force for unnatural-related incidents.

Peru was one of the only South American countries left that wasn’t a part of INHUP. There were always a few countries on every continent that stayed out so that black market dealers had somewhere to flee when INHUP finally nailed them. Certain people paid politicians handsomely to ensure it stayed that way.

Nita took a seat far away from the other people in the park. Under the shade of a floripondio tree, she cracked open her medical journals on unnaturals.

Sometimes it was frustrating reading them and knowing they were wrong about certain things. While lots of unnaturals were “out” and recognized by the world, most still hid, afraid of public backlash. So when the journals talked about zannies being the only species of unnatural that consumed nontangible things, like pain, Nita wished she could point out that there were creatures who consumed memories, strong emotions, and even dreams. INHUP just hadn’t officially recognized them yet. INHUP was big on doing damage control, and part of trying to decrease racism and discrimination against unnaturals was not telling people just how many types there were.

It also kept people like Nita’s mother from finding out about them. Sometimes.

Nita whiled the afternoon away in the shade of the tree, devouring medical research like candy, until the sun dipped so low there wasn’t enough light to read by.

When Nita got home, she was greeted by a string of exple- tives.

She crept into the hall, shoulders tight with tension. Her mother could be unpredictable when angry. Nita had been on the receiving end before and wasn’t eager to repeat the experience.

But ignoring her mother was more dangerous, so Nita padded into the kitchen.

“What are you doing?” Nita gaped, staring at the mess.

Her mother tucked a strand of hair behind her ear and gave Nita a wry smile. Around her, empty shipping crates littered the floor, along with packing materials like bubble wrap and Styrofoam worms. A gun sat on the kitchen table, and Nita briefly wondered what it was doing out.

“I want to have the zannie parts shipped out tomorrow.

We’ve got something new, and to be frank, this apartment isn’t big enough to hold all the parts.” Her mother flashed her another smile.

Nita was inclined to agree. Her dissection room was already at capacity, and they’d only dissected one zannie. There really wasn’t room for a second body.

“Something new, huh? I take it everything went well, then?” Nita’s mother laughed. “Do things ever go well with unnaturals that aren’t on the list?”

Among the unnaturals that were public knowledge, there was a list of “dangerous unnaturals” — unnaturals whose continued existence depended on them murdering other people. It wasn’t a crime to kill them in INHUP member countries, it was “preemptive self-defense.” But anything not on the list, the harmless unnaturals (which was most of them, in Nita’s experience), it was very much a crime to kill.

Her mom mostly brought Nita unnaturals on the list. Mostly.

Nita knew her mother had probably killed a lot of not-evil, not-dangerous people and sold them. She tried not to think about it too much, because really, there wasn’t much she could do about it, was there?

Besides, they were always dead by the time they got to Nita. And if they were already dead, it would be a shame to let their bodies go undissected.

Speaking of . . .

“What did you bring back?” Nita asked, weaving through the crates to the fridge, where she took out last night’s leftovers and shoved them into the microwave.

“Something special. I put it in the dissection room.”

Nita felt her fingers twitch, the imaginary scalpel in her hand making a sliding cut through the air, like a Y incision. She couldn’t wait for the slow, relaxing evening, just her and the body. The straight autopsy lines, the jars full of organs watching over her, like her own weird guardian angel.

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 col- lector 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 dig- its. 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?”

Nita nodded, appreciating her mother’s efforts to quell her anxiety even as her nausea rose. “Yeah.”

Her mother gave her an appraising look. “You know, if you want, I can go cut his tongue out now. I have some pliers — I can pull it right out. Then you won’t have to worry about him talking.”

“That’s okay, Mom.” Nita forced a smile. “I’m fine.”

“If you’re sure . . .” Her mother gave her another searching look before sighing. “All right. Shall we start packing some of those zannie parts?”

Nita nodded, glad for the change in subject.

They spent the rest of the afternoon filling up crates. Her mother had arranged the bribes to get them back to the family warehouse in the States. Her father would handle them from there. He dealt with the online sales, storage, and shipping of the body parts, while her mother dealt with the retrieval. Her father was also their major cover, if INHUP ever came sniffing. Nita was sure her mother had a record a mile long — her stack of foreign passports, driver’s licenses, and credit cards was probably two feet high. That sort of thing usually came with a record, in Nita’s opinion.

Her father, though, was squeaky clean as far as Nita knew.

By day, he worked as a legal consultant in Chicago, and by night, he sold body parts on the internet. Nita missed him, and their home, and their shitty Chicago suburb that was actually a two-hour drive from Chicago. She hadn’t been home since she was fourteen.

She wondered what her father would say about this situation. Would he be unhappy her mother had brought a live unnatural home? And moreover, a harmless one?

It was one thing when her mother dumped a zannie or a unicorn on Nita’s table. For one, they were monsters who couldn’t continue to live without killing other people. And the world agreed — that was why there was a Dangerous Unnaturals List. It wasn’t even a crime to kill them. You were saving lives.

But someone like the boy in the other room? How could she justify that?

Sighing, Nita wiped the sweat off her forehead as they closed another crate. No matter how she thought about it, she couldn’t find a way to justify murdering that boy.

Well, except money.

“It looks like we’re going to need a few more shipping crates.” Her mother ran a hand through her hair. Her manicure caught the light, black and red and yellow, like someone had tried to cover a fire with a blackout curtain.

Nita poured a glass of juice. “Probably.”

“I think we deserve pizza now. How about you?” Nita heartily agreed.

After dinner, they realized they were low on bottled water.

Tap water wasn’t drinkable unless boiled, and Nita’s mother didn’t like the taste. She’d been promising they were going to get a UV light for purifying water since they arrived a few weeks ago, but it hadn’t happened yet.

Her mother sighed and got up, dusting pizza crumbs off her lap. “I’ll go down to the store and get a seven-liter bottle. I’ll start on the boy when I come back.”

“Start what?”

Her mother grinned. “I sold his ear an hour ago.” Nita stiffened. “You’re going to cut it off tonight?” “Of course.”

Nita swallowed, looking away. “But you can’t mail it until tomorrow morning. It makes more sense to cut it off tomorrow. If freshness is important, like you said.”

Her mother’s eyes narrowed. Nita tried to resist the urge to shift in place, but failed.

Finally, in a small voice, Nita whispered, “I don’t want to hear him screaming all night. I won’t get any sleep.”

Her mother laughed, throwing her head back, then came over and clapped Nita on the back. It was just a little harder than it should have been, and Nita stumbled forward a step.

“You’re absolutely right, Anita.” Her mother grinned as she walked back to the door. “We’ll do it tomorrow morning.”

Nita stood there, trembling, as the door closed with a thud and a click. She remained in place for a few minutes, calming her breathing before picking up a slice of pizza and walking back to the dissection room.

When she opened the door, she found the boy sitting cross-legged in the cage, watching her. She approached with caution, and as she got closer, she was able to discern that yes, those stains on his clothes were definitely dried blood.

She put the pizza close enough to the bars that he could wiggle his fingers through and pull pieces off. She skittered back, afraid if she got too close he would leap at her. Not that he could do much, chained to the cage, which was chained to the wall. But she was careful anyway.

He looked down at the pizza and licked his lips. “Gracias.” “De nada.” Nita was surprised at how hoarse her voice was. She stood there for a long moment, awkward, not sure

what to do next. Logically, she knew better than to talk to him. She didn’t want to know anything about him if — when — she had to dissect him. But she also felt weird just giving him food and leaving.

This was the part where she could really have used more social skills practice. Was there etiquette for this kind of situation?

Probably not.

He wormed his fingers through the bars and ripped off the tip of the pizza. His hands wouldn’t reach to his mouth because of the handcuffs, so he had to bend his head over to eat. He chewed slowly, and after one bite, just sat, looking at the pizza but not eating. She wondered if he didn’t like pep- peroni.

“Cómo te llamas?” he asked, still not looking up. His accent was clearly Argentinian, his y sounds blurring into sh, so it sounded like “cómo te shamas?”

His accent wasn’t too hard to understand, unlike Nita’s.

Her father was from Chile, and she’d lived in Madrid until she was six, so Nita’s Spanish was a hopeless tangle of the two accents. Sometimes the Peruvians in the grocery store couldn’t understand her at all.

“Nita.” She hesitated. “Y tu?”

“Fabricio.” His voice was soft. “Fabricio Tácunan.” “Fabricio?” Nita couldn’t keep the incredulity out of her

voice. “Is that from Shakespeare or something?”

He looked up at her then, and frowned. “Pardon?”

Nita repeated slowly, trying to make her accent less pro- nounced.

This time he understood. He raised his eyebrows, voice pitched slightly differently. More curious, less sad, his Spanish soft and barely audible. “Who is Shakespeare?”

“Umm.” Nita paused. Did they teach Shakespeare in Latin American schools? If the boy — don’t think of him by name, you’ll get too attached and then where will you be? — had been a captive of a collector, had he even gone to school? “He’s an English writer from the fifteen hundreds. One of his characters was named Fabrizio, I think. It’s . . . I guess I thought it was kinda an old name.”

He shrugged. “I don’t know. I think it’s fairly common where I’m from. One of my father’s employees has the same name. But he spells it with a z, Fabrizio. The Italian way.”

Fabricio looked down at his shirt, crusted with dried blood and swallowed. “He spelled it with a z.”

Oh.

Nope, too much information. Nita didn’t want to hear about this.

Why did you even talk to him, then? she scolded herself. This was going to make everything worse later.

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 uni- corn 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 pro-pensity 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, eaves- dropping, 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 tar- get 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 try- ing 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.

Something uncomfortable and squiggly shifted in her chest. The plaque was talking about Pizarro, the man who’d carved a bloody swathe through Peru. He’d taken the Inca — the ruler of the Incan people — hostage, and then ransomed him for a room full of gold. When the Incan people gave him the gold, he killed the Inca anyway.

Pizarro wasn’t even the worst of the conquistadores. Christopher Columbus used to cut the hands off indigenous people who didn’t dig enough gold for him each month.

Like her mother cut off Fabricio’s toes. Nope.

Nita really didn’t want to think about that.

So she ignored the niggling little voice that told her she had no right to claim the tourists were being entitled jerks when her mother felt entitled to take these people’s lives and sell their body parts for profit.

She went to the local bodega instead of the giant grocery store. She didn’t like how crowded the grocery store was. People were always talking to her and breathing near her, and some- times they brushed by her, and she found it uncomfortable.

The bodega was smaller, and she actually had to talk to the person at the cashier sometimes, but it was worth it to not feel the press of so many bodies around her. Also, the bodega never had a line.

As she was paying, Nita’s eyes were drawn to the television sitting on a chair on the other side of the room, a stack of toilet paper and Kleenex packages on top. It was an old, boxy unit, and someone had put on the news.

“The debate over whether to add unicorns to the Dangerous Unnaturals List continues, as INHUP starts its third day of discussions over the proposal.”

Nita smiled as a memory surfaced, one of the few she had where she really felt her mother cared. A man with blond hair and swirly black thorn tattoos had reached to ruffle her hair at a store, and her mother had nearly shot him right then and there. Nita had been swept away before the man could get too close, and while her mother never said, Nita knew that particular soul-eating unicorn was dead now. He would never again target virgins. She’d seen the new powdered unicorn bone stock.

Letting out a breath, Nita shook her head. Her mother might be many things, but she loved Nita. It was a scary kind of love, but it was there. That was important. Sometimes it was easy to forget, given her mother’s suspicious nature and obsession with money.

A reporter was interviewing a scientist about unnatural genetics.

“Unicorns are another type of unnatural linked to reces- sive genes. This means these creatures can reproduce with humans, and the genetic makeup can lie dormant for generations before the right circumstances combine and two per- fectly normal parents give birth to a monster.

“It’s not only unicornism that’s hereditary,” the man on the screen ranted. “But other creatures. Zannies. Kappa. Ghouls. Even vampires, to some extent.”

Nita thought of the pieces of zannie in her apartment. She wondered how many people it had tortured in its life to feed its hunger for pain. It was a good thought, because she had no guilt about cutting up a monster like that, and even admired her mother for killing it.

“Could you describe the proposal you’ve submitted to INHUP, Dr. Rodón?”

“Genetic manipulation. It’s a very select series of genes unique to each species, so once fully mapped, it should be easy to screen for and eliminate them. If we catch it before they’re born, we can eradicate all dangerous human-born unnatu- rals.”

The clerk gave Nita her water with a smile, and she nearly ripped it out of his hand as she stormed out of the shop, unable to listen to another minute of that drivel.

Nita hated people.

While Nita agreed it might be an effective, even humane way to reduce the monster population, she knew people would take it too far. People always took it too far. How long before people started isolating genes from harmless unnaturals and eliminating them too? Aurs, who were just bioluminescent people? Or mermaids? Or whatever Fabricio was?

Or even Nita and her mother?

FOUR

The next morning, Nita woke to screaming.

She yanked the covers off and reached for the scalpel she kept on her nightstand. Her feet tangled in the sheets as she stumbled out of bed and fell on her knees with a thud.

The screaming rose in pitch, sharpening into a long, horrible shriek.

Breathing fast, Nita freed herself and climbed to her feet. She crept out of her room, scalpel first, toward the source of the noise. The screams were punctuated by the rattle of metal against metal, the scraping squeak of something heavy on the linoleum floor, and her mother’s vicious swearing. Nita’s heartbeat stuttered.

Her mother hadn’t been testing her when she mentioned cutting off Fabricio’s ear. She was actually doing it. Right now.

Nita opened the door to the dissection room and saw blood. It had spattered her clean white walls and floor. Droplets clung to her mother’s angry face, and streaks of red tears patterned Fabricio’s cheeks. He’d scooted his head as far into the cage as he could and had bunched his legs so his feet were pressed to the front of the cage. He rocked it from side to side, trying to prevent her mother from getting a grip. The padlock was on the floor, but the cage door had swung shut, and Fabricio was holding it closed by wrapping his remaining toes around the door and tugging.

Her mother was holding a syringe, probably something to sedate Fabricio. He knocked it out of her hand with his shoulder, and it clattered to the bottom of the cage. He used an elbow to smash it, spilling the contents and chunks of broken glass across the ground.

Both of them turned as Nita entered, and Nita flinched when she saw Fabricio’s face straight on. Her mother had clearly tried to cut off his ear while he slept, and he’d woken up mid cut. His ear had been partly severed, and then the knife had slipped, slicing a deep red line across his cheek.

Nita took an involuntary step forward to stop this, to do something. Her mouth opened to protest. Then it closed.

You can’t stop this, Nita. You can’t save him.

If you show sympathy, your mother will make sure you regret it. She wouldn’t hurt me, Nita protested. But that didn’t mean

there weren’t worse things her mother could do. The memory of small broken bodies stuffed between her sheets surfaced, but she shoved it away.

She let her hands fall to her sides as she talked herself out of action and looked away. She was no stranger to blood and carnage, but she hated that shard of hope shining from Fabricio’s eyes. She didn’t want to see it replaced by betrayal.

“Nita.” Her mother rose, flicking blood off her fingers. “Good morning.”

“Good morning.” Nita paused. “Are you trying to get the ear?”

“Yes. He’s not cooperating.” Her mother beckoned her. “Give me a hand.”

Nita hesitated only a split second before approaching. “How can I help?”

The hope in Fabricio’s eyes cracked, and then melted into terror and anger. Nita tried not to look.

Her mother took out another syringe, presumably full of sedatives. “I’m going to try and hold him still. I want you to sedate him.”

Nita took the syringe with trembling fingers, not letting herself look at Fabricio. It was better this way, wasn’t it? This way he wouldn’t feel the pain when his ear came off.

Nita wouldn’t have to hear him scream.

“Why didn’t you sedate him before you started?” Nita asked, hiding her shaking hand from her mother.

Her mother shrugged, nonchalant. “I thought I could cut it off fast enough.”

No, Nita realized, looking at the half smile twitching across her mother’s face. You thought no such thing. You wanted this to hap- pen, so I would wake up and be forced to help you.

Nita was being tested. She didn’t know what the conse- quences of failure were, but she knew they weren’t good.

You shouldn’t have talked to Fabricio and then lied about it to her. Nita had been stupid. She should have known better. Clenching her jaw, she put the syringe down. “I don’t see how it’ll be any easier to sedate him than it would be to just get the rest of the ear off.” She showed her mother her scalpel.

“There’s only a strip of flesh left. It won’t take much to finish the job.”

Her mother’s smile widened until it seemed to consume her face. “If you think so, I’m happy to try.”

“Nita.” Fabricio spoke for the first time. “Nita, por favor.” Nita’s mother laughed. “Oh, it figured out your name.” Nita clenched the scalpel in her sweaty palm and focused

on the ear, ignoring Fabricio’s crying and continued whispers of her name like a prayer.

Just get this over with. Then she could figure out where to go from there. But if she failed this, bad things would happen. She didn’t want a repeat of the dact incident with parts of Fabricio in her bed each morning.

She tried not to look at his face as she pushed the scalpel through the cage bars, but she couldn’t escape his sobs and cries. Her hand was shaking, and her palm was so sweaty that when Fabricio shook the cage again, the scalpel was knocked right out of Nita’s fingers, leaving a deep, bloody gash across her palm along the way.

Nita yanked her hand back, swearing as the blood dripped down her arm.

Her mother gave her a tired look. “Well, heal it already, and we’ll try again.”

Nita turned away so her mother wouldn’t see the flash of anger in her expression. Then she let out a breath and focused her body. She increased blood clotting factor in the affected area to speed up the scabbing process. She didn’t want to do too much repairing until she had some disinfectant, though— while she could stimulate her body’s natural defenses against the microbes, it was just easier to wash the wound in soap.

Nita wasn’t sure how old she’d been when she discovered that other people couldn’t control their bodies the same way she could. Her mother did it all the time — enhanced her own muscles so she could run faster, hit harder, heal quicker.

The more Nita understood about her body, the more she could control it. But it was dangerous — there was a reason for swelling, and if you took away the symptom without dealing with the underlying cause, it could make things worse. She’d discovered that the hard way when she was seven and her father had to take her to a hospital because she’d accidentally paralyzed herself trying to make her bicycle-butt bruise go away. Only after the x-rays and scans, and the doctor’s detailed explanation of the precise issue, had Nita been able to fix it.

After that, she’d been very cautious about how she altered herself.

“Are you done yet?” Her mother’s voice was cold.

Nita nodded and turned back to her mother. “For now. But it’ll take time to fully heal. I severed a tendon — I don’t think I’ll be able to hold a scalpel for a day or so.”

Her mother scowled, clearly displeased. Nita made no comment and kept her face blank. It wouldn’t do for her mother to see how relieved this injury made Nita feel, or for her mother to realize she was stalling and could, if she wanted, finish healing the wound much sooner than tomorrow. Now she had at least a day where she didn’t personally have to do the slicing. That was something.

“Fine.” Her mother picked up the bloody scalpel, gave it a quick rinse in the sink, and then, before either Nita or Fabricio had a chance to react, spun with near superhuman speed and threw it. It neatly sliced through the last piece of cartilage connecting Fabricio’s ear to his body, and he screamed as the sev-ered piece of flesh tumbled to the ground. He tried to clap his hands over his ear, but they were still chained to the bottom of the cage, and he couldn’t reach. Instead, he wept as blood coated the side of his face.

Her mother scooped up the scalpel and speared the ear like a piece of steak. She showed it to Nita with a grin. “You know, I think my aim could have been better.”

Nita resisted the urge to throw up.

***

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