There was no one. Just a few other pedestrians and a panhandler with a flute trilling a slightly off-key song.
Nita kept walking, wanting to gain distance from her mother.
She still couldn’t believe it.
Nita had defied her mother. To her face.
It was impossible.
This wasn’t the first time Nita had gone against her mother. There was the dact incident when she was twelve. Nita still occasionally woke up with nightmares about the dead dact bodies her mother had left in Nita’s bed. But that had been a secret. She had skulked out in the middle of the night, never confronting her mother.
Nita had only confronted her mother to her face once.
Nita had been fourteen. She and her mother had been living in Germany for two years, and her mother was talking about relocating them to Vietnam so she could find new unnaturals to hunt. Nita had been delighted at the idea of not having to dissect so many unicorn bodies. The first one was interesting—the four hundredth was not.
She’d decided that, given that things were already changing, it was a good time to call a family meeting to ask for a few other changes. She’d wanted to tell both her parents she’d decided to go to college and ask them to let her take the test for her GED. She’d already found several places to study and could take the test in Hanoi, so actually getting her parents onboard was the final hurdle.
Her father was on Skype, his face taking up the whole laptop screen. There in spirit, but not there in flesh to protect her if things went wrong.
And oh, how wrong they’d gone.
First, her mother had laughed, like it was some sort of joke. When Nita insisted she was serious, her mother’s smile had died and she’d said no. Nita, angry, young, and stupid, had jutted out her chin and arrogantly asked, “Why?”
Before Nita could blink, her mother had grabbed her wrist, yanked her so close their faces were inches apart, and hissed, “Because I said so.”
Nita didn’t remember her mother letting her go, though she must have. She didn’t remember going to her room to cry and hold a GED study prep book close to her chest. Her mind skipped all that, to the next memory, of her mother slowly tearing out the pages of the study guide one at a time until the book was nothing but a hard shell and a pile of paper.
Then her mother had whispered, “If you have time to waste on this, then you have time to run more errands.”
Nita hadn’t objected. She’d spent the next month going with her mother on her hunts. Nita would wait in the car or outside the building until the hard part was over, and only come in to help her mother load the body. It was messy and bloody, and her hands were always painted with red.
She’d taken to wearing her dissection gloves at all times. She never knew when she’d be called on to cut a body up to fit in a small suitcase.
After a month of this, her mother had casually asked, “Are you still thinking of college?”
Nita had tensed, sensing a trap. “No. Of course not.”
“Why not?”
She’d looked away. “Because you said so.”
And her mother had smiled, long and thin, and things went back to the way they were before. No more trips with her mother. No more trips anywhere, really. Just Nita and her dissection room, peace and silence.
Nita had learned a lesson, though not the one her mother wanted her to. She didn’t stop wanting to go to college, she just kept it a secret. She’d stolen money, hoping to save enough to take her GED and apply for college. If her mother didn’t know, then she couldn’t punish Nita.
But Nita had never defied her mother to her face like she had today. This was more defiant than she’d been in the college discussion, more than the dact war, more even than freeing Fabricio.
Her hands were still shaking.
She wondered what her punishment would be.
Squeezing her eyes shut, Nita swallowed back the terror oozing up her throat like acid, and instead focused on praising herself. She’d done a good thing. She’d stood up for herself. She hadn’t let her mother trample her dreams.
Nita looked up at the bright sun and let the warmth suffuse her body. She leaned against the side of a brick building and the rough surface scraped her clothes. She took another breath of cold air, and her lungs felt like they expanded wider than she’d ever thought. People walked down the street, ignoring her, and the cool air was bracing. Almost cleansing.
It was strange. She felt terribly vulnerable, but also wonderfully light, almost giddy. She was frightened of the uncertainty, of the depth of how much she had to do and how little she had. But she was also full of helium, like the sun, and she just wanted to smile.
It was like she’d shed a great burden when she’d left her mother. She’d been carrying a planet on her shoulders, and now that it was gone, she could see the vastness of the universe and how small she and the planet she’d been holding were. It was daunting, but it was also breathtakingly beautiful.
She was alone. And that was okay.
A blast of cool air made her shiver.
She was alone—which meant she was completely unprotected, and the entire black market wanted her in a cage to take apart and sell.
But they didn’t know where she was. She had time to formulate a plan.
She thought about her end goal—to become a researcher in unnatural science, to present papers at university conferences, to research and dissect various unnaturals with the blessing of universities and governments around the world.
She thought about the black market that stood in her way. And how she could get rid of it.
She needed the market to respect her, to fear attacking her so much they left her alone. But how could she ever give herself that kind of reputation? Especially now, alone, with no money, in yet another foreign country?
She stilled. She didn’t have to do this alone.
She pulled out her cell phone and connected to the Starbucks Wi-Fi across the street.
Swallowing, she sent an email to Kovit. Hey. Are you in Toronto now? Can we meet?
The response came a moment later.
I’d love to. Where are you now?
Nita smiled and began setting up a rendezvous.
Nine
NITA STOOD IN FRONT of a small café, a wooden sign with black letters burned into it hanging above the door. It had a jungle theme that made Nita shift from foot to foot, reluctant to step in. It felt like stepping into the past, returning to the market along the Amazon River. If she opened the door, Boulder or Reyes might be waiting for her, tranquilizer guns and chains in hand.
Her missing toe tingled, and she bit her lip, trying to banish the memories of Mirella screaming from her mind. She could hardly believe only a week had passed.
Nita’s fingers curled around an invisible scalpel. She focused on all the wonderful dissections she’d do when she had a moment to herself, trying to soothe her nerves.
Inside, the café was full of cushy faux-leather chairs that wasted far too much space and small, too-short tables. The walls were patterned with more trees and plants. A painted monkey stared out at her with huge blue eyes and a wide, toothy smile. In the corner, a jaguar hung on a tree, almost completely obscured by a real, leafy plant in the corner. Even the ceiling was painted green with leaves meant to emulate the claustrophobic sense of being trapped beneath the canopy. The room was lit with lanterns that gave the café a dim, almost romantic atmosphere.