“You don’t know me.” Kovit’s voice was cold.
It was an excellent strike. Very little blood, instant death from the spinal cord severing. Neat. Tidy. The kind of death Nita liked. Kovit really was good at what he did.
Allen’s body slumped against the pillar, and Kovit sighed softly, his eyes dark and heavy-lidded as the last trickle of pain slid through him. He examined the crumpled form with regret. “I would have liked to play awhile.”
Nita shivered and looked away from the hungry expression on his face. She could see his imagination in the curl of his smile and the flash of his teeth. It made her body want to huddle in a corner and hide.
Voices echoed through the platform, becoming louder as a group of shadows headed their way. Their shoes clicked on the cement floor, and Nita’s eyes narrowed.
The train pulled into the platform with a whoosh of air. Kovit took her still-bloody hand, and she stepped over the dead body and followed him. Her shoe made a small bloody half footprint to match the scuffed handprints.
Nita glanced back at the crumpled form against the pillar. He looked small and fragile, as though he’d just slumped against the pillar to rest from a long day of work and fallen asleep, sliding down to curl at the base.
The train doors slid shut, and they were rolling away, body disappearing from sight.
Twelve
“YOU HAVE BLOOD all over your shirt.” Kovit said, his voice soft.
Nita looked down, and sure enough, her entire gray INHUP shirt was dark red with streaks of blood. It formed a strange almost Rorschach pattern. It looked kind of like a man falling, unraveling as he went.
Nita edged closer to Kovit, glancing surreptitiously around the car. There were only a few people, and no one had noticed them yet.
Kovit unzipped his sweater and handed it to her. She put it on without hesitation, zipping it up to hide the gore. It was still warm, and it pressed the cooling blood on the shirt against her skin, making her shiver.
More people got on at the next stop, and Nita shifted closer to Kovit, away from the press of strange bodies. She kept her neck tucked into the sweater and shoved her bloody hands into the pockets. Her eyes stayed trained on the red stripes on the gray floor, slightly raised.
Kovit pulled her toward two seats facing backwards. The seats were strangely laid out, facing every possible direction so they looked haphazardly thrown in the car.
The two of them sat in tense silence. Nita wondered what would happen when the body was discovered. Were there security cameras? Had they left fingerprints? Were their fingerprints on file?
She’d been in Toronto less than a day and with Kovit less than an hour before she’d been involved in a murder.
And she hadn’t even had a chance to dissect the body.
No, we aren’t supposed to think like that.
Why not? He was evil. We didn’t know him. Why shouldn’t we want to dissect him?
Because . . . well, actually, yeah.
She closed her eyes and tried to pretend she didn’t feel the eyes of the people in the train car on her. In her pocket, her hand twitched for a scalpel. What she would have given for a chance to take that body apart. She just wanted a few hours of peace. Of straight lines and clear glass jars. Of labels and weights.
Nita pulled her phone from her pocket, and carefully examined each piece for physical bugs. Pulling the battery meant that the phone couldn’t be tracked by any spyware on the device, but it wouldn’t help if someone had just stuck a physical tracking device on there.
There was nothing.
She looked down at the two pieces of the phone and thought of leaving it on the subway. It wasn’t like she could ever use it again.
But then she had a better idea.
She pocketed it as the subway doors opened, and Kovit tugged her sleeve.
“Come on,” he whispered. “The blood is seeping through your clothes.”
Nita looked down and saw he was right. She hunched over herself, trying to hide the stains. They left the train and ascended the stairs. They were in a transfer station, and Kovit snagged a touristy T-shirt on a newsstand and bought it.
They found a handicapped washroom, and Nita took the new T-shirt from him and went inside.
The room was grimy, and there were stray pieces of toilet paper on the floor. But it was empty and she was alone.
Nita locked the door.
She leaned against the wall and just breathed, taking huge gulps of air and trying to steady her nerves, calm the adrenaline rush.
Finally, she stripped off Kovit’s sweater and the grimy T-shirt and used paper towels and the bathroom sink to start washing the half-dried blood covering her body.
The water was warm, and it melted the dried blood from her skin and soaked her body in a faint red sheen as the blood trickled down the sink drain. Nita ran her hands over her throat, where the garrote had dug into her flesh. She swallowed, the memory of pressure choking her air out and digging into her skin.
She shook as the enormity of her situation came crashing down around her.
Her location was up on the internet.
There were potentially hundreds of bounty hunters after her, and she didn’t even know what her enemies looked like.
But they all knew what she looked like.
She pressed her forehead into the mirror and gripped the sides of the sink, bracing herself, as water trickled down her bare chest, washing all the evidence away.
It had been necessary to kill the man. She knew it, she accepted it. But still, she waited for the guilt to hit, the sludgy feeling she got whenever she thought of eyes darkening and bodies falling, life leaching out of people.
There was nothing.
Nita took deep breaths and waited, telling herself it was okay to feel emotion now that it was all over. But still nothing came. She tried to remember the last time she’d cried over a murder. Had it been Reyes, her first kill?
Yes. It had. But even though the screams from the people she’d murdered in the market had haunted her dreams, she hadn’t really cried for them. She’d felt something—guilt perhaps, though she wasn’t really sure if that was an accurate word for the strange mix of revulsion and satisfaction that came when she thought of her escape.
But for this man, Allen, there was nothing. Just . . . emptiness.
And that scared her more than feeling guilt ever could.
She’d been hesitant and jittery over murdering Fabricio, but in a way that felt comforting. She wasn’t completely a bad person if she was conflicted about murder, right? In a way, her guilt made her feel human, made her feel more justified in her killing. After all, if she felt guilt, then surely that meant she was still good enough to recognize right from wrong.
But this nothingness was different. The man in the subway was like Boulder’s guards, dead at her hand, nothing more than blurry memories of blood. Unimportant. Not worthy of the emotional capacity it would take to care.
It was scary how desensitized to murder she was becoming.
Nita tried to think of her future, imagine who she’d be when all of this was over, but all she could see were the blurry out-of-focus faces of a million dead black market hunters.
She let out a long sigh. When would it end? Probably not until the whole black market was as scared of the sight of her as that receptionist was of Kovit.
She wiped blood off her face. Now, there was a thought.
She felt a smile curling up her lips, cracked and broken, twisted in a way that was slightly wrong. It was the kind of smile Kovit would appreciate.