Her voice trembled slightly, and she turned to Nita. “My whole time there, there was this big public debate about whether ghouls should be added to the Dangerous Unnaturals List. I started getting nightmares.”
Diana paused. “Well, I’d had nightmares since the shooting. I don’t think I’ll ever not have nightmares.” She shivered. “But these ones were different. In them, I would wake up one morning to find that INHUP made a law that ghouls were on the list now. My foster mother would be waiting with the boy who killed my family, and she’d tell me he’d been acquitted of all charges, because murdering my family wasn’t a crime anymore. Then she’d shoot me.”
Diana’s voice had gone watery and soft, and she clenched her eyes tightly shut, but the tears still leaked at their corners.
Nita sat with her hands awkwardly in her lap for a moment, wondering if she ought to pat Diana’s shoulder. But she didn’t move.
Diana swallowed hard, and continued. “It was my biggest fear, that in the space of a minute the people taking care of me would hear the news and switch tactics and murder me.”
Nita believed it. Not just that Diana was afraid, but that the people would very well do that. It had happened before. There was a small genocide every time a species was added to the list.
“I’d seen it before too,” Diana continued, her voice soft. “How fast people change. I’d never really had trouble at my school. But when I was fourteen, there was this guy, the janitor. I didn’t even know him. I guess his brother had died in combat, though. And the next day he came in and he started screaming at me and the only other brown kid in school like it was our fault. He kept saying we needed to go back to our own country. Stuff like that.” Her jaw tightened, fists clenching at her sides. “My great-grandparents emigrated from Iran in the thirties. I don’t speak Farsi. I’ve never even been out of North America. Where the hell would I go back to?”
She sighed, twisting a stray hair in her fingers. “The worst part was that everyone just . . . They just stood there and did nothing. I went home early that day and the school called my foster parents to tell them I was cutting class.”
Nita blinked. “Wait, you got in trouble for it?”
She nodded. “Yeah.” A sharp laugh. “Stupid, right? But I think that was the moment I realized how quickly people can turn. The janitor was awful, but I didn’t really know him. It was all those people in the cafeteria who did nothing. The teachers. My friends. They all just stood there and let him scream at me.”
Diana’s voice went shaky. “If they were like that when they were fighting someone on the other side of the world who looked like me, what would happen if I was actually put on the list and considered a threat?”
Nothing good, of that Nita was sure.
Diana took a shaky breath. “So one day I ran away.”
“And you ended up here?”
“Eventually.”
Nita wondered what stories were contained in that “eventually.” How a runaway American kid even crossed the border into Canada. How she met a murderous, manipulative kelpie.
“Why Canada?” Nita asked.
Diana shrugged. “I dunno. I guess I thought it would be better? Everything just seemed better in Canada.”
“And is it?” Nita asked.
Diana considered. “I’m not sure that it’s better or worse so much as . . . different. Canadians love to feel superior to Americans by talking about how much better things are here. But it’s less that things are better and more that they don’t have the same issues. Problems that run rampant in the US don’t exist here. But at the same time, Canada has a whole lot of problems the States doesn’t.”
Diana sighed softly, resting her chin in her hand. “I think, more than anything, people like to feel superior to others. Canadians like to feel that they’re better than Americans. Americans love to feel they’re better than the whole world. And when people feel superior, it makes it harder for them to see the problems just beneath the surface. They don’t want to believe them, to face them, because if they did, can they really claim to be superior anymore?”
Nita nodded slowly. She thought of her past self, feeling so superior, so much better a person for not being a killer like her mom. It didn’t matter that she enabled her mother’s work, helped her sell the bodies. The fact that Nita wasn’t a killer made her a better person and let her excuse her own hypocrisy to herself.
“So none of the problems in the US exist here?”
“Oh, I didn’t say that.” Diana shrugged. “There’s still racism here—anti-Muslim sentiment has been an issue lately. That was never limited to the US.”
“No.” Nita snorted, thinking about all the different places she’d lived. “It really isn’t.”
She thought about the old woman in the grocery store in Japan who assumed Nita wouldn’t understand her, so instead of asking if she wanted chopsticks, hit Nita with them. She thought of how often people would come up to her on the street in Germany, either to speak to her in Turkish—which she didn’t speak at all—or to gently tell her that the Turkish part of town was over there, and was she lost?
Everywhere she went, there were problems, even if they manifested differently.
“Do you like it here, though?” Nita asked.
Diana ran her hand through her hair and smiled faintly. “Yeah. Yeah, I do. I’m . . . I’m a lot happier here.”
Nita raised her eyebrows. She wondered if it was because of or in spite of Adair. She thought it might be the first one. She didn’t understand their relationship, but there was a relaxed familiarity, even when Diana was irritated, that made them seem close.
Diana shrugged. “Life here is a lot less complicated. Adair gives me food and promises he didn’t kill anyone for it. And in exchange for not having to steal the bodies from morgues myself, I do all the computer things for him.”
“You mean hacking.”
“Yeah.”
Nita blinked slowly. “You do realize he hides murders and you’re probably eating someone else’s victims.”
Diana shook her head. “No, I’m not. He eats those. Kelpies only eat rotting bodies. They need to be under the water two, three weeks before a kelpie will touch it. But ghouls, we need our meat fresher than that. By the time someone calls him for a cleanup, he gets to a murder site, and gets the body to me, it’s been out too long. Morgues and such refrigerate bodies—and if it was someone who died in a hospital, they go to the refrigerator really fast, so they last longer. That’s what my family always ate.” She swallowed. “I know Adair has people he pays to freeze bodies right after they die in the hospital.”
Nita thought it was far more likely he went out and just murdered people if Diana needed them that fresh, but she didn’t say so. It would be cruel to shatter her delusions, and Diana had just prevented them from getting thrown out.
“Anyways.” Diana wiped her eyes and got to her feet. “I don’t know a lot about your situation, but I know you’re wanted for sale on the black market, and I know sometimes we have to do shitty things to keep ourselves safe. I don’t approve of murdering people, but I won’t let Adair kick you out to be arrested or kidnapped or sold.”