“That’s not—”
“No.” His eyes were narrowed, and his voice suddenly went icy cold. Nita’s eyes widened and she stepped back, instinct pulling her away. “You don’t get to do that, Nita.”
“Do what?”
“Judge me for not wanting to kill him. Judge me. You’re uncomfortable that I ripped a stranger’s tongue out. You, who blew up an entire market! Who lured strangers to a building to murder them! But you’ve got some sort of righteous rage that I won’t murder the man who was like a father to me?”
“The people in the market were bad!”
“All of them? All the people? Even the prisoners?” His voice dipped low.
“That couldn’t be helped.” She swallowed. “I just . . . I have some morals.”
“So do I.” His eyes narrowed. “And they don’t exist for your convenience,” he spat. “They don’t bend or change based on what you want or need at the time, Nita.”
His eyes were black, and there was no light in the shadow of the barn, masking his face in darkness. His voice was low and angry, and Nita’s heart jackrabbited as he spoke. Sometimes she could see the monster inside him.
And sometimes he made her see the monster inside herself.
She swallowed and looked toward the INHUP agent, gasping on the ground a dozen feet away.
She looked at the man, with his wide, frightened eyes, face covered in blood, and she flashed back to another pair of frightened eyes. Fabricio, crouched in a cage, begging for help. This man had the same eyes.
She’d stood up to her mother and saved Fabricio. And he’d sold her.
If Nita saved this INHUP agent, if she followed that withered thing she called her conscience again, what would happen? He would thank her. And then he’d clap her in cuffs and send her to jail and Kovit to death.
Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me.
“Okay.”
“Okay what?”
“I get it. I won’t bring up the Henry thing again. Go eat.” She swallowed. “I’m going to go to the barn. Come get me when you’re finished.”
His anger melted away, and he hesitated, like he hadn’t expected to win this argument, and he wasn’t sure he should have.
“Okay.” His voice was soft. “I’ll be with you soon.”
She turned away and stumbled up to the barn. She slammed the door closed, but it didn’t stop the screams from seeping through the wood and slinking into her mind like shadows.
Her body began to shake, and she crumpled to the ground, wrapping her arms around her knees.
And there, quietly, with the sound of an innocent man’s screams in the background, being tortured because of her mistakes, she began to weep.
Thirty-Four
THE SCREAMS STOPPED soon after, but Kovit didn’t return. If she strained hard, she thought she could still hear gurgles and gasps. She wondered if Kovit had crushed the man’s voice box so she wouldn’t have to hear the screaming.
It was considerate, in a horrible kind of way.
She swallowed, her throat choking with phlegm from her tears and sniffling into her jeans. How had everything gotten so fucked up?
You teamed up with a zannie. How did you think this was going to end?
He’d made it very clear he had no rules about who he hurt as long as he didn’t know them. He didn’t care. Human suffering meant nothing to him.
She’d done it again, gotten lulled by the lighter side of him. Sometimes she could forget what he was, what he did. Until she was forced to remember.
She’d read once that people formed stronger bonds in wartime, and they did it faster. Shared trauma made people connect. She wondered if that was all she and Kovit were—a biological consequence of the constant tension they’d experienced together in the market.
How much of their friendship was just chemicals? Two people in a high-stress situation who clicked?
If that’s all it was, did it make it any less real?
Her hand made invisible Y incisions in the air with her bloody scalpel.
She thought about the paused video last night, the promises of the monstrous things that would happen caught in a child’s brilliant smile.
An image of the INHUP agent he was torturing outside flashed into her mind, bone sticking out through flesh, blood pooling around him, and Kovit’s hungry, needy expression.
Stop. Stop thinking about it.
Her mind didn’t obey.
And even though her imagination continued to supply her with awful images, her foot continued to tap on the ground, impatient for him to finish so they could get the hell out of here and kill Fabricio.
That scared her a little. The fact that even after this, even though she was terrified, crying in a barn trying to block out screams, she still imagined herself doing things with Kovit in the future. She still saw them as a team.
How fucked up was that?
“Nita?”
She turned around. Kovit pushed the door open and approached, worry lines creasing between his eyebrows. His hands were black with dried blood, and the blood in his hair had dried and kept it out of his face like hair gel. It blended into his natural hair color so it was completely invisible.
Nita cleared her throat. “That was fast.”
He hesitated. “We have things to do, places to be.”
He looked away as he spoke, but she didn’t press him for the real reason he’d cut his meal short. She didn’t want to hear the words. That he’d died too soon. That blood loss from ripping his tongue out had caused him to go into shock and feel less pain.
That if Nita hadn’t been there, he could have drawn it out much longer, that she was stifling him.
Nita looked up at him. She felt like she’d known him for ages, the darkness of his eyes more familiar to her than her own.
Maybe that just meant she should look in a mirror more often.
Sometimes she thought there was nothing left of her soul to burn away, that everything was long gone. And sometimes she wondered if she wasn’t more normal than she wanted to admit.
She’d told herself she’d face the darkness in herself, in her mother, in others. She wouldn’t turn away and pretend it wasn’t there. But she’d been doing just that since she met up with Kovit again. She’d been willfully ignoring the parts of him that didn’t suit her and taking advantage of the parts that did.
Kovit was not all evil. But the fact was that the evil was there. And it wasn’t going away.
She didn’t like knowing what he did. She didn’t like seeing that man’s eyes bulge in pain, didn’t like hearing Mirella’s screams echoing through her memory. But when she didn’t see it, she didn’t care.
She really had just replaced her mother with another monster.
“Nita?” Kovit’s voice was soft. “Are you okay?”
She blinked and focused on him. He stood a few steps away, hands loose at his sides, and his eyes were dark with concern. Her heart gave a little flip for an entirely different reason.
She was so messed up.
She massaged her temples. “It’s fine. I’m just on edge.”
He put his hand on her shoulder.
She flinched.
He jerked his hand back and lowered it. His face went from shock to sadness, then a moment of deep, pitiful guilt before smoothing over into a poker face.