face would be made public in about a week.”
Kovit was silent for a long moment. His voice, when it came out, was small and shattered. “Why?”
She bowed her head. “The email said he did it to make sure you couldn’t leave again. So you’d be trapped with him. So you’d need his protection to survive.”
Kovit laughed, a tinny, broken sound, and tipped his head back to look at the fluorescents above him. “So this is it, then. This is the end.”
“This is not the end,” Nita snarled, putting her hands on either side of his face and forcing him to look at her. “We won’t let it be.”
She thought of her list of corrupt INHUP agents. She thought of all the things Kovit knew about the Family he’d worked for and wondered if he could sell them for protection. Though they probably wouldn’t do witness protection for a zannie.
He trembled softly and shook his head. “No one’s ever survived being up on one of the list’s wanted posters. The longest anyone lasted was two weeks.” He closed his eyes, and she could see him beginning to spiral into despair again. “It’s over.”
Nita clenched her teeth and pulled his face closer to hers. She wouldn’t let him give up, not when they’d come so far. “No one had ever escaped from Mercado de la Muerte, and we burned it to the ground. No one’s ever been the subject of as high profile a black market hunt as me, and I’m still here.” For now, anyway. “We’ll find a way, Kovit. Trust me.”
Kovit met her eyes, and she could see he wanted to believe her, he hungered for her to be right, but he couldn’t quite accept it. “It’s too late. It’s not like we can take the information back from INHUP.”
“No,” Nita agreed. “We can’t. But we can prevent INHUP from publicizing it.”
“How?”
Nita looked at him, from his long, dark eyelashes to his trembling lips. Beneath her hands, his skin was soft, and she rubbed her thumbs gently over his cheeks, wiping away the spots of blood that patterned his face like tears.
Finally she whispered, “I have an idea.”
Two
NITA EXPLAINED HER IDEA, and Kovit’s eyes widened further and further the more she said. When she finally fell silent, he looked down at his hands, folded in his lap and streaked with blood.
“I . . .” He hesitated. “I need a moment to think.”
Nita nodded slowly. “Okay.”
He bowed his head, twisting his hands in his lap. He shivered occasionally, Fabricio’s pain flowing through him from the other room.
Nita wondered how distracting it was for him, if the constant influx of pleasure made it hard to focus. Kovit would have to leave the building to gain enough distance to not feel Fabricio’s agony. But leaving the building wouldn’t make him immune to feeling every other pain of the people around him. Every hangnail, every scrape, every sprain. She shuddered at the thought, wondering how he blocked out all that feeling, kept himself from constantly twitching and shivering and being distracted.
Especially given that most pain wasn’t strong enough for him to actually eat, it must get annoying. Zannies fed on extreme pain, the kind only found in torture, war zones, and hospitals. The rest of it, all those little micro pains, those were just background noise. She wondered what it would be like to always know how everyone around you hurt and to have it feel good. How it would change the way your brain perceived the world.
Had anyone ever done an MRI on a zannie? Their neural connections must be fascinating. She’d search online later to see if there were any research papers that covered this.
If there weren’t, and if they survived this and she got into university one day, maybe Kovit would let her do an MRI on him and scan his brain herself. It would make a great thesis topic.
She pulled her mind away from the future before she went too far down that road. There was no if. She would be an unnatural researcher one day. Just as soon as she got the black market to stop hunting her.
She let out a breath. It had been a hard few weeks. She’d made mistakes. But she’d learned from them, she had a plan now. A multipronged one to get the black market off her back, to make herself so powerful that people thought twice before coming after her. A plan that would make her far more valuable alive and free than