Not Even Bones

Not Even Bones is a novel by Rebecca Schaeffer set in a contemporary world where "unnaturals," human beings born with supernatural biological traits, live alongside ordinary humans. The International Non-Human Police (INHUP) regulates unnatural-related crimes and maintains a Dangerous Unnaturals List designating species whose survival requires harming humans, such as zannies, who feed on human pain and are driven to torture. Peru has not signed into INHUP, making it a haven for the black market in unnatural body parts.

Seventeen-year-old Nita lives in Lima, Peru, with her mother, who hunts and kills unnaturals and sells their bodies on the darknet. Nita dissects the corpses and packages them for sale, while her father, Enrique, handles online sales and shipping from Chicago. Pulled out of school years ago, Nita has had almost no social contact outside her parents and secretly dreams of attending college to study biology. She is herself an unnatural who can manipulate her own body's biological processes, accelerating healing, suppressing pain, and modifying muscles and hormones. Her mother shares this ability.

Nita's mother returns from Buenos Aires with a living captive: Fabricio Tácunan, a teenage boy caged in Nita's dissection room. Fabricio is an extremely rare unnatural whose body parts are so valuable that a single toe once sold for six figures. The mother plans to sell his extremities while he is alive, then harvest his organs. Nita is horrified; she has never dealt with a living subject. She knows the cost of defiance: When she once rescued harmless creatures her mother planned to skin, her mother poisoned every one and placed the corpses in Nita's bed. Despite this fear, after being forced to help cut off Fabricio's ear, Nita acts. She cuts through his cage at night, walks him to a bus station, and gives him a ticket toward Ecuador, her remaining money, and her personal cell phone so he can call INHUP. She watches him board the bus and returns home.

Her mother orders Nita to pack, and they flee to a hotel. Before any confrontation occurs, a stranger breaks in and injects Nita with a sedative.

Nita wakes in a glass cell in Mercado de la Muerte (Death Market), the world's largest black market for unnatural body parts, hidden in the Peruvian Amazon. A 16-year-old captive named Mirella, whose pinkish-gray skin is linked to the legend of Amazonian pink river dolphins, occupies the cell across from her. The facility is run by Reyes, a cold woman who orders her enforcer, Kovit, a young man in his early twenties, to cut Nita on camera so buyers can watch her heal. Kovit slices skin from Nita's arm and shudders with pleasure, revealing himself as a zannie. Nita immediately shuts off her pain receptors, depriving Kovit of the pain he feeds on. Since only three people knew of her ability and her father would never betray her, Nita concludes her mother sold her as punishment for freeing Fabricio.

Buyers parade through the facility. Boulder, a wealthy crime lord, eats Mirella's eye and a strip of Nita's skin, claiming unnatural flesh grants immortality. A vampire Nita dubs "Zebra-stripes" asks about a woman matching her mother's description. When Reyes orders Kovit to sever Nita's fingers for refusing to heal on command, Kovit refuses, reasoning that mutilating someone who cannot feel pain wastes his sustenance. This defiance saves Nita's fingers and begins an uneasy rapport. Kovit shares that he turned his zannie mother in to INHUP at age 10 but declines to explain why. His sister hid him and was later taken into INHUP custody; he has not seen her in 10 years. Meanwhile, Reyes has Kovit torture Mirella as punishment for resisting, her screams echoing for hours.

Nita escapes by forcing Kovit to open her cell, overpowering him, and freeing Mirella. At the dock, Boulder spots Mirella and shoots her in the stomach. Mirella falls into the Amazon River and disappears. Stranded without money for boat passage, Nita returns to the facility. She finds a gun Kovit has hidden and calls her father's number from Kovit's phone, reaching only a police sergeant, a troubling sign she cannot yet explain. When Reyes arrives and prepares to execute Kovit, Nita shoots Reyes in the shoulder. Kovit tackles the wounded Reyes and kills her. They shake hands as partners.

They search Reyes' jungle mansion but find no cash, only intelligence materials including lists of bribed officials and sales ledgers. Nita dissects Reyes' body and has the guards sell the parts, but the proceeds fall short of what they need for boat passage. They raid Boulder's house and find thousands of dollars, but the guards ambush them. The guards had used powdered unicorn bone, a painkiller that renders them invisible to Kovit's pain-sensing ability. Nita is shot in the shoulder, and both are dragged back to the cage. Boulder arrives, eats Nita's severed baby toe, and promises to return daily for more.

Locked together and badly wounded, Kovit teaches Nita to punch properly. She enhances her muscles, drives his switchblade into the glass wall, and shatters it with repeated blows. In the security room, Nita discovers photos from her personal cell phone, the one she gave Fabricio, along with text messages from her own number negotiating her sale to the market. Kovit identifies the Tácunan surname as belonging to a powerful crime family. Fabricio was never helpless; he sold Nita after she freed him. The revelation shatters Nita's belief that her mother betrayed her. In cold fury, she decides to burn the market to the ground.

Before dawn, Nita and Kovit distribute propane tanks and set the market ablaze. Explosions engulf the buildings, and hundreds of people perish. Kovit, overwhelmed by the wave of pain from the dying, collapses in ecstasy in a rowboat. Nita rows alone. Downstream, pink dolphins attack the boats of fleeing occupants. Boulder knocks his guard Jorge into the river, but the dolphins drag both Boulder and his remaining guard beneath the surface. Mirella surfaces briefly in human form, promising no one will escape and the market will never be rebuilt, before slipping underwater.

During the long row to Tabatinga, Brazil, Kovit reveals why he turned in his mother: She had begun torturing children and eventually turned on Kovit himself. He created strict personal rules at age 12 to prevent his own descent into unchecked cruelty, and he urges Nita to establish her own moral boundaries. Nita cries, recognizing how close she has come to becoming her mother, and resolves to build principles grounded in deliberate choice.

In Tabatinga, they part ways. Kovit plans to find his sister and leave the criminal world. Nita needs INHUP's resources, including a plane ticket home, and wants to learn what happened to her father. INHUP flies her to headquarters in Bogotá, Colombia, where Agent Quispe interviews her. Nita lies strategically, omitting Kovit, the murders, and the fire, and claiming that Reyes implied her mother had been killed. Quispe shows her a photo of Zebra-stripes, identified as a mafia fixer recently spotted near Nita's hometown. Then Quispe tells Nita that her father was murdered just over a week ago. Nita breaks down.

After three days of grief, Quispe announces another survivor has been transferred from INHUP's office in Quito, Ecuador. The refugee walks into the lounge: Fabricio Tácunan. He smiles tentatively, unaware Nita has uncovered his betrayal. The novel ends with Nita staring at him, fury simmering beneath forced calm.