Nor am I. But I’ve done terrible things anyway, things I can’t take back. I’ll never be able to look at a stranger without knowing, in a flash, what their insides look like. I’ll never hear a knock at the door without wondering if it’s the police. I can never have an unguarded conversation with anyone.

Tane doesn’t have to live with any of that, at least not yet.

‘Lucky break,’ I echo, wondering how long it will take Warner to realise that I lied to her.

CHAPTER 13

CHAPTER 13

Without me, you cannot live.

But when I’m broken, you do not die.

I’m often paired with diamonds. What am I?

Dinner is reheated Biggs. It’s a dangerous meal, since I still don’t know how he died. He may have been poisoned. But Aaron Elliott smelled off. Must have been left unrefrigerated too long, which means he’ll have to be cooked, and I’m too hungry to wait. Eating people is dangerous anyway, because of blood-borne viruses. Doesn’t mean I can make myself stop.

Don’t judge me. Heart disease is the number-one killer in the USA, but you still eat doughnuts. Your diet is killing you, too.

While I’m chewing, I find myself looking at Biggs’s left hand. The right is in my freezer. I’m saving it so I can plant it in the home of his killer, once I’ve worked out who it is.

The cut on his index finger is bugging me. When I was homeless I donated plasma every two weeks, because they’d give you free food after. Cheese, crackers, juice, a milkshake. But I couldn’t help watching the people in the other chairs, leaning back like fat kings on thrones as the blood trickled out of their arms—so I always left hungrier than I arrived.

Before each donation the nurses would stab my fingertip with something a bit like a stapler, taking a single drop of blood to check my haemoglobin levels. I’m type O negative, universal donor, so my blood was in demand. If the levels were too low the first time, they’d keep stabbing fingers until they got an acceptable reading. The wound on Biggs’s fingertip looks a bit like the ones I used to have.

Or … I look closer. That could be a bite mark. Not one of mine. I don’t take little nibbles like that. I take huge chunks, like a great white shark.

On a hunch, I lift Biggs’s floppy arm, bending his elbow so his hand is near what’s left of his face. I’m no forensic expert, but his teeth seem like they might match the divot in his finger.

I think back to the bloody prints on the wall planner in the shipping container. A tingle ascends my spine as a half a theory emerges from the shadows in my mind.