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 dead.

If it went right.

If Kovit wasn’t captured and killed by INHUP first.

If Fabricio cooperated.

If if if. So many variables.

She closed her eyes. Right now, she couldn’t focus on that. One step at a time. She needed to focus on Kovit, on getting him out of this mess Henry had put him in.

Finally, she fidgeted and asked, “Well? What do you think of my idea?”

“I don’t know,” he admitted.

“It’ll work,” she insisted.

Kovit gave her a look, one eyebrow arched in mild judgment.

Nita looked away, wincing slightly. “Sorry.”

It had only been a few hours since they’d had their conversation about Nita pushing her ideas on him, and she was already sliding back into bad habits. If Kovit was hesitant about one of her plans, they were supposed to talk it out. It was, after all, his life on the line. He had the right to reject it.

“Okay.” Nita tried to find the words. “Can you tell me why you don’t like it?”

He weighed his words carefully. “You want to contact my sister.”

“Yes.”