It was hard to imagine Mirella as such a powerful activist that she could cause a summit like this. That she could inspire assassination attempts. Mirella was always trapped in Nita’s mind as the victim, powerless and angry. A victim of Reyes, who sold her for parts on the black market, a victim of Boulder, who’d stolen her eye and eaten it.

A victim of Kovit, who’d tortured her.

Nita shivered at that thought and tried not to think too hard about Kovit leaning over her shoulder, reading up on assassination plans for Mirella.

“Wow, this activist person is impressive.” Kovit scrolled through the email. “She really pissed these people off.”

Nita blinked. “You still can’t say her name?”

“Whose name?”

“Mirella.”

He looked at her blankly.

And Nita realized: he didn’t remember Mirella’s name. She was nothing to him but another faceless victim in his past. He had no idea who Nita was talking about. Mirella was so unimportant to him that the memories had already faded into nothing.

Nausea rose in Nita’s stomach. Mirella’s screams had haunted Nita’s nightmares, and Kovit, the instigator of those screams, didn’t even remember her. Nita had always known he dissociated from his victims, refused to name them, refused to make them people in his mind. But seeing him looking between Nita and the email in confusion after everything he’d done made her ill.

Kovit occasionally frightened her. She hated watching him eat, seeing the perverse pleasure he got from others’ pain. But seeing this, right here, this lack of recognition, was somehow so much worse than when he’d ripped that INHUP agent’s tongue out in front of her. Worse than Fabricio describing what Kovit had done to him.

“Dolphin girl,” Nita tried. “You remember, in the market?”

He continued to stare at her blankly, and a chill ran down Nita’s spine.

She turned away quickly. “Never mind. It’s not important.”

Even though it really was.

She clicked through the emails and found that this latest assassination attempt was going to be the third by Almeida alone, never mind other organizations. Mirella was apparently very effective as an activist.

Nita sighed. All that power, and all Mirella had managed to do was paint an even bigger target on her back. Nita couldn’t help but sympathize—they were stuck in similar situations, targets of people more powerful than they. In some ways, it felt like they’d never escaped the black market at all. They’d just gotten out of one cage and into another. And this one didn’t have clear walls or ways to see your enemies. You couldn’t shoot them or burn them, because you didn’t always know who they were. And even if you did, Nita imagined if Mirella murdered high-ranking government officials, it would have consequences.

But the key difference was, Nita hadn’t chosen this life.