But Soro had never been one to stand around, had certainly never gone searching for small talk. He dragged his eyes open. “What do you want?”
Soro straightened, visibly relieved by the end of such an unpleasant task. “Want has nothing to do with it,” they said, already turning toward the door. “There’s something you need to see.”
August circled the bodies, trying to understand what he was looking at. It was like a riddle, a puzzle, a what’s-wrong-in-this-picture, only everything was wrong. In five years, he’d seen a lot of death, but he’d never seen anything like this.
It wasn’t the what that bothered him.
It wasn’t even the how.
It was the why.
A full FTF squad was made up of eight soldiers. A leader. A medic. A tech. A sniper. And crew. It was a rare thing these days to have a full squad. Too often soldiers were picked off, and casualties usually weren’t replaced until a group numbered less than four, and then they were folded into another unit.
That morning, Squad Nine had been made up of seven soldiers.
By midday, all of them were dead.
“What happened here?” asked August, half to himself and half to Soro.
“According to Control,” said the other Sunai, “they were on their way back from a recon mission. Their comms were off, and there’s no surveillance on this block.”
The bodies lay scattered in the street, a grisly tableau.
They hadn’t died at night, hadn’t been fed on by Corsai. August looked around, then squinted up at the sun.
Judging by the angle of the light, this part of the street would have been in shadow all morning.
But that didn’t explain the seven corpses.
The sudden and simultaneous turn of violence.
Bullet casings littered the ground, and a knife lay several feet away, stained to the hilt, but as far as August could tell, Squad Nine hadn’t been ambushed, hadn’t been attacked by any outside force, human or monstrous.
They’d attacked their own team.
Not one on six—this wasn’t a matter of one soldier going mad—every one of them had a weapon in hand and a fatal wound. It made no sense.
His gaze trailed across their faces, faces he knew and didn’t know, faces that had once been people and were now just husks. Like Rez, he thought, fighting down the sense of loss before it could surface.
“What a waste.” Soro stood to the side, absently twirling their flute, as if they were standing in a garden instead of a crime scene. The bodies on the ground wore FTF badges, but in Soro’s eyes, he knew, they were no longer soldiers.
They were sinners.
And sinners deserved whatever gruesome ends they met.
But still—what could possibly drive an entire squad to do this?
Was it a symptom of the rift within the Compound?
No, there was tension, but verbal sparring was one thing, and this—this was something else entirely. It was too broad a leap between annoyance and this level of aggression.
Some kind of foul play, then?
A Malchai?
He wondered, for a moment, if the dead soldiers were a message from Alice, some kind of morbid gift laid out like a feast. But the patches weren’t missing, and none of the wounds had been made by teeth.
No, as gruesome as the deaths were, they were done by men, not monsters.
“Does Henry know?” he asked.
“Of course.” Soro paired the words with a flat look, as if the thought of not reporting this had never occurred to them. August imagined it hadn’t—Henry was human, but he was also the head of the FTF, the general in their makeshift army.
“And the Council?” he asked.
At that, Soro shook their head. “Henry wanted you to see it first.”
August frowned. “Why?”
The Sunai shifted their weight. “He said you’ve always had a . . . sensitivity. A way of thinking like a human. He said you study them.” The words seemed to make Soro uncomfortable. “That you’ve always wanted to be one of—”
“I’m a Sunai,” said August, bristling. “And I don’t have a clue what happened here. If Henry wants a human’s take, he should send someone else.”
Soro looked relieved.
August turned away from the corpses and started back toward the Compound.
Sloan wiped the blood from his hands as he climbed the tower steps.
There was something foul about it—in a human’s veins, it was warm, vital. Outside, it was nothing but a mess.
In the darkened lobby, Malchai lounged on every surface, leaning on stairs and draping themselves over railings. A dozen Fangs dotted the dark stone floor, steel collars glinting as they knelt beside their masters.
Blood leaked from bite marks on their skin, but Sloan’s hunger barely rose at the sight of it, of them. He’d never had a taste for willing prey.
At the sound of his steps, the Malchai stirred, red eyes going to the floor as he passed.
Inside the elevator, Sloan let his eyes slide closed. He dreamed of many things, of blood and power and a broken city, of Henry Flynn brought low and the task force on its knees, of August’s burning heart in his hand and Katherine’s neck beneath his teeth.
But as the elevator rose, Sloan longed only for sleep. A few quiet hours before the frenzy of the night.
He stepped out of the elevator and into the penthouse, and stopped.
Alice had set the place on fire.
That was his first thought. Heat radiated off the steel coffee table where she had dumped what looked like a bucket of hot coals. A variety of tools and kitchen utensils protruded from the burning mess, and four Malchai crouched on the floor in front of her, feasting on a young man.
“Before you ask,” said Alice, “It wasn’t like the Falstead. I didn’t have anything to do with it this time. I’ve moved on.”
“What are you talking about?” asked Sloan.
Alice gave an impatient flick of her fingers. “Oh, a handful of Fangs—they must have snapped—who knows why. Went and killed each other—so it seems. The Corsai didn’t leave much behind. A petty squabble, if I had to guess. Humans are so”—she blew on the coals—“temperamental.”
“And what about them?” asked Sloan, nodding toward the Malchai.
“Oh, they volunteered.”
“For what?”
Alice didn’t answer. Instead she took one of the Malchai by the chin, raising his red eyes to hers. Her voice, when she spoke, was different, lower, smoother, almost hypnotic.
“Do you want to make me proud?”
“Yes,” whispered the Malchai.
She drew a thin metal bar from the fire, its end a burning red tip.
“Alice,” pressed Sloan.
“Here’s a riddle,” she said, her voice threading with manic cheer. “You can banish a Corsai with light, defang a Malchai’s bite, but how do you do stop a Sunai’s song?”
Sloan thought of Ilsa, the last sound she made before he tore out her throat.
“You don’t have to,” said Alice with a smile. “You just stop listening.”
With that she drove the burning spike into the Malchai’s ear.
It didn’t feel real until Kate hit the Waste.