If he said anything else, Kate didn’t hear it. The name caught like barbed wire in her head, bringing with it red eyes and a black suit, a shadow at her father’s back, a voice in her head whispering, Katherine.
But Sloan wasn’t here in Verity, because he was dead. She’d seen him lying on a warehouse floor, a steel bar through his back and—
Kate’s attention snapped back to the alley. One of the thugs was coming close—too close—his hands raised as if she were a child or a dog, something easily spooked.
“Careful, Joe, you know he likes them fresh.”
Kate shifted up against the wall and felt the familiar weight of the handgun at her back. She drew it out, and the moment the gun was in her hand, her pulse began to slow, and there it was again, that wonderful, terrifying calm, the whole messy world narrowing to a single, even road. Shoot.
Her finger came to rest against the trigger, the safety still on.
“Stay back,” she said, infusing her voice with all the cold precision she’d learned from Callum Harker.
One of the men actually flinched, but the other let out a delighted laugh, and the woman kept her eyes on Kate, as if daring her to try it:
“I don’t think you have it in you.”
Her grip tightened on the gun. “The last person who said that didn’t live very long.”
It would be so easy, whispered the darkness. It would feel so good. She wanted to, she wanted to more than anything wanted to hurt wanted to kill and these people deserved to pay they deserved—
She tried to picture August, stepping between her father and the barrel of the gun.
Not like this.
Even as her thumb clicked the safety off, she forced herself to breathe, to think. The wall behind her was nothing but brick, but to the right there was a dumpster and a low wall leading to God-knows-where.
“See?” taunted the woman, drawing a pair of cuffs from her back pocket. “All bark and no—”
Kate pulled the trigger.
The bullet struck the fire escape with a deafening crack, and the three thugs jumped, twisting reflexively toward the sound as Kate took off. The shock gained her a second’s head start, nothing more. She mounted the dumpster half an instant before the woman reached it, fingers clutching at her ankle. Kate kicked her away, swung herself up over the low wall, and dropped to the other side.
She hit the ground running and beelined south toward the Seam, hoping they wouldn’t follow.
But the too-quiet streets behind her filled with shouts and echoing steps. Kate was still sore from her run in the Waste, but imminent danger had a way of silencing pain. At last the Seam came into sight, three stories of wood and metal carving a line between North and South City.
She was surprised to see figures along its top, but she didn’t have time to wonder who they were. She charged toward the nearest gate, only to realize it was bolted shut. A call went up behind her and Kate skidded, changing direction as she ran for the next gate. Locked. But there had to be a way through.
Turn and fight, said the darkness, but she kept running, and there, at last, a way out—or in. A building, one of the structures consumed by the wall. The doors were plated with copper and there was a sign posted on them, something about a checkpoint, but she didn’t have time to stop and read, stop and think—
The doors swung open, and she burst through into a derelict lobby. There were voices nearby, the shuffle of feet, but Kate kept running—across the cavernous space toward a second set of doors, a mirror to the first.
Locked.
Of course, they were locked. Kate threw her shoulder against the wood once, twice, then reared back and slammed her reinforced heel into the digital lock. It cracked and gave just as the northern doors swung open behind her. A voice echoed through the hall.
“Get back here you bit—”
But Kate was already through the doors and out onto the southern side of the city.
Shouts went up from the Seam overhead but she kept running, taking a zigzag course through alleys and around corners, before finally slowing to a jog and then a walk and then, at last, limping to a stop. She clutched her side and realized she was still gripping the gun, knuckles white, and she had no idea where she was, but at least she was on the right side of the Seam.
That was a start.
The bag slid from her shoulder, and Kate sank to one knee and started rummaging through it right before she felt the rush of air, the weight of a mass falling toward her. She jumped back, narrowly avoiding the body that crashed to the ground.
Only it didn’t crash at all.
The shape landed in an elegant crouch and then rose, revealing long, lean limbs, and a plume of silver hair. Kate swung the gun up on instinct, but the creature was already closing the gap, fingers vising around Kate’s wrist before she could think to aim. The gun tumbled from her grip, even as the urge to fight washed through her, but it broke against a wall of shock at the creature’s eyes, which were not a burning red, but a flat, colorless gray. Kate couldn’t tell if the monster was a man or a woman, but she knew one thing: it was a Sunai.
A short steel blade appeared in the Sunai’s free hand, long fingers twirling the weapon, but what Kate had first taken for an ornamented hilt was in fact a kind of flute.
And the Sunai was lifting the instrument, as if to play.
“Wait,” said Kate—what a useless word—as the instrument brushed the Sunai’s lips. “I’m not—your enemy—” She tried to twist free, but the Sunai’s grip was steel.
“Only the guilty fight. Are you guilty, then?”
The answer rose in Kate’s throat, and when she swallowed, trying to hold it at bay, the Sunai’s hand tightened to the point of pain around her wrist, and the first beads of bloody light began to shine on the surface of her skin.
Disgust darkened the Sunai’s face and Kate’s head swam, her senses already slipping, but she kicked out, twisting sideways as she did, and managed to wrench herself free, free of the Sunai’s hold and the pain and the nearness of her own death. She staggered back a step, two, shoulders colliding with a wall as she clutched her wrist, the pricks of light already gone beneath her skin.
“I’m on your side!” she snapped, even as her fingers ached for the gun, the knife, the iron spike.
“You are a sinner,” snarled the Sunai with sudden force. “You will never be on our—”
“Caught you!” One of the thugs from North City came crashing around the corner, brandishing a pair of knives. “Thought you could—”
He saw the Sunai, and froze, while the Sunai’s own look darkened, their cold gray eyes taking in the collar around his throat. “What a foolish Fang you are.”
The thug was already scrambling away, but it was too late. The Sunai was on him in an instant, pulling him into an embrace that might have passed for tender, if not for the blade protruding from his side, the red light flooding to the surface of his skin, the way his mouth opened in a strangled scream.
Kate saw her chance and took off running.