“Anything good?” Kate was staring at him intently. “I only have one decent ear, and you have two stellar ones. The least you can do is share.”
His gaze fell to the tablet on the table, a vid file open on the screen. “What were you watching?”
Kate slid the tablet toward him. “You tell me.”
August looked down and saw the line of a steel bow streaked with blood. His stomach twisted. It was him. Walking back to the Compound the night he’d slaughtered Alice’s Malchai. The black tally marks stood out against his skin—at least, the patches of skin not covered in gore.
He didn’t recognize the thing on that screen, and he did, and he didn’t know which was worse. He could feel Kate’s eyes on him. He’d never understood how some people had such heavy gazes.
“August—”
“Don’t,” he warned.
“This isn’t you.”
“It is now. Why is it so hard to understand, Kate? I’m doing what I have to. I . . .”
You owe her nothing, warned his brother. In truth, part of him wanted to talk to Kate, to exorcise the voices in his head, make sense of the confusion, but he didn’t have the strength to argue. Not about this. His sleeves were rolled up, and he focused on the thin black marks that etched his skin.
“I hated you,” she said out of nowhere.
August’s head snapped up. “What?”
“When we first met. I hated you. Do you know why?”
“Because I was a monster?”
“No. Because you wanted to be human. You had all this power, all this strength, and you wanted to throw it away—for what? A chance to be weak, helpless. I thought you were an idiot. But then I watched you burn alive for that dream. I watched you tear yourself apart to hold on to it, and I realized something. It’s not about what you are, August, it’s about who, and that stupid, dreaming boy—that wasn’t a mistake, or a delusion, or a waste of energy. It was you.”
She leaned forward. “So where did you go?”
August started to answer, but a tray came crashing down onto the table, loud enough that they both jumped. Harris swung a leg over the bench. Ani and Jackson, too. Kate sat very still, and for a long moment, no one spoke, the tension drawing out like a note, warbling and brittle. In the end, Jackson was the one who broke it.
“No beef,” he muttered sullenly.
“Told you,” said Ani, spearing a piece of wilted broccoli as Kate rose to leave.
“Where are you going?” asked August, but she was already walking away. He swore under his breath and followed, hundreds of eyes following them out. “Kate.”
“Fine.” She reached the hall and headed straight for the nearest exit. “You’re doing what you have to, but so am I. I’ve been playing boot camp all day, but I’m not going to sit around any longer. You go on having your existential crisis, playing the big bad monster, but there’s a real demon out there, in our city, and I’m going to find it, with or without you.”
“I can’t let you go out there—”
“Then come with me. Help me hunt this thing down. Or stay out of my way.”
August caught her arm. “What will you do when you find it, Kate? How will you kill it? Are you sure you can kill it, with its claws in your head?”
He watched her try to say yes, saw the words catch in her throat. When she finally answered, her voice was brittle. “I don’t know,” she said, meeting his gaze, “but I’ll be damned if I let it kill me. You might not want to fight your monsters, August. But I’m fighting mine.”
He sighed, slung the violin over his shoulder, and took her hand.
“Come on.”
Fresh air flooded Kate’s lungs, crisp and cool, and for an instant she was dizzy from the sheer relief of being outside, even at night.
What had Henry Flynn said about the dark?
It makes us feel free.
A ribbon of UVR light surrounded the Compound, tracing a band of safety against the dark beyond. It stretched like a broad sheet, the width of a road. Like a moat. Thinner versions traced the bases of several nearby buildings—barracks, she guessed, extensions of the FTF’s main compound—but the rest of the city was dark in a way she’d never seen it.
It was unnerving, that darkness.
Thicker than the lack of light.
The night beyond the moat twisted and writhed, the shadows whispering to her.
hello little harker
She could feel it rising in her, that longing for a fight. All her life she’d clung to it like the grip on a knife, but now she put all her strength into setting it down.
In the distance, the Seam traced a thin line, and beyond that, the looming shape of her father’s tower. Sloan’s tower.
She thought of him standing in the penthouse with his ember-red eyes, his sickly sweet voice, his tongue running over sharpened teeth.
I will kill him, she thought. And I will take my time.
Her focus narrowed, thoughts condensing to a clear and perfect point—a vision of herself drawing a silver blade over Sloan’s skin, peeling him open one slice at a time, revealing those dark bones and— August caught her sleeve.
Her boots were skimming the edge of the light strip.
“Here,” said August, drawing a tablet from his pocket. He tapped the screen, and a second later the surface turned reflective. A mirror. “You said this is how you see into its head. So look.”
Her eyes were instantly drawn to the glass, but she resisted.
“I’m not your private scrying board. If I see where it is, we go together.”
August nodded. His grip tightened on his violin case, and she told herself this would work. It had to. She would hunt the monster down, and August would slay it, and the nightmare in her head would end, and she would kill Sloan, and then she would go back to Prosperity, and the Wardens, and Riley.
That wasn’t another life, another Kate, it was this one, it was hers, it was now.
She blew out a breath and turned toward the mirror, bracing herself.
Where are you? she asked the glass, just before she fell in.
She is back in her father’s office with the monster in the black suit and the shadows whispering weak
weak
weak in the window a pair of silver eyes round as moons —Where are you?— and for the first time the darkness pushes back the vision shudders
holds
she forces her way
to the glass and when
she reaches the window the image finally cracks shatters
into—
—red eyes everywhere people
screaming sobbing
begging
for mercy the taste of fear
like ash
in its mouth it moves
away
there
and gone and there again now
a group
of soldiers on an overpass guns
and badges catching
the light a tangle
of voices it reaches out
from the dark all hollow hunger and cold delight because
they do not see it coming—
Kate wrenched back, as if struck.
The tablet tumbled from her fingers and August caught it as she doubled over, pain jabbing like a cold knife behind her eyes. For an instant she was still trapped between the mirrors, caught somewhere outside herself, the ground eroding beneath her feet.
She blinked away the blinding white of the light strip.