But beyond the gate, these stairs blazed with light.
The FTF had spent three painstaking weeks securing the line, sealing up all the cracks and pumping the passage so full of UV rays that Harris and Jackson had nicknamed it “the tanner,” since you could pick up a tan between the checkpoint and the Compound.
Rez undid the series of locks, and August flinched a little at the brightness as they made their way down to the platform and then onto the tracks.
“Stay together!” ordered Ani as Harris locked the gate again behind them.
It was a dead zone down here, and the comm signals guttered out, the tunnels echoing around them as they walked in rows of two and three. Jackson and Harris punctuated the silence by lobbing instructions at the shaken recruits while August focused on the beat of his heart, the tick of his watch, the markers on the walls, counting down the distance until they could come up for air.
When they finally climbed the stairs to the street, the Compound rose like a sentinel before them, lit from tower to curb. A UV-Reinforced strip the width of a road traced the building’s base, the technological equivalent of a castle moat, powering up as the daylight began to thin.
The Compound steps were flanked by soldiers, their expressions varying from grim to annoyed at the sight of the newest North City survivors; but when they saw August, their eyes went to the ground.
Rez peeled away with a “later, boss,” and the forty-two recruits were marched up the steps, but August lingered at the edge of the light strip, listening.
In the distance, somewhere beyond the Seam, someone cried out. The sound was too far away, too high, too broken for human ears to catch, but August heard it all the same, and the longer he listened, the more sounds he heard, and the more the chords began to untangle, the quiet unraveling into a dozen distinct noises: A rustle in the darkness; a guttural growl; metal dragging against rock; the buzz of electricity; a shuddering sob.
How many citizens, he wondered, were still across the Seam?
How many had fled into South City or escaped into the Waste?
How many had never made it out?
One of the first things Sloan and his monsters had done was round up as many humans as possible and trap them in makeshift prisons fashioned from hotels, apartment buildings, warehouses. Word was that every night they’d let a few of them go. Just for the fun of hunting them down.
August turned back and went inside. He headed straight for the bank of elevators, avoiding the eyes of the soldiers, the new recruits, the little girl being handed off to a member of the FTF.
He leaned against the elevator wall, relishing the moment of solitude—right before a hand caught the closing door. The metal parted, and another Sunai stepped in.
August straightened. “Soro.”
“Hello, August,” said Soro, eyes brightening. Their fingers brushed the button for the twelfth floor.
The newest Sunai appeared older than either of their siblings, but they treated Ilsa like a ticking bomb and looked at August the way he had once looked at Leo, with a mixture of caution and deference.
Soro was tall and lean, pale skin marked with small black X’s. They sported a plume of silver hair that worked like a shadow, changing their face depending on how it fell. Today it was swept back, their delicate cheekbones and strong brow on full display.
August had first thought of Soro as a she, though in truth, he hadn’t been sure, and when he’d worked up the courage to ask whether Soro considered themself male or female, the newest member of the Flynn family had stared at him for a long moment before answering.
“I’m a Sunai.”
That was all they said, as if the rest didn’t matter, and August supposed it didn’t. He never thought of them as anything but Soro after that.
As the doors slid shut and the elevator rose, August cast a short, sideways glance at the other Sunai. The front of their uniform was caked with a mixture of blackish gore and human blood, but Soro didn’t seem to notice or, at least, didn’t seem to care. They enjoyed hunting—no, enjoyed was probably the wrong word.
Soro possessed neither Leo’s righteousness, nor Ilsa’s whimsy, nor, as far as August could tell, his own complicated desire to feel human. What they did possess was an unshakeable resolve, a belief that the Sunai existed solely to destroy monsters and eliminate the sinners responsible for them.
Pride—perhaps that was right word.
Soro prided themself on their ability to hunt, and while they lacked Leo’s passion, they more than matched his technique.
“Did you have a good day?” asked August, and Soro flashed him the ghost of a smile, so faint others probably wouldn’t even see it, so faint August himself might have missed it if he hadn’t spent so long learning how to put his own emotions on display just so humans would see.
“You and your strange questions,” they mused. “I ended seven lives. Does that count as good?”
“Only if they deserved to die.”
A slight crease formed in Soro’s brow. “Of course they did.”
There was no waver, no doubt, and as August stared at Soro’s reflection in the steel door, he couldn’t help but wonder if their catalyst had anything to do with their resolve. Like all Sunai, they had been born from tragedy, but unlike the massacre that brought August forth, Soro’s had been more . . . voluntary.
A month after North City’s plunge back into chaos, a group calling themselves the HPC—Human Power Corp—got their hands on a weapons cache and decided to bomb the subway tunnels, home to so many of the city’s monsters.
And because killing Corsai was tricky (shadows were easy to disperse, but hard to erase), they lured as many Malchai as they could into the tunnels, using themselves as bait. It was a success—if a suicide mission can ever be called a success. A fair number of monsters were killed, along with twenty-nine humans, a stretch of the North City underground collapsed, and the self-named Soro was the only thing to emerge from the wreckage, followed out by a thin, wavering trail of classical music, the kind Harker had piped into the subways for so long.
The elevator came to a stop at the twelfth floor, and Soro stepped out, glancing back before the doors closed.
“Did you?”
August blinked. “Did I what?”
“Have a good day?”
He thought of the man begging for his life, the little girl clutching her mother’s leg. “You’re right,” he said, as the elevator door slid shut. “It’s a strange question.”
By the time August reached the Compound roof, his body was aching for air.
It wasn’t a physical thing, like hunger or sickness, but he felt it all the same, driving him up, up, up to the top of the Compound.
You could see the whole city from here.