August unzipped the coat a little, and a small, furry face poked out the top.
Henry’s eyes widened. “What is that?”
“It’s a cat,” said August.
“Yes,” said Henry, rubbing his neck. “I’ve seen them before. But what is it doing in your jacket?”
“He belonged to Osinger,” explained August, freeing the cat from his coat. “I felt responsible—I was responsible—and I couldn’t . . . I tried to leave but . . .”
“August.”
He switched tactics. “You’ve taken in your share of strays,” he said. “Let me have this one.”
That earned him a relenting smile. “Who will take care of it?” asked Henry.
Just then someone made a sound—something between a gasp and a delighted squeak—and Ilsa was there between them, lifting the small creature into her arms. August nodded at Henry as if to say, I can think of someone who would love to. Henry just sighed, shook his head, and left the room.
Ilsa brought the cat an inch from her face and looked it in the eyes. It responded by reaching out a single black paw and bringing it to rest on the bridge of her nose. The cat seemed mesmerized by her. Most things were. “What’s its name?” she whispered.
“I don’t know,” said August.
“Everybody needs a name,” she cooed, sinking cross-legged to the kitchen floor. “Everybody deserves one.”
“Then name it,” said August.
Ilsa considered the small black cat. Held him to her ear. “Allegro,” she announced.
August smiled. “I like that,” he said, sitting down across from her. He reached out, and scratched the cat’s ears. Its purr thrummed under his fingers.
“He likes you,” she said. “They can tell the difference, you know, between good and bad. Just like we can.” Allegro tried to climb into her hair, and she dragged him gently back into her lap.
“Will you look after him, while I’m at school?”
Ilsa folded herself around the cat. “Of course,” she whispered. “We will look after each other.”
They were still sitting on the floor with Allegro when Leo returned, a steel guitar strapped to his back, and a streak of blood—not his—across his cheek. He took one look at Allegro and frowned. Allegro took one look at him and put its ears back. Ilsa broke into a laugh, as sweet as chimes, and right then August knew, for sure, that he was keeping the cat.
Kate sat on her bedroom floor until the music stopped.
Her hands were shaking a little as she lit a cigarette; she took a long drag, leaned her head back against the door, and looked around. Her room, like the rest of the penthouse, was sleek and sparse, made of sharp edges and hard lines. There were no traces of her childhood, no height measurements or nicks, no stuffed animals or old clothes, no fashion ads or posters. No field beyond the window.
When she was twelve, it had felt sterile, cold, but now she tried to embrace the room’s austerity. To embody it. The blank walls, the unshakable calm.
One of the few pieces of decoration was a folding frame with a pair of photographs inside. She plucked it from the table. In the first photo, a five-year-old Kate stood with one arm thrown around her father, the other wrapped around her mom. Above her head, Callum kissed his wife’s temple. Alice Harker was beautiful—not just in the way that all children think their parents are—but concretely, undeniably gorgeous, with sun-kissed hair and large hazel eyes that lit up whenever she smiled. The picture had been taken two months before the Phenomenon.
The second photo was a reenactment, taken the day they returned to V-City after the truce. Together again. A family reunited, made whole. She ran her thumb over the faces. An eleven-year-old Kate with her arms around her parents, reunited after six years apart. Six years of chaos and fighting. Six years of quiet and peace.
The changes showed on all of them. Kate was no longer a round-faced child, but a freckled youth. Her mother had tiny wrinkles, the kind you got from laughing. And her father still looked at Alice, his gaze intense, as if afraid that if he looked away, she would vanish again.
And she had.
“Get up, Kate. We have to go.”
Sloan was wrong. Kate had wanted to come back to V-City, had wanted to stay.
“I want to go home,” she’d whispered.
“I want to go home,” she’d begged.
It was her mother who couldn’t adjust. Her mother who dragged her from bed in the middle of the night, eyes red and lipstick smeared across her cheek.
“Hush, hush, we have to be quiet.”
Her mother who bundled her into the car.
“Where are we going?”
Her mother who drove into oncoming traffic.
Her mother who slammed the car into the concrete rail.
Her mother who died with her head against the wheel.