“Do you know how many stars she has?”
August shook his head.
Leo’s fingers splayed. “Two thousand one hundred and sixty-two.”
August started to do the math, then stopped. Six years. Six years since Ilsa had last gone dark. Six years since something ended the territory war.
Leo must have seen the understanding register. He traced a circle with his index finger. “Who do you think made the Barren, little brother?”
Beyond the door, the traitor was confessing in a broken whisper. Ilsa took his face in her hands and guided him down to the concrete floor. She lay on her side, stroking his hair.
Somewhere in the city was a place where nothing grew.
“That’s not possible,” whispered August. The last time he’d gone dark, he’d taken out a room of people. The idea that Ilsa could level a city block? Leave a scar on the surface of the world? If that was true, no wonder Henry didn’t want the truce to break. The FTF thought Flynn had a bomb.
And they were right.
Behind his eyes, August saw the stretch of scorched earth at the center of the city. Did she . . . did she mean to do it? Of course not—he hadn’t meant to hurt anyone, either—but things got lost in the darkness. When Sunai went dark, lives ended. There were no rules, no boundaries: the guilty and the innocent, the monstrous and the human—they all perished.
A culling, that’s what Leo called it.
How many had died that day in the square? How many innocent lives lost among the guilty? It wouldn’t come to that again. It couldn’t. There had to be another answer.
“Her confinement was part of the truce,” continued Leo. “But memories are short, and it seems our Northern half needs to be reminded.”
The way he spoke of her made August’s skin crawl. “She isn’t a tool, Leo.”
His brother looked at him with those terrifying black eyes, their surfaces too flat, too smooth. “We are all tools, August.”
Inside the cell, Ilsa began to hum. The sound barely reached him, a muffled song that still sent a tremor through his bones. Unlike August, who relied on his violin, or Leo, who could make his music with almost anything, Ilsa’s only instrument was her voice.
August watched, a dull hunger rolling through him as the red light rose to the surface of the man’s skin and spread through hers like a flush. He’d just fed, and still it ached, his constant need, a hollowness he feared would cease to exist only when he did.
Twin tendrils of smoke rose from the man’s hollowed eyes as the last of his life escaped. The corpse went dark.
“One day you’ll see,” said Leo calmly. “Our sister’s true voice is a beautiful, terrible thing.”
Beyond the Plexi and steel, Ilsa ran her hand along the man’s hair like a mother putting a child to sleep.
August felt ill. He backed away, turned, and retraced his steps to the medical wing, where Harris hadn’t moved, and Henry was still working on Phillip’s shoulder, and Phillip looked halfway to dead. Suddenly, August was unbearably tired.
He almost asked if it was true about Ilsa, but he already knew.
Instead he said, “We have to do something.”
Henry looked up from the table, exhausted. “Not you, too.”
“Something to stop the truce from breaking,” said August. “Something to stop another war.”
Henry rubbed the back of his arm against his eyes, but said nothing. Harris said nothing. Leo, now standing in the doorway, said nothing.
“Dad—”
“August.” Emily brought a hand to his shoulder, and he realized he was shaking. When she spoke, her voice was low and steady. “It’s late,” she said, wiping a smudge of blood from his cheek. “You better go upstairs. After all,” she added, “it’s a school night.”
A strangled sound clawed up his throat.
He wanted to laugh at the absurdity of this life, with all its farces. He wanted to take up his violin and play and play and play until all the hunger was gone, until he stopped feeling like a monster. He wanted to scream, but then he thought of his sister’s voice turning the city to ash, and bit his tongue until pain filled his mouth in lieu of blood.
“Go on,” urged Emily, nudging him toward the elevator.
And he went, following the trail of blood, like bread crumbs, through the door.
“Rough night?” asked Kate, climbing the bleachers.
Freddie’s head was bowed over a book, but she could see the shadows under his eyes, the tension in his jaw.
He didn’t look up. “That obvious?”
She dropped her bag. “You look like hell.”
“Why, thank you,” he said dryly, raking a hand through still-damp hair.