Emily set the knife down with a click. “Do you even have to ask?”
“You think I’ll get hurt?” And then, before she could answer, August was on his feet. In a single, fluid move he took up the knife and drove it down into his hand. Henry flinched, and Emily sucked in a breath, but the blade glanced off August’s skin as if it were stone, the tip burying in the chopping block beneath. The kitchen went very quiet.
“You act as though I’m made of glass,” he said, letting go of the knife. “But I’m not.” He took her hands, the way he’d seen Henry do so many times. “Em,” he said, softly. “Mom. I’m not fragile. I’m the opposite of fragile.”
“You’re not invincible, either,” she said. “Not—”
“I’m not putting you out there,” Henry cut in. “If Harker’s men catch you—”
“You let Leo lead the entire task force,” countered August. “His face is plastered everywhere, and he is still alive.”
“That’s different,” said Henry and Emily at the same time.
“How?” he challenged.
Emily brought her hands to August’s face, the way she did when he was a child—but that wasn’t the right word. He’d never been a child, not really, children didn’t come together fully formed in the middle of a crime scene. “We just want to protect you. Leo’s been part of the campaign from day one. But that makes him a constant target. And the more ground we gain in this city, the more Harker’s men will try to exploit our weaknesses and steal our strengths.”
“And which am I?” asked August, pulling away. “Your weakness, or your strength?”
Emily’s warm brown eyes went wide and flat as the word spilled out. “Both.”
It was unfair to ask, but the truth still stung.
“Where is this coming from?” asked Henry, rubbing his eyes. “You don’t really want to fight.”
He was right, August didn’t want to fight—not on the streets in the dead of night, and not here with his family—but there was this horrible vibration in his bones, something struggling to get out, a melody getting louder and louder in his head. “No,” he said. “But I want to help.”
“You already do,” insisted Henry. “The task force can only treat the symptoms. You and Ilsa and Leo, you treat the disease. That’s how it works.”
But it’s not working! August wanted to shout. The V-City truce had held for only six years—Harker on one side, and Flynn on the other—and it was already fraying. Everyone knew it wouldn’t hold. Every night, more death crept across the Seam. There were too many monsters, and not enough good men.
“Please,” he said. “I can do more if you let me.”
“August . . . ,” started Henry.
He held up his hand. “Just promise me you’ll think about it.” And with that he backed out of the kitchen before his parents were forced to tell him the truth.
August’s room was an exercise in entropy and order, a kind of contained chaos. It was small and windowless, close in a way that would have been claustrophobic if it weren’t so familiar. Books had long outgrown their shelves and were now stacked in precarious piles on and around his bed, several more open and splayed, pages down, across the sheets. Some people favored a genre or subject; August had little preference, so long as it wasn’t fiction—he wanted to learn everything about the world as it was, had been, could be. As someone who had come quite suddenly into being, like the end of a magic trick, he feared the tenuous nature of his existence, feared that at any moment he might simply cease to be again.
The books were stacked by subject: astronomy, religion, history, philosophy.
He was homeschooled, which really meant he was self-schooled—sometimes Ilsa tried to help, when her mind worked in columns instead of knots, but his brother, Leo, had no patience for books, and Henry and Emily were too busy, so most of the time August was on his own. And most of the time it was okay. Or rather, it used to be okay. He wasn’t sure when exactly the insulation had started to feel like isolation, just that it had.
The only other thing in his room besides furniture and books was a violin. It sat in an open case balanced across two stacks of books, and August drifted instinctively toward it, but resisted the urge to take it up and play. Instead he nudged a copy of Plato off his pillow and slumped down onto the tangled sheets.
The room was stuffy, and he pushed up the sleeves of his shirt, revealing the hundreds of black tallies that started at his left wrist and worked their way up, over elbow and shoulder, around collarbone and rib.
Tonight there were four hundred and twelve.
August pushed the dark hair out of his eyes and listened to Henry and Emily Flynn, still in the kitchen, as they talked on in their soft-spoken way, about him, and the city, and the truce.