“Break that for me,” she said, nodding at the driver’s side door.
“The window?” asked August, and she gave him a look that said yes, obviously the window, and he gave her a look that said I don’t commit petty crimes very often before he slammed his elbow into the glass to shatter it. The sound wasn’t loud, but it echoed through the garage as Kate reached in and unlocked the doors. She brushed the pebbles of broken glass from the seat and slid in as gingerly as possible, using the lighter’s hidden knife to pry open the panel beside the steering wheel. August rounded the car and sank into the passenger seat, the violin case between his knees as she sliced wires and began stripping them.
“Is this something they teach at boarding school?” he asked, craning to watch the garage behind them.
“Oh yeah,” she said, crossing two wires together. Nothing. “This, breaking and entering, monster killing. It’s all standard.” She stripped another pair and tried again. There was a spark, and the car’s engine thrummed to life.
“Impressive,” said August dryly.
She lifted both hands to the wheel, then winced as the pain caught up. “I don’t suppose you know how to drive?”
August shook his head. “No. I can probably figure it out—”
“That’s okay,” she said, shifting into drive. “We already have plenty of ways to die.”
She put her foot on the gas, and the car shot forward with surprising power, letting out a squeal that made August groan. It wasn’t that loud, she thought. Maybe Sunai had sensitive hearing. She gripped the wheel—growing up, she’d always liked cars, the fresh air racing past, the feeling of freedom, of motion. She wasn’t that fond of them since the accident, but driving was a handy skill, like physics and combat. She rounded the corner of the parking structure, and hit the brakes. There was a gate over the exit, a man in the booth.
She reached for the seat belt, then remembered the stitches and decided to leave it.
“Hold on,” she said, gunning the gas.
The car surged forward. August gripped the door. “Kate, I don’t think this is a—”
But the rest of his words were cut off by the satisfying crack of the front bumper connecting with the garage gate, the former denting and the latter snapping off as they burst through and onto the darkened street.
The car swerved for an instant before righting itself, and Kate smiled as she revved the engine, drowning the attendant’s shouts in their wake.
August twisted in his seat and looked back at the wreckage and the motel, and she wondered if he was thinking about Ilsa. She shifted lanes, following the traffic lights as they changed from red to green so that no matter what, they were always moving. “Is anyone coming?”
August slumped back against the seat with a ragged sigh. “Not yet.” His eyes were closed, his muscles tense, fingers white on the handle of the door as if he might be sick.
“You okay?”
“I’m fine.” She didn’t believe him, but his tone was clipped in that way that said to let it go. She had more important things to worry about right now than his mood, so she headed east and watched V-City shrink in her rearview mirror until it was a steel hill, a speck, and then, nothing.
“Tell me something,” said Kate.
The pain in her body had finally settled into something low and pervasive, but that was proving to be worse, because it made her want to fold in on herself, on the world, and that didn’t work behind the wheel of the car. August sat silently beside her, looking out into the darkness as they passed from the yellow into the green, and finally from the green into the Waste. If he noticed the shift, he didn’t say anything.
There wasn’t a strict boundary, some bright billboard to announce that you were now leaving V-City. There didn’t need to be. It was the transition from manicured lawns to wild grass, the change from streetlights and nice houses to nothing.
UVR lines carved out the road—not from overhead but set into the pavement below—and made the night beyond look solid. They were on the Eastern Transit, one of four supply roads that led from the capital all the way to the Verity border. Kate tried to imagine what they looked like from the sky, ribbons of light running like compass spokes away from V-City. From that angle, the Waste would register as a massive black ring, a two-hundred mile buffer between the capital and the subcities that hugged the periphery, each little more than a speck of light compared to V-City’s beacon.