Apparently the transit roads used to be packed, back in the days before the Phenomenon, when travel in and out of the territory wasn’t restricted, and then after, when people tried to evacuate the city, only to be pushed back by those who already lived outside it. These days the Waste roads were largely bare, save for the semis carrying shipments between subcities and the capital.
It was a dangerous job. The Waste looked empty, but it wasn’t. Not many Malchai came this way, but the Corsai loved to hunt in the dark and pick off anything they could, from a cow to a family of five. The monsters that ventured this far out served no master, and the people who braved the Waste were just as lethal. Survivalists, mostly, scavengers who raided homes and stole from semis. These were the people who didn’t have the money to buy Harker’s protection, the ones who didn’t want to fight for Flynn and his task force, or die on his moral high ground. They didn’t want anything to do with V-City. They just wanted to stay alive.
But the dead zone didn’t go on forever. She’d spent most her life on the other side of the Waste, and she knew that out ahead there was a place where razor wire gave way to open fields, and the high beams trailed into starry nights, and a girl could grow up in a house with her mother afraid of nothing, not even the dark.
“Tell me something,” she said again.
August had been sitting there, his eyes fixed on the night, his fingers tapping out some kind of short, staccato rhythm against his leg. Now he glanced toward her. His face looked strangely hollow, his eyes feverish. “Like what?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “A story?”
August frowned. “I don’t like stories.”
Kate frowned, too. “That’s weird.”
“Is it?” asked August.
Kate drummed her nails on the wheel. The paint was chipping. “Yeah. I mean, most people want to escape. Get out of their heads. Out of their lives. Stories are the easiest way to do that.”
August’s gaze escaped to the window. “I suppose,” he said. It was maddening how little he talked, how much she wanted to. She switched on the radio, but the signal was already full of static, so she snapped it back off. The quiet gnawed at her already fraying edges.
“Say something,” she whispered. “Please.”
August’s jaw clenched. His fingers tightened on his pants. But he cleared his throat and said, “I don’t get why people are always trying to escape.”
“Really?” said Kate. “Take a look around.”
In the distance beyond August’s window, the nothing gave way to something—a town, if it could be called a town. It was more like a huddle of ramshackle structures, buildings gathered like fighters with their backs together, looking out on the night. The whole thing had a starved dog look about it. Fluorescent lights cut glaring beams through the darkness.
“I guess it’s different for me,” he said, his voice taut. “One moment I didn’t exist and the next I did, and I spend every day scared I’ll just stop being again, and every time I slip, every time I go dark, it’s harder to come back. It’s all I can do to stay where I am. Who I am.”
“Wow, August,” she said softly. “Way to kill the mood.”
That won her a small exhausted laugh. But by the time it left his lips, it was already fading. He turned his face away, and Kate flexed her fingers on the wheel and kept her eyes ahead. Pain sparked across her stomach every time she breathed. Beside her, August was quiet, coiled, eyes on the night.
“What happened to her?” she asked, trying to distract them both.
“Who?”
“Ilsa,” she said. “She doesn’t seem . . . all there.”
August rubbed his fingertips over the tallies above his wrist. “She’s never been all there,” he said. “For the longest time I thought . . . I thought that was just her way. Scattered. I didn’t get it until recently.”
“Get what?”
“It’s who she is,” he said. “It’s what she is. Cause and effect.”
“You mean it has to do with the catalyst?”
August nodded. “Sunai are the result of tragedies,” he said, “acts of horror so dark they upset the cosmic balance. Leo came from some kind of cult slaughter in the first weeks of the catalyst. This whole group thought the world was ending, so they threw themselves off a roof. Only they didn’t go alone; they dragged their families with them. Parents. Children.”
Kate let out a shallow breath. “Christ.”
“No wonder my brother is so righteous,” he said softly.
“Ilsa was different,” he continued. “Emily—Henry’s wife—she told me the story. Ilsa came from a bombing in the basement of a big hotel in North City.”
The Allsway Building, thought Kate. Harker Hall. You could still see the scorch marks on the walls.