August heard her coming.
People were made of pieces—looks and smells, sure, but also sounds. Everything about Emily Flynn was staccato. Everything about Henry was smooth. Leo’s steps were as steady as a pulse. Ilsa’s hair made the constant hush-hush of blankets.
And Kate? She sounded like painted nails tapping out a steady beat.
August was leaning back against the warm metal bleachers, chin tipped toward the sun, when she sat down in the row behind him. The steel bench thrummed from the sudden weight, and August decided that even if she hadn’t made a sound, he’d still have guessed it was her. She had a way of taking up space. He could feel the soft pressure of her gaze, but he kept his eyes closed. A gentle breeze ran fingers through his hair, and he let himself smile, a small almost-natural thing. A shadow slid across the red-white glow of sun, and his eyes drifted open and there she was, looking down at him. There was a softness to her features from this angle, a distant quality to her eyes, like clouds muddling a crisp blue sky.
“Hello,” he said.
“Hello,” she said. And then, absently, “Where were you?”
He squinted. “What?”
But Kate was already shaking her head, edges sharpening. “Nothing.”
August sat up, twisting slowly around to look at her. “Tell me,” he said, regretting the words the moment they were out. He could see her gaze flatten, the answer rising to her lips. “Or don’t,” he added quickly. “You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to.”
Kate blinked, her gaze focusing again. But then she said, “It’s just a game I sometimes play. When I want to be somewhere else.”
“Like where?”
A small crease appeared between her brows. “I don’t know. But you’re telling that if you could be anywhere right now, you’d be here on the Colton bleachers?”
August smiled. “It’s pretty nice.” He gestured to the field, the distant line of trees. “And of course, there’s the view.”
She rolled her eyes. Up close, they were blue. Not sky-bright, but dark, the same shade as her navy Colton polo. She had her hair twisted over one shoulder, and again he saw the teardrop scar in the corner of her eye, the silvery line that traced her face from scalp to jaw. He wondered how many people got close enough to notice. And then, before he could ask, she was leaning back, stretching her legs out on the bleachers.
“Shouldn’t you be in class?” she asked.
“I have study hall,” he said, even though he obviously wasn’t there, either. “What about you?”
“Gym,” she said. “But I got kicked out for misconduct.” August raised both brows, the way he’d seen Colin do when feigning surprise. “Did you know they teach self-defense here?” she went on. “It’s a joke. I mean, S-I-N-G tactics, really? As far as I know, a kick to the groin isn’t going to stop a Corsai from tearing you apart.”
“True,” he said, resting his elbows against the bench behind him. “But there are plenty of bad humans in the world, too.” Like your father. “So, did you get kicked out for lecturing the teacher?”
“Even better,” she said, running a hand through her sandy hair. “I got kicked out for breaking his collarbone.”
Something escaped August’s throat, a soft, breathless laugh. The sound took him by surprise.
“According to the counselor,” continued Kate, “I have a violence problem.”
“Doesn’t everyone?”
Neither one of them mentioned his map sketch or the monster she’d drawn across Verity, and soon an easy quiet settled over the bleachers, interrupted only by Kate’s nails, which she rapped in a soft, constant way against the metal bench, and the distant sounds of students running on the track. It wasn’t supposed to feel like this, thought August. He was sitting inches away from the daughter of a bloodthirsty tyrant, the heir to North City. He should feel disgusted, repulsed. At the very least, unnerved. But he didn’t.
He wasn’t sure what he felt. Frequency. Consonance. Two chords that went together.
Don’t push her away, said one voice, while another warned, Don’t get too close. How was he supposed to do both?
“So, Freddie,” she said, dragging herself upright, “what brings you to Colton?”
“I was homeschooled,” he said, and then, struggling to find words that weren’t a lie, “I guess my family thought . . . it was time for me to socialize.”
“Huh, and yet every time I’ve seen you, you’ve been alone.”
August shrugged. “I guess I’m not really a people person. What about you?”
Her eyes went wide in mock surprise. “Didn’t you hear? I burned down a school. Or did drugs. Or slept with a teacher. Or killed a kid. It really depends on who you ask.”
“Is any of it true?”
“I did burn down a school,” she said. “Well, part of a school. A chapel. But it was nothing personal. I just wanted to come home.”
August frowned. “You got out of V-City.” It was no small feat, with the border cities capped and the Waste in the way. “Why would you want to come back?”
Kate didn’t answer right away. Which was strange—most of the time he couldn’t stop people from talking—but she tipped her head back and looked up at the sky. It was a cloudless day, and for a second she seemed lost, as if she expected to see something up there, and didn’t. “It’s all I have left.” The words came out soft, like a confession, but she didn’t seem to notice. Her gaze drifted back to earth. “Are those real?”
August looked down and realized that his sleeves had ridden up enough to reveal the lowest line of tallies. Four hundred and nineteen.
“Yes,” he said, the truth across his lips before he even thought to stop it.
“What do they stand for?”
This time August bit back the answer, and ran a thumb over the oldest marks around his wrist. “One . . .” he said slowly, “for every day without a slip.”
Kate’s dark eyes widened in genuine surprise. “You don’t strike me as an addict.”
“Well,” he said thoughtfully, “I didn’t strike you as a Freddie, either.”
She cracked a smile. “So what’s your poison?”
He sighed dramatically, and let the truth tumble off his tongue. “Life.”
“Ah,” she said ruefully. “That’ll kill you.”
“Not as fast as cigarettes.”
“Touché,” she said, “but—”
She was cut off by a scream. August tensed, and Kate’s hand went straight for her backpack, but it was just some student on the field faux-tackling his girlfriend. She squealed again, beaming even as she fled.
August let out a low breath. He would never understand why people screamed for fun.
“You okay there?” asked Kate, and he realized he was gripping the bleachers, knuckles white. Gunfire crackled like static in the back of his head. He pried his fingers free.
“Yeah. Not a fan of loud noises.”
She pursed her lips, gave him a look that said how cute, then gestured to the case at his feet. “Violin?”
August looked down, nodded. He’d smuggled the instrument out of the compound this morning, slipping out before Leo could stop him. His fingers were itching to play again. He’d gone to the music room only to discover that an ID card wasn’t all you needed to use the practice space. He was halfway through the door when a girl cleared her throat behind him.
“Excuse me,” she said, “but the room’s mine.”
August hadn’t understood. “Yours?”
She pointed out a clipboard on the wall. It was a sign-up sheet. “My time,” she explained. August’s heart sank. He held the door open and let her pass, then examined the list of times and names on the sheet. It was Wednesday, and the space was booked solid until Friday afternoon. August wasn’t supposed to stay after school—Henry had been insistent, wanting him back across the Seam before the gates closed at dusk, even though he didn’t use them to get home—but in a rare moment of defiance, August had signed himself u
p.
“I’ve always liked music,” said Kate, picking at the metal polish on her nails. August waited for her to go on, but the bell rang and she shook her head, settling her hair back over one eye. “Are you any good?”
“Yes,” he said without hesitation.
“Will you play for me?”
August shook his head, and the look she gave him made it clear—she wasn’t used to being told no.
“Performance anxiety?” she said blandly. “Come on.”
She was looking at him through the sweep of blond, waiting, and he couldn’t exactly say that he played only for sinners. He swallowed, struggled to find a lie that skirted truth.
“Go on,” she insisted. “I promise not to—”
“Freddie!” shouted a voice, and August turned to see Colin waving him toward the cafeteria. He rose gratefully to his feet.
“I better go,” he said, taking up the case as casually as possible.
“I’ll get you to play for me,” she called as he descended the metal steps. “One way or another.”
He didn’t say anything, didn’t dare look back as he jogged over to Colin, who was staring baldly. When August reached the sidewalk, the boy patted him down. “He lives!” he announced with feigned shock.
August waved him off, and Colin fell into step beside him. “But seriously, Freddie,” he said, shooting a glance back at the bleachers. At Kate. “Do you have a death wish? Because I’m pretty sure there are faster, less painful ways to go. . . .”
Kate got through the rest of the day without hurting anyone, so that was something. She didn’t know if it was luck, odds, or Freddie. Even though she’d teased him, there had been a moment on the bleachers where the answer to Where are you? had really been Here. She wasn’t sure why, only that for the first time in ages, sitting in that strange but comfortable silence, she felt like herself. Not the Kate who grinned at the rumors, or the one who held a knife to a girl’s throat, or drove a crowbar through a monster’s heart.
The Kate she’d been before. The version of her that made jokes instead of threats. The one that smiled when she actually meant it.
But this wasn’t the right world for that Kate.
She tossed her bag onto the bed, and the vial from Dr. Landry tumbled out.
Maybe it was the pills, smoothing her edges. Maybe . . . but there was still something about Freddie. Something . . . disarming, infectious, familiar. In an auditorium full of stares, his was the gaze she felt. In a classroom full of students learning lies, he scribbled the truth in the margins. In a school that clung to the illusion of safety, he didn’t shy from talk of violence. He didn’t belong there, the way she didn’t belong there, and that shared strangeness made her feel like she knew him.
But she didn’t.
Not yet.
She sat at her desk, tapped her computer awake, and logged into the Colton Academy website.
“Who are you, Mr. Gallagher?” she wondered aloud, pulling up the student directory and scrolling through profiles until she found the one she was looking for. She clicked on Frederick Gallagher’s page. His information was listed on the left-hand side—height, age, address, etc.—but the photo on the right was odd. She’d had half a dozen pictures taken, one for every school, and they always insisted on front and center, eyes forward, big smile. But the boy on-screen wasn’t even looking at her.
His face was in profile, eyes cast down, edges blurred, and lips parted as if he’d been caught midbreath as well as midmotion. If it wasn’t for the barest edge of a black tally mark where his cuff was riding up, she wouldn’t have been sure it was him.
Why hadn’t the office retaken the photo?
There was something teasing about the blurred shot, and Kate found herself craving a better picture, wanting the luxury of being able to stare at someone without being stared at. She booted a new browser on the city’s updrive, went onto a social networking site the students all seemed to use, and typed in his name.
Two matches came up in the V-City area, but neither one was the Freddie she’d met. Which was odd, but Freddie said he was homeschooled. Maybe he’d never joined the site. She opened a third browser and typed his name into the search engine. It landed half a dozen hits—a mechanic, a banker, a suicide victim, a pharmacist, but no match for her Freddie.
Kate sat back in her chair, and tapped a metal nail against her teeth.
These days, everyone left a digital mark. All day, every day at Colton, people were snapping photos, recording every mundane moment as if it deserved to be preserved, remembered. So where was he?
Something twinged in her mind. Maybe she was being paranoid, searching for a complicated answer when the simple one—that he was that rare teen who preferred staying off-grid—was probably true.
Probably. But it was like an itch, and now she’d started scratching . . .
The drive wasn’t the only place that information was logged, not in North City. She logged into her father’s private uplink, clicked on the archive labeled human. The screen filled with thousands of thumbnails, each with a name and date. Freddie wasn’t like the other kids at Colton, and maybe she wasn’t the only one who’d noticed. She typed his name into the search bar, half hoping his face would show up with a tag for some disturbance, even just an anomaly, but—nothing.
Exasperated, she clicked back to the school directory and reconsidered the picture, staring at it for several long minutes as if it might come to life, complete the arc of motion, meet her eyes. When it didn’t, Kate scrolled through his profile, scribbled down his address, and got to her feet.
There was still one place she hadn’t looked.
“Hello?” she called out as she crossed the penthouse. No answer. She did a quick lap through the open layout. No sign of Sloan or Harker. The door to her father’s office was locked, but when she pressed her good ear to the wood, she didn’t hear the hum of the soundproofing system that Harker activated when he was inside. She keyed in the code—she’d set up a camera on her second day, caught the motion and order of his fingers—and a second later the door opened under her touch.
The lights came up automatically.
Callum Harker’s office was massive, and strangely classic, with a broad, dark desk, a wall of bookshelves, and a bank of windows overlooking the city. She crossed to the shelves and ran her hand over the large black books that ran the wall. Ledgers.
Harker was a careful man; he kept both physical and digital copies of the information on all his citizens. The computer was locked—Kate hadn’t been able to crack the access code—but the beautiful thing about books was that anyone could open them. The ledgers were alphabetical, and retranscribed every year. When people lost Harker’s protection in the course of that year, their names were blacked out. If they gained protection, their names were written in at the back of the book.
Kate pulled the G ledger from the wall and opened it on the desk, paging through until she found the name: Gallagher.
Eleven Gallaghers were listed under Harker’s protection in North City, and there was even a Paris Gallagher whose address matched the one on Freddie’s profile, but there was no mention of Freddie himself. But she’d seen the pendant around his neck. She turned to the back of the ledger, hoping to find his name in the additions.
It wasn’t there.
“Where are you?” she whispered, right before someone cleared his throat.
Her head snapped up. Her father was standing in the doorway, wiping his hands on a black square of silk. “What are you doing, Katherine?”
The air stuck in Kate’s lungs. She forced it out, hoping the exhale might pass for an exasperated sigh. “Looking for a name,” she said, leaning against the desk, as if she had every right to be there. “There’s a girl at my school who’s driving me crazy. She had a medal, and I was hoping it was stolen or expired, but alas,” she said, letting the ledger fall shut, “she’s still under your protection.”
Harker’s dark eyes hung on her. She tried to ignore the d
ried blood on his cuffs. “Sorry,” she added. “I should have waited for you to get home, but I didn’t know when that would be.”
“I didn’t think I’d left the room unlocked.”
“You didn’t,” said Kate coolly, pushing off the desk and walking out. She was relieved when he didn’t follow.
Back in her room, she sank into her chair, Freddie’s student profile still up on her screen. It made even less sense now, a blurred photo beside a name that, according to her father’s records, didn’t exist. Could he be using an alias? But why?
The only people who hid were the ones with something to hide.
So what was Frederick Gallagher hiding?
August hated blood—hated the sight, hated the smell, hated the slimy, too-thick feel—which was unfortunate, since he was currently covered in it.
It wasn’t his, of course.
It was Phillip’s. The FTF with the warm smile and the buzz cut, the one who treated August like a friend, and glared at Harris whenever he used the word monster.
“Hold him still,” ordered Henry. “I need to tourniquet the wound.”
Phillip’s shoulder had been torn from the socket. Visibly. His FTF gear had been shredded, and August could have reached out and traced his fingers over the Corsai’s claw marks—teeth marks? It was always hard to tell—if Phillip hadn’t been writhing around so much on the steel medical table.
August had been sitting at the counter doing homework, Allegro playing with his laces, when they got the call. Another attack. But this one wasn’t at the Seam. And it wasn’t random. It was an ambush. Harker’s monsters knew exactly where the FTF would be patrolling, and when. Someone had told them. And now four FTFs were dead and Phillip seemed hell-bent on going down in a blaze of obscenities and blood.
“For God’s sake, hold him still.”
Leo and August pinned Phillip down while Henry moved with careful, decisive motions over the vicious wound. His partner, Harris, stood to the side, blood streaked across his face, looking numb from shock while Emily stitched up a gash on his bicep. She didn’t have Henry’s surgical grace, but her hands were just as steady.