Kate’s hand was throbbing as she ran it under the kitchen tap. It looked like she’d put it on a stove. It felt that way, too. All she’d done was take August’s hand and not let go.
Anger, madness, joy . . . I don’t want to keep going.
That’s what he’d said in the woods.
Whatever he was going through now wasn’t joy. How long had he been suffering? She’d noticed the temper, when the car broke down, but he’d managed to keep most of the madness to himself. The joy he couldn’t. And now . . . the sound of his pained voice clawed inside her head.
I don’t want to disappear.
She set the bloodstained spikes in the sink, cut the tap, and wove back through the house. The bathroom was clouded with steam, but August was no longer standing in the shower, and she panicked until she noticed his mop of dark hair cresting the wall of the tub.
I can’t keep going toward the edge.
His eyes were closed, his head tipped back, his body dangerously still beneath the shower’s stream as the water rose over his hips.
Don’t let me fall.
“August?” she said quietly.
He didn’t answer. Didn’t move. Kate forced herself forward, holding her breath until August gave a small shudder. She exhaled, relieved by the subtle motion. His teeth were clenched, his eyes squeezed shut against the fire.
She watched as he took a breath, and went under.
He didn’t come back up.
His bones had stopped glowing, easing the skeletal effect that made her think of Malchai, of monsters. Beneath the water, August looked so . . . human. A teenage boy, his long limbs folded up and his black curls floating around his face. She counted the seconds, watching the last of the breath leave his lips, wondering if she’d need to pull him out.
And then, at last, he surfaced.
He gripped the rim of the tub and dragged himself up, water streaming into his eyes. They were no longer on fire, but they hadn’t returned to pale gray, either. They were darker, the color of charcoal, set too deep in his hollowing face.
Kate knelt and curled her fingers over his. His hand tensed beneath hers, but his skin had cooled enough to touch, and he didn’t pull away. “Kate,” he murmured, his vision sliding in and out of focus.
“I’m here,” she said. “Where are you?”
August closed his eyes, took a long breath. “Lying on my bed,” he whispered. “Listening to music while my cat chews on the corner of a book.”
Kate almost laughed. It was such an ordinary answer. His hand was getting hot again, so she let her fingers slide from his and sank back against the tub wall. Behind her, the shower almost sounded like rain, and she dug the silver medallion from beneath her collar, rubbing a thumb absently over the surface.
“Your house,” said August tiredly, and she couldn’t tell if it was a question.
“It was,” said Kate, turning the pendant between her fingers.
A small, shuddering sigh from the tub. “Why are there so many shadows in the world, Kate? Shouldn’t there be just as much light?”
“I don’t know, August.”
“I don’t want to be a monster.”
“You’re not,” she said, the words automatic, but as she said it, Kate realized that she believed it, too. He was a Sunai—nothing was going to change that—but he wasn’t evil, wasn’t cruel, wasn’t monstrous. He was just someone who wanted to be something else, something he wasn’t.
Kate understood the feeling.
“It hurts,” he whispered.
“What does?” asked Kate.
“Being. Not being. Giving in. Holding out. No matter what I do, it hurts.”
Kate tipped her head back against the tub. “That’s life, August,” she said. “You wanted to feel alive, right? It doesn’t matter if you’re monster or human. Living hurts.”
She waited for him to say more, wondering why she no longer felt the urge to talk. Maybe she was finally out of secrets, or maybe she was just getting used to him. When she couldn’t take the silence anymore, she got to her feet, stiff from the tile floor, and made her way down the hall to the first door on the left.
Beneath the film of dust, her bedroom walls were yellow—not sunflower yellow, but pale, almost white, the color of the sun, the real sun, not the one kids drew. The bed was narrow but soft, and there were drawings tacked up on one wall.
She rifled through the drawers and found an old journal and a few discarded pieces of clothing, things she hadn’t bothered to take with her back to V-City. They were all too small, of course, but Kate had to get out of her ruined clothes, so she continued to her mother’s room at the end of the hall.
The door wasn’t shut all the way, and it swung open under her touch.
The room beyond was simple and dark, the curtains drawn, but the sight of the bed, with its nest of pillows, sent an ache through her. If Kate closed her eyes, she could see herself sprawled on that bed, reading, while her mother playfully covered her with those pillows one by one.
She stepped slowly across the floor, over a weed growing up between the floorboards, and sank on the edge of the bed, ignoring the plume of dust. Beneath the dust, it still smelled like her mother, and before she knew what she was doing, Kate had curled up in the sea of pillows, burying her face in the nearest one.
Home, she thought, as the memory reached up and dragged her under.
They’d been back in V-City for four months, and Kate still couldn’t sleep. Every night she dreamed of monsters—teeth and claws and crimson eyes—and every night she woke up screaming.
“I want to go home,” she told her mother.
“We are home, Kate.”
But it didn’t feel right. It wasn’t like the stories her mother had told her when she was growing up. There was no happy family, no loving father—only a shadow she hardly saw, and the monster in his wake.
“I want to go home,” she pleaded every time she woke.
“I want to go home,” she begged every time her mother put her back to bed.
“I want to go home.”
Her mother was getting thinner, her eyes rimmed with red. The city was eating her, piece by piece. And then one night, she said, “Okay.”
“I’ll talk to your father,” she promised. “We’ll work it out.”
The night of the accident, Kate was still dreaming, still trapped in a room of violent shadows, when her mother shook her awake.
“Get up, Kate. We have to go.”
An angry red mark flared on her mother’s cheek, a welt with an H in the middle, the echo of Callum Harker’s ring where it had struck her face. Weaving through the darkened penthouse. A shattered glass. A toppled chair. The office doors sealed shut and sleep still clinging to Kate, tripping up her feet.
“Where are we going?” she asked in the elevator.
“Where are we going?” she asked in the garage.
“Where are we going?” she asked as the car’s engine came to life, and her mother finally answered.
“We’re going home.”
They never made it.
Kate sat up. Tears were streaming down her face, making tracks in the dust. She scrubbed her cheeks with the back of her hand.
I want to go home.
The words had been hers. Always hers. She’d said them a hundred times. When had they gotten twisted, tangled, confused?
That plea, that night, her father’s H bruised into her mother’s skin . . . what else had she forgotten?
The accident spiraled through her mind, pieces fitting into the gaps. The sudden headlights, as if they’d veered into oncoming traffic—but they hadn’t. It was the other car that swerved. And then her mother’s gasp, her sudden jerk on the wheel as she tried to get out of the way. Too late. The horrible momentum of the crash, the sound of crushed metal and broken glass, and the blinding force of her skull meeting the window. Her mother, slumped against the wheel, broken lungs fighting for air once, twice. The world suddenly so still, white noise in her ears
and blood in her eyes and, beyond the broken glass, her father’s pet just standing there, his crimson gaze sharp and his mouth curled into a rictus grin.
Kate surged up off the bed, and retched on the old wood floor. She crouched there, forcing air into her lungs. How could she forget so much?
But she remembered now.
She remembered everything. And those memories didn’t belong to a different Kate. They were hers. Her life. Her loss. And one way or another, she would have Sloan’s heart.
Shaking, she got to her feet, steadied herself, and rounded the bed. She rolled the rug up with her shoe, fingers skimming the wooden floor until she found the lip of the loose board and shifted it aside. Nestled in the darkness beneath she found the metal case and lifted it free. She spun the lock, lining up the numbers until the case clicked open. Inside she found a clip of cash, a set of border papers, and a handgun. Her mother hadn’t wanted to take it, but Harker insisted, so she had put it here, with the other things she didn’t need. Kate pocketed the cash, checked the gun’s magazine—it was full of silver-tips—and slid it into her waistband, tucked against her spine, before turning to the papers. She thumbed through the stack, hesitating when she saw Alice Harker’s face staring up at her. She put her mother’s papers back in the box, folded her own, and got up.
In her mother’s chest of drawers, Kate found a dark sweater and when she held it up, she was surprised to see how close they were in size. Another reminder of how much time had passed. She set the sweater on the chest of drawers and stripped off August’s jacket and the shirt beneath, cringing at the way her stitches tugged as she pulled on the clean clothes, the silver medallion warm against her bare skin. She closed her eyes and brought the sweater cuffs to her nose, inhaling the fading scent of lavender. Her mother had tucked it into all the drawers to keep the clothes fresh.
She found a T-shirt for August and slung it over her shoulder.
The bathroom was still quiet in that heavy way, so she hung the shirt on the door and went outside, padding across the tangled grass and ruined garden toward the small garage. The sun was already starting to sink, but the light caught on something in the distance, beyond the line of trees and back in the direction of the Waste.
Kate squinted.
It looked like some kind of warehouse, or an industrial barn. It was new—at least, it hadn’t been there six years ago—but the whole thing was still, no smoke rising from the chimneys, no trucks coming and going, no perimeter. Either it had been abandoned or raided.
Inside the garage, she found the car. It had gone unused, even when they lived here, but her mom had insisted on having one, in case of emergencies. The day they returned to V-City, Harker had sent a small entourage to pick them up, so there’d been no reason to take it. She disconnected the battery from the generator and closed the hood. She tipped a gallon of gas into the tank and tried the door. It creaked, but came open, and Kate lowered herself into the driver’s seat, and found the key tucked against the visor. She slid it into the ignition, held her breath, and turned. On the first try the motor shuddered. On the second, it started.
A victorious sound escaped her throat.
And then, as she turned the car off, she heard the rumble of a second engine. A distant truck. She held her breath and reminded herself that the main road lay on the other side of an incline and beyond the line of trees. She reminded herself that no one could see the house from there, but she still stayed in the car, gripping the wheel, until all she could hear was her heart.
August knew he was losing his mind.
The worst part was he could feel it happening.
The sickness had taken over his body, infecting his thoughts, and now he was trapped inside himself, caught in the haze like a dreamer trapped at the edge of sleep. He could feel the corner of the dream but he couldn’t reach it, couldn’t pull himself out.
He couldn’t hold on to his words, either. They slid through his thoughts and out of his mouth and then they were gone before he could grasp their meaning.
The pain had faded for a while, smothered by madness and joy, but now the tallies seared across his skin again, pulsing hotly, and the gunshots rang through his head in a barrage of white noise. He pressed his burning forehead against the cold tiles, his skin hissing like doused fire as the cold fought against the fever.
His body finally cooled and he slumped back against the wall of the tub, letting the cold water rise over his shins, up his spine, closing over his ribs.
Kate came and went, her dark eyes floating in the steam, here and gone and here again.
She was here now.
“Listen to me,” he said, trying to hold on to the words before they got away. “You need . . . to go.”
“No.”
“You can’t . . . be here . . . when I fall.”
Her hand on his again, one of them cold and the other hot and he didn’t know which was which. Lines were blurring. “I’m not going to let you fall, August.”
Again, the fear, the wrenching sadness. “I . . . can’t . . .”
“You can’t hurt me,” she cut in. “Not as long as you’re you, right? So I’m going to stay.”
He clenched his teeth, closed his eyes, and tried to focus on his heart, his bones, his muscles, his nerves. Picked himself apart piece by piece, cell by cell, tried to feel every little atom that added up to him.
Every one of those atoms begged him to let go, to give in, to let the darkness wash over him. He felt himself sliding toward unconsciousness and forced himself awake, scared that if he went under now, something else would surface.
Kate perched on the edge of the couch, a cigarette between her teeth.
She’d scavenged and come up with half a pack, her mother’s old stash.
Those things can kill you, he’d said that first day.
Kate’s lips quirked around the cigarette. She clicked the silver lighter, watched the flame dance in front of the tip, then put the fire out, and tossed the cigarette aside, unlit.
Plenty of other ways to die.
She clicked the television on, cringing at the sight of her face on the screen.
“. . . the hours since Harker’s press conference,” the news anchor was saying, “there has been a rise in unrest along the Seam, and FTF and Harker forces have reportedly come to blows. We go now to Henry Flynn . . .”
The screen cut to a press conference. A slim man stood behind a podium, back straight.
A dark-skinned woman stood at his left, her hand on his shoulder—his wife, Emily. On his other side, an FTF with his arm in a sling. Thousands of task force members, and Flynn had picked a wounded one. Clever, thought Kate grudgingly, casting himself as the victim. Then again, he was: His son was missing, framed for a crime he didn’t commit. Because of her father. Because of her.
“My family had nothing to do with the attack on Katherine Harker.”
“Is it true you planted a spy at her school?”
“Is it true one of your Sunai is missing?”
“Is it true—”
Kate clicked the television back off, dug the cell from her pocket, and was halfway through a message to her father when a sound cut through her thoughts.
Tires. On gravel.
Her head snapped up. The sound had been muffled by the TV and the hiss of the shower, and by the time she got off the couch and looked out the window, the car was pulling to a stop out front. A man climbed out of the driver’s side, young and lean in a black FTF cap. Kate tensed. A member of Flynn’s task force? She tugged the gun from her back, and switched off the safety as the man climbed the steps, and knocked.
Her stomach dropped as she saw the handle. She hadn’t locked the door.
“August Flynn?” called the man, and then, “Are you in there?”
Kate held her breath.
What was he doing here?
She hesitated. Maybe it was safe. Maybe he didn’t mean them any harm. Maybe she could go with August to South City. . . .
The
man started knocking again, and she began to creep across the living room, unsure of whether she was going toward the door or the hall. Maybe . . . but how had he found them?
The knocking stopped.
“Katherine Harker?” called the voice.
Her chest tightened.
“I know you’re in there.”
Her eyes were trained on the front door, so she didn’t see the side table, the one she always used to catch her knee on. Her shin caught the wooden leg, and the framed photo on top fell facedown with a hard snap.
The handle began to turn, and Kate took off toward the hall.
She was halfway there when the door burst open.
August heard a sound beyond the shower.
A heavy beat. He thought it could be one of Kate’s songs but there were no words, only the repetitive Thud. Thud. Thud.
August dragged himself into a sitting position. It hurt to breathe, hurt to move, but he was still here, still him.
He got to his feet, pants plastered to his skin with water, and swayed, then steadied himself against the tile wall as he turned the shower off, straining to hear over the pulse of the gunfire in his head. But beyond the harsh staccato, he heard his name, and then the sound again, and he realized it had the steady cadence of a fist against wood.
Thud. Thud. Thud.
He stepped out of the tub, feeling like his body was made of glass—one wrong move and it would simply shatter. He braced himself a moment on the edge.
“Kate?” he called.
And then he heard the crash.
The door burst open as Kate crossed the entryway. The man caught her around the waist, and the two went down struggling. He landed on top of her hard, wrenching her wrists over her head, but she got her knee up into his stomach, and then her foot, sending him back into the wall as she rolled over and up, and leveled the gun.
“Don’t move,” she growled, heart racing, but hands steady. His hat had fallen off, and his hair fell into his eyes, but not before she saw the ruined H on his cheek. Not FTF, then. One of Sloan’s. “Put your hands up.”