But all she said was, “You’ve got a pair of eyes on you,” and pressed the damp towels to Kate’s nose, as if that was all there was to it.
“Thank you,” murmured Kate, trying to hide the tremor in her voice, the surprise, the relief. But the moment the woman was gone, she slumped against the counter, hands shaking.
Well, thought Kate grimly.
At least she wasn’t contagious.
NOW LEAVING PROSPERITY, announced the sign.
There was no guard tower, no armed checkpoint—no penalty for trying to get out—just an open gate. And then she was in the buffer zone, the mile-long stretch of neutral land between territories.
She came to the four-way stop, the same one she’d passed through before, and was hit by another moment of déjà vu. The base of her skull prickled as she pulled forward, taking the road toward Verity.
The signal on the radio failed.
The road ahead was empty.
Turn around, said a voice in her head. Turn around while you still can. But it was already being drowned out by the thought of her iron spikes, of her gun, of her bare hands sinking into—
Dammit, she thought, gripping the wheel. Keeping that voice out, it was like trying to keep your eyes open on the road at night, fatigue wearing you down a little more with every yawn, the slippery slope between a blink and something deadly.
She slowed as the Verity border came into sight.
The barricade was down and a soldier emerged from the patrol building as Kate adjusted her sunglasses and slowed to a stop. She shifted the car into neutral but didn’t turn the engine off, letting her fingers rest on the gearshift.
The guard wasn’t that old, maybe in his early twenties, a little on the squat side. A patch on his uniform marked him as a Prosperity citizen—the surrounding territories of Temperance, Fortune, and Prosperity took turns manning the Verity border. He had an assault rifle slung on a strap, but at the sight of Kate, he swung the weapon back over his shoulder. Oh, the perks of being perpetually underestimated.
Kate rolled the window down. “Hi there.”
“I’m sorry, miss. You’ve got to turn around.”
She opted for naive innocence, raising her eyebrows behind her glasses. “Why?”
The guard looked at her like she was missing a vital piece. “The Verity border’s been closed for months.”
“I thought it was open again.”
He shook his head apologetically.
“Huh,” she said, pretending to squint into the sun as she scanned the crossing for other signs of life. “Well, that’s a drag. How long have you been at this post”—she scanned his gear for a name tag—“Benson?”
“Two years.”
“And who did you piss off to get landed here?”
He chuckled, leaning his elbow on the hood. “Every now and then, someone tries to cross. I don’t know what makes them do it, if they’ve got friends egging them on or a death wish or they think the stories are just stories—I don’t know, and I don’t care. Protocol is protocol. It’s for your own good, miss—”
“Harker,” cut in Kate.
He twitched.
“Does that name mean anything to you?” she pressed, the cheerfulness bleeding from her voice as her left hand closed around the gun tucked into the driver’s side door. The darkness in her rushed forward at the touch, a current washing over her, trying to sweep her away.
“It should. My father was Callum Harker. You know, the man who kept monsters like pets inside that hellhole. Look around, Benson. All your cameras, all your weapons, all your everything is facing the other way. Do you know why that is? Because your job is to keep anyone and anything from getting out. It doesn’t matter who goes in. Don’t believe me? Just look.”
He actually took his eyes off her, just for a second, and in that second, she raised her gun. Benson looked back and actually jumped, lifting his hands in an automatic plea.
Do it, whispered the thing in her head, in her hand, in her blood. It will be so easy. It will feel so good.
Her finger drifted toward the trigger. “I am crossing that border today.”
Doubt swept across the soldier’s face. “Like you’d actually—”
She fired.
The desire had closed around her hand like a second grip, squeezed the trigger for her, but she’d felt it coming, just in time, and shifted the barrel several inches wide.
Benson stared in horror. “You crazy bitch.”
“Open the gate,” she said through clenched teeth. “I honestly don’t think I’ll miss a second time.”
The soldier backed away and punched a code into the box by the patrol door. The barricade began to lift. “We’re just trying to keep you safe!”
Kate cocked her head. “Haven’t you heard?” she said, shifting the car into gear. “There’s no such thing.” She gunned the engine and the car shot forward into the Waste. “Not anymore.”
The face in the mirror was covered in blood.
It dotted August’s cheek, splashed across the front of his fatigues. Red and black, black and red.
He turned the shower on, spun the tap until the hot water was all the way up, and stripped off his clothes, shivering as the air met the tallies on his skin.
He hadn’t slept, hadn’t been able to settle down long enough, so he’d gone back out again and again, trying to scrub Rez and Alice from his mind, taking on any and every mission. When his own team retired, he joined another, and another, made himself a shield and a weapon, let the trouble come to him. The night was a blur of violence behind his eyes, but the restlessness was gone, excised by action, leaving only an absence in its place.
He stepped into the scalding stream and bit back a gasp. The water burned, each drop a prick of fire on his skin. The pain was shallow, but he found himself clinging to it the way he’d once clung to hunger.
A way of taking control, of reminding himself that he could feel, that he wasn’t—
A monster? taunted Leo in his patronizing way.
At his feet, blood and grime swirled down the drain, and August leaned his head against the tile wall, his vision blurring as fatigue washed up against him. He wasn’t sore—that was the wrong word—soreness was a physical thing, the product of tired muscles, strained bodies. But there was an ache all the way down to his core. He was empty, like the bodies he’d left behind, hollow without that spark of life, humans and monsters both reduced to empty shells, stardust to stardust, and—
He turned the shower off and stepped out, slicking his wet hair back off his face. The room was full of steam—when he wiped the fog from the mirror and saw his gray eyes reflected in the glass, he couldn’t shake the feeling they had gotten darker. Leo’s eyes had been black—the black of piano keys and starless skies—darkened by all the times he’d shed his human form for the one that waited beneath the surface.
August turned away from the mirror.
He pulled on fresh fatigues and stepped into the hall. Allegro was there, chasing a piece of lint, but when the cat saw him, he shied back, and when August reached to pet him, the cat recoiled from his touch, black ears going flat against his head. He let out a small hiss and scurried away.
August frowned, following Allegro into the kitchen where the cat darted between Ilsa’s legs. She crouched, hauling the creature up into her arms and planting a kiss on his nose before lobbing a questioning look at August.
He took another step toward her, toward the cat, but Allegro hissed in warning.
What was it Ilsa said about animals?
They could sense the difference between good and bad, human and monster.
For a second, only a second, that other piece of himself—the piece he’d put away—tried to surface, stunned and hurt by the cat’s rebuff, by what it meant. But August forced it under.
It will weaken, promised Leo. It will fade.
Ilsa’s eyes narrowed. What have you done?
August stiffened. “What I had to.”
Her
mouth turned down as she folded her arms protectively around the cat and shook her head. There were no words to that, none that August could read.
“What is it?” he demanded.
But she just kept shaking her head, as if unable to stop, and August prickled. He didn’t understand what she was trying to say, what she wanted from him.
He pushed a pad of paper across the counter. “Dammit, Ilsa, just write it down.”
His sister pulled back from the paper, from him, as if struck. And then she turned on her heel and swept out.
Soro walked in just as Ilsa rushed past. The two nearly collided, but Ilsa had a way of parting the world around her, and the other Sunai leaped gracefully out of her path. A second later, Ilsa’s door closed, a single punctuating note—the loudest sound she’d made in months—and August let out a low, hard breath.
Soro considered him. Their silver hair was swept forward, falling into gray eyes, but August could still tell they were raising an eyebrow.
“Don’t ask,” he said.
Soro shrugged. “I wasn’t planning on it.”
August leaned back, shoulders resting against the shelves.
“You are tense,” they said.
He closed his eyes and muttered, “I’m tired.”
Another beat of silence. “I heard . . . about the ambush.”
But Soro had never been one to stand around, had certainly never gone searching for small talk. He dragged his eyes open. “What do you want?”
Soro straightened, visibly relieved by the end of such an unpleasant task. “Want has nothing to do with it,” they said, already turning toward the door. “There’s something you need to see.”
August circled the bodies, trying to understand what he was looking at. It was like a riddle, a puzzle, a what’s-wrong-in-this-picture, only everything was wrong. In five years, he’d seen a lot of death, but he’d never seen anything like this.
It wasn’t the what that bothered him.
It wasn’t even the how.
It was the why.
A full FTF squad was made up of eight soldiers. A leader. A medic. A tech. A sniper. And crew. It was a rare thing these days to have a full squad. Too often soldiers were picked off, and casualties usually weren’t replaced until a group numbered less than four, and then they were folded into another unit.
That morning, Squad Nine had been made up of seven soldiers.
By midday, all of them were dead.
“What happened here?” asked August, half to himself and half to Soro.
“According to Control,” said the other Sunai, “they were on their way back from a recon mission. Their comms were off, and there’s no surveillance on this block.”
The bodies lay scattered in the street, a grisly tableau.
They hadn’t died at night, hadn’t been fed on by Corsai. August looked around, then squinted up at the sun.
Judging by the angle of the light, this part of the street would have been in shadow all morning.
But that didn’t explain the seven corpses.
The sudden and simultaneous turn of violence.
Bullet casings littered the ground, and a knife lay several feet away, stained to the hilt, but as far as August could tell, Squad Nine hadn’t been ambushed, hadn’t been attacked by any outside force, human or monstrous.
They’d attacked their own team.
Not one on six—this wasn’t a matter of one soldier going mad—every one of them had a weapon in hand and a fatal wound. It made no sense.
His gaze trailed across their faces, faces he knew and didn’t know, faces that had once been people and were now just husks. Like Rez, he thought, fighting down the sense of loss before it could surface.
“What a waste.” Soro stood to the side, absently twirling their flute, as if they were standing in a garden instead of a crime scene. The bodies on the ground wore FTF badges, but in Soro’s eyes, he knew, they were no longer soldiers.
They were sinners.
And sinners deserved whatever gruesome ends they met.
But still—what could possibly drive an entire squad to do this?
Was it a symptom of the rift within the Compound?
No, there was tension, but verbal sparring was one thing, and this—this was something else entirely. It was too broad a leap between annoyance and this level of aggression.
Some kind of foul play, then?
A Malchai?
He wondered, for a moment, if the dead soldiers were a message from Alice, some kind of morbid gift laid out like a feast. But the patches weren’t missing, and none of the wounds had been made by teeth.
No, as gruesome as the deaths were, they were done by men, not monsters.
“Does Henry know?” he asked.
“Of course.” Soro paired the words with a flat look, as if the thought of not reporting this had never occurred to them. August imagined it hadn’t—Henry was human, but he was also the head of the FTF, the general in their makeshift army.
“And the Council?” he asked.
At that, Soro shook their head. “Henry wanted you to see it first.”
August frowned. “Why?”
The Sunai shifted their weight. “He said you’ve always had a . . . sensitivity. A way of thinking like a human. He said you study them.” The words seemed to make Soro uncomfortable. “That you’ve always wanted to be one of—”
“I’m a Sunai,” said August, bristling. “And I don’t have a clue what happened here. If Henry wants a human’s take, he should send someone else.”
Soro looked relieved.
August turned away from the corpses and started back toward the Compound.
Sloan wiped the blood from his hands as he climbed the tower steps.
There was something foul about it—in a human’s veins, it was warm, vital. Outside, it was nothing but a mess.
In the darkened lobby, Malchai lounged on every surface, leaning on stairs and draping themselves over railings. A dozen Fangs dotted the dark stone floor, steel collars glinting as they knelt beside their masters.
Blood leaked from bite marks on their skin, but Sloan’s hunger barely rose at the sight of it, of them. He’d never had a taste for willing prey.
At the sound of his steps, the Malchai stirred, red eyes going to the floor as he passed.
Inside the elevator, Sloan let his eyes slide closed. He dreamed of many things, of blood and power and a broken city, of Henry Flynn brought low and the task force on its knees, of August’s burning heart in his hand and Katherine’s neck beneath his teeth.
But as the elevator rose, Sloan longed only for sleep. A few quiet hours before the frenzy of the night.
He stepped out of the elevator and into the penthouse, and stopped.
Alice had set the place on fire.
That was his first thought. Heat radiated off the steel coffee table where she had dumped what looked like a bucket of hot coals. A variety of tools and kitchen utensils protruded from the burning mess, and four Malchai crouched on the floor in front of her, feasting on a young man.
“Before you ask,” said Alice, “It wasn’t like the Falstead. I didn’t have anything to do with it this time. I’ve moved on.”
“What are you talking about?” asked Sloan.
Alice gave an impatient flick of her fingers. “Oh, a handful of Fangs—they must have snapped—who knows why. Went and killed each other—so it seems. The Corsai didn’t leave much behind. A petty squabble, if I had to guess. Humans are so”—she blew on the coals—“temperamental.”
“And what about them?” asked Sloan, nodding toward the Malchai.
“Oh, they volunteered.”
“For what?”
Alice didn’t answer. Instead she took one of the Malchai by the chin, raising his red eyes to hers. Her voice, when she spoke, was different, lower, smoother, almost hypnotic.
“Do you want to make me proud?”
“Yes,” whispered the Malchai.
She drew a thin metal bar
from the fire, its end a burning red tip.
“Alice,” pressed Sloan.
“Here’s a riddle,” she said, her voice threading with manic cheer. “You can banish a Corsai with light, defang a Malchai’s bite, but how do you do stop a Sunai’s song?”
Sloan thought of Ilsa, the last sound she made before he tore out her throat.
“You don’t have to,” said Alice with a smile. “You just stop listening.”
With that she drove the burning spike into the Malchai’s ear.
It didn’t feel real until Kate hit the Waste.
Until she saw the open land, the sprawling nothing, and remembered dragging August’s fevered body through the fields to the house, remembered her mother’s room, the man at the door, and the gun in her hand. A single bang, the division between before and after. Innocence and guilt. Human and monster.
She didn’t like to think about that.
Didn’t like to remember that somewhere, out there, was the monster she’d made.
With any luck it had starved to death in the Waste.
With any luck—
The car shuddered, spluttered, and began to smoke. She swore and guided the dying vehicle onto the empty shoulder.
She was eight miles from the outskirts of V-City.
Eight miles, and less than two hours until dark.
Kate got out, and rounded the car. The gun sat on the passenger-side floor where she’d dropped it as soon as the barricade was out of sight. She took it up, savoring the weight in her hand, remembering the sweet recoil and—
She ejected the clip from the gun and put both pieces in her bag, hitched it up on her shoulder, and began to run. Her own shadow stretched out in front of her, cast by the sinking sun at her back, and her shoes beat out a steady rhythm on the asphalt.
Track had been a mandatory activity back at Leighton, and Kate had quickly discovered two things:
She loved running.
And she hated running in circles.
She tried to remember that love now, with nothing but an open road, a straight line ahead, but two miles in, she was pretty sure she’d made it all up.
Four miles in, she wished she had a cigarette.
Five miles in, she regretted ever smoking.