Seven miles in, she staggered to a jog and then a walk, a limp and then a stop, retching on the side of the road. Her head had started aching again, and she wanted to lie down, to close her eyes, but the sun was hovering over the horizon, and the last thing she needed was to be caught out in the Waste after dark.
She had to keep moving, so she did.
Funny, how simple things became when you didn’t have a choice.
Her legs and lungs were on fire by the time she finally reached the green zone.
Once upon a time it had been the richest section of the capital, a place reserved for those who could afford not only to purchase Harker’s protection but to carry on with their lives as if nothing was wrong. Once upon a time—but now it was empty.
It would have been easy to assume that everyone in the green had up and left, some kind of mass exodus.
It would have been . . . except for the number of cars in the driveways. And the blood.
Long-dry brown stains worn thin by weather and sun. But it was everywhere. Splashed like rust against car doors and curbs, garages and steps. An echo of violence.
“What happened here?” she murmured to the empty streets, even though she knew the answer.
Corsai, Corsai, tooth and claw,
Shadow and bone will eat you raw.
The sun dipped below the horizon and Kate perched her sunglasses on her head. The light was quickly thinning—soon it would be gone. She had to get inside.
She unzipped her bag and forced her fingers to gloss over the gun and take up the switchblade and an iron spike instead before starting down the street. She made her way to house after house, but the doors were all bolted. At the third one, she stood on her toes, peered into a window, and stilled.
It looked like a crime-scene photo, minus the bodies, dark stains streaking the walls and floor and toppled furniture. She imagined the people in the green locking themselves inside, waiting, until the power went out and the shadows slipped under their doors.
A low hiss sounded on the air, and Kate tensed, fingers tightening on her weapons before she realized the sound was human.
“Psst,” came the voice. “Over here.”
Kate turned and caught a flash of light on metal. No, not metal. A mirror. One of the front doors across the street was cracked open and a man was twisting a compact back and forth to signal her.
“Hello?” she called out, moving toward him.
“Shh,” he hissed, eyes darting nervously around the street. He had a flashlight in one hand, even though it wasn’t yet dark, and over his shoulder she could see the glow of more lights inside the hall.
“Get in, get in,” he said, opening the door just enough to let her through.
She crossed the yard, but hesitated at the base of the stairs. Her shadow had vanished, swallowed up by the dusk, and she could feel something twitch behind her, but every other house was quiet, empty, except for his. It set her nerves on edge.
“Well?” pressed the man. He didn’t look very dangerous—beanpole thin, with a receding hairline and the constant twitch of frayed nerves—but Kate knew from experience that men could be monsters, too, especially in Verity. “Those other houses, they got nothing, and we got maybe ten minutes until the light’s all gone,” he huffed, “so get in or get left out.”
“I’m armed,” she said. “And I intend to stay that way.”
His head bobbed, as if he understood, or didn’t care, and Kate blew out a breath and ducked inside. The moment she was through, he shut the door and threw the deadbolt into place. Her stomach clenched at the sound of it, sharp and final as a gunshot.
He brushed past her, turning on more lights and angling them toward the door. As her eyes adjusted, she realized that underneath his coat, the man was draped in metal, had fashioned a kind of chain mail from discs of patterned iron. Medallions. The same ones Callum Harker used to sell his citizens as protection from the monsters who hunted at his whim.
But Kate’s father had never given anyone more than a single disk. She thought of the blood in the street, the missing bodies. She didn’t have to ask where the rest of the medals had come from.
“What were you doing out there?”
“Just passing through,” she said. “Seemed like a nice day for a stroll.” He stared at her blankly. No ear for sarcasm, then. Up close, his eyes were bloodshot, as if he hadn’t slept in days. “Is this your house?”
He looked around nervously. “Is now,” he said, still bustling, as if unable to stop. “Living room’s through there.” He nodded across the hall, then ducked into a kitchen. Kate heard the clank of a pot, the crack of a match as she made her way through a pair of open doors into a sitting room.
A narrow sliver between the curtains showed the dusk quickly giving way to dark. The curtains themselves were made of copper wire threaded together into a delicate version of the same chain mail the man was wearing. In the center of a coffee table was a display of batteries, flashlights, and light bulbs.
An altarpiece to artificial light.
“You got a name?”
Kate jumped. He’d come up on her bad side, and she hadn’t heard him, not until he was too close. He was holding two cups.
“Jenny,” she lied. “You?”
“Rick. Well, Richard. But I always liked Rick.” He offered her one of the cups. She still had the iron spike in one hand, the silver lighter with its hidden switchblade in the other. She set the spike aside to take the cup and lift it to her mouth. It smelled vaguely like coffee and her body cramped with hunger and thirst, but she knew better than to drink it.
Rick shuffled around, adjusting more lights, and Kate lowered herself into a chair, her limbs stiff and her body clumsy with fatigue. She nodded at the curtain, the world beyond the house. “What happened out there?”
“What happened?” His voice tightened. “They came. Corsai, Malchai, everything with teeth.”
She could see it. First the Malchai had come through, tearing out throats, and then the Corsai, feeding in their wake. No wonder there was nothing left.
“I wasn’t even supposed to be here,” murmured Rick. “I was on my way into the Waste, thought the green would be a safe place to camp out for the night.” A nervous laugh.
“How did you survive?” asked Kate.
“At first I hid. And then I, uh, well, there were all these abandoned houses.” The fidgeting grew worse. He moved like an addict, strung out on fear. “I did what I could. What I had to.”
Kate turned the silver lighter between her fingers. “Why didn’t you leave? Head for South City or go out into the Waste?”
“Thought about it a hundred times. I’d walk outside in the light of day, try to get myself to go, but who knows what’s going on out there? There’s no cell signal, and hell, after what happened here, I wouldn’t be surprised if the whole world’s gone dark. Man came through, a few months back, running from North City, and he said the Malchai had rounded the humans up, keep ’em like meals in a fridge.
“No,” Rick went on, “no, I’ve got everything I need here, and I’m gonna wait it out. Those bastards can’t live forever.”
Silence fell over the room, and then Kate’s stomach growled audibly.
“Hold on,” said Rick, getting to his feet. “I’ll get you some food.”
“What about South City?” she called after him.
“No idea,” he called back.
She leaned forward, fingers drifting over the collection of batteries, just as something sounded in the hall. If Kate’s head hadn’t been turned the right way, she might not have heard it. If she hadn’t been her father’s daughter, she might not have known what it was: a shotgun shell being locked into the chamber of a gun.
And that, thought Kate, is why I’m not an optimist.
Her own gun sat unloaded in the bag at her feet, but the lighter was still in her hand, and with a small snick, the switchblade came free, the sudden shine of its edge stirring the darkness in her head as she rose to he
r feet.
Rick was in the doorway, shotgun raised. He flicked the barrel toward the blade. “Put it down.”
Kate’s grip tightened on the knife, and instead of her heart racing, she could feel it to start to slow, to steady. It would be so easy. She could already see the switchblade buried in his throat, could—
No.
That wasn’t how it would happen. Rick had a shotgun, and even with addled nerves, it would be nearly impossible for him to miss from this close, not when there were more than a hundred pellets in a shell. He might die, but so would she, and even if the darkness in her head didn’t seem to care about that, the rest of Kate sure did.
She set the blade carefully on the back of the couch. “What now, Rick?”
His nervousness hadn’t stopped, but it had quieted, pressed down beneath a new resolve. “Hands on your head.”
Kate’s mind turned over and over—but between the eight-mile run from the Waste and the shotgun leveled at her head, she was coming up blank, every thought drifting back toward blind violence instead of logic, strategy, reason.
“Go on,” he ordered, hoisting the shotgun for emphasis. “Back toward the door.” She did what she was told, slowly, trying to buy time. “It’s nothing personal, Jenny,” he muttered. “It’s really not. I’m just so tired. They won’t let me sleep.”
“Who?”
They were at the front door.
“Slide the bolt.”
She did.
“Open the door.”
She did.
It was no longer dusk, but full night. The light from the doorway spilled out two or three feet, carving a narrow block of safety, but beyond that, the street was dark.
“I know you’re out there!” Rick’s voice echoed through the streets, ricocheting off empty houses and abandoned cars.
For a second, nothing happened.
Then the shadows began to stir. White eyes dotted the darkness, teeth gleaming like knives, and Kate’s stomach turned with the memory of music and running, of empty subway cars and breaking strings and claws slashing flesh.
The Corsai whispered their awful chorus.
beatbreakruinfleshbonebeatbreak
And then the words began to shift . . .
beatbreakruinrendlittlelostharker
. . . spacing themselves into coherent order.
little lost harker
Fear rose in her, sudden and visceral, and she knew the monsters could smell it on her skin.
“Look here!” called Rick. “I brought you something to eat.”
eat little harker little lost
“Just leave me alone for one night,” he begged. “Just one night. Let me sleep.”
give us the harker
Kate’s head spun, an irrational desire brushing up against her fear, the urge to throw herself into the dark, to claw at the things with claws, to tear them apart as they tore into her.
The steel barrel of Rick’s shotgun jabbed between her shoulders, and Kate took a halting step forward.
Do something, she thought.
Kill them all, whispered the thing in her skull.
Not that.
“Have you ever killed anyone?” she asked.
“I’m sorry,” he said, and the miserable edge in his voice told her all she needed to know. He didn’t want to shoot her. “I’m just so tired.”
“It’s all right, Rick. I’m going.” Kate shuffled a half step forward, and felt him sag a little with relief, shifting the shotgun away from the center of her back and up, over her shoulder.
She rocked backward into Rick’s chest, one elbow slamming into his face as she twisted around, taking the shotgun with her. Two breaths—that’s all it had taken—but Rick was on one knee, clutching his bloody nose, and Kate was in the open doorway, holding the gun.
Shoot, said the voice in her head as he got to his feet, but his heel skimmed the first stair and he lost his balance, tripping down the three short steps and out of the safety of the light.
Shoot, said the monster, but she didn’t know if it would be a mercy to Rick or a gift to the madness inside her, so she threw the weapon into the grass. Rick staggered toward it as Kate backed into the house, and the last thing she saw was the glint of the shotgun as he swung it clublike at the shadows before she slammed the door and drove the bolt home.
The house was empty.
Kate knew because she had checked the whole thing, top to bottom, back to front. Rick had done a solid job of securing the windows and doors, but if she listened she could hear the scrape of nails on wood, on brick, on glass, the trail of the Corsai’s claws outside, scratching to get in. Reminding her that she was trapped.
“Where are you, Kate?” she wondered aloud, and when her first thought was of Riley and Prosperity and the coffee shop table with the Wardens, she decided she didn’t want to play the stupid game anymore.
She had passed the mirror in the hall three times—now she stopped in front of it, a pair of scissors in her hand. Avoiding her own gaze—she didn’t want to see the silver spreading, didn’t need to be reminded, could feel the thing like a weight, leaning against her thoughts—she loosened her hair, combed it before her eyes, and began to trim.
Strips of blond fell to the floor, and Kate didn’t stop until her hair carved a path across her face, sweeping over her left eye. Just another scar.
Torn between the desire to collapse and the fear of letting her guard down enough to sleep, she raided the kitchen cabinets (she ended up with powdered coffee, a liter of water, and a protein bar processed enough to last an apocalypse), switched on every flashlight she could find, and finally retreated to the living room.
Slumping down onto the couch, she dug the tablet out of her bag and booted a message window.
Riley, she started, then stopped when she remembered there was no connection, no signal to tap into.
Her fingers hovered over the blank screen. The cursor blinked, waiting, and she knew it was useless, but the house was too quiet and the monsters too loud, so she started typing anyway.
My real name is Katherine Olivia Harker.
Her fingers moved haltingly across the screen.
My mother’s name was Alice. My father’s was Callum. I didn’t want to lie, but sometimes it’s so much easier than the truth. Shorter. I just wanted to start over.
Have you ever done that?
It’s freeing, at first, like shedding a heavy coat. And then you get cold, and you realize life’s not a coat at all. It’s skin. It’s something you can’t take off without losing yourself, too.
Kate stopped, pressing her palms against her eyes. Why was she writing about Verity as if she’d missed it, as if she’d been looking for an excuse to go home?
She set the tablet aside, the message unfinished, and stretched out, pulling a blanket around her shoulders. Outside the house, the Corsai grew restless, the grinding of their claws and teeth now paired with whispers that whistled through the cracks like wind.
come out little harker come out come outcomeoutcomeout
It sounded as if they were right beyond the windows.
Kate tensed as nails scraped over glass, her nerves tightening with every hiss and scratch and taunt. The iron spike sat on the table, and her fingers drifted toward it as Rick’s tired eyes and desperate words came back to her.
Just one night. Let me sleep.
Kate dug through her bag and came up with the music player, skimming through the songs until she found something with a heavy beat. It filled her good ear, blocking out the Corsai’s relentless calls, and she turned the volume up and up and up until it drowned out the monster in her head as well.
The Malchai fell to the ground at August’s feet, a hole torn through its chest.
“That was close,” said Harris, stepping over another body.
“Too close,” said Ani, breathless, a shallow cut along her cheek.
It had been a careless attack: a pair of Malchai and a Fang had thought to catch them by surprise, a
s if two monsters and a human stood a chance against a squad of FTFs, especially one with a Sunai at the helm.
“What should we do with this one?” asked Jackson. The Fang was trussed up at his feet, one eye swelling shut and blood running into rotting teeth.
It would be easy enough to reap his soul, but August had already taken a half dozen lives, and the thought of taking on another made his bones ache.
“Call a jeep,” he said. “We’ll take him alive. See if Soro can get anything useful out of him.”
They started back, covering the short distance to the Seam, but as the barricade drew nearer, August’s steps slowed.
The thought of returning to the Compound, of standing still with all these souls inside him—no wonder Leo never stopped.
The night was full of monsters, and he needed to hunt.
So hunt, said his brother.
And why shouldn’t he?
They reached the Seam’s gate. Harris signaled on the comm and the doors ground open, the jeep waiting for them on the other side. The squad passed through, but August stopped.
Harris glanced back at him. “What’s up?”
“I’ll meet you back at the Compound.”
“No way,” said Ani.
“If you’re going back out,” added Jackson, “we’ll go with you.”
“That’s not necessary,” said August. He was already turning to go when Harris caught him by the arm.
“No solo missions, sir,” said Harris. That was the Night Squad’s first and most important rule. If you had to work the dark, you did it in teams.
That rule is for them.
Leo was right. August didn’t need a team.
“Let go of me,” he warned, and when Harris didn’t, he shoved the soldier back into Ani, hard enough to send both of them stumbling. Something crossed their faces, but August turned away without trying to read it.
“Take the Fang to the cells,” he said. “That’s an order.”
And this time, when he walked away, no one tried to stop him.
It was a strange thing, to walk alone.
He had grown so used to the echo of other footfalls, the need to think about other bodies, other lives. Without them, he was free.