Our Dark Duet

by Victoria Schwab

  It belonged to the woman in green.

  The mother, with the little girl still beside her, one small arm still wrapped around the woman’s leg. Red light beaded on her skin, streaking down her cheeks like tears.

  August forced himself down the stairs.

  “He broke my heart,” confessed the woman, fingers curled into fists. “So I sped up. I saw him in the street and I sped up. I felt his body break beneath my tires. I dragged it off the road. No one knew, no one knew, but I still I hear that sound every night. I’m so tired of hearing that sound. . . .”

  August reached for the woman’s hands and stopped, his fingers hovering an inch above her skin. It should be simple. She was a sinner, and the FTF harbored no sinners.

  It didn’t feel simple.

  He could let her go.

  He could . . .

  The light in the hall was beginning to dim, the pale glow of forty-two souls sinking back beneath the surfaces of their skin. The red on hers shone brighter. She met his eyes, looking past him, perhaps through him, but still at him.

  “I’m so tired . . . ,” she whispered. “But I’d do it again.”

  Those last words broke the spell; somewhere in the city, a monster lived, hunted, killed, because of what this woman had done. She had made a choice.

  And August made his.

  He wrapped his hands around hers, snuffing out the light.

  August retreated to the lobby as soon as it was done, as far as he could get from the collective sounds of shock, the palpable relief of the spared, the child’s piercing scream.

  He stood over the siren mosaic, rubbing his hands, the sinner’s last words echoing in his head. Her life still sang beneath his skin. It had given him a moment of strength, steadiness, less like hunger sated—he hadn’t been hungry in months—than the sensation of being made solid, real. A calm that evaporated the moment the little girl began to scream.

  He’d moved the mother’s corpse, carried it out of the hall, out of the child’s sight, for the collection team. Her skin had felt strange beneath his touch, cold and heavy and hollow in a way that made him want to recoil.

  He’d spent a lot of time watching the soldiers of the FTF—he no longer tried to mimic their faces, postures, tones, but studying them had become a habit. He had watched the way their hands shook after bad missions, the way they drank and smoked and joked to cover it.

  August didn’t feel sick, or jittery.

  Just empty.

  How much does a soul weigh? he wondered.

  Less than a body.

  The symphony doors swung open.

  “This way,” said Harris, leading the group through. Ani had the little girl in her arms.

  August felt Jackson put a hand on his shoulder. “You did your job.”

  He swallowed, looked away. “I know.”

  They ushered the crowd toward the southern doors. They were locked, but August keyed in the code as Ani tapped her comm. “Clear?”

  A crackle of static, and Rez’s dry voice. “Clear as it gets.”

  The whole group parted around August as he made his way to the front of the group, recoiling as if that small measure of distance would keep them safe.

  Outside, North City now rose at their backs, but the sun was continuing its slow descent between the buildings.

  There was still safely an hour before day began edging to dusk, which meant that monsters weren’t the most pressing concern. The Corsai kept to the dark, and while the Malchai weren’t incapacitated by daylight, it did weaken them. No, the real danger, as long as the sun was up, were the Fangs—humans who’d sworn allegiance to the Malchai, who worshipped the monsters like gods, or simply decided they’d rather submit than flee. It was Fangs who’d ambushed his team at the symphony hall that time, Fangs who committed most of the daylight crimes, Fangs who ushered new monsters into the world with every sin.

  August started forward across the street.

  Only six blocks separated the checkpoint from the safety of the Flynn Compound, but forty-two dazed civilians, four FTFs, and a Sunai would be too tempting a target. They had a dozen jeeps, but gas was tight, and the vehicles were in high demand, plus tensions were always high in the wake of a screening, and Henry didn’t want the new recruits to feel like prisoners being carted off to jail.

  Walk with them, the man had said. Step for step.

  So August and his squad led the way toward the broad set of stairs on the corner.

  Boots sounded nearby, the stride even, casual, and a moment later Rez fell into step beside him.

  “Hey, boss.”

  She always called him that, even though she had ten years on him—more than that. After all, August only looked seventeen. He’d risen out of gun smoke and shell casings on a cafeteria floor five years before. Rez was short and slight, one of the first North City recruits to trade their Harker pendant for an FTF badge. She’d been a law student in her past life, as she called the time before, but now she was one of the best on August’s team, a sniper by day and his partner on rescue and recon after dark.

  He was glad to see her. She never asked how many souls he’d reaped, never tried to make light of what he had done. What he had to do.

  Together, they reached the gated stairwell, a steel arch overhead marking it as a subway station. At the sight of it, several people slowed.

  August didn’t blame them.

  The subways were largely the domain of the Corsai—dark tunnels like the one he’d raced through with Kate, full of shadows that twitched and twisted, claws that glistened in the dark, whispers of beatbreakruinfleshbonebeatbreak sliding between teeth.

  But beyond the gate, these stairs blazed with light.

  The FTF had spent three painstaking weeks securing the line, sealing up all the cracks and pumping the passage so full of UV rays that Harris and Jackson had nicknamed it “the tanner,” since you could pick up a tan between the checkpoint and the Compound.

  Rez undid the series of locks, and August flinched a little at the brightness as they made their way down to the platform and then onto the tracks.

  “Stay together!” ordered Ani as Harris locked the gate again behind them.

  It was a dead zone down here, and the comm signals guttered out, the tunnels echoing around them as they walked in rows of two and three. Jackson and Harris punctuated the silence by lobbing instructions at the shaken recruits while August focused on the beat of his heart, the tick of his watch, the markers on the walls, counting down the distance until they could come up for air.

  When they finally climbed the stairs to the street, the Compound rose like a sentinel before them, lit from tower to curb. A UV-Reinforced strip the width of a road traced the building’s base, the technological equivalent of a castle moat, powering up as the daylight began to thin.

  The Compound steps were flanked by soldiers, their expressions varying from grim to annoyed at the sight of the newest North City survivors; but when they saw August, their eyes went to the ground.

  Rez peeled away with a “later, boss,” and the forty-two recruits were marched up the steps, but August lingered at the edge of the light strip, listening.

  In the distance, somewhere beyond the Seam, someone cried out. The sound was too far away, too high, too broken for human ears to catch, but August heard it all the same, and the longer he listened, the more sounds he heard, and the more the chords began to untangle, the quiet unraveling into a dozen distinct noises: A rustle in the darkness; a guttural growl; metal dragging against rock; the buzz of electricity; a shuddering sob.

  How many citizens, he wondered, were still across the Seam?

  How many had fled into South City or escaped into the Waste?

  How many had never made it out?

  One of the first things Sloan and his monsters had done was round up as many humans as possible and trap them in makeshift prisons fashioned from hotels, apartment buildings, warehouses. Word was that every night they’d let a few of them go. Just for the fun of h
unting them down.

  August turned back and went inside. He headed straight for the bank of elevators, avoiding the eyes of the soldiers, the new recruits, the little girl being handed off to a member of the FTF.

  He leaned against the elevator wall, relishing the moment of solitude—right before a hand caught the closing door. The metal parted, and another Sunai stepped in.

  August straightened. “Soro.”

  “Hello, August,” said Soro, eyes brightening. Their fingers brushed the button for the twelfth floor.

  The newest Sunai appeared older than either of their siblings, but they treated Ilsa like a ticking bomb and looked at August the way he had once looked at Leo, with a mixture of caution and deference.

  Soro was tall and lean, pale skin marked with small black X’s. They sported a plume of silver hair that worked like a shadow, changing their face depending on how it fell. Today it was swept back, their delicate cheekbones and strong brow on full display.

  August had first thought of Soro as a she, though in truth, he hadn’t been sure, and when he’d worked up the courage to ask whether Soro considered themself male or female, the newest member of the Flynn family had stared at him for a long moment before answering.

  “I’m a Sunai.”

  That was all they said, as if the rest didn’t matter, and August supposed it didn’t. He never thought of them as anything but Soro after that.

  As the doors slid shut and the elevator rose, August cast a short, sideways glance at the other Sunai. The front of their uniform was caked with a mixture of blackish gore and human blood, but Soro didn’t seem to notice or, at least, didn’t seem to care. They enjoyed hunting—no, enjoyed was probably the wrong word.

  Soro possessed neither Leo’s righteousness, nor Ilsa’s whimsy, nor, as far as August could tell, his own complicated desire to feel human. What they did possess was an unshakeable resolve, a belief that the Sunai existed solely to destroy monsters and eliminate the sinners responsible for them.

  Pride—perhaps that was right word.

  Soro prided themself on their ability to hunt, and while they lacked Leo’s passion, they more than matched his technique.

  “Did you have a good day?” asked August, and Soro flashed him the ghost of a smile, so faint others probably wouldn’t even see it, so faint August himself might have missed it if he hadn’t spent so long learning how to put his own emotions on display just so humans would see.

  “You and your strange questions,” they mused. “I ended seven lives. Does that count as good?”

  “Only if they deserved to die.”

  A slight crease formed in Soro’s brow. “Of course they did.”

  There was no waver, no doubt, and as August stared at Soro’s reflection in the steel door, he couldn’t help but wonder if their catalyst had anything to do with their resolve. Like all Sunai, they had been born from tragedy, but unlike the massacre that brought August forth, Soro’s had been more . . . voluntary.

  A month after North City’s plunge back into chaos, a group calling themselves the HPC—Human Power Corp—got their hands on a weapons cache and decided to bomb the subway tunnels, home to so many of the city’s monsters.

  And because killing Corsai was tricky (shadows were easy to disperse, but hard to erase), they lured as many Malchai as they could into the tunnels, using themselves as bait. It was a success—if a suicide mission can ever be called a success. A fair number of monsters were killed, along with twenty-nine humans, a stretch of the North City underground collapsed, and the self-named Soro was the only thing to emerge from the wreckage, followed out by a thin, wavering trail of classical music, the kind Harker had piped into the subways for so long.

  The elevator came to a stop at the twelfth floor, and Soro stepped out, glancing back before the doors closed.

  “Did you?”

  August blinked. “Did I what?”

  “Have a good day?”

  He thought of the man begging for his life, the little girl clutching her mother’s leg. “You’re right,” he said, as the elevator door slid shut. “It’s a strange question.”

  By the time August reached the Compound roof, his body was aching for air.

  It wasn’t a physical thing, like hunger or sickness, but he felt it all the same, driving him up, up, up to the top of the Compound.

  You could see the whole city from here.

  It wasn’t the kind of roof you were supposed to go onto. It couldn’t be reached by the elevators or the main stairs, but August had found an access hatch in an electrical room on the top floor the year before. Now he stepped out into fresh air as the sun touched the horizon and let out a slow, shuddering exhale.

  Up here, he could breathe.

  Up here, he was alone.

  And up here, at last, he came apart.

  That’s what it felt like, a slow unraveling, first his posture, then his face, every inch of his body stiff from being held in place under the weight of so many searching eyes.

  Pull yourself together, muttered Leo in his head.

  August smothered the voice and stepped forward until the toes of his boots skimmed the roof’s edge. It was a twenty-story drop, nothing but concrete waiting at the bottom. It would hurt, but only for an instant.

  He’d always loved Newton’s law of gravity, the part about things falling at the same speed, no matter what they were made of. A steel bearing. A book. A human. A monster.

  The difference, of course, was what happened when they hit the ground.

  The impact would split the concrete beneath his boots. But by the time the dust cleared, he would still be there. On his feet. Unbroken.

  All things fall, mused Leo.

  August inched back a step, and then two, sinking to the sun-warmed rooftop and wrapping his arms around his knees. The tallies shone against his skin.

  He’d spent so long trying to hide them, but now he wore them on display. One for every day since August last went dark.

  One for every day since he’d—

  Killed me.

  He squeezed his eyes shut.

  You truly are a monster now.

  “Stop,” he whispered, but Leo’s voice played on in his head, and the worst part was he didn’t know—couldn’t tell—if it was just a memory, an echo, or really Leo, some last piece of his brother clinging to August’s bones.

  He’d killed Leo, reaped his life, or his soul, or whatever it was that Sunai had in them, and now it was in him. August pictured their two lives like water and oil, refusing to mix.

  He’d often wondered if the humans he reaped stayed with him, if some part of who they were—who they’d been—lingered in his blood, fused with his soul. But the humans never had a voice. And Leo did.

  Tell me, August. Are you still hungry?

  He dug his nails into the rough surface of the rooftop. He hadn’t been hungry in months, and he hated it, hated the fullness, hated the strength, hated the fact that the more often he fed, the emptier he felt.

  But most of all, he hated the fact that some small part of him wanted to slip again, to feel that feverish prickle, like an oncoming cold, to remember what it felt like to be alive, to be hungry. Every day when he entered the symphony hall, he hoped the souls would all shine white. They almost never did.

  The sky began to darken like a bruise and August let his forehead come to rest against his knees and breathed into the sliver of space as dusk thickened. The sun was almost gone when the air shifted at his back and a hand settled in his hair.

  “Ilsa,” he said softly.

  He dragged his head up as his sister sank to the roof beside him. She was barefoot, her strawberry curls loose and rippling in the breeze, everything about her so open, unguarded. It was easy to forget that she was the first Sunai, that she had made the Barren, erased an entire piece of the city and everyone in it.

  Our sister has two sides. They do not meet.

  But August had never seen Ilsa’s shadow self, had only known this one, playful and
sweet and sometimes lost.

  Now the only thing lost was her voice.

  He missed it, that lilting cadence that made everything sound light, but Ilsa didn’t speak anymore. Her collar was open, revealing the vicious line that ran like a ribbon around her throat. Sloan’s work. He’d cut right through her vocal cords, severed her voice and stolen her ability to speak, to sing.

  And yet, just as Leo’s voice had a place in August’s head, so did hers, and when she met his gaze, he read the question in her eyes. The constant concern. The gentle pressing.

  Talk to me.

  As she twined one long arm through his, and let her head fall against his shoulder, he knew that he could tell her.

  About the girl and her mother, about Leo’s voice scratching away inside his skull, about the way he longed for hunger, and that he was afraid: afraid of his purpose, afraid he couldn’t do it, afraid he could, afraid of what he needed to become, and what he was becoming, what he already was, and the truth that underneath it all—quieter than it had been, but there, there all the same—was that vain and useless and impossible longing to be human. A desire he kept trying to drown. A desire that held its breath until his focus slipped, and then surged up again, gasping for air.

  He could tell her—confess, as so many damned souls did to him—but what was the point? The words were like dominoes lined up in his head, and if he started speaking, if he toppled that first tile, they would all come crashing down. For what? The selfish urge to feel . . .

  Her fingers tightened on his arm.

  Talk to me, little brother.

  But a Sunai’s command carried no weight without words. It was unfair, he knew, that because she couldn’t ask, he didn’t have to answer.

  “Everything went as it should,” he said, because that wasn’t a lie, even if it didn’t feel like the truth.

  Ilsa lifted her head and sadness swept across her face like a flush. He looked away, and she pulled free and lay back on the concrete roof, her arms spread wide, as if trying to embrace the sky.

  The cloudless day was giving way to a clear and moonless night, and this high up, with most of the northern grid down, he’d be able to make out a handful of stars. Nothing like the paintings of light he’d seen in the sky beyond the city, just a handful of dots flickering overhead, there and gone and there again, like the memory of that night in the Waste when he was with Kate and the sickness was just starting. When the stolen car broke down and they stood on the side of the road, Kate shivering and August burning up, and overhead, the sky was a fabric of light. When he stared, mesmerized by the sheer number of stars, and she said that people were made of stardust, and maybe he was, too.