Our Dark Duet

by Victoria Schwab

  She leaned forward. “So where did you go?”

  August started to answer, but a tray came crashing down onto the table, loud enough that they both jumped. Harris swung a leg over the bench. Ani and Jackson, too. Kate sat very still, and for a long moment, no one spoke, the tension drawing out like a note, warbling and brittle. In the end, Jackson was the one who broke it.

  “No beef,” he muttered sullenly.

  “Told you,” said Ani, spearing a piece of wilted broccoli as Kate rose to leave.

  “Where are you going?” asked August, but she was already walking away. He swore under his breath and followed, hundreds of eyes following them out. “Kate.”

  “Fine.” She reached the hall and headed straight for the nearest exit. “You’re doing what you have to, but so am I. I’ve been playing boot camp all day, but I’m not going to sit around any longer. You go on having your existential crisis, playing the big bad monster, but there’s a real demon out there, in our city, and I’m going to find it, with or without you.”

  “I can’t let you go out there—”

  “Then come with me. Help me hunt this thing down. Or stay out of my way.”

  August caught her arm. “What will you do when you find it, Kate? How will you kill it? Are you sure you can kill it, with its claws in your head?”

  He watched her try to say yes, saw the words catch in her throat. When she finally answered, her voice was brittle. “I don’t know,” she said, meeting his gaze, “but I’ll be damned if I let it kill me. You might not want to fight your monsters, August. But I’m fighting mine.”

  He sighed, slung the violin over his shoulder, and took her hand.

  “Come on.”

  Fresh air flooded Kate’s lungs, crisp and cool, and for an instant she was dizzy from the sheer relief of being outside, even at night.

  What had Henry Flynn said about the dark?

  It makes us feel free.

  A ribbon of UVR light surrounded the Compound, tracing a band of safety against the dark beyond. It stretched like a broad sheet, the width of a road. Like a moat. Thinner versions traced the bases of several nearby buildings—barracks, she guessed, extensions of the FTF’s main compound—but the rest of the city was dark in a way she’d never seen it.

  It was unnerving, that darkness.

  Thicker than the lack of light.

  The night beyond the moat twisted and writhed, the shadows whispering to her.

  hello little harker

  She could feel it rising in her, that longing for a fight. All her life she’d clung to it like the grip on a knife, but now she put all her strength into setting it down.

  In the distance, the Seam traced a thin line, and beyond that, the looming shape of her father’s tower. Sloan’s tower.

  She thought of him standing in the penthouse with his ember-red eyes, his sickly sweet voice, his tongue running over sharpened teeth.

  I will kill him, she thought. And I will take my time.

  Her focus narrowed, thoughts condensing to a clear and perfect point—a vision of herself drawing a silver blade over Sloan’s skin, peeling him open one slice at a time, revealing those dark bones and—

  August caught her sleeve.

  Her boots were skimming the edge of the light strip.

  “Here,” said August, drawing a tablet from his pocket. He tapped the screen, and a second later the surface turned reflective. A mirror. “You said this is how you see into its head. So look.”

  Her eyes were instantly drawn to the glass, but she resisted.

  “I’m not your private scrying board. If I see where it is, we go together.”

  August nodded. His grip tightened on his violin case, and she told herself this would work. It had to. She would hunt the monster down, and August would slay it, and the nightmare in her head would end, and she would kill Sloan, and then she would go back to Prosperity, and the Wardens, and Riley.

  That wasn’t another life, another Kate, it was this one, it was hers, it was now.

  She blew out a breath and turned toward the mirror, bracing herself.

  Where are you? she asked the glass, just before she fell in.

  She is back

  in her father’s office

  with the monster

  in the black suit

  and the shadows

  whispering

  weak

  weak

  weak

  in the window

  a pair of silver eyes

  round as moons

  —Where are you?—

  and for the first time

  the darkness

  pushes back

  the vision

  shudders

  holds

  she forces

  her way

  to the glass

  and when

  she reaches

  the window

  the image

  finally cracks

  shatters

  into—

  —red eyes

  everywhere

  people

  screaming

  sobbing

  begging

  for mercy

  the taste

  of fear

  like ash

  in its mouth

  it moves

  away

  there

  and gone

  and there again

  now

  a group

  of soldiers

  on an overpass

  guns

  and badges

  catching

  the light

  a tangle

  of voices

  it reaches

  out

  from the dark

  all hollow hunger

  and cold delight

  because

  they do not see

  it coming—

  Kate wrenched back, as if struck.

  The tablet tumbled from her fingers and August caught it as she doubled over, pain jabbing like a cold knife behind her eyes. For an instant she was still trapped between the mirrors, caught somewhere outside herself, the ground eroding beneath her feet.

  She blinked away the blinding white of the light strip.

  Three bright red drops of blood hit the ground, and then August’s hand was on her arm, his voice lost in the noise as he lifted her face.

  She saw the too-even planes of his brow and cheeks fold with worry, and she wanted to tell him she was okay, but she didn’t feel okay, so instead she wiped her nose and said, “Sixteen.”

  August stared at her. “What?”

  “I saw a patch. It had a number—”

  Understanding lit his face and he reached for the comm.

  “Squad Sixteen, are they on mission?”

  “Affirmative.”

  He scanned the dark. “Where?”

  By the time the controller read the address, August was already running, Kate close behind. He kept up a stream of orders on his comm, and sections of the grid came up around them. They were getting close—Kate’s vision kept doubling, two places overlaid before her eyes. And then they rounded a corner, and she saw the overpass and the Seam, and the stretch of street, and it was empty.

  “No,” she gasped, first in frustration and then in horror as gunfire shattered the night, lighting up the arch beneath the overpass as a squad of soldiers turned their weapons on one another, and in the staccato bursts of light, she saw it, like a shadow thrown in their wake.

  The Chaos Eater.

  August saw it.

  Only for an instant, when the short, bright flashes of gunfire lit the underpass. It stood there, a spot of stillness amid the violence, its silver eyes glinting. August saw it and felt—empty, a numbing cold, as if the burning coal at the center of his chest had turned to ice.

  His limbs grew heavy and his mind slowed, and Kate’s voice was distant in his ears, a single echoing word that took too long to form.

  “Play.”

  She pulled hi
s face toward hers. “August, play.”

  The world stuttered back into motion, and he got the violin up, the bow on the strings, but the monster was already gone, the killing done, the underpass plunged back into terrible, too-still shadow. He drew a light baton and lobbed it into the dark, throwing the whole gruesome scene into sudden relief as the first Corsai scattered from the bodies.

  “Dammit,” muttered Kate.

  And then, to August’s horror, one of corpses staggered to its feet.

  The soldier looked down at his hands, covered in blood, and began to sob and rage and then, just as quickly, he went quiet and calm, and smiled, and the smile became a laugh and the laugh became a groan. It was like a flickering image, two selves warring, both losing.

  “We’re all going to die,” he murmured, and then, voice rising: “It’s a mercy. I’ll make it fast—”

  “Soldier,” called August, and the man spun toward them, eyes wide.

  “Don’t look!” said Kate, but it was too late. August met the soldier’s eyes and saw the silver streaked across the man’s wild gaze, and his first irrational thought was of moonlight. He braced for monster’s poisonous power to reach out and wrap around him, the way the coldness had—but nothing happened.

  To August, the man’s eyes were just eyes, the madness contained by its new host.

  “It’s a mercy,” said the soldier again.

  And then he saw Kate, and something in him snapped at the sight of another human, another target. He lunged for the nearest gun. Kate dropped to the ground and August stepped in front of her, drawing his bow across the strings.

  The soldier staggered, as if struck, the weapon falling from his hands as August’s music warred with the monster’s hold. The man gripped his skull and screamed, anguish on his face as he looked down at what he’d done, and then the anguish was gone too, wiped away by the spell of August’s song.

  When the man’s soul surfaced, it wasn’t red or white, but both, one streaked with the other, guilt and innocence twined together, vying for his life.

  August stopped playing.

  He didn’t know what to do.

  Kate was on her knees, gaze empty and crimson light wicking off her skin.

  He reached for his comm.

  “Soro.”

  A moment later, they responded. “August. What is it?”

  He looked from Kate to the soldier, the tangled light to the bodies of the murdered FTFs. “I need your help.”

  Four walls, a ceiling, and a floor.

  That’s all there was in the cell. The door was steel and the walls were concrete, except for the one interrupted by a single strip of glass, that wasn’t even glass, but shatter-proof plastic.

  Kate stood in the viewing room on the other side, Soro and August and Flynn at her back. Flynn sat in a chair while Soro twirled their flute and August leaned in the doorway, but Kate didn’t take her eyes from the soldier.

  He was on his knees in the center of the cell, blindfolded and cuffed to a steel loop embedded in the concrete floor. Soro had bandaged the gunshot wounds in his shoulder and leg, but if he was in any pain, it seemed lost beneath the madness.

  This is me, she thought. This is what happens to me.

  She’d come back to herself, somewhere between the end of August’s song and Soro’s arrival, in time to see August cinching the strip of cloth over the soldier’s eyes.

  “He shouldn’t be in the building,” said Soro, arms crossed. “He’s infected.”

  “That,” said Flynn, sitting forward, “is why he’s isolated.”

  Isolated was a kind word for it. Kate wasn’t even the one in the concrete cube, and she still felt like she’d been entombed. The cell was one of several on the Compound’s lowest level, and no other humans had been allowed even a modicum of contact with the prisoner. The Sunai were, apparently, immune to the soldier’s sickness. August, with Flynn’s guidance, had tried to sedate the man, but it hadn’t worked. Some vital thing was severed between his body and his mind, and no matter what they pumped into his veins, he didn’t slow, didn’t sleep, didn’t do anything but rave.

  “He should have been executed,” said Soro.

  “I overruled,” said August, affecting that cold, formal tone.

  Soro tipped their head. “Which is why he’s still alive.”

  Flynn rose to his feet. “August was right. He’s one of ours. And he’s the first survivor we’ve seen.”

  Not exactly, thought Kate, but she kept it to herself.

  “If there is a cure for this condition—”

  “If there is a cure,” she cut in, “it will be killing the Chaos Eater.”

  The silver-haired Sunai shot her a look. “What were you doing outside the Compound?”

  Kate kept her gaze on the cell. “Hunting.”

  “With whose permission?”

  “Mine,” said August firmly. “And without her, the entire squad would be dead.”

  “The entire squad might as well be,” said Soro.

  “Enough,” said Flynn wearily.

  “We’re all going to die,” murmured the prisoner. “I’ll make it fast.”

  Flynn tapped a microphone. “Do you know who you are?”

  The soldier twitched, shuddered at the voice, and shook his head, as if trying to dislodge something. “Myer. Squad Sixteen.”

  “Do you know what you’ve done?”

  “I didn’t mean to but it felt so good so good I want to—no no no.” His breath hitched, and then he mouthed something, too low to hear. Kate read his lips.

  Kill me.

  And then, just as quickly, he was back again, promising mercy, mercy—that he would make it quick—and Kate wrapped her arms around her ribs.

  This is me.

  A hand settled on her shoulder. “Come on,” said August, and she let him lead her away from the soldier and his screams.

  As soon as they were in the elevator, Kate slumped against the wall and bowed her head, eyes lost behind the shadow of her bangs. August couldn’t read her face like that, and it made him think of the way she’d looked out on the light grid—when she’d looked into the mirror and all of her features had gone eerily blank, like she wasn’t even there. And then she’d come crashing back, all the color and life rushing into her face before the force of it—whatever it was—hit her.

  “You’re staring,” said Kate without looking up.

  “Out there,” he said slowly. “When you were searching for it—”

  “Everything has a cost.”

  “You should have told me.”

  “Why?” Her head drifted up. “You said yourself, August. We do what we have to. We become what we have to.” They reached the top floor, and Kate stepped out. “I thought you of all people would approve.”

  August trailed her down the hall. “It’s not the same.”

  Kate gave him an exasperated look. “No,” she said, “You’re right. It’s not.” She cocked her head, bangs sliding aside to reveal the silver in her eye. It had spread, thrown out cracks and stolen more of the blue. “This thing in my head, it’s not going away. It’s there, every moment, trying to tip that balance, and turn me into that thing parading as a soldier in your basement. But at least I’m fighting it.”

  With that she turned and vanished down the hall.

  Let her go, said Leo.

  But August didn’t.

  He found her sitting on his bed, her knees drawn up.

  He set the violin case against the door and sank onto the bed beside her, suddenly exhausted. For a few long moments they sat there, neither speaking, even though he knew how much Kate hated silence. And, even though his presence should make her want to speak, it was his own voice that rose out of the quiet.

  “I didn’t stop fighting,” he said, the words so low he worried Kate wouldn’t hear them, but she did. “I just got tired of losing. It’s easier this way.”

  “Of course it’s easier,” said Kate. “That doesn’t mean it’s right.”

&
nbsp; Right. The world broke down into right and wrong, innocence and guilt. It was supposed to be a simple line, a clean divide, but it wasn’t.

  “You asked me where I went,” he said, pressing his palms together. “I don’t know.” And that small confession, it was like stepping off a cliff, and he was falling. “I don’t know who I am, and who I’m not, I don’t know who I’m supposed to be, and I miss who I was; I miss it every day, Kate, but there’s no place for that August anymore. No place for the version of me who wanted to go to school, and have a life, and feel human, because this world doesn’t need that August. It needs someone else.”

  Kate’s shoulder came to rest against his, warm, solid.

  “I spent a long time playing that game,” she said. “Pretending there were other versions of this world, where other versions of me got to live, and be happy, even if I didn’t, and you know what? It’s lonely as hell. Maybe there are other versions, other lives, but this one’s ours. It’s all we’ve got.”

  “I can’t protect this world and care about it.”

  Kate met his gaze. “That’s the only way to do it.”

  He folded forward. “I can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because it hurts too much.” He shuddered. “Every day, every loss, it hurts.”

  “I know.” Kate’s hand threaded through his, and for an instant he was curled against the bottom of a bathtub, fever tearing over his skin with Kate’s grip and her voice his only anchors.

  I’m not letting go.

  Her grip tightened.

  “Look at me,” she said, and he dragged his head up. Her face was inches from his own, her eyes midnight blue, save for the violent silver crack.

  “I know it hurts,” she said. “So make it worth the pain.”

  “How?”

  “By not letting go,” she said softly. “By holding on, to anger, or hope, or whatever it is that keeps you fighting.”

  You, he thought.

  And for once, a word felt simple, because Kate was the one who kept him fighting, who looked at him and saw him, and saw through him at the same time, and who never let go.

  He didn’t decide to kiss her. One second her mouth was an inch from his, and the next, his lips were on hers, and the next, she was kissing him back, and the next, they were a tangle of limbs, and the next, Kate was on top of him, pressing him down into the sheets.