Our Dark Duet

by Victoria Schwab

  “What are you doing?”

  The bow skipped on the strings and August opened his eyes. The clock on the wall read 9:45 AM. Ilsa was gone and Soro stood in the doorway, their silver hair slicked back, confusion tingeing the steady planes of their face.

  “Playing,” he said simply.

  His limbs ached and if his fingers could have cracked and bled, they would have hours ago. As it was, the steel strings were hot from so much use, the notes wobbling. If they had been made of anything else, they would have snapped.

  “Why?” asked Soro.

  That question—a single word—with so many answers. “Do you ever wonder why music brings a soul to surface? What makes beauty work as well as pain?”

  “No.”

  “Maybe it is a kind of mercy,” he went on, “but maybe there’s more to it than that.” The violin was heavy in his grip, but he didn’t stop playing. “Maybe there is more to us than murder.”

  “You are behaving strangely,” said Soro. “Is it the sinner?”

  “Her name is Kate.”

  The Sunai shrugged, as if the information were meaningless, and turned their attention to the soldier in the cell, the red and white light like oil and water on his skin.

  “How odd.”

  “He is not guilty,” said August.

  “He is not innocent, either,” said Soro. “And your playing will not save him.”

  Soro is right, sneered Leo in his head. How many hours have you wasted? August’s grip faltered.

  His hands were beginning to shake.

  “You are tired, brother. Let me help.”

  Soro turned toward the door without drawing their flute.

  “Wait,” said August, but it was too late—Soro marched into the cell and broke the soldier’s neck.

  August stopped playing, the violin slipping from numb fingers as the soldier collapsed to the ground, the light gone from his skin.

  August folded against the wall.

  “Why?” he asked when Soro returned. “Why did you do that?”

  The other Sunai looked at him with something like pity.

  “Because,” they said, “we must focus on the living. He was already dead. Come on,” they said, holding open the door. “Our work is waiting.”

  Kate stared down at the tablet and tried not to scream.

  The need to stay calm was warring with the ticking clock in her head and the fact she didn’t know how to trap a shadow, how to catch a monster she was always a step behind.

  She had nothing, and the longer she wracked her brain, the more her anger mounted, the more helpless she felt, the more she wanted to take her frustration out on something, anything. It left her feeling brittle, which made her mad, which made her pulse climb all over again, the shadow whispering all the while in her skull.

  You are hunter.

  You are a killer.

  You are running out of time.

  Do something.

  Do something.

  DO SOMETHING.

  A sound tore itself free from Kate’s throat, and she swept her arm across the table, sending the coffee cup and the tablet crashing to the floor. She put her head in her hands, took a long breath, then stood and picked up the pieces.

  There were answers—she just had to find them.

  She started clicking through every folder on the FTF server.

  She found food logs, census data, a registry of recent deaths, subfolders marked with either an M or an F (for Malchai or Fang, if she had to guess). There was a third folder, marked by another letter—A. There was no telling what that stood for, but the deaths in that one were the most gruesome.

  And then, somewhere between her third and fourth coffee, something caught her eye: a map of V-City, marked with X’s in blue and gray and black, the month stamped at the top.

  The X’s, she soon discovered, marked gains and losses on both sides of the Seam.

  She backed out of the search until she found the rest of the maps, month by month, going back to Callum’s death and Sloan’s rise.

  Kate straightened in her chair. The images were all the same.

  Sure, the X’s shifted back and forth, but never strayed from the few blocks on either side of the Seam.

  And the more files she studied, the stranger the picture became.

  The FTF acted like it was in control, like it was winning, but it wasn’t. Six months, and the Flynn Task Force hadn’t planned or executed a single large-scale attack. Why not?

  It made no sense.

  Kate got to her feet and went looking for Flynn.

  Of course, she quickly realized she didn’t know where to find him.

  The command center was the first logical place to look, and a quick survey of the elevator buttons showed that one and only one floor—three—required key-card access. Which, of course, Kate didn’t have.

  She dug the silver lighter from her back pocket and knelt in front of the panel, and she was halfway through prying off the metal plate when the elevator hummed to life. Kate shot to her feet but the doors were already closing. The 3 on the panel lit up, and the elevator started down.

  Sloan watched the monster come.

  He watched it go.

  He sat on the penthouse’s gray sofa, his long legs stretched across the glass coffee table, and studied the footage, watching as, over and over, the creature drew itself together, and as, over and over, it fell apart again, waxing and waning as if it were a moon.

  He drew a pointed nail across the screen, and the clip began again, an idea coalescing in his head the way the shadow coalesced in the station.

  But unlike the shadow, Sloan’s idea held firm.

  Alice swung her legs over the back of the sofa.

  “Seven for seven,” she said, rolling a bit of explosive between her fingers. “The caches are clear. And I left the little soldier boys a present, in case they come looking.”

  She leaped up again, and Sloan sank back and closed his eyes—

  And noticed a change in the room.

  A new tension.

  The two engineers were still at their table, but they were muttering under their breath.

  “. . . don’t . . .”

  “. . . we have to . . .”

  “. . . he’ll kill us both . . .”

  Sloan rose to his feet, but Alice was already there.

  “Secrets, secrets, are no fun,” she said, ruffling the man’s hair. He flinched away from her touch, and her grip tightened, forcing his head back. “Do you have something to say?”

  The man’s eyes darted nervously as Sloan approached.

  “Well?” he asked. “Have you found a solution to my quandary?”

  The man glared at the woman, but after a moment, she nodded. “The subway,” she said under her breath.

  Sloan’s eyes narrowed. “There are no subways under the Flynn Compound.”

  “No,” said the woman, “not anymore.” She showed him a screen with the underground grid. “This is the most recent map of the subway system, and—”

  “D-d-don’t,” stammered the other engineer, but his protests died when Sloan brought his nails to rest against the man’s throat.

  “Hush,” he said, his attention leveled on the female engineer. “Go on.”

  The woman tapped through several pages on a second screen. “I dug through the old records and found this: the original grid.” She set the tablets side by side. “And here,” she said, indicating a place where old tunnels intersected, “is the Compound.”

  Sloan’s gaze ticked back and forth between the two images. In one, the Compound seemed impenetrable. In the other, its fatal flaw was laid bare.

  “It wouldn’t be hard,” she continued slowly, “to access the old subway system from the newer line—for example, from the tunnel that passes beneath this tower. Then, with enough explosives, the damage would be catastrophic. . . .”

  Catastrophic.

  Sloan smiled.

  “And what if,” he said, “I no longer wanted
to destroy the Compound? What if I only wanted to make a way in?”

  “That wasn’t the plan,” growled Alice.

  “Plans change,” said Sloan. “They evolve.” He lifted the woman’s chin. “Well?”

  “It wouldn’t be hard,” she said. “You’d need to rig a set of charges. Smaller, controlled blasts. But even minor detonations will draw attention.”

  “Well then,” said Sloan, turning his gaze on the male engineer. “I suggest you also devise a distraction.”

  He crossed the penthouse, throwing open the doors to what had once been Callum’s room, Alice on his heels. He opened the closet and knelt, searching the boxes on the floor.

  “Does this change of plans have anything to do with our intruder?” asked Alice.

  “It does,” said Sloan, drawing out a crate.

  She sulked. “I thought we were going to kill it.”

  “Why kill a thing that can be used?”

  “How do you plan to use a thing you can’t even catch?”

  Alice had a point.

  Sloan had been wrong, he realized now, in baiting his first trap, wrong to offer fear when his prey fed on stronger fare. On violence. On chaos. On potential.

  He knew just the bait he’d need.

  But how to contain a shadow?

  He lifted the lid from the crate. Folded inside was a sheet of gold, a curtain spun from that most precious metal. Once upon a time, Callum Harker had slept beneath the sheet as protection from monsters.

  Of course, it hadn’t saved him in the end.

  But still, a human’s shield was a monster’s prison.

  Alice recoiled at the sight of the gold, and the taste on the air burned Sloan’s throat. He put the lid back on.

  “Gather the Fangs.”

  Alice cocked her head. “How many?”

  “All of them.”

  Kate wasn’t entirely sure how she’d gotten there.

  The Compound’s command center was buzzing with activity, the air around her humming with voices and the constant crack and buzz of comms, all blurring into a kind of white noise in her good ear.

  She clutched her tablet as she wove through the crowded hall, trying to stay out of the way of the men and women rushing from room to room, some in plain clothes and others in uniform. A trio of soldiers sat before a bank of consoles, sending out orders, and through a glass door, she saw a familiar halo of red curls sitting before a massive bank of screens, each with a surveillance feed.

  Kate knocked once, so softly that she felt the sound more than heard it, but Ilsa turned in her chair. Not fast, as though startled, but calmly, as though she knew exactly who she’d find.

  Over Ilsa’s shoulder, cameras rotated past, flicking from shot to shot, lingering only a second or two on each angle. Within moments Kate was getting dizzy, but before she looked away she saw a sequence of frames taken from inside elevators and smiled.

  “Thanks for the ride,” she said, and Ilsa gave an amenable shrug.

  The glow from the screens traced an outline around her, casting most of her in shadow, but the small stars across her shoulders and down her arms danced with bluish light.

  One hundred and eighty-six.

  The same number as August—and Kate, though she didn’t bear the same marks. All three of them joined by the actions of a single night.

  Her attention drifted from the stars to the scar at Ilsa’s throat. She could almost make out the taper of a Malchai’s nails.

  Sloan.

  Anger flashed through her, quick and hot, met by the sudden desire to march across the Seam, to find her father’s monster and tear him apart. The urge swept over her like madness, and for a second, it was all she could think of, all she could see—

  Ilsa’s hand came to rest like a cool weight on Kate’s cheek. She hadn’t seen the Sunai rise, or cross the room, and she marveled that August could seem so solid, and his sister so insubstantial.

  What did that make Soro? she wondered. Something else entirely.

  Ilsa’s eyes were wide with worry, but Kate pulled away.

  “It’s okay,” she said, relieved that she could still say those words, which meant they must be true. For now.

  Ilsa cocked her head, and swept her fingers across the air, a gesture clearly meant to encompass the entire command center. The question was wordless, but clear:

  What are you looking for?

  “Henry Flynn,” she answered. “Is he around?”

  Ilsa’s head bobbed once. She pointed to the hall, and Kate was about to leave when she caught Ilsa glancing at the tablet still in Kate’s hand, her pale eyes suddenly focused, intent.

  Did you see?

  Kate started to answer when she heard a familiar word issue from across the hall.

  “Alpha.”

  August’s call sign.

  Kate started toward the sound and found a door ajar, several people gathered around a speaker.

  “We’ve reached Fifth and Taylor.”

  Something turned over in Kate’s mind. Why did that sound so familiar?

  “No signs of trouble.”

  She closed her eyes, trying to draw a map in her mind.

  It was in North City, but there was something else, something more.

  “We’re going in the front.”

  “Wait,” she said, stepping into the room. Five faces swiveled toward her, only one of them familiar. Henry Flynn leaned against the wall, as if for support. The other four had only one thing in common: scorn.

  “Kate?” August’s voice sounded over the comm.

  She stepped up to the table. “Don’t go in yet.”

  “Miss Harker,” said Flynn wearily.

  “Never let a Harker loose, Henry,” said an older woman. She had an acerbic smile and milky eyes that stared into the middle distance, unseeing.

  “What are you doing on this level?” demanded a soldier with a trim beard.

  “And in the Council’s chamber,” added a middle-aged soldier with two black braids.

  Kate shook her head. “Fifth and Taylor—I know that building, what is that?”

  “You really shouldn’t eavesdrop,” said Flynn.

  “It’s a depot,” offered the youngest soldier. “Our intel indicates it holds a supply of dry grains.”

  But that wasn’t it. “No,” she said, remembering. “It’s a subway stop.”

  Flynn straightened a little, wincing as he did. “It was, a while back. Harker built a warehouse over it.”

  “And you’re taking your squad in through the front door?” challenged Kate.

  Flynn’s jaw tightened. “You think it’s a trap.”

  “You assume it’s not?” she countered.

  “There’s no evidence—” started the female soldier.

  “No, August said there were no signs of trouble. I’m guessing he means Fangs, or Malchai. Something with a pulse.” She looked to Flynn. “You want me to think like Sloan. I can’t. But I can think like my father, and I can tell you, he would never leave supplies unguarded.”

  That, at last, made them hesitate.

  “What do you suggest?” asked Flynn.

  Kate chewed her lip. “August,” she said after a moment, “do you have lights on you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good,” she said. “Then go through the subway.”

  A muffled curse issued from another comm. Whoever it was, she didn’t blame them. Dark spaces were the Corsai’s territory. Static filled the line for half a minute, followed by a splash, the shuffle of legs wading through shallow water, a few colorful words, and then the muted sound of hands on bars, and August telling the rest of his team to stay back. The whole room seemed to hold its breath at the scrape of the metal cover. And then, static again, broken only by short sharp intake of breath.

  “Alpha?” prompted Flynn.

  “We’re inside,” said August. “Intel was right: there’s a large supply of grain . . .”

  The bearded man shot Kate a withering look.

&
nbsp; “But the whole place is rigged to blow.”

  Kate felt a momentary swell of triumph, but had the decency not to say I told you so, given the precarious nature of the situation.

  “Well,” she said. “Good thing you took the tunnel.”

  A new voice came on the comm. “Alpha Squad Tech, Ani, here. I can deactivate it.”

  “All right, Alpha Squad,” said Flynn. “Be careful.”

  The comm static vanished, replaced by a steady quiet, and Kate realized that the whole room had gone silent, all eyes turned toward her. If they expected her to leave, they were disappointed. She held her ground.

  “Is there something else you’d like to say?” asked Flynn.

  “I’ve been studying the files on your drive.”

  “Who gave you access to that information?” demanded the bearded soldier.

  “You’ve been fighting for six months,” she went on, “but it looks like a stalemate, not a battle. You’re not making any sustainable forward progress; you’re just trying to hold your ground.”

  “Why the hell are we listening to a teenage girl?”

  “Oh, am I just a teenage girl now? I thought I was the daughter of your enemy or the soldier who just saved your squad.” She could feel her temper rising. “Am I dead weight or a danger to your cause or an asset with information? Make up your mind.”

  The blind woman gave a short, humorless laugh.

  “Miss Harker—” warned Flynn.

  “Why haven’t you attacked the tower?”

  “We don’t have enough people,” said the female soldier.

  Kate scoffed at that. “The FTF has tens of thousands.”

  “Less than a thousand,” countered the young man, “are skilled enough to make the Night Squads.”

  “If we sent even half,” said the bearded soldier, “the loss we could sustain—”

  “—would be worth it,” countered the blind woman.

  So this was the problem, thought Kate. The reason for half measures, stalemates, slow deaths. How could they fight Sloan? They were too busy fighting among themselves.

  She looked to Henry Flynn, who had said nothing, only listened.

  “Why should they risk their lives for North City?” asked the female soldier.

  “This isn’t about North and South,” snapped Kate. “It’s about Verity. You’re bleeding soldiers, and Sloan’s letting you, because he can. He doesn’t care how many pieces he sacrifices in this game.”