Our Dark Duet

by Victoria Schwab

  “War is not a game,” said the bearded soldier.

  “Not to you, but it is to him, and you’re never going to end this until you end Sloan, and in order to end Sloan, you have to take risks, you have to think like him, play like him—”

  The Council started speaking over her.

  “We cannot afford—”

  “—A coordinated attack on the tower—”

  “—you mean a suicide mission—”

  “You cannot win unless you’re willing to fight.” Kate slammed her fist on the table, and heard the sound of metal burying itself in wood.

  The Council recoiled, and she looked down and saw her hand wrapped around the switchblade. She didn’t remember drawing the lighter, didn’t remember freeing the knife, but there it was, embedded in the table.

  The Council stared at the shining metal, and Kate almost reached out to free the blade. Instead she backed away. Putting space between her hand and the knife and the people in the room.

  “Kate, are you all—” started Flynn, but she was already out the door.

  Kate punched the elevator button, pressing her forehead to the cold steel. She listened to the low, slow crank of the machinery, and took the stairs instead.

  She hit the lobby and wove through the crowded hall toward the nearest outer door. She needed air. The question was how to get out. She scanned the soldiers congesting the hall and saw one tuck a pack of cigarettes into the fold of his sleeve. That would do. Kate sped up right as he turned toward her.

  The collision was brief, and just hard enough to set them both off balance. By the time he righted himself, the cigarettes were in her pocket. He muttered something under his breath, but she didn’t wait around to hear it.

  Kate was ten feet from the Compound door when a guard stepped into her path. “You’re not cleared to leave.”

  She flashed the pack of cigarettes. He didn’t move. “Come on.” She gestured down at herself, trying to keep the urgency from her voice. “No gear, no weapons. I’m not going far.”

  “Not my problem.”

  She saw herself grabbing the knife from his thigh, imagined the clean line it would make across his throat. She even took a step forward, closing the distance between them as—

  “Let her go,” muttered another guard. “She’s not worth it.”

  The first one scowled, but shoved the door aside, and just like that, without any blood or bodies, Kate was free.

  A shiver ran down her spine as the Compound door slammed shut behind her. It was an unsettling thing, to be on the wrong side of a locked door, even with the last shreds of daylight clinging to the sky and the UVR strip starting to brighten beneath her feet, but Kate filled her lungs with cold air and took a few steps onto the stream of light.

  You are still in control.

  She looked down at the pack of cigarettes. It had been months since she’d last smoked—she’d half expected the urge to resurface with the city, as if returning to this old life meant returning to her old self, too. But she didn’t even crave it.

  The pack hung from her fingers as she took a step, and then another, and another, putting distance between herself and the Compound. Beyond the strip of light, dusk was slipping in like fog, and she could almost feel the Chaos Eater stirring in the shadows.

  Kate spread her arms.

  Come and get me.

  The Fangs gathered in the tower basement.

  The same basement where Callum Harker had once held court, where a man with a homemade bomb had killed twenty-nine and ushered the first Sunai into the world, where blood still stained the floor and death still ghosted the walls, and Corsai whispered hungrily from the darkest corners.

  Sloan stood on the platform, watching them jostle for space—more than a hundred men and women from across North City, united only by those bands of steel around their throats.

  They had always been a violent bunch. The kind of humans who found power by taking it from others, who tolerated their own submission only because it placed them higher than the rest of the prey, and who believed, on some level, that they were better than their own kind, stronger than one other, and oh-so-eager to prove that strength.

  Bravado. That was the word for it.

  They had been gathered for less than an hour and already they were at one another’s throats. Posturing, lobbing insults, their bodies coiled with energy and their eyes shining with drink.

  Sloan had studied enough humans to know the way their minds weakened and their tempers flared under its effects. The liquor had been a welcome present, a reward, proof that they’d been chosen.

  He cleared his throat and called for silence.

  “I’ve summoned you because you have proven yourselves worthy of my attention.” He shaped his words carefully. “I’ve summoned you because you are among the fiercest, the strongest, and the most bloodthirsty humans in my employ.”

  Laughter, low and feral, rippled through the crowd. Sloan’s gaze wandered up to the gold-shrouded cage hanging overhead, its shape too dark for human eyes.

  “I’ve summoned you,” he said, “because I know you are willing, but I do not know if you are able.”

  “Come now, Sloan. They are only humans.” Alice came slinking forward from the shadows behind him, her voice dripping with scorn. “Do any humans really possess the strength to rise above their mediocrity? To become monstrous? To become more?” Her face was a perfect mask of disdain.

  Collars rattled and voices rose, the basement a riot of hunger and noise, of drunken humans gunning for a fight.

  “You are all the same,” Alice continued to taunt the Fangs. “Meat. Blood. Soul. No human will ever prove my equal.”

  “Give us a chance!” came a voice from the crowd.

  “We’ll show you!” shouted another.

  Sloan stepped to the edge of the platform. “Who thinks themselves worthy?”

  Hands went up, and bodies jostled, and the whole crowd churned, the bloodlust thick enough to taste.

  A slow smile spread across Sloan’s lips. “Who will prove it?”

  “Hey, you.”

  The voice came from behind her, gruff and male.

  Kate’s arms fell back to her sides as she turned and recognized the soldier from the hall, the one whose cigarettes she’d lifted. He was flanked by a stocky girl and a squat young man.

  “The fuck you think you’re doing?” he demanded. “You gonna give me my shit back?”

  Kate looked down at the pack of cigarettes in her hand and started to apologize, then stopped. She had an idea. It was, admittedly, a very bad idea. But Kate was running out of time inside her own head and if she couldn’t hunt the Chaos Eater, then maybe she could bait it.

  Make it come to her.

  What was it Emily Flynn had said?

  Some will see your presence as an insult.

  Others might take it as a challenge.

  Right now, she could practically feel the violence wicking off the FTFs.

  Would it be enough?

  Could she keep herself from hurting them?

  “I know who you are,” snarled the first soldier. “Harker.” He spat the name, as if it were a curse.

  He was still coming toward her, and she could feel the smooth resolve spreading through her head, the longing to fight, to hurt, to kill. At least she’d left the switchblade embedded in the table. That ought to give them a fighting chance.

  She knew it was a bad idea.

  But it was the only one she had.

  “You want your cigarettes?” Kate crushed the pack in her hand. “Go fetch,” she said, lobbing it into the dark.

  And just like that, the soldier lunged, not for the cigarettes but for her, and they went down on the strip.

  Kate rolled, landing on top of him, but before she could get any leverage, an arm hooked around her neck and wrenched her off.

  “You don’t deserve to wear that badge,” snarled the woman.

  Kate glanced at the FTF stitched onto her sleeve. “It
came with the clothes,” she said, dropping her knee and rolling the soldier over her shoulder. But the moment she was free, someone hit her sidelong and she went down hard, the monster surging up within her.

  No, she thought, forcing it back even as she straightened. She fought to keep her breathing even, her pulse steady, as she stared past the soldiers into the shadows of the city.

  Where are you?

  Kate licked a drop of blood from her lip as the soldiers circled. “You’ll have to do better than that.”

  “I’ll show you!” called a Fang, forcing his way toward the stage.

  He tried to climb up, but Alice slammed her shoe into his face and he went toppling backward, nose gushing blood.

  The taste of copper stained the air and Sloan felt his own hunger stir as laughter rustled through the crowd, low and cruel.

  “I didn’t say go!” said Alice. “If you want to play, there are rules. When I say go, bring me a piece of—” She waved a sharp nail back and forth through the air before pointing at a man: “him.”

  The Fang’s eyes widened. He was broad-shouldered and covered in ink, but in that moment, Sloan saw the bravado falter, fall away.

  Alice did have a way with people.

  She flashed a vicious smile. “The largest piece wins!”

  The crowd’s unfocused energy shifted, narrowing to a point.

  “Ready?”

  “Wait,” begged the man, but it was too late.

  “Go.”

  The Fangs turned, and in a single wave, they surged toward him. The first scream left his throat just as the lights overhead flickered and went out.

  Kate collapsed to her hands and knees on the light strip, her vision blurring white.

  “Not so cocky now, are you?”

  The pain kept her grounded, even as the monster in head told her to fight back.

  Make me, she thought, forcing herself to her feet.

  They weren’t the best fighters, these three, but it was taking half Kate’s strength just to keep the dark at bay, to keep that horrible, wonderful calm from stealing through her head, to keep her hands from freeing a soldier’s knife and—

  She threw an elbow back and up, a dirty move, but the FTFs had trained to fight Fangs, who fought dirty, too, and suddenly her arm was trapped behind her back.

  Kate struggled for balance, and for a second, as they grappled, she had a glimpse of the light strip, and the Compound, and a shadow leaning back against the wall.

  Not the Chaos Eater, but Soro, polishing their flute.

  Soro, watching, as if it were a sport, and then Kate’s arm was twisted up, viciously, and she was being hauled toward the place where the light strip met the spreading dark.

  “Stop.” The word came out a whisper. A plea. She refused to shout, refused to scream, but she could see the shadows moving beyond the safety of the Compound’s light, the telltale glint of Corsai’s eyes and teeth, and panic rippled through her as they forced her toward the edge.

  “What’s the matter?” sneered the soldier. “I thought Harkers weren’t afraid of the dark.”

  She squeezed her eyes shut and tried to reach across whatever thread bound her mind to the monster’s, as if she could summon it to her.

  “This is the part where you beg,” said the soldier as Kate’s boots skidded over the last few feet of the light strip, and she felt herself starting to slip. Her vision narrowed and her heart slowed. The urge was there, so simple, so clear.

  “Taylor,” warned the second soldier.

  “Enough,” called the third.

  But Taylor’s mouth was close, his breath hot on her skin. “Beg,” he snarled, “the way my uncle did when your father—”

  Kate drove her boot back into his knee, and heard the satisfying crack of bone right before he screamed, and in that moment of pain, his grip failed and she was behind him, forcing him to his knees, his face inches from the dark.

  It would be so easy to pitch him forward across the line of light, into that place where real monsters waited.

  “Stay back,” she warned as the other two soldiers started toward her.

  Kate bowed her head. “This is the part,” she said, “where you beg.”

  Her vision slid in and out of focus, as if she were in a dream, and the soldier began to whimper softly, and everything in her wanted to just—let go. But the Chaos Eater hadn’t come—it was still out there, still free.

  Kate sighed, and hauled the soldier back into the safety of the light.

  For an instant, the tower basement went dark.

  A dark unlike Sloan had ever seen. True black—a total, unnatural absence of light—and then, just as quickly, the lights were back, flickering and only half as bright.

  The Fangs looked around in confusion.

  And there, in their midst, stood the shadow.

  It smudged the air, just as it had in the footage. It had no face, no mouth, nothing but a pair of silver eyes, round as mirrors. The sight of it left Sloan cold. And hungry. As if he hadn’t eaten in nights.

  A few Fangs noticed it too, turning on the monster with raised fists and bloodshot eyes, only to stop, to still. Something passed between them, a flicker of motion, the flash of silver, and it was like watching dominoes tip. The Fangs turned away from the shadow, and toward one another—

  And the killing began.

  Sloan stood on the stage, mesmerized by the frenzy, by the way the Fangs began tearing at one another, their motions vicious but deliberate, moving with a strange mixture of urgency and calm, but what unnerved him most was the quiet. There should have been screams, pleas, terror and pain echoing through the concrete chamber, but the humans slaughtered one other in such perfect silence, while the shadow began to drift through the mass, growing more solid with every step.

  Alice was across the stage, a cable in her hand, and when the creature reached the center of the floor, she let go.

  The cage came whistling down, the gold veil billowing before it landed with a crash atop the shadow. That crash was so much louder than the killing, and yet the humans didn’t waver from their slaughter, not even when Sloan leaped down from the stage and made his way toward the shrouded cell.

  The sheet had slipped in the fall, a slice of darkness visible through the gap in the gold, and when Sloan peered through, he half expected the cage to be empty, the shadow gone. But there it was, a solid black shape in the center of the cell, and as he stopped before it, the shadow’s silver eyes drifted up until Sloan saw himself reflected in them.

  “Hello, my pet.”

  The soldier was on the ground, clutching his knee.

  The other two hurried to his side as Kate stepped around his moaning form and started back toward the Compound.

  She was halfway there when it happened.

  Between one step and the next, her vision doubled and the world plunged away and she was falling. Not down—she was still on her feet, still on the light strip, but she was also somewhere else, somewhere cold and dark, damp and concrete—

  —senses filling

  with the acrid taste

  of blood and ash

  a gold cage

  that burns

  like smoke

  and there

  beyond the cage

  a pair of red eyes

  float in the dark

  a skeleton

  in a black suit

  and the world

  narrows

  to the point

  of a single shape

  the name rising

  like smoke—

  Sloan.

  Sloan studied the shadow while the remaining Fangs grappled and strangled and fought among the bodies on the floor. Movement stirred at the edge of his sight as a man covered in blood started toward the stairs, his motions steady, purposeful.

  “No one leaves,” ordered Sloan, the words directed at Alice, who beamed before launching herself in a blur, snapping one man’s neck before tearing out another’s heart. She could be efficient
when given the right task.

  Sloan turned his attention back to the creature in the cage.

  The footage had not done it justice.

  It had shown Sloan the shadow’s appearance, yes, revealed the way its influence spread from victim to victim, the violence like a disease, contagious. But on the tablet screen, the creature had been merely a shape, flat and featureless.

  Now, standing in its presence, Sloan felt hollow, cold. His skin prickled and his teeth ached, and something as simple and primal as fear began to well inside him, until it met with something stronger.

  Victory.

  Here was a thing of darkness, like the Corsai; a lone hunter, like a Malchai; a creature that bristled Sloan’s edges like a Sunai; but it was none of those things. It was a weapon, a thing of absolute destruction.

  And now it belonged to him.

  VERSE 4

  A MONSTER UNLEASHED

  Kate didn’t remember falling, but she was on her hands and knees, blood dripping from her nose onto the glaring white light of the strip beneath her. Somewhere, beyond the ringing in her head, she heard the sound of steps, brisk and even, and she knew she had to get up, but the pain was tearing through her skull, and her thoughts were rattling around inside her head, shaken loose by the sudden change in who, in what, in where.

  Sloan.

  Sloan had the Chaos Eater.

  Her vision doubled again, and for a flickering instant the Malchai was there, hovering in front of her on the strip, his sallow skin stretched over dark bones, and his red eyes looking right at her, through her—but Kate forced herself to her feet as he dissolved, replaced by cold gray eyes and short silver hair.

  Soro.

  Kate staggered back, or tried to, but the Sunai caught her by the collar.

  “What happened just now?”

  Kate’s head was still spinning, but she managed to find a truth. “Your soldiers jumped me.”

  Soro wasn’t having it. Their grip tightened, hauling Kate closer. “I saw you go down. What happened?”

  Kate fought the pull of Soro’s question, but the truth slid between clenched teeth. “The Chaos Eater,” she said. “Sloan has it.”