He dragged his eyes from the sky. “Really?”
“Maybe that’s what you’re made of. Just like us.”
And despite everything, August smiled.
It was such a hard-won smile, but it was worth it.
And then, all of a sudden, it was gone, and August shuddered, bracing himself against the car. Something like a chill went through him, a tremor that seemed to run from his limbs to his core.
Her hands hovered in the air around him, helpless. “What’s wrong?”
“I’ll . . . I’ll be okay,” he said.
“Bullshit.”
In response, he tugged aside his collar and she saw the edge of light, not bright but burning against his chest like the lit end of a cigarette. It drew a single line, the ember red darkening to black. A new tally. A new day.
“How many is that?”
He was still shaking, but when he looked up, there was something in his eyes, a kind of grim triumph. “Four hundred and twenty-three.”
Just then, truck lights cut through the darkness, coming from the direction of V-City.
Kate waved the HUV, and to her relief, the truck slowed and hauled itself onto the shoulder. It was a semi, obviously reinforced for the trek through the Waste, its grill and flanks framed by grates with iron striping, its windows coated to make them bulletproof. There were several scores along its sides, and they probably weren’t from Corsai. The monsters targeted humans. The humans targeted supplies.
Kate tucked the ornate silver pendant under her shirt and stepped up onto the truck’s footboard as the passenger window inched down.
“What the hell are you kids doing out here?” asked the driver. He was middle-aged and had the cropped, weathered look of someone who’d spent too much of his life on edge.
“Car trouble,” she said, flashing her best smile. “Can you give us a lift?”
He looked past her to August, and Kate tried to see him as the driver would, just a lanky teen boy with an instrument case slung over his shoulder. “Where you going?”
Kate nodded at the road heading away from V-City. She dug up the name of the easternmost subcity. “Louisville.”
He shook his head. “That’s on the other side of the Waste,” he said. “You’re better off trying to catch a lift back toward the capital.”
“We saw a town or something a little ways back,” she said, filling her voice with naiveté. “You think we should head there?”
The man grimaced. “You try to get inside a fort at night, the only thing you’re gonna get is shot.” He ran a hand through his short hair. “Dammit.” He wasn’t wearing a medallion. Kate swallowed, then tugged her pendant over her head.
The weight of the silver was solid, reassuring. She didn’t want to get rid of it, but she couldn’t stay here on the side of the road, either. She held it up for the driver to see. “Look, we don’t want to cause trouble. We haven’t got much cash, but if you can at least give us a lift in the right direction, I’ll give you this.”
The driver’s eyes went wide, and Kate knew she had him. After all, a Harker medallion was safety, and safety was a luxury, a commodity more valuable—and more expensive—than a truck, a house, a life.
The man’s fingers closed around the silver. “Get in.”
Kate climbed into the front seat, and August slid onto a bench that looked like it also functioned as a cot. He knitted his fingers and bowed his head. Kate wasn’t an idiot. Something was obviously wrong. But every time she asked he just got mad, as if she was making it worse. He looked ill. Did monsters get ill? Or did they only get hungry? How long had it been since he’d eaten?
“Look,” said the driver. “I’m not in the smuggling business, okay? I’m a trucker. I only go as far as the subcities, so if you’re looking for a way through the border, I can’t help you.”
“It’s fine,” said Kate. “We’re not trying to cross.”
“Then what the hell are you doing out here in the dark?”
And it was weird, but Kate almost told him the truth. It seemed to bubble up, out of her mind and out her mouth, the words rising so fast she had to bite her tongue to stop them. What had August said, about Sunai and truth? She shot him a look, but he was sitting hunched forward, elbows on knees, staring at the ground.
“It was a dare,” she said. “We were with some friends.”
“There was a concert tonight,” added August from the back seat. “At the edge of the green.”
“Yeah,” chimed in Kate. “Our friends bet us twenty bucks we wouldn’t drive into the Waste when it was over. Forty if we brought something back from the subcity on the other side. Stupid me,” she added. “I didn’t check the tank.”
The driver shook his head. “Kids these days,” he said, guiding the semi back onto the road. “You got too much time and too little sense.” His sleeves were rolled up, and his right forearm bore several nasty scars. Corsai marks. “I’ll take you as far as the next truck stop. It’s about as safe as it gets out here. After that, you find your own way back into the green.”
Kate nodded. “Works for us,” she said, casting a glance at August. But she couldn’t see his face. It was lost in shadow.
August felt the semi slow, and dragged his head up off the backseat.
The truck was pulling off the UVR strip and onto a second, smaller road. For an instant the road light faded, then it redoubled as a building came into sight.
It was more a fortress than a truck stop. High metal fences topped with razor wire circled the structure, and massive UVRs cut a swathe through the darkness, a moat of light that stretched across the tarmac, erasing every shadow. A sign over the building—which really looked like several buildings stacked together—announced that this place was the Horizon.
The driver stopped in front of the fence and honked once, then waited. Two men stood on either side, weapons in hand. One held an HUV and some kind of machete, the other a machine gun. One weapon for the monsters, August realized, and one for the raiders.
The gates hissed open and the semi rumbled forward into the lot. August heard the metallic grind of gates closing again, and his chest tightened at the thought of being penned in.
“This is as far as we go,” said the driver as he parked. “Plenty of guys here’ll give you a ride back. You got any cash?”
“A little,” said Kate, even though August was pretty sure they were down to spare change. The man chewed his lip, then held out the medallion she’d given him. “Give ’em this, then.”
Kate hesitated. “We had a deal.”
“I was going this way,” said the driver. “Go on. Take it.”
Kate took the pendant and tucked it into her pocket with a quiet thanks. Outside, the night had gotten crisper, the cool air washing over August like a salve. Around them, a dozen trucks were parked in even rows, like black tallies, shadowless against the pavement. His eyes floated closed, his mind sliding into four hundred and twenty-three lines, into echoes ghosted on barren ground, into gunshots and screams and blazing hunger.
And then he was being pulled, and he opened his eyes to see Kate dragging him toward the fluorescent haze of the rest stop.
“Come on,” she said, “I’m starving,” and he tried to laugh but the sound stuck in his throat like glass.
The Horizon was apparently the place to be at 4 A.M. It was like its own small, self-contained city, with a cafeteria and bathrooms with showers and supply stores, the whole space so well lit that it hurt Kate’s eyes.
August had gone to the bathroom, mumbling something about freshening up, and Kate wandered the aisles, trying to pretend she had more than five dollars in her wallet as she perused the shelves. Credit cards she had in abundance, but cards were traceable, and she’d used most of her cash to pay for the motel.
She was thinking about palming a granola bar when she saw the watch. It was hanging on a low display with a few maps and other travel supplies, an ordinary digital watch except for the fact it showed not only time and temper
ature but coordinates. She didn’t have an address for where she was going. But she had the numbers, latitude and longitude.
38° 29.45
–86° 32.56
Kate pulled the watch from the display as casually as possible, examining it for several long moments before slipping it into the pocket of her coat. Only it wasn’t her coat, but August’s. And when she shoved the watch into the pocket, her fingers came up against something metal and smooth: the stolen cell phone. Her eyes flicked up, but there was no sign of August, and the rest of the patrons were busy pouring too much sugar in their coffee or looking glassy-eyed at the row of television screens mounted along the wall.
Kate drew the cell phone from her pocket. It was off, to save power, and she held the button down until it booted, hoping for a message. Nothing.
She looked around. Maybe they didn’t need to keep going. Maybe they could stay here, in the Horizon. It was warded six ways against monsters. No Malchai would ever get in, and the place was big enough to keep them from looking too conspicuous. Maybe—
And then she heard her name, not coming from August or anyone in the store, but from the television on the wall.
She looked up and saw a picture filling the screen.
A picture of her.
August clutched the sink, his vision sliding in and out of focus.
It was getting worse.
He stared at the mirror, and his reflection stared back, eyes wide and cheeks hollow. His bones were on fire; when he looked down at his hands, he thought he could see them through the skin, not dark like a Malchai’s but glowing white, alive with heat. The fever was burning out the anger, leaving something else in its wake.
He fumbled with the tap and ran his hands under the cold water. Tendrils of steam rose from where the moisture met his skin.
They were so far from the city, and the absence—of people, of monsters, of energy—was making him woozy.
Pack a snack, Leo had said.
August groaned inwardly.
Mind over body.
Mind over body.
Mind over body over bodies on the floor over tallies seared day by day by day into skin until it cracked and broke and bled into the beat of gunfire and the melody of pain and the world was made of savage music, made and was made of, and that was the cycle, the big bang into the whimper and on and on and none of it was real except for August or all of it was real except for him. . . .
He surfaced with a gasp—it was getting harder and harder to stay afloat—and clenched his hands into fists on the rim of the sink. He could feel his nails denting his palms, threatening to break the skin.
August had done this before, had starved himself, determined to believe that he was stronger than this, disgusted by the fact he wasn’t, by the way the hunger ravaged him when it barely seemed to touch his siblings, desperate to find something on the other side, something besides darkness. August had gone to the edge of his senses, and over, had memorized the steps, the stages, as if knowing them was half the battle to overcoming, to outwitting—outwilling—the need. First came anger, then madness, then joy, then sorrow. They should make a nursery rhyme about that, anger, madness, joy, sorrow, anger, madness, joy, sorrow, ang—
He was sliding again.
You’re okay, you’re okay, you’re okay.
“You okay, kid?”
He looked up and saw a man standing there, the left half of his face creased with scars.
August swallowed, found his voice. “Tired of fighting,” he said.
The man shook his head, the gesture sympathetic as he washed his hands.
“Aren’t we all?”
The headline on the screen read:
KATHERINE HARKER ABDUCTED, FLYNN FAMILY SUSPECTED
“Henry Flynn is denying any responsibility in the abduction,” the news anchor was saying, “but sources close to the case confirm that a member of the Flynn family was attending school with Katherine Harker and was seen with her immediately preceding her disappearance. “What’s more”— the news anchor’s eyes went bright with morbid glee—“evidence suggests that a Sunai was responsible for the attack at the esteemed school, which left three students and a teacher dead, and Harker’s only child missing.”
Kate’s stomach lurched. Several men were standing around, looking up at the screens. One muttered something vile underneath his breath; another said there better be a reward. “Turn this trash off,” grumbled the third.
“Can’t,” said the old woman working the till. “It’s on every channel.”
The screen then cut to footage of her father, who was standing before a podium in a crisp black suit, as if he didn’t know what was happening, as if his own rogue monsters weren’t to blame. “I will have my daughter back,” he said, “and I will see the perpetrators—whoever they are—punished for their crimes against my family and against this capital. We in North City see this for what it is: an act of war.”
The news anchor was back. “If you have any information about Katherine Harker, contact the number below . . .”
Kate was already coding a message into the stolen cell.
Call. Urgent.
She backed away from the line of televisions, ducking behind a display of some nondescript, nonperishable food. One minute passed. Two. And then it rang.
“Katherine,” came her father’s voice, only a ghost of his former panic in his voice. He’d regained his usual composure. “Are you all right?”
“Why would you say that on TV?” she snapped. “I told you it wasn’t them!”
A measured exhale. “I don’t know that. Not for sure.”
“I do,” she whispered angrily.
“So he is with you.”
The question threw her. “What?”
“Frederick Gallagher. Also known as August Flynn. Henry’s third Sunai.” Her chest tightened. She would have told him, was planning to tell him. Hell, she was planning to deliver the monster to her father’s feet. Now she couldn’t bring herself to say his name. “Has he been with you the entire time?” pressed Harker.
But Kate didn’t give. This wasn’t August’s fault. August hadn’t tried to kill her. August had saved her life.
“Katherine—”
“Where is Sloan?”
“Hunting down those who moved against me.”
“He’s the one moving against you!” she snarled.
“No,” he said evenly. “He’s not. I questioned him myself. Sloan says he had no hand in the attack.”
“That’s a lie!”
“We both know he cannot lie.”
Her thoughts spun. It had to be Sloan. Who else would have done this?
“Dad—”
“Stay out of the city until you hear from me.”
“So you can let people think I’ve been abducted?”
“So I can keep you safe.” His tone was hardening. “And you need not code the messages, Katherine. This is my phone, after all. Who else would see it?”
Your shadow, she wanted to say.
Instead, she hung up.
“You’re letting out the cold,” snapped a rasping voice. August drew his head out of the beverage case to see a wiry old woman in a Horizon uniform.
“Sorry,” he said, shutting the fridge doors. “I meant to let it in.” The words sounded wrong on his tongue, but they were already out.
Nearby, a woman’s voice started rising as she talked into a cell.
A man dropped his cup of coffee, spilling it on another trucker. The second swore, and shoved the first back, a little too hard. Tension rose like pressure in the store around him.
The woman hurried away, and then, between one burning heartbeat and the next, August caught the scent of crime—old blood, a chill in the air that rustled against his fevered skin. August swayed, his fingers tightening on the strap of the violin case as his gaze slid across the store, over shelves and faces until . . . there. The whole world came into focus around the man. He was stocky, with a mud-splattered coat, a short,
uneven beard, and a head too small for his shoulders.
But August didn’t care about any of that. All he cared about was the shadow coiling like a cape behind the man, restless and wrong, and the fact he was already out the front door, taking the promise of cold bones and clear thoughts with him.
August moved to follow but someone gripped his arm.
Kate. “We have to go,” she snapped. “Now.”
“Kate, I . . .” He couldn’t drag his eyes from the man’s shrinking form. “I need to . . .” But before he could finish, she took his jaw in her hand—he was amazed it didn’t burn her fingers—and turned it toward a bank of televisions mounted on the wall. Her face was plastered on the screens—all the screens—above the headline:
KATHERINE HARKER ABDUCTED, FLYNN FAMILY SUSPECTED
He felt himself surface, a painfully sharp moment of clarity as he took in the headline. “No,” he said, the word knocked out of him like a breath. “I didn’t—”
Just then the front doors chimed open, and the driver, the one who’d given them a lift, came in and saw the screens and stopped. “What’s this?”
“Shit.” Kate pulled August down below the rim of the shelves. “Go. Now.” She shoved him in the direction of a hall. He cast a last, desperate glance toward the front doors, but the man with the sin-made shadow was already gone.
“Come on,” said Kate, pushing him past the bathrooms and through the back exit, out onto the other side of the truck stop’s tarmac. The UVRs rained down on them, and August winced, head pounding.
“I didn’t abduct you,” he said. “I saved your life. You’re the one who decided to run.”
“And you’re the one who decided to come with me.” Kate was already walking away. Away from the truck stop. Away from him. She disappeared around the nearest corner, and he forced himself to follow.
“We have to tell someone,” he said, jogging to catch up. “We have to let them know you’re okay.”
“In case you forgot,” she called back, “someone is still trying to kill me.”
“They don’t even have to!” August knew he had a point. He was fighting to hold on to it. “This is exactly what they wanted, Kate. To blame my family for breaking the truce. And it’s going to work if we don’t—”
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