This Savage Song (4 page)

A ghost of amusement rippled through Leo's features. “Then you'll just have to get your hands dirty.” With that, he pulled the case from August's grip and nudged him into the elevator. August stumbled, then turned back, his hands prickling with the sudden absence of the violin.

“Good-bye, brother,” said Leo, punching the button for the lobby.

“Have fun at school,” he added as the doors slid shut.

August shoved his hands into his pockets as the elevator plunged twenty floors. The compound was part skyscraper, part base of operations, all fortress. A concrete beast, steel, barbed wire, and Plexiglas, most of it dedicated to barracks housing members of the task force. The vast majority of the FTF's sixty thousand officers were housed in other barracks across the city, but the nearly a thousand stationed at the compound served as camouflage as much as anything. The fewer people coming in and out of the building, the more each one stood out. And if you were Harker, trying to ferret out
Flynn's three Sunai, his secret weapons, you were keeping track of every face. It wasn't so much a problem for Leo, since he
was
the face of the FTF, or Ilsa, since she never left the compound, but Henry was determined to keep August's identity a secret.

On the ground floor, people were already streaming in and out of the building (with the night curfew as it was, days started early), and August moved with them, as if he were one of them, across the concrete lobby and through the guarded doors and onto the street. The morning washed over him, warm and bright and tarnished only by the disk of metal scratching against his skin and the absence of his violin.

Sunlight seeped between the buildings, and August took a deep breath and looked up at the Flynn compound looming overhead. Four years of hardly ever going out, and even then, almost always at night. Now here he was. Outside. Alone. Twenty-four million people in this supercity at last count, and he was only one of them, just another face in the morning commute. For one, dazzling, infinite moment, August felt like he was standing on a precipice, the end of one world and the beginning of another, a whisper and a bang.

And then his watch beeped, dragging him back from the edge, and he set off.

The black sedan cut through the city like a knife.

Kate watched as it carved down streets, across bridges, the traffic splitting like flesh as the car sliced its way through North City. Outside, the morning was loud and bright, but from within, it looked like an old movie, all the color leeched out by the tinted windows. Classical music piped through the radio, soft but steady, reinforcing the illusion of calm that most people bought into so willingly. When she asked the driver, a stone-faced man named Marcus, to change the station, and he ignored the request, she put her left earbud in and hit play. Her world became a heavy beat, a rhythm, an angry voice, as she leaned back into the leather bench of the backseat and let the city slide past. From here, it looked almost normal.

V-City was a place Kate knew only in glimpses, snapshots, time-lapse moments strung together with years
of space between each one. She'd been sent away once for her own safety, stolen a second time in the dead of night, and banished a third for her mother's crimes. But she was finally back where she belonged. In her father's city. At her father's side.

And this time, she wasn't going anywhere.

Kate fiddled with her lighter as she studied the tablet propped in her lap, a map of V-City filling the screen. At first glance, it looked like every other supercity—a high-density center trailing off at the edges—but when she tapped the screen with a metallic nail, a new layer of information appeared.

A black line cut across the image from left to right, bisecting the city. The Seam. In reality, it wasn't a straight line, but it was a hard one, carving V-City in two. Stand on the North side, and you were in Callum Harker's territory. Stand on the South side, and you were in Henry Flynn's. Such a simplistic solution to six messy, brutal years of fighting, of sabotage and murder and monsters. Draw a line in the sand. Stay on your half. No wonder it wasn't holding up.

Flynn was an idealist, and it was well and good to talk of justice, to have a “cause,” but at the end of the day his people were dying. Flesh and bone versus tooth and claw.

V-City didn't need a moral code. It needed someone
willing to take control. Someone willing to get his hands dirty. It needed Harker. Kate had no pretentions—she knew her father was a bad man—but this city didn't need a good one.

Good
and
bad
were weak words. Monsters didn't care about intentions or ideals. The facts were simple. The South was chaos. The North was order. It was an order bought and paid for with blood and fear, but order all the same.

Kate traced her finger along the Seam, over the grayed square that marked the Barren.

Why had her father settled for only half the city? Why did he let Flynn hide behind his wall, just because he had a few strange monsters on a leash?

She chewed her lip, tapped the map again, and a third layer of information appeared.

Three concentric circles—like a bull's-eye—ghosted over the top of the map. It was the risk grid, designed to show the increase in monsters and the need for vigilance as one traveled in toward the center of the city. A band of green formed the outer ring, followed by yellow, and red at the center. Most people didn't pay attention to the zones during the day, but everyone knew the boundaries, the place where the violent red gave way to the vigilant yellow before bleeding into the relative safety of the green. Of course, for those with her father's
protection, the risk dropped to almost zero . . . so long as you stayed within the North City limits. Go past the green and you hit the Waste, where North and South didn't matter, because it was every man for himself.

Go far enough and you eventually found safe ground again; out near the borders where monsters were still rare, the population kept low. Out where supercity people weren't welcome in case they brought the darkness with them like a plague. Where a girl might burn down a chapel, or lie in a field of grass beside her mom and learn the summer stars . . .

Somewhere, a horn, and Kate looked up, the house in the country dissolving back into the city streets. She stared past the partition and the driver and the front window, at the silver gargoyle on the hood. The car had originally come with an angel ornament, arms and wings flung back by some invisible wind, but Harker had broken it off and replaced it with the beast, hunched forward, tiny claws curling around the front lip of the grill.

“This is a city of monsters,” he'd said, tossing the angel in the trash.

Her father was right about that. But monsters—
real
monsters—didn't look like the stupid little hood ornament. No, real monsters were
much
worse.

August tipped his face toward the sun, savoring the late summer morning as he walked, letting his body move and his mind go blissfully still. It was amazing how easy it was to think in straight lines when he was in motion, even without the violin. He made his way down cracked sidewalks, past buildings with boarded windows. Half the structures were burned-out husks, abandoned and gutted, any useful materials scraped out to fortify other buildings. South V-City still looked like a ravaged corpse, but it was rebuilding. FTF were everywhere, standing on rooftops, patrolling the streets, radio signals crackling from the handhelds on their uniforms. At night, they hunted monsters, but during the day, they tried to stop new ones from being made. Crime. That was the cause. Corsai
,
Malchai
,
Sunai–they were the effect.

August blended in with the heavy foot traffic as he made his way north, the noise of the city like music
around him, full of harmony and dissonance, rhythm and clash. It layered and layered until the melody tipped into discord, the wonder turning to distress, and he had to fight to focus on the path instead of everything in it. The path itself was easy, four blocks straight up Center Ave.

A beeline to the Seam.

August's steps slowed as it came into sight.

The
barrier was massive,
a three-story barricade cutting east to west through the downtown, warded with stripes of pure metal and studded with cameras. The wall was the result of six years of territory war, each act of violence, each human death, ushering more Corsai and Malchai into the world, all because the Flynns had the city, and Harker wanted it.

Two blocks to the west sat the Barren—a ruined block of scorched earth, a reminder to both sides. It had been a plaza once, a piece of green at the heart of the city, but now there was nothing. Some people said you could see the outlines of the dead still ghosted on the pavement. Most of the FTF said that Henry Flynn had detonated a weapon there on the last day of the territory wars, something bad enough to scrub every sign of life. August didn't believe that—didn't
want
to believe it—but whatever happened that day, the threat of an encore was enough to make Harker call terms, agree to cut V-City in two.

By day, the capital was still unified, at least in theory. Three gates were punched out of the Seam to let people through, but they were monitored by armed men and the ever-watchful red eyes of the moving cameras, and everyone who passed through had to show identification while the scanning cameras verified them as human.

Which was a problem.

August turned down a narrow half-ruined street that ran parallel to the Seam until he reached an office building, its windows replaced by sheets of steel, a pair of FTF flanking the door. The woman at the front desk offered him a short nod as he passed through security and down a separate elevator to the basement. Small dots of neon paint on the wall marked the path and he followed them through a web of dank hallways to a wall. Or what
looked
like a wall. Metal sheeting pushed aside to reveal a tunnel, and August made his way along until he reached a matching false wall on the other end. He slid it open, and stepped out into the cellar of a ground floor apartment.

It was quiet here, and he paused, hating how relieved he felt to be alone again so soon. He gave himself ten seconds, waiting for his heart to slow and his nerves to settle, before he dusted himself off, and climbed the stairs.

Paris was chain-smoking and cooking breakfast.

She didn't even startle when August appeared in the kitchen behind her.

“Morning, doll,” she called, her iron medallion dangling dangerously close to her omelet. Allies on the North side were rare, and extremely expensive, and even then they were risky, but Henry and Paris were old friends, and she'd passed Leo's inspection. August looked around. Her apartment was . . . cozy, like pictures he'd seen in magazines from before the Phenomenon. Tile and wood and window glass. “Subway pass is on the table.”

“Thanks, Paris,” he said, unzipping his FTF jacket and hanging it on a hook by the door. His shirtsleeves had ridden up again, and two rows of black tallies were now showing. He pulled the material down, even though Paris couldn't see the marks. Couldn't see anything, for that matter.

Paris might be blind, but her other senses were sharp. Sharp enough to notice the absence of his violin, the barely audible vibration of its strings within the case. She blew a thoughtful puff of smoke.

“No concert today?” she asked, dripping ash into her eggs.

August's fingers curled the way they always did around the case's handle but found only air. “No,” he said, digging the Colton Academy blazer from his bag
and shrugging it on before the hall mirror. He was surprised to see his features crinkle, almost automatically, into a frown.

“Flynn told me about your music,” mumbled Paris, to herself, and he knew by her tone that when she said
your
, she meant all three of them. “Always wondered what it sounds like . . . .”

August buttoned the blazer. “I hope you never know,” he said, heading for the door. “I'll be back before dark.”

“Have a good day at school,” she called as it closed behind him, and unlike Leo, she actually sounded like she meant it.

August stepped onto the street and breathed a sigh of relief when he saw the Seam safely at his back. And then he turned north, and his eyes widened. He'd braced himself, but the difference between the two sides of V-City still caught him in the chest. North City wasn't a bombed-out shell. Whatever scars it had, they'd all been covered up, painted over. Here the buildings glittered, all metal, stone, and glass, the streets dotted with slick cars and people in nice clothes—if Harker had enforcers on the street, they blended in. A shop window was filled with fruit so colorful it made August want to try it, even though he knew it would taste like ash.

Anger flared through him at the sight—the
illusion
—of this safe, clean city, and the tallies across his skin
prickled in warning, their warmth countered by the sickly cool weight of the medallion against his chest. Focus, focus.

The nearest subway station sat a block away. South City had shut down the subways—it was too dangerous, what with the Corsai flocking to the dark—and boarded up the passages as best they could, even though August knew the FTF still used the tunnels when they had to.

He took the stairs two at a time. He'd read somewhere that V-City had grown up as much as out, that the buildings were actually built on
top
of the old grid, the subways where the original streets used to be. He didn't know if it was true, but the subway station below was as clean as the roads above, buffed white stone and, somewhere underneath the sounds of foot traffic, a strain of classical music. A piano concerto. No signs of struggle or suffering, no remnant of the terrors that came out at night. It was a trick, meant to lure South siders over and remind North siders why they paid the price.

August got to the platform just in time to miss the train. He slumped back against a post to wait for the next one, his attention wandering from a couple kissing farther down the line to a busker playing guitar before it finally settled on a small girl in front of him, clutching a woman's hand. She looked over at him, and August stared back, fascinated by the sight of such a young
child. There were so few children in the compound, so few in South City for that matter. The girl broke into a toothy grin, and August found himself smiling back.

And then she starting singing.

“
Monsters, monsters, big and small
,” she sang cheerfully. “
They're gonna come and eat you all
.”

A shiver ran through him.

“
Corsai, Corsai, tooth and claw,

Shadow and bone will eat you raw
.

Malchai, Malchai, sharp and sly
,

Smile and bite and drink you dry
.”

August swallowed hard, knowing what came next.

“
Sunai, Sunai, eyes like coal
,

Sing you a song and steal your soul.
”

The little girl's smile grew even wider.

“
Monsters, monsters, big and small
,

They're gonna come and eat you all!
”

She gave a small, delighted squeal, and August felt ill and took a step away.

When the train pulled into the station, he chose another car.