This Savage Song (11 page)

“Hey,” he said. “Feeling better?”

“Much,” said August, heading toward his room.

“Then why is your stomach moving?”

August dragged to a stop and looked down at his FTF jacket, which was indeed beginning to shift and twist. “Oh,” he said. “That.”

August unzipped the coat a little, and a small, furry face poked out the top.

Henry's eyes widened. “What is that?”

“It's a cat,” said August.

“Yes,” said Henry, rubbing his neck. “I've seen them before. But what is it doing in your jacket?”

“He belonged to Osinger,” explained August, freeing the cat from his coat. “I felt responsible—I
was
responsible—and I couldn't . . . I tried to leave but . . .”

“August.”

He switched tactics. “You've taken in your share of strays,” he said. “Let me have this one.”

That earned him a relenting smile. “Who will take care of it?” asked Henry.

Just then someone made a sound—something between a gasp and a delighted squeak—and Ilsa was there between them, lifting the small creature into her
arms. August nodded at Henry as if to say,
I can think of someone who would love to
. Henry just sighed, shook his head, and left the room.

Ilsa brought the cat an inch from her face and looked it in the eyes. It responded by reaching out a single black paw and bringing it to rest on the bridge of her nose. The cat seemed mesmerized by her. Most things were. “What's its name?” she whispered.

“I don't know,” said August.

“Everybody needs a name,” she cooed, sinking cross-legged to the kitchen floor. “Everybody deserves one.”

“Then name it,” said August.

Ilsa considered the small black cat. Held him to her ear. “Allegro,” she announced.

August smiled. “I like that,” he said, sitting down across from her. He reached out, and scratched the cat's ears. Its purr thrummed under his fingers.

“He likes you,” she said. “They can tell the difference, you know, between good and bad. Just like we can.” Allegro tried to climb into her hair, and she dragged him gently back into her lap.

“Will you look after him, while I'm at school?”

Ilsa folded herself around the cat. “Of course,” she whispered. “We will look after each other.”

They were still sitting on the floor with Allegro when Leo returned, a steel guitar strapped to his back, and
a streak of blood—not his—across his cheek. He took one look at Allegro and frowned. Allegro took one look at him and put its ears back. Ilsa broke into a laugh, as sweet as chimes, and right then August knew, for sure, that he was keeping the cat.

Kate sat on her bedroom floor until the music stopped.

Her hands were shaking a little as she lit a cigarette; she took a long drag, leaned her head back against the door, and looked around. Her room, like the rest of the penthouse, was sleek and sparse, made of sharp edges and hard lines. There were no traces of her childhood, no height measurements or nicks, no stuffed animals or old clothes, no fashion ads or posters. No field beyond the window.

When she was twelve, it had felt sterile, cold, but now she tried to embrace the room's austerity. To
embody
it. The blank walls, the unshakable calm.

One of the few pieces of decoration was a folding frame with a pair of photographs inside. She plucked it from the table. In the first photo, a five-year-old Kate stood with one arm thrown around her father, the other wrapped around her mom. Above her head, Callum
kissed his wife's temple. Alice Harker was beautiful—not just in the way that all children think their parents are—but concretely, undeniably
gorgeous
, with sun-kissed hair and large hazel eyes that lit up whenever she smiled. The picture had been taken two months before the Phenomenon.

The second photo was a reenactment, taken the day they returned to V-City after the truce. Together again. A family reunited, made whole. She ran her thumb over the faces. An eleven-year-old Kate with her arms around her parents, reunited after six years apart. Six years of chaos and fighting. Six years of quiet and peace.

The changes showed on all of them. Kate was no longer a round-faced child, but a freckled youth. Her mother had tiny wrinkles, the kind you got from laughing. And her father still looked at Alice, his gaze intense, as if afraid that if he looked away, she would vanish again.

And she had.

“Get up, Kate. We have to go.”

Sloan was wrong. Kate had wanted to come back to V-City, had wanted to stay.

“I want to go home,” she'd whispered.

“I want to go home,” she'd begged.

It was her
mother
who couldn't adjust. Her mother who dragged her from bed in the middle of the night,
eyes red and lipstick smeared across her cheek.

“Hush, hush, we have to be quiet.”

Her mother who bundled her into the car.

“Where are we going?”

Her mother who drove into oncoming traffic.

Her mother who slammed the car into the concrete rail.

Her mother who died with her head against the wheel.

And after the accident, it was her
father
who wouldn't look at her. She would float in and out of sleep, would wake to see him standing in the doorway, only to realize it wasn't him at all, just a monster with dark bones and red eyes and a too-sharp smile.

And when she was finally better, it was her father who sent her away. Who buried her mother, and then buried her. Not in the ground, but in Fischer. In Dalloway. In Leighton and Pennington and Wild Prior and St. Agnes.

At first, she'd pleaded and begged to come home, to stay home, but over time, she stopped. Not because she stopped wanting it, but because she learned that pleading didn't work on Callum Harker. Pleading was a sign of weakness. So she learned to bury the things that made her weak. The things that made her like her mother.

Kate returned the picture frame to the bedside table
and looked down at her hands. Her lungs hurt from the smoke but her hands had stopped shaking, and she considered the black blood staining her fingers, not with horror but with grim determination.

She was her father's daughter. A Harker.

And she would do whatever she had to do to prove it.

“Valor, Prosperity, Fortitude, Verity,” recited the teacher, a middle-aged man named Mr. Brody, as he tapped the four central territories on the map. Combined, they took up more than half the space, the six remaining territories filling in the land on either side. “These are, of course, the four largest of the Ten Territories, with populations ranging from twenty-three to twenty-six million. Can anyone tell me the smallest?”

Grace
, thought August as he scribbled a rough map in his notebook and carved it into ten, mirroring the divisions on the board.

“Fortune?” asked a girl, pointing to the northwest corner.

“I'm talking about population, not landmass, so no. Fortune has almost seventeen million.”

It also had
mountains
. August looked out the window,
tried to imagine the blue haze of peaks in the distance. He couldn't.

“Charity?” guessed a boy in the back, pointing to the southeast corner, where oceans bordered two sides of the territory. Mountains. Oceans. All Verity had were plains, interrupted here and there by hills, which were little more than undulations according to the topographic map.

“Nine point three million. Getting closer.”

“Grace?” ventured a girl at the front, pointing to a mass on the northeast coast.

“
That
is correct. Can anyone tell me how many—”

“Six million three-hundred and fifteen thousand, at last count,” said Kate without raising her hand. She was sitting one desk over.

Of all the classes they could have shared, they'd ended up with History. The irony wasn't lost on him.

“Very good, Miss Harker,” said Mr. Brody with a shit-eating grin (a term August had learned from Harris). “Luckily for the rest of you, this course will focus primarily on our own illustrious territory . . .”

August might have found his current situation flat-out
funny
—being in a room with his enemy's daughter, learning about the balance of power and politics in Verity—if he didn't have to focus every ounce of energy on keeping his mouth shut as the teacher went
on about their
esteemed
capital, skipping over any mention of the monsters that ran it in the light of day or the ones that roamed its streets at night. It wasn't as if he expected the class to be objective, but it was still hard to listen to the skewed narrative. Every time the teacher referred to the city as V-City instead of North City, as if the southern half wasn't worth mentioning, as if it didn't exist beyond the Seam, August felt his chest tighten. People weren't really this deluded, were they?

The class wasn't the only thing making him tense; he'd overheard a conversation that morning between Henry and Leo. They were talking—heatedly—about the latest incident at the Seam. A handful of Corsai had found a crack and come through, and no one knew if Harker had sent them or if the monsters on his side were getting restless. August had hovered outside the office to listen.

“It doesn't matter why they came,”
Leo was saying.
“It doesn't matter who sent them. Either Harker did, in which case he is actively breaking the truce, or they rebelled, in which case Harker is failing to control them and the truce is forfeit.”

“We've come so far,”
said Henry.
“I will not put this city through another war.”

“We made a promise,”
said Leo.

“A
threat.”

“—that if Harker broke his covenant, we would see his empire
razed.
”

“Those were
your
words, Leo. Not mine.”

“We must remind him of the weapons at our disposal.”

“People will die,”
challenged Henry.

“People are always dying.”

August had shivered at the cold detachment in his brother's voice.

At the front of the room, Mr. Brody was droning on. “. . . marked forty years since the dissolution of the federal government—you should all know this—in the wake of the war in . . .” he trailed off, waiting for an answer.

“Vietnam,” announced a boy.

“Indeed,” said the teacher. “National unrest, a strained economy, and depleted morale resulted in the federal collapse and subsequent reconstruction of the once-United States.” He tapped the center of the map. “Now, can anyone tell me how many of the antiquated states now make up Verity? Anyone?”

August continued to shade in his own map, the names drifting through his head.
Kentucky. Missouri. Illinois. Iowa.
They sounded like nonsense words.

“And in the aftermath of these tumultuous events?”

August was halfway through labeling the map when he felt a pair of eyes, and glanced over to find Kate
staring at his paper. He hadn't defaced the territories, but he'd started a running list in the corner of the page with other, more fitting, names for each.

Greed, Malice, Gluttony, Violence
.

Kate frowned slightly. August held his breath. All around them, the class rambled on, but for him, the room was receding, leaving only the two of them in focus.

“. . . states combined to form fewer, independent territories,” said a girl near the front.

“Good.” Mr. Brody turned to write the answer on the board, and Kate reached across the aisle. He tensed, wondering what she was about to do, when she brought her pen to his paper and drew a second
V
beside the one at the beginning of
Verity
. He frowned, confused.

By the time the teacher looked back, her hands were folded on her desk.

“What else?”

“States became self-governing,” added a boy.

“And then condensed into the Ten Territories.”

“Power concentrated in the capitals.”

“And so did the people.”

Every time someone called out an answer, the teacher returned to the board, and every time he did, Kate leaned over and added another mark—a jagged line, a swoop, a pair of dots. It took him half the class to
figure out what she was doing, and then, between one scribble and the next, it came together.

The body. The mouth. The claws.

Kate had turned
Verity
into a monster.

He stared at her, and then, he couldn't help it.

He smiled.