Our Dark Duet

by Victoria Schwab

  The lights of South City faded with every step, and August kept his violin out and ready, the neck in one hand and the bow in the other, as he followed the whisper of shadows.

  But something was off. The night was too still, the streets too empty, and he could feel the monsters drawing back into the dark.

  His comm crackled. “August,” said Henry sternly. “What are you doing?”

  “My job,” he said simply, switching off the device just before the streetlights to every side flickered and went out, plunging him into darkness.

  A moment later, a sound cut the night—not a scream, but a laugh, high and gritty and full of venom.

  “Sunai, Sunai, eyes like coal, play me a song and steal my soul.”

  Alice. He turned in a slow circle, trying to find her, but the voice echoed off buildings, and eyes began to dot the dark, red and white against the curtain of black.

  He lifted the violin, bow resting on the strings as her voice drifted forward.

  “What are you waiting for?” she taunted.

  The darkness stirred, and four Malchai stepped out of shadow.

  “Won’t you play us a song?”

  As if on cue, they attacked.

  The Malchai were fast, but for once, August was faster.

  He drew the first note, the sound crisp and clear enough to cut the night. It should have cut the monsters, too, stopped them in their tracks.

  But it didn’t.

  They kept coming, and August retreated one step, two, his bow slicing over the strings, song pouring into the space between them, taking shape, drawing ribbons of light, but the monsters didn’t slow, didn’t stop, didn’t even seem to hear—

  Too late, he saw their mutilated ears, and realized they couldn’t hear him.

  August swore, dropping the violin and twisting the bow in his hand to reveal the razored edge of its spine as the Malchai fell on him. He slashed a throat, black blood misting the air, noxious as death, as nails dug into his arms, and a hand snarled in his hair.

  But they were no match for him, no match at all. For once, August didn’t have to worry about humans, didn’t have to hold any lives but his own. The freedom was so shocking that he lost himself in the violence.

  He became an instrument of ending, a piece of music, the notes drawing out as darkness wrapped up around his hands, and smoke swallowed his fingers and climbed his wrists, that other self peeling him away, shedding him inch by inch. The Malchai screamed and thrashed, and heat flared in his chest, his pulse rising, urging him to let go, let go, let go.

  But it was already over. His violin lay several feet away, the bow in his hand slick with gore, and August stood, panting from the fight, the broken bodies of the monsters strewn at his feet.

  Well done, little brother.

  He looked down at his hands, the skin still engulfed in shadow and smoke. The darkness lapped at the tallies on his forearms, threatening to erase the writing on his skin, to erase him, but there was no need, the fight was done, and as he watched, the shadows receded.

  August flexed his hands and tipped his head back to the night.

  “You’ll have to try harder than that,” he called to Alice, his voice echoing through the dark.

  Henry was waiting at the Compound doors. At the sight of August, he marched forward onto the light strip. “What were you thinking?”

  He doesn’t understand.

  “How could you be so reckless?”

  He can’t.

  “You could have been taken.”

  He’s only human.

  But August had never seen Henry so visibly distraught. The light made him pale and gaunt, and he was breathing hard enough for August to hear the hitch in the man’s chest. Concern rose up, but he forced it down.

  “What’s gotten into you?” demanded Henry.

  “Nothing,” said August. “I’m fulfilling my purpose. And it feels right,” he added, even though the high had already faded, and the blood had gone tacky on his skin, the sick scent of it hitting the back of his throat.

  Henry’s face filled with dismay, and August was left clawing for the calm that had surrounded him so easily during the fight, grasping at the dregs of the freedom he’d felt in the dark.

  “You abandoned your team.”

  “I sent them home. I didn’t need them anymore.”

  Henry rubbed at his brow. “I know you’re upset about Rez—”

  “This isn’t about Rez,” countered August. “This isn’t about any one human. I’m just tired of losing. What good is my strength if you don’t let me use it?”

  Henry’s hands came to rest on his shoulders. “What good is your strength if we lose you to Sloan? Look at Ilsa. Think of Leo. You may think you’re invincible, but you’re not.”

  “I don’t have to be invincible,” said August, shrugging him off. “I just have to be stronger than everyone else.”

  Sloan ran his hand along the office shelves, nails trailing over the cloth and leather spines of Harker’s collection until he found what he was looking for.

  “Here we are,” he said, returning to the penthouse’s main room.

  The three engineers were sitting at the table, a broad plane of slate on a steel frame. A length of chain ran from their ankles to the table legs, which were bolted to the floor. The table was already littered with tablets, but he cleared a space and let the book thud onto the stone top, relishing the way they startled at the sound.

  “What do you want?” asked one of the men.

  Sloan turned through the pages until he reached a photo of the city, taken from before the territory wars, before Sloan himself. When Flynn’s fortress was just another tower in a sea of steel.

  “What I want,” he said, running his nail down the page, letting it come to rest on the Compound, “is to bring this building down.”

  The engineers stilled.

  It was the woman who spoke. “No.”

  “No?” echoed Sloan softly.

  “We won’t do it,” said the other man.

  “We can’t,” amended the woman. “It’s not possible. A building of that size, it’s not as if you could ever destroy it from a distance, and even if you had the materials—”

  “Ah.” Sloan took the small cube from his pocket, set the explosive on the table. The engineers drew back.

  “My predecessor believed in preparation. He cached his arsenals in various places around the city, stored all manner of things, from guns to precious metals to a fair quantity of this. Do not worry about materials,” he said, returning the cube to his pocket. “Just find a way to plant them.”

  He started to walk away and heard the rattle of chains, the sound of the book rustling. He turned back in time to see the second man, tome raised, as if to strike Sloan with it. What a pain, he thought, catching the man by the throat. The book tumbled uselessly from his hands.

  Sloan sighed, and tightened his grip, lifting the man off the floor. That’s what he got for giving these new pets a measure of freedom. He looked past the struggling, gasping form to the other two engineers.

  “Perhaps I wasn’t clear . . . ,” he said, snapping the man’s neck.

  The woman gasped. The other man shuddered. But neither rose from their seats. That was progress, he thought, letting the body fall to the floor beside the book.

  Just then Alice came storming in, her hands clenched and her eyes blazing, no sign of her mutilated Malchai or August Flynn.

  “Another failed attempt?” cooed Sloan, picking up the book as she barreled past toward her room.

  “Practice makes perfect,” she growled, slamming the bedroom door.

  She is alone

  in a place

  with no light

  no space

  no sound

  and then

  the darkness

  asks who

  deserves

  to pay

  and a voice

  —her voice—

  answers

  everyone

/>   and the word

  echoes

  over and over

  and over

  and over

  and the nothing

  fills with bodies

  packed in as tightly

  as the crowd

  in the basement

  of Harker Hall

  when Callum

  stood on stage

  and passed his judgment

  every human

  is her father

  every monster

  is his shadow

  and there is a knife

  in her hand

  and all she wants

  is to cut them down

  one by one

  all she wants

  all she wants—

  but if she starts

  she will never stop

  so she lets go

  and the knife

  falls from her fingers

  and the monsters

  tear her

  apart.

  Kate lurched forward out of sleep, heart racing.

  For one terrible, disorienting moment she didn’t know where she was—and then it came rushing back.

  The house in the green, the man with the shotgun, the Corsai in the street.

  She was lying on the couch beside the altar of batteries and bulbs, dawn slicing through the makeshift metal curtains. The ghost of the nightmare lingered as she got to her feet. She’d slept in her boots, unable to shake the fear that something would come, that she’d have to be ready to fight, to run. Her music player had died in the night, but the Corsai, they had never stopped.

  No wonder Rick had gone mad.

  She washed her face with the last of the water, ate numbly, then spread her weapons on the table, drawn to, and repulsed by, them in equal measure. She strapped an iron spike to her calf, returned the switchblade to her back pocket. The click of the clip sliding into the handgun sent an almost pleasant shiver through her. She thumbed the safety on and tucked the weapon into the back of her jeans. Out of sight, out of mind, she told herself, even as the metal kissed her spine. She hauled her bag back onto her shoulder, then threw the bolt and stepped out into the early morning light.

  In daylight, the quiet was even worse, the green’s emptiness more unnerving than any number of people.

  Rick’s shotgun lay on the sidewalk near the street, the only sign of the man save for a thin line of dried blood on the pavement. If there were any others in the neighborhood, they didn’t show themselves, and Kate didn’t go looking.

  She needed to keep moving.

  There were plenty of cars on the street, but cars made noise, and the last thing she wanted to do was let all of V-City know she was coming. Especially since she had no idea who—or what—would be there to greet her. Instead she trudged across several dew-wet lawns until she found a bicycle lying on its side in the grass, abandoned like everything else in the green.

  Kate righted the bike, trying not to think about whoever it belonged to, or what had happened to the owner, as she swung her leg over the seat and pushed off, toward the yellow, and the red, and the waiting city.

  The violin was a mess.

  August sat on the edge of his bed, his fingers moving deftly over the steel as he loosened the pegs and pried the strings free. Next came the neck, the fingerboard, the tailpiece, the bridge.

  Piece by piece, he dismantled the instrument, the way FTF soldiers dismantled their guns, scrubbing the blood and gore from every curve and crevice, cleaning and drying every piece before putting the violin back together.

  He worked in silence, unable to shake the feeling he was rubbing the blood in, instead of getting it out, but when he was done, the weapon was whole again, ready for its next fight.

  Like you, little brother.

  He tucked the gleaming instrument back into its case beside the bow, and rose, stepping out into the hall.

  He heard movement in the kitchen, the soft shuffle of steps, the whisper of something like sand, and when he rounded the corner he saw the cupboards open, a sack of sugar spilling across the counter and onto the floor.

  None of the lights were on, but his sister stood at the island, hands dancing over piles of sugar, separating it into hills and valleys with her fingers while Allegro padded around her legs, leaving tiny paw prints in the white dust.

  August took a cautious step forward, careful not to startle her. He kept his voice low.

  “Ilsa?”

  She didn’t look up, didn’t even register his presence. Ilsa lost herself sometimes, got stuck inside her head. Once, during these episodes, her thoughts had poured out in tangled ribbons of speech. Now she unraveled in silence, her lips pressed into a thin line as she swept her fingers through the sugar, and as August drew close, he realized what she was making. It was a shallow model—the loose sugar couldn’t form anything tall without losing its shape—but he recognized the snaking line of the Seam running down the center, the grid of streets and buildings to either side.

  Ilsa had sculpted V-City.

  Her hands slid to the island’s edge and she bent forward, bringing her face to the counter as if to peer between the walls of her creation.

  And then she drew a deep breath, and blew.

  The entire city scattered, the only sound the whoosh of Ilsa’s breath and the rain of sugar as it spilled onto the floor. She looked at him then, at last, her eyes wide, but not empty, not lost at all. No, she looked straight at August, and swept her hand above the counter as if to say, Do you see?

  But August only saw one thing. “You’re making a mess.”

  Ilsa’s brow furrowed. She smoothed the sugar beneath her palm and drew her finger in slow, looping curls. It took August a few seconds to realize she was writing a word.

  Coming

  August stared at the mess, at the message. “What’s coming?”

  Ilsa let out an exasperated breath and swept her arm across the counter, scattering the remains of the city and sending a cloud of sugar into the air. It dusted August’s hair, settled on his skin. To a human, it might have tasted sweet, but to him, it tasted like one thing:

  Ash.

  Growing up, Kate had plenty of nightmares, but only one of them recurring.

  In the dream, she was standing in the middle of Birch Street, one of the busiest roads in North City, but there were no cars. No commuters on the sidewalk. No movement in the shop windows. It was as if the city had been tipped on its side and shaken until every sign of life had fallen out. It was just . . . empty, and no people meant no sound, and the silence seemed to grow and grow and grow around her, the white noise weighing her down until she realized it wasn’t the world, it was her ears, the last of her hearing stolen away, plunging her into an eternal silence, and she started to scream and scream until she finally woke up.

  As Kate rode through the red zone, that same horrible silence swept around her, that old, irrational fear, and she strained, trying to catch something—anything—besides her own pulse and the hush of tires over pavement.

  But there was nothing, nothing, and then—

  Kate slowed. Were those voices? They reached her in pieces, highs and lows fragmented by the stone and steel buildings, the sounds brightening in her good ear only to fall away again before she could find the source, or figure out if they were getting closer or farther away. She dismounted as carefully as possible, leaning the bicycle against a wall just as someone whistled behind her.

  Kate spun, and saw a man perched on a fire escape. He was dressed in dark jeans and a T-shirt, but the first thing she noticed was the band of steel around his throat. It looked like a collar.

  “Well, well,” he said, rising to his feet.

  A door swung open nearby, and as two more figures—a man and a woman—stepped through, she realized the first one hadn’t been whistling at her. He’d been whistling for them. They were rougher, their skin weathered and stained by old tattoos, but they wore the same metal circles around their throats.

  Like pets,
she thought, and between the pallor of blood loss and the puncture wounds that ran like needle scars up the inside of their arms, it was obvious whom they belonged to.

  “Oh, this is perfect,” cooed the woman.

  The man on the fire escape broke into a grin. “Just his type, isn’t she?” Type? “Down to the blue eyes.”

  “It’s uncanny. Sloan will be . . .”

  If he said anything else, Kate didn’t hear it. The name caught like barbed wire in her head, bringing with it red eyes and a black suit, a shadow at her father’s back, a voice in her head whispering, Katherine.

  But Sloan wasn’t here in Verity, because he was dead. She’d seen him lying on a warehouse floor, a steel bar through his back and—

  Kate’s attention snapped back to the alley. One of the thugs was coming close—too close—his hands raised as if she were a child or a dog, something easily spooked.

  “Careful, Joe, you know he likes them fresh.”

  Kate shifted up against the wall and felt the familiar weight of the handgun at her back. She drew it out, and the moment the gun was in her hand, her pulse began to slow, and there it was again, that wonderful, terrifying calm, the whole messy world narrowing to a single, even road. Shoot.

  Her finger came to rest against the trigger, the safety still on.

  “Stay back,” she said, infusing her voice with all the cold precision she’d learned from Callum Harker.

  One of the men actually flinched, but the other let out a delighted laugh, and the woman kept her eyes on Kate, as if daring her to try it:

  “I don’t think you have it in you.”

  Her grip tightened on the gun. “The last person who said that didn’t live very long.”

  It would be so easy, whispered the darkness. It would feel so good. She wanted to, she wanted to more than anything wanted to hurt wanted to kill and these people deserved to pay they deserved—

  She tried to picture August, stepping between her father and the barrel of the gun.

  Not like this.

  Even as her thumb clicked the safety off, she forced herself to breathe, to think. The wall behind her was nothing but brick, but to the right there was a dumpster and a low wall leading to God-knows-where.