This Savage Song

by Victoria Schwab

  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.

  Monsters, monsters, big and small . . .

  Kate hummed as the car barreled on. She tapped the tablet’s screen, closing out of the map and opening a new window, clicking through the folders on her father’s private drive—she’d swiped the access codes on her first night home—until she found the ones she was looking for. Harker had surveillance throughout North City, not just on the Seam but on nearly every block of the red zone. Every day the footage was checked and then cleared, save for any “incidents”—those were stored so he could see them and take action, if necessary. These “incidents” would never make the news, of course. They knew better than to put stuff like this on TV. It would disturb the illusion of normalcy, of safety—and that’s what the people were paying for.

  But Harker had to keep an eye on his monsters. Had to know when new ones showed up, when old ones misbehaved. The culled footage had been filtered into categories. Monster. Human. Genesis.

  Kate had been working her way through the footage since the moment she arrived, trying to learn everything she could about the real monsters of Verity. She tapped Genesis, and it brought up two further options. Corsai or Malchai (they’d never caught a Sunai’s creation on film). She felt like she was traveling down a rabbit hole as she tapped Corsai and the screen filled with video clips, the thumbnails nothing but a blur of shadows. Her fingers hovered for a moment over the grid, and then she tapped a clip, and the footage expanded to fill the screen.

  The film had been trimmed, all the fat cut away, leaving only the violent meat of the incident behind. The camera didn’t have a good angle, but she could still make out two men at the mouth of an alley, standing beneath a streetlight. It took her a moment to realize she was watching a fight. It started out as nothing, a conversation gone south, a shove into the wall, a clumsy punch. One of the men went down, and the other started kicking him—over, and over, and over—until the man on the ground was not a man, but a twitching tangle of limbs, his face a bloody mess.

  The attacker took off, and for several long seconds, the man lay there on the pavement, chest lurching up and down in a broken way. And then, as he struggled to rise, the shadows around him began to move. He didn’t notice, was too busy scraping himself off the ground, but Kate watched, transfixed, as the darkness stretched, and twitched, peeled away from the walls and the street, and pulled itself together, its shape rising up like smoke, face marked only by eerie white eyes that shook the camera’s focus, and the glistening of teeth. Its mouth yawned wide and its body wavered, slick and shiny, its limbs ending in talons.

  And the man, still on his hands and knees, made the mistake of crawling forward, out of the safety of the streetlight.

  The moment he crossed out of the light, it came, a flurry of teeth and claws that sank into the man’s flesh and began to shred.

  “Violence breeds violence.” One of the teachers at St. Agnes had said that, after Nicole Teak tripped Kate, and Kate reciprocated by breaking Nicole’s nose. The teacher went on to make a point about how she was only perpetuating the problem, but by then Kate had stopped listening. As far as she was concerned, Nicole had deserved it.

  But the teacher had been right about one thing: violence breeds.

  Someone pulls a trigger, sets off a bomb, drives a bus full of tourists off a bridge, and what’s left in the wake isn’t just shell casings, wreckage, bodies. There’s something else. Something bad. An aftermath. A recoil. A reaction to all that anger and pain and death. That’s all the Phenomenon was really, a tipping point. Verity had always been violent—the worst in all ten territories—it was only a matter of time before there was enough mass and all that bad started pulling itself together.

  Kate ran her thumb over the medallion pinned to the front of her uniform, protection from things that went bump. On her screen, the Corsai continued to feast. Most of the frenzy was lost in shadow, but here and there a razor glint of tooth or claw flashed on-screen, and Kate watched as blood sprayed across the pool of light. She made a small, disgusted noise, glad the footage had no sound.

  Marcus waved from the other side of the partition, and Kate pulled the earbud from her ear, plunging herself back into a world of black and white, morning light, and the soft trill of piano keys.

  “What is it?” she asked, annoyed.

  “Sorry, Miss Harker,” said Marcus through the partition. “We’re here.”

  Colton Academy sat at the place where the yellow met the green and the city streets gave way to suburbs, the safest zone of the city, where the richest could build their little shells and pretend that Verity wasn’t being eaten alive. It looked like a photograph, pale stone buildings sitting on a stretch of vivid green grass, all of it showered in crisp morning light. Only a fifteen-minute drive from the dark heart of North City, but you’d never know it by looking at the place. Kate guessed that was the point. She’d rather be at an inner-city institution, in the heart of the red, but most of them had been shut down, and even if it had been an option, her father wouldn’t hear of it. If he had to have her in V-City, he was determined to keep her “safe.” Which meant out of the way, since there was no such thing as safe in this place, no matter which half you called home.

  Marcus held open the door, and she stepped out, shaking off the memory of the Corsai and pulling her features back into alignment. She smoothed the collar of her Colton-issued polo, ran a hand over her pale hair. It was loose, parted to cover the scars where her head had struck the glass. It could have been worse—the hearing loss was partial—but she knew better than to let it show. It was a weakness all the same and weaknesses should
never show—that’s what Harker told her, back when she was twelve and the scars were all fresh.

  “Why?” she’d asked, because she’d been young and stupid.

  “Every weakness exposes flesh,” he’d said, “and flesh invites a knife.”

  “What are your weaknesses?” she’d asked him, and Harker’s mouth had become something that almost looked like a smile, but wasn’t one.

  To this day, he’d never answered that question. Kate didn’t know if it was because her father didn’t trust her with his weaknesses, or because he didn’t have any. Not anymore. But she wondered if there was another version of Callum Harker in one of those other worlds, and if that one had secrets, and weaknesses, and places where knives could get.

  “Miss Harker,” said the driver. “Your father wanted me to pass along a message.”

  She slipped her silver lighter into her shirt pocket. “What’s that, Marcus?” she asked blandly.

  “If you get yourself expelled, he’ll ship you out of Verity. One way. For good.”

  Kate flashed a cool grin. “Why would I get myself expelled?” she said, looking up at the school. “I’m finally where I want to be.”

  “Park Station,” announced a calm, metallic voice.

  August sank back against the train seat and tugged a well-read copy of The Republic from his backpack, opening it to the middle. He knew most of the text by heart, so it didn’t matter which page he landed on. What mattered was that it gave him a reason to be looking down instead of up. He listened to the stops as they were announced, not willing to risk an upward glance at the grid in case he caught the attention of the cameras above. More little red eyes looking for monsters, even though everyone knew they all came out at night.

  Well, thought August. Almost all.

  “Martin Center.”

  Three stops to Colton. The subway car was filling up, and August stood, offering up his seat to an old woman. He kept his head bowed over the book, but his eyes trailed across the passengers, in their nice dresses and slacks, heels and suits, and not a weapon in sight.

  A man jostled his shoulder as he squeezed past, and August tensed.

  There was nothing unusual about the man himself—suit and tie, a bit slack around the middle—it was his shadow that caught August’s eye. It didn’t behave as a shadow should—in such a well-lit space, he shouldn’t even have one—but when the man stopped, the shadow kept moving, twitching and shifting around him like a restless passenger. No one else could see it, but to August’s eyes, it loomed in the air, a ghostly thing with too many features for a shadow, too few for a man. August knew it for what it was, an echo of violence, a mark of sin. Somewhere in the city, a monster lived and killed because of this man, because of something he’d done.

  August’s fingers tightened on the pole.

  If they were in South City, he would learn the man’s name. It would be handed to him—or Leo—on a slip of paper along with an address, and he would find him in the night, silence the echo, and claim his life.

  But this was North City.

  Where bad people got away with everything, so long as they had the cash.

  August tore his eyes away as the old woman sitting on the bench leaned forward.

  “I’ve always wanted to be on stage,” she said in a confiding voice. “I don’t know why I’ve never done it. I’m afraid it’s too late now. . . .”

  August closed his eyes.

  “Union Plaza.”

  Two stops.

  “I’m sure it’s too late . . . ,” the woman rambled on, “. . . but I still dream about it. . . .”

  She wasn’t even talking to him, not really. Monsters couldn’t tell lies, but when humans were around Sunai, they became . . . honest. August didn’t have to compel them—if he could compel them not to open up, he would—they just started unloading. Most of the time they didn’t even realize they were doing it.

  Henry called it influence, but Leo had a better word: confession.

  “Lyle Crossing.”

  One stop.

  “. . . I still dream . . .”

  Confession was without a doubt his least favorite ability. Leo relished it, willing everyone around him to voice their doubts, their fears, their weaknesses, but it just made August uncomfortable.

  “Do you dream . . . ?”

  “Colton,” announced the voice overhead.

  The train ground to a halt, and August said a silent prayer as he fled the subway car, the woman’s confession following him out.

  If North City was surreal, Colton was something else entirely. August had never been this far from the red. The Academy was fenced in, but unlike the Seam, the walls seemed more aesthetic than functional; beyond the wrought iron gate, Colton Academy sat on a rolling stretch of grass, a line of trees at its back. August had seen trees once before, in a run-down park three blocks south of the compound, but these were different. There were enough of them to make a wall. No, a forest. That was the name for so many.

  But the trees didn’t distract him nearly as much as the people.

  Everywhere he looked, he saw them, not FTF cadets or North civilians, but teenagers in Colton’s trademark blue. Boys and girls walking through the gates, or sitting clustered in the grass. He marveled at the easy way they chatted and hung on one another, elbows bumping, arms thrown around shoulders, head to head and hip to hip. The way their faces broke into broad grins, or pursed in annoyance, or opened with laughter. They made it look so . . . natural.

  What was he doing here?

  Maybe Leo was right; he should have eaten something. Too late now. He fought the urge to retreat, tried to remind himself that he’d wanted a way out of the compound, that Leo of all people had vouched for him, that he had a job to do, one as important as the rest of the FTF. He forced his feet forward, so sure with every step that someone would see through the Colton clothes and the practiced smile, and notice he wasn’t human. As if it were written on his face as plainly as the marks down his arm. All of a sudden the hours spent before the mirror seemed ridiculous. How could ever he mimic this? How could he think that he was capable of passing for one of them, just because they were the same age? The thought snagged him. They weren’t the same age. They only looked his age. No, that wasn’t right: he looked their age, because they’d all been born, and he’d woken up in the shape of a twelve-year-old boy because that’s how old they’d been, the bodies in the black bags when it started with a bang, not the universe only the sharp staccato bursts of gunfire and—

  He slammed to a stop, struggling for air.

  Someone bumped his shoulder, not a friendly jostle but a hostile jab, and August stumbled forward, regaining his balance in time to see the guy—broad-shouldered and blond—shoot a hard look back.

  “What’s your problem?” snapped August, the question out before he could think to stop it.

  The boy spun on him. “You were in my way,” he growled, grabbing August’s collar. “You think I’m gonna let some shit newbie mess this up? This is my year, asshole, my school.” And then, to August’s horror, the guy kept talking. “Think you can scare me with that creepy stare? I’m not afraid of you. I’m not afraid of anyone. I . . .” he shuddered, forcing August closer. “I can’t sleep; every time I close my eyes I see them.”

  “Hey now,” said another student over August’s shoulder. “There a problem, Jack?”

  The blond guy, Jack, blinked a few times, gaze sharpening, and then shoved August backward. The other student caught his shoulder. “Come on, no need for that. My friend here’s sorry. He didn’t mean to piss you off.” His tone was friendly, casual.

  “Keep him away from me, Colin,” snapped Jack, his voice normal again, “before I break his smug face.”

  “Will do.” Colin shook his head. “Ass,” he muttered as Jack stormed away. He turned toward August; a short, slim boy with a widow’s peak and warm eyes set in an open face. “Making friends on your first day, huh?”

  August straightened, smoothed his
jacket. “Who said it was my first day?”

  Colin laughed, an easy sound, as natural as breathing. “It’s a small school, dude,” he said with a grin, “and I’ve never seen you before. You got a name?”

  August swallowed. “Frederick,” he said.

  “Frederick?” echoed Colin, raising a single brow. August wondered if he’d made a mistake, chosen the wrong name.

  “Yeah,” he said slowly, then added, “but you can call me Freddie.”

  No one had ever called him Frederick or Freddie, but it was the right answer. Colin’s face morphed again, from skepticism to cheer in an instant. “Oh, thank God,” he said. “Frederick is a really pretentious name. No offense. Not your fault.”

  They started walking toward the main building together, but a pair of students called Colin’s name.

  “Hey, I’ll see you inside,” he said as he jogged over to meet them. Halfway there he twisted around with a grin. “Try not to piss off anyone else before school starts.”

  August managed a ghost of the boy’s smile. “I’ll do my best.”

  “Name?” asked the woman in the registration office.

  “Frederick Gallagher,” said August, managing what he hoped was a nervous smile as he brushed a strand of hair out of his eyes. “But I go by Freddie.”

  “Ah,” said the woman, pulling out a folder with a yellow band along the top. “You must be one of our new students.”

  He nodded, tweaked the smile. This time, she smiled back. “Look at you,” she said. “Dark hair. Kind eyes. Dimples. They’re going to eat you up.”

  August wasn’t sure what she meant. “I hope not,” he said.

  She only laughed. Everyone laughed so easily here. “You still need to get your identification card,” she said. “Go next door, and hand them the top page in your folder. They’ll take care of you.” She hesitated, looked like she was about to say something more, something personal. He backed away before she could.

  Next door, a short line spilled out of a door marked ID REGISTRATION. August watched as a student at the front of the line handed the man behind the counter his paper, then stepped in front of a pale green backdrop. He grinned, and an instant later a flash went off. August cringed. Another student repeated the process. And another. He backed away.