This Savage Song

by Victoria Schwab

  “Foolish little Harker,” she said, her mouth twisting into a rictus grin, “doesn’t know when to die.” The Malchai’s red eyes cut to August, and she let out a wet hiss. “Sunai.”

  August started to put himself in front of Kate, but someone was stomping down the stairs. He appeared, a human rippling with muscles, a metal baton clutched in one meaty hand. Just like the Malchai, the man’s face bore her father’s brand, and just like the Malchai, it had been clawed off. Angry red welts ran down his cheek.

  The sight of him made Kate’s head spin. A human? The dissenters were gathering steam. And men. But that made no sense; Olivier’s whole point had been—

  The man’s baton slashed toward her, and August pulled her out of the way and got his arm up in time to block the blow. When the metal cracked against his forearm, electricity arced and crackled over his skin. August gasped but didn’t buckle.

  Kate felt a shudder of movement at her back and spun, slashing at the Malchai with the iron spike, but the creature ducked and dodged, her motions terrifyingly fast and impossibly fluid. Beside Kate, August’s fist connected with the man’s face, and his head cracked sideways, but he didn’t fall. He struck again with the baton, and this time August caught it in one hand, the energy arcing over him and filling the stairwell with static. For an instant, his gray eyes burned blue with the power, and then he tore the weapon from the man’s grip.

  Kate stepped too close to the Malchai, trying to get under her guard, but the monster’s skeletal fingers caught her by the jaw and shoved her back into the wall. Light burst across her vision from the force of the blow, and the Malchai’s mouth yawned into a smile.

  Kate smiled, too, then drove the metal spike down into the Malchai’s sinewy forearm. The monster hissed and slammed Kate back again, but this time Kate hit the door instead of the wall and went stumbling backward into the basement garage, landing hard on the concrete. Pain seared through her injured shoulder and across her stomach, and she could feel fresh blood welling against the bandages as the Malchai appeared, pulling the spike free and casting it aside.

  Another crash, and August and the man came tumbling into the garage, a tangle of limbs. The baton went skidding away, and Kate was halfway to her feet when the Malchai sent her sprawling backward to the concrete with a vicious kick. She felt stitches tear, and stifled a cry, eyes blurring. Before she could force herself up, the monster was on her, slight but dense, unyielding.

  Kate strained to reach her back.

  “Oh dear,” said the Malchai, pinning her to the cold ground, her razor teeth shining in the artificial light. “It seems you’ve lost your toy.”

  Kate’s fingers closed over the metal against her spine. “That’s why I keep two,” she said, driving the second spike up into the Malchai’s chest.

  The monster gasped as Kate forced the spike home, greasy black blood spilling over her fingers as the Malchai collapsed onto her, more bones than body. She freed herself from the dead weight, recovered the two spikes, and staggered to her feet in time to see August force the baton up below the human’s chin. There was an electric crackle, a spasm of blue, and the man went down with all the grace of a cinder block.

  August looked shaken, eyes wide and strangely bright, but he was already moving again. He plunged back into the stairwell and reemerged a moment later clutching his violin case. Kate didn’t waste time. She turned and started moving briskly, deliberately, between the rows of vehicles.

  “What are you looking for?” he asked. A car alarm was going off in the distance, and he cringed as if the sound were deafening.

  “A ride,” she answered. Some of the cars were too new, others too old. She finally stopped in front of a black sedan, nice enough, but not one of the models with fancy security and keyless entry.

  “Break that for me,” she said, nodding at the driver’s side door.

  “The window?” asked August, and she gave him a look that said yes, obviously the window, and he gave her a look that said I don’t commit petty crimes very often before he slammed his elbow into the glass to shatter it. The sound wasn’t loud, but it echoed through the garage as Kate reached in and unlocked the doors. She brushed the pebbles of broken glass from the seat and slid in as gingerly as possible, using the lighter’s hidden knife to pry open the panel beside the steering wheel. August rounded the car and sank into the passenger seat, the violin case between his knees as she sliced wires and began stripping them.

  “Is this something they teach at boarding school?” he asked, craning to watch the garage behind them.

  “Oh yeah,” she said, crossing two wires together. Nothing. “This, breaking and entering, monster killing. It’s all standard.” She stripped another pair and tried again. There was a spark, and the car’s engine thrummed to life.

  “Impressive,” said August dryly.

  She lifted both hands to the wheel, then winced as the pain caught up. “I don’t suppose you know how to drive?”

  August shook his head. “No. I can probably figure it out—”

  “That’s okay,” she said, shifting into drive. “We already have plenty of ways to die.”

  She put her foot on the gas, and the car shot forward with surprising power, letting out a squeal that made August groan. It wasn’t that loud, she thought. Maybe Sunai had sensitive hearing. She gripped the wheel—growing up, she’d always liked cars, the fresh air racing past, the feeling of freedom, of motion. She wasn’t that fond of them since the accident, but driving was a handy skill, like physics and combat. She rounded the corner of the parking structure, and hit the brakes. There was a gate over the exit, a man in the booth.

  She reached for the seat belt, then remembered the stitches and decided to leave it.

  “Hold on,” she said, gunning the gas.

  The car surged forward. August gripped the door. “Kate, I don’t think this is a—”

  But the rest of his words were cut off by the satisfying crack of the front bumper connecting with the garage gate, the former denting and the latter snapping off as they burst through and onto the darkened street.

  The car swerved for an instant before righting itself, and Kate smiled as she revved the engine, drowning the attendant’s shouts in their wake.

  August twisted in his seat and looked back at the wreckage and the motel, and she wondered if he was thinking about Ilsa. She shifted lanes, following the traffic lights as they changed from red to green so that no matter what, they were always moving. “Is anyone coming?”

  August slumped back against the seat with a ragged sigh. “Not yet.” His eyes were closed, his muscles tense, fingers white on the handle of the door as if he might be sick.

  “You okay?”

  “I’m fine.” She didn’t believe him, but his tone was clipped in that way that said to let it go. She had more important things to worry about right now than his mood, so she headed east and watched V-City shrink in her rearview mirror until it was a steel hill, a speck, and then, nothing.

  “Tell me something,” said Kate.

  The pain in her body had finally settled into something low and pervasive, but that was proving to be worse, because it made her want to fold in on herself, on the world, and that didn’t work behind the wheel of the car. August sat silently beside her, looking out into the darkness as they passed from the yellow into the green, and finally from the green into the Waste. If he noticed the shift, he didn’t say anything.

  There wasn’t a strict boundary, some bright billboard to announce that you were now leaving V-City. There didn’t need to be. It was the transition from manicured lawns to wild grass, the change from streetlights and nice houses to nothing.

  UVR lines carved out the road—not from overhead but set into the pavement below—and made the night beyond look solid. They were on the Eastern Transit, one of four supply roads that led from the capital all the way to the Verity border. Kate tried to imagine what they looked like from the sky, ribbons of light running like compass spokes away from
V-City. From that angle, the Waste would register as a massive black ring, a two-hundred mile buffer between the capital and the subcities that hugged the periphery, each little more than a speck of light compared to V-City’s beacon.

  Apparently the transit roads used to be packed, back in the days before the Phenomenon, when travel in and out of the territory wasn’t restricted, and then after, when people tried to evacuate the city, only to be pushed back by those who already lived outside it. These days the Waste roads were largely bare, save for the semis carrying shipments between subcities and the capital.

  It was a dangerous job. The Waste looked empty, but it wasn’t. Not many Malchai came this way, but the Corsai loved to hunt in the dark and pick off anything they could, from a cow to a family of five. The monsters that ventured this far out served no master, and the people who braved the Waste were just as lethal. Survivalists, mostly, scavengers who raided homes and stole from semis. These were the people who didn’t have the money to buy Harker’s protection, the ones who didn’t want to fight for Flynn and his task force, or die on his moral high ground. They didn’t want anything to do with V-City. They just wanted to stay alive.

  But the dead zone didn’t go on forever. She’d spent most her life on the other side of the Waste, and she knew that out ahead there was a place where razor wire gave way to open fields, and the high beams trailed into starry nights, and a girl could grow up in a house with her mother afraid of nothing, not even the dark.

  “Tell me something,” she said again.

  August had been sitting there, his eyes fixed on the night, his fingers tapping out some kind of short, staccato rhythm against his leg. Now he glanced toward her. His face looked strangely hollow, his eyes feverish. “Like what?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “A story?”

  August frowned. “I don’t like stories.”

  Kate frowned, too. “That’s weird.”

  “Is it?” asked August.

  Kate drummed her nails on the wheel. The paint was chipping. “Yeah. I mean, most people want to escape. Get out of their heads. Out of their lives. Stories are the easiest way to do that.”

  August’s gaze escaped to the window. “I suppose,” he said. It was maddening how little he talked, how much she wanted to. She switched on the radio, but the signal was already full of static, so she snapped it back off. The quiet gnawed at her already fraying edges.

  “Say something,” she whispered. “Please.”

  August’s jaw clenched. His fingers tightened on his pants. But he cleared his throat and said, “I don’t get why people are always trying to escape.”

  “Really?” said Kate. “Take a look around.”

  In the distance beyond August’s window, the nothing gave way to something—a town, if it could be called a town. It was more like a huddle of ramshackle structures, buildings gathered like fighters with their backs together, looking out on the night. The whole thing had a starved dog look about it. Fluorescent lights cut glaring beams through the darkness.

  “I guess it’s different for me,” he said, his voice taut. “One moment I didn’t exist and the next I did, and I spend every day scared I’ll just stop being again, and every time I slip, every time I go dark, it’s harder to come back. It’s all I can do to stay where I am. Who I am.”

  “Wow, August,” she said softly. “Way to kill the mood.”

  That won her a small exhausted laugh. But by the time it left his lips, it was already fading. He turned his face away, and Kate flexed her fingers on the wheel and kept her eyes ahead. Pain sparked across her stomach every time she breathed. Beside her, August was quiet, coiled, eyes on the night.

  “What happened to her?” she asked, trying to distract them both.

  “Who?”

  “Ilsa,” she said. “She doesn’t seem . . . all there.”

  August rubbed his fingertips over the tallies above his wrist. “She’s never been all there,” he said. “For the longest time I thought . . . I thought that was just her way. Scattered. I didn’t get it until recently.”

  “Get what?”

  “It’s who she is,” he said. “It’s what she is. Cause and effect.”

  “You mean it has to do with the catalyst?”

  August nodded. “Sunai are the result of tragedies,” he said, “acts of horror so dark they upset the cosmic balance. Leo came from some kind of cult slaughter in the first weeks of the catalyst. This whole group thought the world was ending, so they threw themselves off a roof. Only they didn’t go alone; they dragged their families with them. Parents. Children.”

  Kate let out a shallow breath. “Christ.”

  “No wonder my brother is so righteous,” he said softly.

  “Ilsa was different,” he continued. “Emily—Henry’s wife—she told me the story. Ilsa came from a bombing in the basement of a big hotel in North City.”

  The Allsway Building, thought Kate. Harker Hall. You could still see the scorch marks on the walls.

  “It was right after the chaos started,” he said. “Not even weeks, days. Days of confusion and terror. They didn’t even know yet what was going on, but something got inside that place, and the people who managed to get away all went to the basement. They huddled down, just trying to stay alive. Barricaded the doors. But someone decided that if they were going out, it wasn’t going to be at a monster’s hand. That someone brought a homemade bomb into that basement with them and lit the fuse.” August shook his head. “No wonder my sister broke apart.”

  “And you?” asked Kate. “Your brother is righteous, your sister is scattered. What does that make you?”

  When August answered, the word was small, almost too quiet to hear. “Lost.” He exhaled, and it seemed to take more than air out of him. “I’m what happens when a kid is so afraid of the world he lives in that he escapes the only way he knows how. Violently.”

  Silence, so heavy it hurt.

  August leaned his head against the window, and the glass began to fog with steam. A bead of sweat ran down his cheek, and Kate reached to turn on the air, when the car made a sound.

  It wasn’t the kind of sound a car should make.

  August straightened.

  The engine stuttered.

  “What was that?” he asked.

  The car began to rapidly lose speed.

  “Oh no,” she said.

  And then it died.

  A light on the dash was blinking. The high beams were still on.

  The rest of the car was dead.

  “Shit,” muttered Kate.

  “Kate,” ground August through his teeth. “What’s wrong with the car?”

  “It’s out of gas,” she said, already swinging open the door. She was digging in the trunk by the time he got out and joined her.

  The night was cool but it wasn’t enough to dampen the fever. “You couldn’t have picked one with a full tank?”

  “I’m sorry, I was a little busy trying not to die.” Something like a groan escaped his throat. “It’s fine,” she said, producing an HUV flashlight.

  “How is this fine?” he growled, anger burning through his chest, flaring with every breath.

  “We’ll find a ride,” said Kate, keeping her voice even, as if the calm would help.

  August wheeled on her. “Do you see a ride?”

  “What the hell’s gotten into you?” she shot back.

  August opened his mouth to say “nothing” but he couldn’t, and the urge to shout was fighting with the urge to hit something, so he turned and walked away, trying with every step to steady his breathing, calm his heart, knowing that panic would only spread the sickness faster.

  His feet carried him down the line of light at the edge of the road. He wasn’t going anywhere really, just moving.

  Mind over body.

  He knotted his fingers in his hair and stared out into the dark. They were in the middle of nowhere. The light from V-City was nothing but a ghost against the distant clouds, and the night around t
hem black as pitch. They’d passed some kind of fortress a few miles back. It hadn’t looked welcoming. In the distance somewhere, gunfire echoed like far-off thunder, and he didn’t know if it was real or just the phantoms in his head.

  Hunger plucked at his muscles and sang through his bones, and it felt like something was trying to claw its way out.

  He should have eaten the man back in the garage—would have, if he’d had the chance—but to his dismay, the human hadn’t been a killer. Of all Harker’s men, what were the odds of Sloan sending an innocent? Did the Malchai know Sunai could only feed on sinners? Or was it just bad luck?

  After several deep breaths, August had the anger under control. He turned back to the car and saw Kate leaning against the driver’s side door, arms crossed carefully over her ribs, clearly fighting back the cold. August couldn’t feel it, not through the fever.

  “Here,” said August, setting the violin case on the ground and shrugging off his jacket.

  “Keep it,” she said, but he was already settling it around her shoulders. He could see her relax beneath the added warmth.

  His hand lingered a moment on her good shoulder. Something about the contact—simple, solid—made him feel steadier. He started to pull away, but Kate caught his fingers. Her eyes were dark, and the way her lips were parted, he could tell she wanted to say something, but when she spoke, all she said was, “Your hand is hot.”

  August swallowed, and pulled free as gently as possible as something flickered across the sky above Kate’s head. He looked up, and the air caught in his throat. It was a clear night, and the sky was filled with dots of light.

  Kate followed his gaze. “What?” she drawled. “You’ve never seen stars before?”

  “No,” he said softly. “Not like this.” The sky was on fire. He wondered if Ilsa had ever seen stars—not the black icons across her skin, but the real things, which were so strange and perfect. One streaked across the sky, trailing light.

  “I read somewhere,” said Kate, “that people are made of stardust.”