“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.