(According to Riley, the police were “aware of the attacks and continuing to monitor developments,” which as far as Kate could tell was just a long way of describing denial.)

RiledUp: makes dad face wags finger

RiledUp: But seriously. You better not get any blood on my couch.

HunterK: Don’t worry.

HunterK: I left most of it on the stairs.

LiamOnMe: O_O.

HunterK: Any new leads?

TeoMuchtoHandle: nothing yet. the streets are quiet.

What a strange idea.

If she could keep this up, knocking out the Heart Eaters as they took shape instead of cleaning up the wreckage, two steps forward instead of back, maybe it wouldn’t get worse. Maybe she could keep it from becoming a Phenomenon. Maybe—what a useless word. Maybe was just a way of saying she didn’t know.

And Kate hated not knowing.

She closed the browser, fingers hesitating over the darkened screen before she opened a new window and started searching for Verity.

Kate had first learned how to tap into foreign signals at her second boarding school, out on the eastern fringe of Verity, an hour from the Temperance border.

All ten territories were supposed to transmit openly, but if you wanted to know what was really going on in another territory, you had to slip behind the digital curtain.

That was the idea—but no matter how hard Kate looked, she couldn’t find her way home.

True, the quarantine had gone back into effect, the borders that had peeled open so slowly over the last decade slamming shut again. But there was no curtain to slip behind, nothing coming out of Verity at all.

The signal was gone.

There was only one explanation: the tech towers must have gone down.

With the borders closed and the comm grid out, Verity was officially cut off.

And the people in Prosperity didn’t care. Not even the Wardens—Teo had used the word inevitable. Bea thought the borders should never have been opened, that Verity should have been left to consume itself like a fire in a glass jar. Even Riley seemed ambivalent. Only Liam showed the slightest concern, and it was more pity than a vested interest. They didn’t know, of course, what Verity meant to Kate.

Hell, Kate didn’t know either.

But she couldn’t stop searching.

Every night she checked, just in case, clicked through every bread crumb on the opendrive, hoping for some news about Verity, about August Flynn.

It was the weirdest thing—she’d seen August at his worst. Watched him descend through hunger into sickness and madness and shadow. Watched him burn. Watched him kill.

But when she pictured him now, she didn’t see the Sunai made of smoke or the figure burning in a cold tub. She saw a sad-eyed boy sitting alone on the bleachers, a violin case at his feet.

Kate shoved the tablet away and slumped back on the couch. She threw an arm over her eyes and let the steady beat of the radio fold around her until she sank down toward sleep.

But then, in the lull between songs, the sound of footsteps echoed in the stairwell. She stilled, turning her good ear toward the door as the steps slowed, stopped.

Kate waited for a knock, but it never came. Instead she heard the sound of a hand on the doorknob, the shudder of the lock as it was tried but held fast. Kate’s fingers slipped beneath the couch cushion and produced a gun. The same one she’d used to kill a stranger in her mother’s house, the same one she’d used to shoot her father in his office.

A muffled voice sounded beyond the door, followed by the scrape of metal, and Kate leveled the weapon at the door as it swung open.

For a moment, the shape in the doorway was nothing but a shadow, the hall lights tracing the outline of a figure a fraction taller than she was, with round edges and short hair. No red eyes, no sharp teeth, no dark suit. Just Riley, standing there, juggling a box of pizza and a six-pack of soda and a key.

He saw the gun and threw his hands up, dropping the cardboard and the cans and the key ring to the floor. One of the cans exploded, raining soda on the landing.

“Dammit, Kate.” His voice was strangled.

Kate sighed and set the weapon on the table. “You should knock.”

“This is my place,” he said, retrieving the pizza box and the rest of the soda with shaking hands. “Do you pull the gun on everyone, or just me?”

“Everyone,” said Kate, “but for you I left the safety on.”

“I’m flattered.”

“What are you doing here?”

“Oh, you know,” he shot back, “checking on the squatter in my apartment, making sure she didn’t trash the place.”

“You wanted to see if I bled on the couch.”

“And the stairs.” His gaze flicked from her to the gun on the table and back. “Permission to enter?”

Kate spread her arms along the back of the couch. “Password?”

“I brought pizza.”

The smell emanating from the box was heavenly. Her stomach growled. “Oh, all right,” she said. “Permission granted.”

Rituals were funny things.

People thought of them as either elaborate formulas, magic spells, or compulsions drilled into the subconscious by months or years of repetition.

But really, ritual was just a fancy word for habit. A thing that became easier to do than not do. And habits were simple—especially bad ones, like letting people in.