“No beef,” he muttered sullenly.

“Told you,” said Ani, spearing a piece of wilted broccoli as Kate rose to leave.

“Where are you going?” asked August, but she was already walking away. He swore under his breath and followed, hundreds of eyes following them out. “Kate.”

“Fine.” She reached the hall and headed straight for the nearest exit. “You’re doing what you have to, but so am I. I’ve been playing boot camp all day, but I’m not going to sit around any longer. You go on having your existential crisis, playing the big bad monster, but there’s a real demon out there, in our city, and I’m going to find it, with or without you.”

“I can’t let you go out there—”

“Then come with me. Help me hunt this thing down. Or stay out of my way.”

August caught her arm. “What will you do when you find it, Kate? How will you kill it? Are you sure you can kill it, with its claws in your head?”

He watched her try to say yes, saw the words catch in her throat. When she finally answered, her voice was brittle. “I don’t know,” she said, meeting his gaze, “but I’ll be damned if I let it kill me. You might not want to fight your monsters, August. But I’m fighting mine.”

He sighed, slung the violin over his shoulder, and took her hand.

“Come on.”

Fresh air flooded Kate’s lungs, crisp and cool, and for an instant she was dizzy from the sheer relief of being outside, even at night.

What had Henry Flynn said about the dark?

It makes us feel free.

A ribbon of UVR light surrounded the Compound, tracing a band of safety against the dark beyond. It stretched like a broad sheet, the width of a road. Like a moat. Thinner versions traced the bases of several nearby buildings—barracks, she guessed, extensions of the FTF’s main compound—but the rest of the city was dark in a way she’d never seen it.

It was unnerving, that darkness.

Thicker than the lack of light.

The night beyond the moat twisted and writhed, the shadows whispering to her.

hello little harker

She could feel it rising in her, that longing for a fight. All her life she’d clung to it like the grip on a knife, but now she put all her strength into setting it down.

In the distance, the Seam traced a thin line, and beyond that, the looming shape of her father’s tower. Sloan’s tower.

She thought of him standing in the penthouse with his ember-red eyes, his sickly sweet voice, his tongue running over sharpened teeth.

I will kill him, she thought. And I will take my time.

Her focus narrowed, thoughts condensing to a clear and perfect point—a vision of herself drawing a silver blade over Sloan’s skin, peeling him open one slice at a time, revealing those dark bones and— August caught her sleeve.

Her boots were skimming the edge of the light strip.

“Here,” said August, drawing a tablet from his pocket. He tapped the screen, and a second later the surface turned reflective. A mirror. “You said this is how you see into its head. So look.”

Her eyes were instantly drawn to the glass, but she resisted.

“I’m not your private scrying board. If I see where it is, we go together.”

August nodded. His grip tightened on his violin case, and she told herself this would work. It had to. She would hunt the monster down, and August would slay it, and the nightmare in her head would end, and she would kill Sloan, and then she would go back to Prosperity, and the Wardens, and Riley.

That wasn’t another life, another Kate, it was this one, it was hers, it was now.

She blew out a breath and turned toward the mirror, bracing herself.

Where are you? she asked the glass, just before she fell in.

She is back in her father’s office with the monster in the black suit and the shadows whispering weak weak weak in the window a pair of silver eyes round as moons —Where are you?— and for the first time the darkness pushes back the vision shudders

holds

she forces her way

to the glass and when

she reaches the window the image finally cracks shatters

into—

—red eyes everywhere people

screaming sobbing

begging

for mercy the taste of fear

like ash

in its mouth it moves

away

there

and gone and there again now

a group

of soldiers on an overpass guns

and badges catching

the light a tangle

of voices it reaches out

from the dark all hollow hunger and cold delight because

they do not see it coming—

Kate wrenched back, as if struck.

The tablet tumbled from her fingers and August caught it as she doubled over, pain jabbing like a cold knife behind her eyes. For an instant she was still trapped between the mirrors, caught somewhere outside herself, the ground eroding beneath her feet.

She blinked away the blinding white of the light strip.

Three bright red drops of blood hit the ground, and then August’s hand was on her arm, his voice lost in the noise as he lifted her face.

She saw the too-even planes of his brow and cheeks fold with worry, and she wanted to tell him she was okay, but she didn’t feel okay, so instead she wiped her nose and said, “Sixteen.”