August stared at her. “What?”

“I saw a patch. It had a number—”

Understanding lit his face and he reached for the comm.

“Squad Sixteen, are they on mission?”

“Affirmative.”

He scanned the dark. “Where?”

By the time the controller read the address, August was already running, Kate close behind. He kept up a stream of orders on his comm, and sections of the grid came up around them. They were getting close—Kate’s vision kept doubling, two places overlaid before her eyes. And then they rounded a corner, and she saw the overpass and the Seam, and the stretch of street, and it was empty.

“No,” she gasped, first in frustration and then in horror as gunfire shattered the night, lighting up the arch beneath the overpass as a squad of soldiers turned their weapons on one another, and in the staccato bursts of light, she saw it, like a shadow thrown in their wake.

The Chaos Eater.

August saw it.

Only for an instant, when the short, bright flashes of gunfire lit the underpass. It stood there, a spot of stillness amid the violence, its silver eyes glinting. August saw it and felt—empty, a numbing cold, as if the burning coal at the center of his chest had turned to ice.

His limbs grew heavy and his mind slowed, and Kate’s voice was distant in his ears, a single echoing word that took too long to form.

“Play.”

She pulled his face toward hers. “August, play.”

The world stuttered back into motion, and he got the violin up, the bow on the strings, but the monster was already gone, the killing done, the underpass plunged back into terrible, too-still shadow. He drew a light baton and lobbed it into the dark, throwing the whole gruesome scene into sudden relief as the first Corsai scattered from the bodies.

“Dammit,” muttered Kate.

And then, to August’s horror, one of corpses staggered to its feet.

The soldier looked down at his hands, covered in blood, and began to sob and rage and then, just as quickly, he went quiet and calm, and smiled, and the smile became a laugh and the laugh became a groan. It was like a flickering image, two selves warring, both losing.

“We’re all going to die,” he murmured, and then, voice rising: “It’s a mercy. I’ll make it fast—”

“Soldier,” called August, and the man spun toward them, eyes wide.

“Don’t look!” said Kate, but it was too late. August met the soldier’s eyes and saw the silver streaked across the man’s wild gaze, and his first irrational thought was of moonlight. He braced for monster’s poisonous power to reach out and wrap around him, the way the coldness had—but nothing happened.

To August, the man’s eyes were just eyes, the madness contained by its new host.

“It’s a mercy,” said the soldier again.

And then he saw Kate, and something in him snapped at the sight of another human, another target. He lunged for the nearest gun. Kate dropped to the ground and August stepped in front of her, drawing his bow across the strings.

The soldier staggered, as if struck, the weapon falling from his hands as August’s music warred with the monster’s hold. The man gripped his skull and screamed, anguish on his face as he looked down at what he’d done, and then the anguish was gone too, wiped away by the spell of August’s song.

When the man’s soul surfaced, it wasn’t red or white, but both, one streaked with the other, guilt and innocence twined together, vying for his life.

August stopped playing.

He didn’t know what to do.

Kate was on her knees, gaze empty and crimson light wicking off her skin.

He reached for his comm.

“Soro.”

A moment later, they responded. “August. What is it?”

He looked from Kate to the soldier, the tangled light to the bodies of the murdered FTFs. “I need your help.”

Four walls, a ceiling, and a floor.

That’s all there was in the cell. The door was steel and the walls were concrete, except for the one interrupted by a single strip of glass, that wasn’t even glass, but shatter-proof plastic.

Kate stood in the viewing room on the other side, Soro and August and Flynn at her back. Flynn sat in a chair while Soro twirled their flute and August leaned in the doorway, but Kate didn’t take her eyes from the soldier.

He was on his knees in the center of the cell, blindfolded and cuffed to a steel loop embedded in the concrete floor. Soro had bandaged the gunshot wounds in his shoulder and leg, but if he was in any pain, it seemed lost beneath the madness.

This is me, she thought. This is what happens to me.

She’d come back to herself, somewhere between the end of August’s song and Soro’s arrival, in time to see August cinching the strip of cloth over the soldier’s eyes.

“He shouldn’t be in the building,” said Soro, arms crossed. “He’s infected.”

“That,” said Flynn, sitting forward, “is why he’s isolated.”

Isolated was a kind word for it. Kate wasn’t even the one in the concrete cube, and she still felt like she’d been entombed. The cell was one of several on the Compound’s lowest level, and no other humans had been allowed even a modicum of contact with the prisoner. The Sunai were, apparently, immune to the soldier’s sickness. August, with Flynn’s guidance, had tried to sedate the man, but it hadn’t worked. Some vital thing was severed between his body and his mind, and no matter what they pumped into his veins, he didn’t slow, didn’t sleep, didn’t do anything but rave.