The Council recoiled, and she looked down and saw her hand wrapped around the switchblade. She didn’t remember drawing the lighter, didn’t remember freeing the knife, but there it was, embedded in the table.

The Council stared at the shining metal, and Kate almost reached out to free the blade. Instead she backed away. Putting space between her hand and the knife and the people in the room.

“Kate, are you all—” started Flynn, but she was already out the door.

Kate punched the elevator button, pressing her forehead to the cold steel. She listened to the low, slow crank of the machinery, and took the stairs instead.

She hit the lobby and wove through the crowded hall toward the nearest outer door. She needed air. The question was how to get out. She scanned the soldiers congesting the hall and saw one tuck a pack of cigarettes into the fold of his sleeve. That would do. Kate sped up right as he turned toward her.

The collision was brief, and just hard enough to set them both off balance. By the time he righted himself, the cigarettes were in her pocket. He muttered something under his breath, but she didn’t wait around to hear it.

Kate was ten feet from the Compound door when a guard stepped into her path. “You’re not cleared to leave.”

She flashed the pack of cigarettes. He didn’t move. “Come on.” She gestured down at herself, trying to keep the urgency from her voice. “No gear, no weapons. I’m not going far.”

“Not my problem.”

She saw herself grabbing the knife from his thigh, imagined the clean line it would make across his throat. She even took a step forward, closing the distance between them as—

“Let her go,” muttered another guard. “She’s not worth it.”

The first one scowled, but shoved the door aside, and just like that, without any blood or bodies, Kate was free.

A shiver ran down her spine as the Compound door slammed shut behind her. It was an unsettling thing, to be on the wrong side of a locked door, even with the last shreds of daylight clinging to the sky and the UVR strip starting to brighten beneath her feet, but Kate filled her lungs with cold air and took a few steps onto the stream of light.

You are still in control.

She looked down at the pack of cigarettes. It had been months since she’d last smoked—she’d half expected the urge to resurface with the city, as if returning to this old life meant returning to her old self, too. But she didn’t even crave it.

The pack hung from her fingers as she took a step, and then another, and another, putting distance between herself and the Compound. Beyond the strip of light, dusk was slipping in like fog, and she could almost feel the Chaos Eater stirring in the shadows.

Kate spread her arms.

Come and get me.

The Fangs gathered in the tower basement.

The same basement where Callum Harker had once held court, where a man with a homemade bomb had killed twenty-nine and ushered the first Sunai into the world, where blood still stained the floor and death still ghosted the walls, and Corsai whispered hungrily from the darkest corners.

Sloan stood on the platform, watching them jostle for space—more than a hundred men and women from across North City, united only by those bands of steel around their throats.

They had always been a violent bunch. The kind of humans who found power by taking it from others, who tolerated their own submission only because it placed them higher than the rest of the prey, and who believed, on some level, that they were better than their own kind, stronger than one other, and oh-so-eager to prove that strength.

Bravado. That was the word for it.

They had been gathered for less than an hour and already they were at one another’s throats. Posturing, lobbing insults, their bodies coiled with energy and their eyes shining with drink.

Sloan had studied enough humans to know the way their minds weakened and their tempers flared under its effects. The liquor had been a welcome present, a reward, proof that they’d been chosen.

He cleared his throat and called for silence.

“I’ve summoned you because you have proven yourselves worthy of my attention.” He shaped his words carefully. “I’ve summoned you because you are among the fiercest, the strongest, and the most bloodthirsty humans in my employ.”

Laughter, low and feral, rippled through the crowd. Sloan’s gaze wandered up to the gold-shrouded cage hanging overhead, its shape too dark for human eyes.

“I’ve summoned you,” he said, “because I know you are willing, but I do not know if you are able.”

“Come now, Sloan. They are only humans.” Alice came slinking forward from the shadows behind him, her voice dripping with scorn. “Do any humans really possess the strength to rise above their mediocrity? To become monstrous? To become more?” Her face was a perfect mask of disdain.

Collars rattled and voices rose, the basement a riot of hunger and noise, of drunken humans gunning for a fight.

“You are all the same,” Alice continued to taunt the Fangs. “Meat. Blood. Soul. No human will ever prove my equal.”

“Give us a chance!” came a voice from the crowd.

“We’ll show you!” shouted another.

Sloan stepped to the edge of the platform. “Who thinks themselves worthy?”

Hands went up, and bodies jostled, and the whole crowd churned, the bloodlust thick enough to taste.