He lobbed an object through the air and August caught it, cringing at the contact. It was a North City medallion, embossed with a V on one side and a series of numbers on the other. Made of iron, the medal prickled unpleasantly against his palm. Pure metal repelled monsters: Corsai and Malchai couldn’t touch the stuff; Sunai simply didn’t like to (all the FTF uniforms were traced with it, but his and Leo’s had been woven with an alloy).

“Do I really have to wear this?” he asked. The prolonged contact was already making him nauseous.

“If you want to pass for one of them,” said Leo simply. “If you want to get caught and slaughtered, then by all means, leave it off.” August swallowed, and slid the pendant over his head. “It’s a solid forgery,” continued his brother. “It’ll pass a cursory inspection by any human eye, but don’t be caught north of the Seam after dark. I wouldn’t test it against anything that actually comes to heel at Harker’s side.”

Of course, it wasn’t the metal alone that kept the monsters at bay. It was Harker’s sigil. His law.

August settled the medallion against his shirt, zipping up the FTF-issued jacket over it. But as he moved to step into the elevator, Leo barred his path. “Have you eaten recently?”

He swallowed, but the words were already rising in his throat. There was a difference between the inability to lie and the need to speak the truth, but silent omission was a luxury he didn’t have when it came to his brother. When a Sunai asked a question, he commanded an answer. “I’m not hungry.”

“August,” chided Leo. “You’re always hungry.”

He flinched. “I’ll eat later.”

Leo didn’t respond, only watched him, black eyes narrowed, and before he could say anything else—or make August say anything else—August pushed past him. Or at least, he tried to. He was halfway to the elevator when Leo’s hand snapped out and closed over his. The one holding his violin case.

“Then you don’t need this.”

August went stiff. In four years, he’d never left the compound without the instrument. The thought made him dizzy.

“What if something happens?” he asked, panic climbing.

A ghost of amusement rippled through Leo’s features. “Then you’ll just have to get your hands dirty.” With that, he pulled the case from August’s grip and nudged him into the elevator. August stumbled, then turned back, his hands prickling with the sudden absence of the violin.

“Good-bye, brother,” said Leo, punching the button for the lobby.

“Have fun at school,” he added as the doors slid shut.

August shoved his hands into his pockets as the elevator plunged twenty floors. The compound was part skyscraper, part base of operations, all fortress. A concrete beast, steel, barbed wire, and Plexiglas, most of it dedicated to barracks housing members of the task force. The vast majority of the FTF’s sixty thousand officers were housed in other barracks across the city, but the nearly a thousand stationed at the compound served as camouflage as much as anything. The fewer people coming in and out of the building, the more each one stood out. And if you were Harker, trying to ferret out Flynn’s three Sunai, his secret weapons, you were keeping track of every face. It wasn’t so much a problem for Leo, since he was the face of the FTF, or Ilsa, since she never left the compound, but Henry was determined to keep August’s identity a secret.

On the ground floor, people were already streaming in and out of the building (with the night curfew as it was, days started early), and August moved with them, as if he were one of them, across the concrete lobby and through the guarded doors and onto the street. The morning washed over him, warm and bright and tarnished only by the disk of metal scratching against his skin and the absence of his violin.

Sunlight seeped between the buildings, and August took a deep breath and looked up at the Flynn compound looming overhead. Four years of hardly ever going out, and even then, almost always at night. Now here he was. Outside. Alone. Twenty-four million people in this supercity at last count, and he was only one of them, just another face in the morning commute. For one, dazzling, infinite moment, August felt like he was standing on a precipice, the end of one world and the beginning of another, a whisper and a bang.

And then his watch beeped, dragging him back from the edge, and he set off.

The black sedan cut through the city like a knife.

Kate watched as it carved down streets, across bridges, the traffic splitting like flesh as the car sliced its way through North City. Outside, the morning was loud and bright, but from within, it looked like an old movie, all the color leeched out by the tinted windows. Classical music piped through the radio, soft but steady, reinforcing the illusion of calm that most people bought into so willingly. When she asked the driver, a stone-faced man named Marcus, to change the station, and he ignored the request, she put her left earbud in and hit play. Her world became a heavy beat, a rhythm, an angry voice, as she leaned back into the leather bench of the backseat and let the city slide past. From here, it looked almost normal.

V-City was a place Kate knew only in glimpses, snapshots, time-lapse moments strung together with years of space between each one. She’d been sent away once for her own safety, stolen a second time in the dead of night, and banished a third for her mother’s crimes. But she was finally back where she belonged. In her father’s city. At her father’s side.