Our Dark Duet (Monsters of Verity #2)(12)

August had first thought of Soro as a she, though in truth, he hadn’t been sure, and when he’d worked up the courage to ask whether Soro considered themself male or female, the newest member of the Flynn family had stared at him for a long moment before answering.

“I’m a Sunai.”

That was all they said, as if the rest didn’t matter, and August supposed it didn’t. He never thought of them as anything but Soro after that.

As the doors slid shut and the elevator rose, August cast a short, sideways glance at the other Sunai. The front of their uniform was caked with a mixture of blackish gore and human blood, but Soro didn’t seem to notice or, at least, didn’t seem to care. They enjoyed hunting—no, enjoyed was probably the wrong word.

Soro possessed neither Leo’s righteousness, nor Ilsa’s whimsy, nor, as far as August could tell, his own complicated desire to feel human. What they did possess was an unshakeable resolve, a belief that the Sunai existed solely to destroy monsters and eliminate the sinners responsible for them.

Pride—perhaps that was right word.

Soro prided themself on their ability to hunt, and while they lacked Leo’s passion, they more than matched his technique.

“Did you have a good day?” asked August, and Soro flashed him the ghost of a smile, so faint others probably wouldn’t even see it, so faint August himself might have missed it if he hadn’t spent so long learning how to put his own emotions on display just so humans would see.

“You and your strange questions,” they mused. “I ended seven lives. Does that count as good?”

“Only if they deserved to die.”

A slight crease formed in Soro’s brow. “Of course they did.”

There was no waver, no doubt, and as August stared at Soro’s reflection in the steel door, he couldn’t help but wonder if their catalyst had anything to do with their resolve. Like all Sunai, they had been born from tragedy, but unlike the massacre that brought August forth, Soro’s had been more . . . voluntary.

A month after North City’s plunge back into chaos, a group calling themselves the HPC—Human Power Corp—got their hands on a weapons cache and decided to bomb the subway tunnels, home to so many of the city’s monsters.

And because killing Corsai was tricky (shadows were easy to disperse, but hard to erase), they lured as many Malchai as they could into the tunnels, using themselves as bait. It was a success—if a suicide mission can ever be called a success. A fair number of monsters were killed, along with twenty-nine humans, a stretch of the North City underground collapsed, and the self-named Soro was the only thing to emerge from the wreckage, followed out by a thin, wavering trail of classical music, the kind Harker had piped into the subways for so long.

The elevator came to a stop at the twelfth floor, and Soro stepped out, glancing back before the doors closed.

“Did you?”

August blinked. “Did I what?”

“Have a good day?”

He thought of the man begging for his life, the little girl clutching her mother’s leg. “You’re right,” he said, as the elevator door slid shut. “It’s a strange question.”

By the time August reached the Compound roof, his body was aching for air.

It wasn’t a physical thing, like hunger or sickness, but he felt it all the same, driving him up, up, up to the top of the Compound.

You could see the whole city from here.

It wasn’t the kind of roof you were supposed to go onto. It couldn’t be reached by the elevators or the main stairs, but August had found an access hatch in an electrical room on the top floor the year before. Now he stepped out into fresh air as the sun touched the horizon and let out a slow, shuddering exhale.

Up here, he could breathe.

Up here, he was alone.

And up here, at last, he came apart.

That’s what it felt like, a slow unraveling, first his posture, then his face, every inch of his body stiff from being held in place under the weight of so many searching eyes.

Pull yourself together, muttered Leo in his head.

August smothered the voice and stepped forward until the toes of his boots skimmed the roof’s edge. It was a twenty-story drop, nothing but concrete waiting at the bottom. It would hurt, but only for an instant.

He’d always loved Newton’s law of gravity, the part about things falling at the same speed, no matter what they were made of. A steel bearing. A book. A human. A monster.

The difference, of course, was what happened when they hit the ground.

The impact would split the concrete beneath his boots. But by the time the dust cleared, he would still be there. On his feet. Unbroken.

All things fall, mused Leo.

August inched back a step, and then two, sinking to the sun-warmed rooftop and wrapping his arms around his knees. The tallies shone against his skin.

He’d spent so long trying to hide them, but now he wore them on display. One for every day since August last went dark.

One for every day since he’d—

Killed me.

He squeezed his eyes shut.

You truly are a monster now.

“Stop,” he whispered, but Leo’s voice played on in his head, and the worst part was he didn’t know—couldn’t tell—if it was just a memory, an echo, or really Leo, some last piece of his brother clinging to August’s bones.