Our Dark Duet (Monsters of Verity #2)(70)

Her heart faltered, panic running like a tremor through fragile ground, and she had to fight to keep her footing, to stay calm.

“You are in control,” she told herself, the words like weights in her pockets, anchoring her down.

You are in control, she thought as she dressed in a pair of fatigues. The clothes made her think of Team Twenty-Four downstairs, and she almost felt guilty for not joining them, before she remembered that it had been only a ruse, a failed attempt at freedom. Besides, she didn’t think proximity to weapons or people who tested her patience was a very good idea right now.

Another reason to be far from the Wardens and the rest of Prosperity.

Still, as she sank into a chair at the kitchen table, a cup of coffee in one hand and her tablet in the other, she found herself composing another message to Riley. There was a freedom to writing a letter you couldn’t send, and she told him about her father and her mother and the house in the Waste, about the Flynns and August and the cat named Allegro.

She wrote until the headache faded and her mind finally cleared, and then she closed out of the message, and got to work, setting a trap for the Chaos Eater.

“What are you doing?”

The bow skipped on the strings and August opened his eyes. The clock on the wall read 9:45 AM. Ilsa was gone and Soro stood in the doorway, their silver hair slicked back, confusion tingeing the steady planes of their face.

“Playing,” he said simply.

His limbs ached and if his fingers could have cracked and bled, they would have hours ago. As it was, the steel strings were hot from so much use, the notes wobbling. If they had been made of anything else, they would have snapped.

“Why?” asked Soro.

That question—a single word—with so many answers. “Do you ever wonder why music brings a soul to surface? What makes beauty work as well as pain?”

“No.”

“Maybe it is a kind of mercy,” he went on, “but maybe there’s more to it than that.” The violin was heavy in his grip, but he didn’t stop playing. “Maybe there is more to us than murder.”

“You are behaving strangely,” said Soro. “Is it the sinner?”

“Her name is Kate.”

The Sunai shrugged, as if the information were meaningless, and turned their attention to the soldier in the cell, the red and white light like oil and water on his skin.

“How odd.”

“He is not guilty,” said August.

“He is not innocent, either,” said Soro. “And your playing will not save him.”

Soro is right, sneered Leo in his head. How many hours have you wasted? August’s grip faltered.

His hands were beginning to shake.

“You are tired, brother. Let me help.”

Soro turned toward the door without drawing their flute.

“Wait,” said August, but it was too late—Soro marched into the cell and broke the soldier’s neck.

August stopped playing, the violin slipping from numb fingers as the soldier collapsed to the ground, the light gone from his skin.

August folded against the wall.

“Why?” he asked when Soro returned. “Why did you do that?”

The other Sunai looked at him with something like pity.

“Because,” they said, “we must focus on the living. He was already dead. Come on,” they said, holding open the door. “Our work is waiting.”

Kate stared down at the tablet and tried not to scream.

The need to stay calm was warring with the ticking clock in her head and the fact she didn’t know how to trap a shadow, how to catch a monster she was always a step behind.

She had nothing, and the longer she wracked her brain, the more her anger mounted, the more helpless she felt, the more she wanted to take her frustration out on something, anything. It left her feeling brittle, which made her mad, which made her pulse climb all over again, the shadow whispering all the while in her skull.

You are hunter.

You are a killer.

You are running out of time.

Do something.

Do something.

DO SOMETHING.

A sound tore itself free from Kate’s throat, and she swept her arm across the table, sending the coffee cup and the tablet crashing to the floor. She put her head in her hands, took a long breath, then stood and picked up the pieces.

There were answers—she just had to find them.

She started clicking through every folder on the FTF server.

She found food logs, census data, a registry of recent deaths, subfolders marked with either an M or an F (for Malchai or Fang, if she had to guess). There was a third folder, marked by another letter—A. There was no telling what that stood for, but the deaths in that one were the most gruesome.

And then, somewhere between her third and fourth coffee, something caught her eye: a map of V-City, marked with X’s in blue and gray and black, the month stamped at the top.

The X’s, she soon discovered, marked gains and losses on both sides of the Seam.

She backed out of the search until she found the rest of the maps, month by month, going back to Callum’s death and Sloan’s rise.

Kate straightened in her chair. The images were all the same.

Sure, the X’s shifted back and forth, but never strayed from the few blocks on either side of the Seam.

And the more files she studied, the stranger the picture became.