This Savage Song (Monsters of Verity #1)(31)

And when she was finally better, it was her father who sent her away. Who buried her mother, and then buried her. Not in the ground, but in Fischer. In Dalloway. In Leighton and Pennington and Wild Prior and St. Agnes.

At first, she’d pleaded and begged to come home, to stay home, but over time, she stopped. Not because she stopped wanting it, but because she learned that pleading didn’t work on Callum Harker. Pleading was a sign of weakness. So she learned to bury the things that made her weak. The things that made her like her mother.

Kate returned the picture frame to the bedside table and looked down at her hands. Her lungs hurt from the smoke but her hands had stopped shaking, and she considered the black blood staining her fingers, not with horror but with grim determination.

She was her father’s daughter. A Harker.

And she would do whatever she had to do to prove it.





VERSE 2


MONSTER SEE, MONSTER DO





“Valor, Prosperity, Fortitude, Verity,” recited the teacher, a middle-aged man named Mr. Brody, as he tapped the four central territories on the map. Combined, they took up more than half the space, the six remaining territories filling in the land on either side. “These are, of course, the four largest of the Ten Territories, with populations ranging from twenty-three to twenty-six million. Can anyone tell me the smallest?”

Grace, thought August as he scribbled a rough map in his notebook and carved it into ten, mirroring the divisions on the board.

“Fortune?” asked a girl, pointing to the northwest corner.

“I’m talking about population, not landmass, so no. Fortune has almost seventeen million.”

It also had mountains. August looked out the window, tried to imagine the blue haze of peaks in the distance. He couldn’t.

“Charity?” guessed a boy in the back, pointing to the southeast corner, where oceans bordered two sides of the territory. Mountains. Oceans. All Verity had were plains, interrupted here and there by hills, which were little more than undulations according to the topographic map.

“Nine point three million. Getting closer.”

“Grace?” ventured a girl at the front, pointing to a mass on the northeast coast.

“That is correct. Can anyone tell me how many—”

“Six million three-hundred and fifteen thousand, at last count,” said Kate without raising her hand. She was sitting one desk over.

Of all the classes they could have shared, they’d ended up with History. The irony wasn’t lost on him.

“Very good, Miss Harker,” said Mr. Brody with a shit-eating grin (a term August had learned from Harris). “Luckily for the rest of you, this course will focus primarily on our own illustrious territory . . .”

August might have found his current situation flat-out funny—being in a room with his enemy’s daughter, learning about the balance of power and politics in Verity—if he didn’t have to focus every ounce of energy on keeping his mouth shut as the teacher went on about their esteemed capital, skipping over any mention of the monsters that ran it in the light of day or the ones that roamed its streets at night. It wasn’t as if he expected the class to be objective, but it was still hard to listen to the skewed narrative. Every time the teacher referred to the city as V-City instead of North City, as if the southern half wasn’t worth mentioning, as if it didn’t exist beyond the Seam, August felt his chest tighten. People weren’t really this deluded, were they?

The class wasn’t the only thing making him tense; he’d overheard a conversation that morning between Henry and Leo. They were talking—heatedly—about the latest incident at the Seam. A handful of Corsai had found a crack and come through, and no one knew if Harker had sent them or if the monsters on his side were getting restless. August had hovered outside the office to listen.

“It doesn’t matter why they came,” Leo was saying. “It doesn’t matter who sent them. Either Harker did, in which case he is actively breaking the truce, or they rebelled, in which case Harker is failing to control them and the truce is forfeit.”

“We’ve come so far,” said Henry. “I will not put this city through another war.”

“We made a promise,” said Leo.

“A threat.”

“—that if Harker broke his covenant, we would see his empire razed.”

“Those were your words, Leo. Not mine.”

“We must remind him of the weapons at our disposal.”

“People will die,” challenged Henry.

“People are always dying.”

August had shivered at the cold detachment in his brother’s voice.

At the front of the room, Mr. Brody was droning on. “. . . marked forty years since the dissolution of the federal government—you should all know this—in the wake of the war in . . .” he trailed off, waiting for an answer.

“Vietnam,” announced a boy.

“Indeed,” said the teacher. “National unrest, a strained economy, and depleted morale resulted in the federal collapse and subsequent reconstruction of the once-United States.” He tapped the center of the map. “Now, can anyone tell me how many of the antiquated states now make up Verity? Anyone?”

August continued to shade in his own map, the names drifting through his head. Kentucky. Missouri. Illinois. Iowa. They sounded like nonsense words.