This Savage Song (Monsters of Verity #1)(36)

But she didn’t.

Not yet.

She sat at her desk, tapped her computer awake, and logged into the Colton Academy website.

“Who are you, Mr. Gallagher?” she wondered aloud, pulling up the student directory and scrolling through profiles until she found the one she was looking for. She clicked on Frederick Gallagher’s page. His information was listed on the left-hand side—height, age, address, etc.—but the photo on the right was odd. She’d had half a dozen pictures taken, one for every school, and they always insisted on front and center, eyes forward, big smile. But the boy on-screen wasn’t even looking at her.

His face was in profile, eyes cast down, edges blurred, and lips parted as if he’d been caught midbreath as well as midmotion. If it wasn’t for the barest edge of a black tally mark where his cuff was riding up, she wouldn’t have been sure it was him.

Why hadn’t the office retaken the photo?

There was something teasing about the blurred shot, and Kate found herself craving a better picture, wanting the luxury of being able to stare at someone without being stared at. She booted a new browser on the city’s updrive, went onto a social networking site the students all seemed to use, and typed in his name.

Two matches came up in the V-City area, but neither one was the Freddie she’d met. Which was odd, but Freddie said he was homeschooled. Maybe he’d never joined the site. She opened a third browser and typed his name into the search engine. It landed half a dozen hits—a mechanic, a banker, a suicide victim, a pharmacist, but no match for her Freddie.

Kate sat back in her chair, and tapped a metal nail against her teeth.

These days, everyone left a digital mark. All day, every day at Colton, people were snapping photos, recording every mundane moment as if it deserved to be preserved, remembered. So where was he?

Something twinged in her mind. Maybe she was being paranoid, searching for a complicated answer when the simple one—that he was that rare teen who preferred staying off-grid—was probably true.

Probably. But it was like an itch, and now she’d started scratching . . .

The drive wasn’t the only place that information was logged, not in North City. She logged into her father’s private uplink, clicked on the archive labeled human. The screen filled with thousands of thumbnails, each with a name and date. Freddie wasn’t like the other kids at Colton, and maybe she wasn’t the only one who’d noticed. She typed his name into the search bar, half hoping his face would show up with a tag for some disturbance, even just an anomaly, but—nothing.

Exasperated, she clicked back to the school directory and reconsidered the picture, staring at it for several long minutes as if it might come to life, complete the arc of motion, meet her eyes. When it didn’t, Kate scrolled through his profile, scribbled down his address, and got to her feet.

There was still one place she hadn’t looked.

“Hello?” she called out as she crossed the penthouse. No answer. She did a quick lap through the open layout. No sign of Sloan or Harker. The door to her father’s office was locked, but when she pressed her good ear to the wood, she didn’t hear the hum of the soundproofing system that Harker activated when he was inside. She keyed in the code—she’d set up a camera on her second day, caught the motion and order of his fingers—and a second later the door opened under her touch.

The lights came up automatically.

Callum Harker’s office was massive, and strangely classic, with a broad, dark desk, a wall of bookshelves, and a bank of windows overlooking the city. She crossed to the shelves and ran her hand over the large black books that ran the wall. Ledgers.

Harker was a careful man; he kept both physical and digital copies of the information on all his citizens. The computer was locked—Kate hadn’t been able to crack the access code—but the beautiful thing about books was that anyone could open them. The ledgers were alphabetical, and retranscribed every year. When people lost Harker’s protection in the course of that year, their names were blacked out. If they gained protection, their names were written in at the back of the book.

Kate pulled the G ledger from the wall and opened it on the desk, paging through until she found the name: Gallagher.

Eleven Gallaghers were listed under Harker’s protection in North City, and there was even a Paris Gallagher whose address matched the one on Freddie’s profile, but there was no mention of Freddie himself. But she’d seen the pendant around his neck. She turned to the back of the ledger, hoping to find his name in the additions.

It wasn’t there.

“Where are you?” she whispered, right before someone cleared his throat.

Her head snapped up. Her father was standing in the doorway, wiping his hands on a black square of silk. “What are you doing, Katherine?”

The air stuck in Kate’s lungs. She forced it out, hoping the exhale might pass for an exasperated sigh. “Looking for a name,” she said, leaning against the desk, as if she had every right to be there. “There’s a girl at my school who’s driving me crazy. She had a medal, and I was hoping it was stolen or expired, but alas,” she said, letting the ledger fall shut, “she’s still under your protection.”

Harker’s dark eyes hung on her. She tried to ignore the dried blood on his cuffs. “Sorry,” she added. “I should have waited for you to get home, but I didn’t know when that would be.”