This Savage Song (Monsters of Verity #1)(4)

August looked his father in the eyes. Henry Flynn had kind eyes and a sad mouth, or sad eyes and a kind mouth; he could never keep them straight. Faces had so many features, infinitely divisible, and yet they all added up to single, identifiable expressions like pride, disgust, frustration, fatigue—he was losing his train of thought again. He fought to catch it before it rolled out of reach. “I’m not talking about the book.”

“August . . . ,” started Henry, because he already knew where this was going. “We’re not having this discussion.”

“But if you’d just—”

“The task force is off the table.”

The steel door slid open again and Emily Flynn walked in with a box of supplies and set them on the counter. She was a fraction taller than her husband, her shoulders broader, with dark skin, a halo of short hair, and a holster on her hip. Emily had a soldier’s gait, but she shared Henry’s tired eyes and set jaw. “Not this again,” she said.

“I’m surrounded by the FTF all the time,” protested August. “Whenever I go anywhere, I dress like them. Is it such a step for me to be one of them?”

“Yes,” said Henry.

“It isn’t safe,” added Emily as she started unpacking the food. “Is Ilsa in her room? I thought we could—”

But August wouldn’t let it go. “Nowhere is safe,” he cut in. “That’s the whole point. Your people are out there risking their lives every day against those things, and I’m in here reading about stars, pretending like everything is fine.”

Emily shook her head and drew a knife from a slot on the counter. She started chopping vegetables, creating order of chaos, one slice at a time. “The compound is safe, August. At least safer than the streets right now.”

“Which is why I should be out there helping in the red.”

“You do your part,” said Henry. “That’s—”

“What are you so afraid of?” snapped August.

Emily set the knife down with a click. “Do you even have to ask?”

“You think I’ll get hurt?” And then, before she could answer, August was on his feet. In a single, fluid move he took up the knife and drove it down into his hand. Henry flinched, and Emily sucked in a breath, but the blade glanced off August’s skin as if it were stone, the tip burying in the chopping block beneath. The kitchen went very quiet.

“You act as though I’m made of glass,” he said, letting go of the knife. “But I’m not.” He took her hands, the way he’d seen Henry do so many times. “Em,” he said, softly. “Mom. I’m not fragile. I’m the opposite of fragile.”

“You’re not invincible, either,” she said. “Not—”

“I’m not putting you out there,” Henry cut in. “If Harker’s men catch you—”

“You let Leo lead the entire task force,” countered August. “His face is plastered everywhere, and he is still alive.”

“That’s different,” said Henry and Emily at the same time.

“How?” he challenged.

Emily brought her hands to August’s face, the way she did when he was a child—but that wasn’t the right word. He’d never been a child, not really, children didn’t come together fully formed in the middle of a crime scene. “We just want to protect you. Leo’s been part of the campaign from day one. But that makes him a constant target. And the more ground we gain in this city, the more Harker’s men will try to exploit our weaknesses and steal our strengths.”

“And which am I?” asked August, pulling away. “Your weakness, or your strength?”

Emily’s warm brown eyes went wide and flat as the word spilled out. “Both.”

It was unfair to ask, but the truth still stung.

“Where is this coming from?” asked Henry, rubbing his eyes. “You don’t really want to fight.”

He was right, August didn’t want to fight—not on the streets in the dead of night, and not here with his family—but there was this horrible vibration in his bones, something struggling to get out, a melody getting louder and louder in his head. “No,” he said. “But I want to help.”

“You already do,” insisted Henry. “The task force can only treat the symptoms. You and Ilsa and Leo, you treat the disease. That’s how it works.”

But it’s not working! August wanted to shout. The V-City truce had held for only six years—Harker on one side, and Flynn on the other—and it was already fraying. Everyone knew it wouldn’t hold. Every night, more death crept across the Seam. There were too many monsters, and not enough good men.

“Please,” he said. “I can do more if you let me.”

“August . . . ,” started Henry.

He held up his hand. “Just promise me you’ll think about it.” And with that he backed out of the kitchen before his parents were forced to tell him the truth.

August’s room was an exercise in entropy and order, a kind of contained chaos. It was small and windowless, close in a way that would have been claustrophobic if it weren’t so familiar. Books had long outgrown their shelves and were now stacked in precarious piles on and around his bed, several more open and splayed, pages down, across the sheets. Some people favored a genre or subject; August had little preference, so long as it wasn’t fiction—he wanted to learn everything about the world as it was, had been, could be. As someone who had come quite suddenly into being, like the end of a magic trick, he feared the tenuous nature of his existence, feared that at any moment he might simply cease to be again.