This Savage Song (Monsters of Verity #1)(69)

“Tell me something,” said Kate.

The pain in her body had finally settled into something low and pervasive, but that was proving to be worse, because it made her want to fold in on herself, on the world, and that didn’t work behind the wheel of the car. August sat silently beside her, looking out into the darkness as they passed from the yellow into the green, and finally from the green into the Waste. If he noticed the shift, he didn’t say anything.

There wasn’t a strict boundary, some bright billboard to announce that you were now leaving V-City. There didn’t need to be. It was the transition from manicured lawns to wild grass, the change from streetlights and nice houses to nothing.

UVR lines carved out the road—not from overhead but set into the pavement below—and made the night beyond look solid. They were on the Eastern Transit, one of four supply roads that led from the capital all the way to the Verity border. Kate tried to imagine what they looked like from the sky, ribbons of light running like compass spokes away from V-City. From that angle, the Waste would register as a massive black ring, a two-hundred mile buffer between the capital and the subcities that hugged the periphery, each little more than a speck of light compared to V-City’s beacon.

Apparently the transit roads used to be packed, back in the days before the Phenomenon, when travel in and out of the territory wasn’t restricted, and then after, when people tried to evacuate the city, only to be pushed back by those who already lived outside it. These days the Waste roads were largely bare, save for the semis carrying shipments between subcities and the capital.

It was a dangerous job. The Waste looked empty, but it wasn’t. Not many Malchai came this way, but the Corsai loved to hunt in the dark and pick off anything they could, from a cow to a family of five. The monsters that ventured this far out served no master, and the people who braved the Waste were just as lethal. Survivalists, mostly, scavengers who raided homes and stole from semis. These were the people who didn’t have the money to buy Harker’s protection, the ones who didn’t want to fight for Flynn and his task force, or die on his moral high ground. They didn’t want anything to do with V-City. They just wanted to stay alive.

But the dead zone didn’t go on forever. She’d spent most her life on the other side of the Waste, and she knew that out ahead there was a place where razor wire gave way to open fields, and the high beams trailed into starry nights, and a girl could grow up in a house with her mother afraid of nothing, not even the dark.

“Tell me something,” she said again.

August had been sitting there, his eyes fixed on the night, his fingers tapping out some kind of short, staccato rhythm against his leg. Now he glanced toward her. His face looked strangely hollow, his eyes feverish. “Like what?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “A story?”

August frowned. “I don’t like stories.”

Kate frowned, too. “That’s weird.”

“Is it?” asked August.

Kate drummed her nails on the wheel. The paint was chipping. “Yeah. I mean, most people want to escape. Get out of their heads. Out of their lives. Stories are the easiest way to do that.”

August’s gaze escaped to the window. “I suppose,” he said. It was maddening how little he talked, how much she wanted to. She switched on the radio, but the signal was already full of static, so she snapped it back off. The quiet gnawed at her already fraying edges.

“Say something,” she whispered. “Please.”

August’s jaw clenched. His fingers tightened on his pants. But he cleared his throat and said, “I don’t get why people are always trying to escape.”

“Really?” said Kate. “Take a look around.”

In the distance beyond August’s window, the nothing gave way to something—a town, if it could be called a town. It was more like a huddle of ramshackle structures, buildings gathered like fighters with their backs together, looking out on the night. The whole thing had a starved dog look about it. Fluorescent lights cut glaring beams through the darkness.

“I guess it’s different for me,” he said, his voice taut. “One moment I didn’t exist and the next I did, and I spend every day scared I’ll just stop being again, and every time I slip, every time I go dark, it’s harder to come back. It’s all I can do to stay where I am. Who I am.”

“Wow, August,” she said softly. “Way to kill the mood.”

That won her a small exhausted laugh. But by the time it left his lips, it was already fading. He turned his face away, and Kate flexed her fingers on the wheel and kept her eyes ahead. Pain sparked across her stomach every time she breathed. Beside her, August was quiet, coiled, eyes on the night.

“What happened to her?” she asked, trying to distract them both.

“Who?”

“Ilsa,” she said. “She doesn’t seem . . . all there.”

August rubbed his fingertips over the tallies above his wrist. “She’s never been all there,” he said. “For the longest time I thought . . . I thought that was just her way. Scattered. I didn’t get it until recently.”

“Get what?”

“It’s who she is,” he said. “It’s what she is. Cause and effect.”

“You mean it has to do with the catalyst?”