"You're dreaming," said Ilsa in her singsong way. She rested her chin on top of his shoulder, and squinted. "What is that in your eyes?"

"What?"

"That speck. Right there. Is it fear?"

He found her gaze in the mirror. "Maybe," he admitted. He hadn't set foot in a school, not since the day of his catalyst, and nerves rang like bells behind his ribs. But there was something else, too, a strange excitement at the idea of playing normal, and every time he tried to untangle how he felt, he just ended up in knots.

"They're setting you free," said Ilsa. She spun him around and leaned in until her face was barely an inch from his. Mint. She always smelled like mint. "Be happy, little brother." But then the joy fell out of her voice, and her blue eyes darkened, sliding from noon blue to twilight without a blink between. "And be careful."

August managed a ghost of a smile for her. "I'm always careful, Ilsa."

But she didn't seem to hear. She was shaking her head now, a slow, side-to-side motion that didn't stop when it should. Ilsa got tangled up so easily, sometimes for a few moments, sometimes a few days.

"It's okay," he said gently, trying to draw her back.

"The city is such a big place," she said, her voice tight as strings. "It's full of holes. Don't fall in."

Ilsa hadn't left the Flynn compound in six years. Not since the day of the truce. August didn't know the details, not all of them, but he knew his sister stayed inside, no matter what.

"I'll watch my step," he said.

Her fingers tightened on his arms. And then her eyes lightened and she was there again. "Of course you will," she said, all sunshine.

She kissed the top of his head, and he ducked out of her arms and went to his bed, where his violin case sat open, the beautiful instrument waiting inside. August wanted to play-the desire a hollow weight in his chest, like hunger-but he only let himself run his fingers over the wood before snapping the case shut.

He checked his watch as he moved through the dark apartment. 6:15. Even here, twenty stories up, at the top of the Flynn compound, the first morning light was still buried behind the sprawl of buildings to the east.

In the kitchen he found a black lunch bag with a note pinned to the front: Have a great first day.

I hope you don't mind, I took a bite.

~Em When August opened the bag, he saw that everything inside, from the sandwich to the candy bar, was already half-eaten. It was a sweet gesture, really. Emily hadn't just packed him a lunch. She'd packed an excuse. If anyone bothered to ask, he could say he'd already eaten.

Only a green apple sat, untouched, in the bottom of the bag.

The kitchen lights came on as he was shoving the lunch sack in his bag, and Henry wandered in, nursing a cup of coffee. He still looked tired. He always looked tired.

"August," he said with a yawn.

"Dad. You're up early."

Henry was practically nocturnal. He had a saying-the monsters hunt at night, and so must we-but lately his nights had gotten even longer. August tried to imagine what he must have been like, back before the Phenomenon-before violence gave way to the Corsai and the Malchai and the Sunai, before the anarchy, the closed borders, the infighting, the chaos. Before Henry lost his parents, his brothers, his first wife. Before he became the Flynn the city turned to, the only Flynn it had. The creator of the FTF, and the only man willing to stand up to a glorified criminal and fight.

August had seen photos, but the man in them had bright eyes and an easy smile. He looked like he belonged in a different world. A different life.

"Big day." Henry yawned again. "I wanted to see you off."

It was the truth, but not the whole truth. "You're worried," observed August.

"Of course I am." Henry clutched his coffee cup. "Do we need to go over the rules again?"

"No," answered August, but Henry kept talking anyway.

"You go straight to Colton. You come straight home. If the route falls through, you call. If security's too tight, you call. If there's any trouble-anything at all-even a bad feeling, August-"

"I'll call."

Henry's brow creased, and August straightened. "It's going to be fine." They'd gone through the plan a hundred times in the last week, making sure everything was in order. He checked his watch. Again the tallies showed. Again he covered them. He didn't know why he bothered. "I better get going."

Henry nodded. "I know this isn't what you wanted, and I hope it proves unnecessary, but-"

August frowned. "Do you really think the truce will break?" He tried to picture V-City as it must have been, two halves at war along a bloody center. In North City, Harker. In South City, Flynn. Those wanting to pay for their safety against those willing to fight for it. Die for it.

Henry rubbed his eyes. "I hope it holds," he said, "for all our sakes." It was a deflection, but August let it go.

"Get some rest, Dad."

Henry smiled grimly and shook his head. "No rest for the wicked," he said, and August knew he wasn't referring to himself.

He headed for the elevators, but someone was already there, his shape silhouetted by the light of the open doors.

"Little brother."

The voice was low and smooth, almost hypnotizing, and a second later the shadow shifted and stepped forward, resolving into a man with broad shoulders and a wiry form, all lean muscle and long bone. The FTF fatigues fit him perfectly, and beneath his rolled sleeves, small black crosses circled both forearms. Above a chiseled jaw, fair hair swept down into eyes as black as pitch. The only imperfection was a small scar running through his left eyebrow-a relic from his first years-but despite the mark, Leo Flynn looked more god than monster.

August felt himself standing taller, trying to mirror his brother's posture before he remembered that it was too rigid for a student. He slouched again, only this time too far, and then couldn't remember what normal looked like. All the while, Leo's black eyes hovered on him, unblinking. Even when he was flesh and blood, he didn't quite pass for human.

"The young Sunai, off to school." There was no uptick in his voice, no question.

"Let me guess," said August, managing a crooked grin, "you wanted to see me off as well? Tell me to have fun?"

Leo cocked his head. He'd never been very good at sarcasm-none of them were, really, but August had picked up scraps from the guys in the FTF.

"Your enjoyment is hardly my concern," said Leo. "But your focus is. Not even out the door, August, and you've already forgotten something."

He lobbed an object through the air and August caught it, cringing at the contact. It was a North City medallion, embossed with a V on one side and a series of numbers on the other. Made of iron, the medal prickled unpleasantly against his palm. Pure metal repelled monsters: Corsai and Malchai couldn't touch the stuff; Sunai simply didn't like to (all the FTF uniforms were traced with it, but his and Leo's had been woven with an alloy).

"Do I really have to wear this?" he asked. The prolonged contact was already making him nauseous.

"If you want to pass for one of them," said Leo simply. "If you want to get caught and slaughtered, then by all means, leave it off." August swallowed, and slid the pendant over his head. "It's a solid forgery," continued his brother. "It'll pass a cursory inspection by any human eye, but don't be caught north of the Seam after dark. I wouldn't test it against anything that actually comes to heel at Harker's side."

Of course, it wasn't the metal alone that kept the monsters at bay. It was Harker's sigil. His law.

August settled the medallion against his shirt, zipping up the FTF-issued jacket over it. But as he moved to step into the elevator, Leo barred his path. "Have you eaten recently?"

He swallowed, but the words were already rising in his throat. There was a difference between the inability to lie and the need to speak the truth, but silent omission was a luxury he didn't have when it came to his brother. When a Sunai asked a question, he commanded an answer. "I'm not hungry."

"August," chided Leo. "You're always hungry."

He flinched. "I'll eat later."

Leo didn't respond, only watched him, black eyes narrowed, and before he could say anything else-or make August say anything else-August pushed past him. Or at least, he tried to. He was halfway to the elevator when Leo's hand snapped out and closed over his. The one holding his violin case.

"Then you don't need this."

August went stiff. In four years, he'd never left the compound without the instrument. The thought made him dizzy.

"What if something happens?" he asked, panic climbing.

A ghost of amusement rippled through Leo's features. "Then you'll just have to get your hands dirty." With that, he pulled the case from August's grip and nudged him into the elevator. August stumbled, then turned back, his hands prickling with the sudden absence of the violin.

"Good-bye, brother," said Leo, punching the button for the lobby.

"Have fun at school," he added as the doors slid shut.

August shoved his hands into his pockets as the elevator plunged twenty floors. The compound was part skyscraper, part base of operations, all fortress. A concrete beast, steel, barbed wire, and Plexiglas, most of it dedicated to barracks housing members of the task force. The vast majority of the FTF's sixty thousand officers were housed in other barracks across the city, but the nearly a thousand stationed at the compound served as camouflage as much as anything. The fewer people coming in and out of the building, the more each one stood out. And if you were Harker, trying to ferret out Flynn's three Sunai, his secret weapons, you were keeping track of every face. It wasn't so much a problem for Leo, since he was the face of the FTF, or Ilsa, since she never left the compound, but Henry was determined to keep August's identity a secret.

On the ground floor, people were already streaming in and out of the building (with the night curfew as it was, days started early), and August moved with them, as if he were one of them, across the concrete lobby and through the guarded doors and onto the street. The morning washed over him, warm and bright and tarnished only by the disk of metal scratching against his skin and the absence of his violin.

Sunlight seeped between the buildings, and August took a deep breath and looked up at the Flynn compound looming overhead. Four years of hardly ever going out, and even then, almost always at night. Now here he was. Outside. Alone. Twenty-four million people in this supercity at last count, and he was only one of them, just another face in the morning commute. For one, dazzling, infinite moment, August felt like he was standing on a precipice, the end of one world and the beginning of another, a whisper and a bang.

And then his watch beeped, dragging him back from the edge, and he set off.

II.

The black sedan cut through the city like a knife.

Kate watched as it carved down streets, across bridges, the traffic splitting like flesh as the car sliced its way through North City. Outside, the morning was loud and bright, but from within, it looked like an old movie, all the color leeched out by the tinted windows. Classical music piped through the radio, soft but steady, reinforcing the illusion of calm that most people bought into so willingly. When she asked the driver, a stone-faced man named Marcus, to change the station, and he ignored the request, she put her left earbud in and hit play. Her world became a heavy beat, a rhythm, an angry voice, as she leaned back into the leather bench of the backseat and let the city slide past. From here, it looked almost normal.

V-City was a place Kate knew only in glimpses, snapshots, time-lapse moments strung together with years of space between each one. She'd been sent away once for her own safety, stolen a second time in the dead of night, and banished a third for her mother's crimes. But she was finally back where she belonged. In her father's city. At her father's side.

And this time, she wasn't going anywhere.

Kate fiddled with her lighter as she studied the tablet propped in her lap, a map of V-City filling the screen. At first glance, it looked like every other supercity-a high-density center trailing off at the edges-but when she tapped the screen with a metallic nail, a new layer of information appeared.

A black line cut across the image from left to right, bisecting the city. The Seam. In reality, it wasn't a straight line, but it was a hard one, carving V-City in two. Stand on the North side, and you were in Callum Harker's territory. Stand on the South side, and you were in Henry Flynn's. Such a simplistic solution to six messy, brutal years of fighting, of sabotage and murder and monsters. Draw a line in the sand. Stay on your half. No wonder it wasn't holding up.

Flynn was an idealist, and it was well and good to talk of justice, to have a "cause," but at the end of the day his people were dying. Flesh and bone versus tooth and claw.

V-City didn't need a moral code. It needed someone willing to take control. Someone willing to get his hands dirty. It needed Harker. Kate had no pretentions-she knew her father was a bad man-but this city didn't need a good one.

Good and bad were weak words. Monsters didn't care about intentions or ideals. The facts were simple. The South was chaos. The North was order. It was an order bought and paid for with blood and fear, but order all the same.

Kate traced her finger along the Seam, over the grayed square that marked the Barren.

Why had her father settled for only half the city? Why did he let Flynn hide behind his wall, just because he had a few strange monsters on a leash?

She chewed her lip, tapped the map again, and a third layer of information appeared.

Three concentric circles-like a bull's-eye-ghosted over the top of the map. It was the risk grid, designed to show the increase in monsters and the need for vigilance as one traveled in toward the center of the city. A band of green formed the outer ring, followed by yellow, and red at the center. Most people didn't pay attention to the zones during the day, but everyone knew the boundaries, the place where the violent red gave way to the vigilant yellow before bleeding into the relative safety of the green. Of course, for those with her father's protection, the risk dropped to almost zero ... so long as you stayed within the North City limits. Go past the green and you hit the Waste, where North and South didn't matter, because it was every man for himself.

Go far enough and you eventually found safe ground again; out near the borders where monsters were still rare, the population kept low. Out where supercity people weren't welcome in case they brought the darkness with them like a plague. Where a girl might burn down a chapel, or lie in a field of grass beside her mom and learn the summer stars ...

Somewhere, a horn, and Kate looked up, the house in the country dissolving back into the city streets. She stared past the partition and the driver and the front window, at the silver gargoyle on the hood. The car had originally come with an angel ornament, arms and wings flung back by some invisible wind, but Harker had broken it off and replaced it with the beast, hunched forward, tiny claws curling around the front lip of the grill.

"This is a city of monsters," he'd said, tossing the angel in the trash.

Her father was right about that. But monsters-real monsters-didn't look like the stupid little hood ornament. No, real monsters were much worse.

III.

August tipped his face toward the sun, savoring the late summer morning as he walked, letting his body move and his mind go blissfully still. It was amazing how easy it was to think in straight lines when he was in motion, even without the violin. He made his way down cracked sidewalks, past buildings with boarded windows. Half the structures were burned-out husks, abandoned and gutted, any useful materials scraped out to fortify other buildings. South V-City still looked like a ravaged corpse, but it was rebuilding. FTF were everywhere, standing on rooftops, patrolling the streets, radio signals crackling from the handhelds on their uniforms. At night, they hunted monsters, but during the day, they tried to stop new ones from being made. Crime. That was the cause. Corsai, Malchai, Sunaithey were the effect.

August blended in with the heavy foot traffic as he made his way north, the noise of the city like music around him, full of harmony and dissonance, rhythm and clash. It layered and layered until the melody tipped into discord, the wonder turning to distress, and he had to fight to focus on the path instead of everything in it. The path itself was easy, four blocks straight up Center Ave.

A beeline to the Seam.

August's steps slowed as it came into sight.

The barrier was massive, a three-story barricade cutting east to west through the downtown, warded with stripes of pure metal and studded with cameras. The wall was the result of six years of territory war, each act of violence, each human death, ushering more Corsai and Malchai into the world, all because the Flynns had the city, and Harker wanted it.

Two blocks to the west sat the Barren-a ruined block of scorched earth, a reminder to both sides. It had been a plaza once, a piece of green at the heart of the city, but now there was nothing. Some people said you could see the outlines of the dead still ghosted on the pavement. Most of the FTF said that Henry Flynn had detonated a weapon there on the last day of the territory wars, something bad enough to scrub every sign of life. August didn't believe that-didn't want to believe it-but whatever happened that day, the threat of an encore was enough to make Harker call terms, agree to cut V-City in two.

By day, the capital was still unified, at least in theory. Three gates were punched out of the Seam to let people through, but they were monitored by armed men and the ever-watchful red eyes of the moving cameras, and everyone who passed through had to show identification while the scanning cameras verified them as human.

Which was a problem.

August turned down a narrow half-ruined street that ran parallel to the Seam until he reached an office building, its windows replaced by sheets of steel, a pair of FTF flanking the door. The woman at the front desk offered him a short nod as he passed through security and down a separate elevator to the basement. Small dots of neon paint on the wall marked the path and he followed them through a web of dank hallways to a wall. Or what looked like a wall. Metal sheeting pushed aside to reveal a tunnel, and August made his way along until he reached a matching false wall on the other end. He slid it open, and stepped out into the cellar of a ground floor apartment.

It was quiet here, and he paused, hating how relieved he felt to be alone again so soon. He gave himself ten seconds, waiting for his heart to slow and his nerves to settle, before he dusted himself off, and climbed the stairs.