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Where are you, Kate? she asked herself.
It was a game she sometimes played, ever since she learned about the theory of infinite parallels, the idea that a person’s path through life wasn’t really a line, but a tree, every decision a divergent branch, resulting in a divergent you. She liked the idea that there were a hundred different Kates, living a hundred different lives.
-- This Savage Song, Victoria Schwab
The four tally marks on his wrist make him think of the four strings on his violin. August runs a finger over them. He misses his instrument the way an amputee misses their lost limb: haunted by its ghost, a memory so tangible he almost imagines he can feel it still.
The hunger will not start for some time, not after his fall. August does not need to feed. But he longs for his song.
“We need to stop,” he tells Kate.
She has learned not to question him, even though this is the third time today he’s asked her to pull over. Kate guides the truck to the roadside and throws the gears into park; August is already tripping out the door to land on his knees in the ditch.
The engine falls silent, and the radio with it. He hears the driver’s door open and Kate’s boots hit the gravel. There’s the click of her lighter, a short exhale, and then the crunch of her footsteps as she circles the vehicle. And louder than all else is the song calling from his memory--not the hunger pulling him down, but a simple (dare he say human ) panic attack.
“Maybe they’ll have a music shop in the next town,” says Kate, even though she doesn’t believe it.
August grunts, and lifts his hands to rub at his forehead. The fresh air helps to clear his mind, somewhat. “If not, Prosperity will,” he says. He thinks he doesn’t even need to play the instrument, just hold it. He imagines his fingers curling over smooth wood and taut strings, sensing the melody waiting to be released. It would help, he thinks. He hopes.
Kate says nothing more, just leans against the truck and smokes as she waits for his panic to fade. August grounds himself by focusing on the gravel beneath his palms, and the smell of dirt and smoke, and the chill of the breeze on his neck. At last, he stands and only then looks at her, trying not to feel ashamed.
Her shadow twists into a mocking dance.
“Your turn to drive,” is all she says, and flicks her cigarette stub into the dirt.
+
In another life, Kate Harker is alone on this drive. She blasts through wilderness and towns without prejudice, her foot avoiding the brake for miles at a time. Her face is drawn, her mouth a tight line, her lighter and cigarettes forgotten far behind in a city she longs to forget.
Where are you, Kate? she thinks automatically, and then stops before her mind can supply any answers. Where will you go? she asks instead, and Who will you be?
+
Driving helps more than August expects. He doesn’t need much focus to keep the truck in a straight line on an empty highway, but it’s better than the aimless thoughts he’d found in the passenger seat.
Kate looks just as bored as he’d felt. She’s thrown her boots up on the dash and stares at the sky through a window she cranks up and down and up again. Her hair has been tucked behind her damaged ear.
They both have their scars. His are still too tender for examination.
He looks ahead again. The world is flat and ongoing, white-blue sky and dry-brown plains. They are alone out here, the two of them: monster and human on a road trip to the ends of the earth.
It could be worse, he thinks. At least we have each other.
+
In another life, August spends hours each day on the roof of the Flynn compound with eyes trained on the horizon and hand clenched around the neck of his new steel violin. He will not allow himself to regret staying behind, but he also will not stop searching for a cloud of dust in the distance heralding his closest ally’s return.
Ilsa joins him sometimes, when she’s strong enough. She sits silent on the ground at his side, head resting against his knee. August wonders whether it would be safe, isolated as they are on the roof, to play a line of his song for the two of them.
He does not.
+
There is no instrument shop in the next town, nor in the smaller community beyond that. “It’s fine,” August says, which means that must be the truth, and then he catches the look Kate throws his way. “I’ll be fine.”
For now, at least.
They trade off driving every few hours, switching whenever August begins to feel restless or overwhelmed again. At one point, Kate muses that she should have picked up an apple for him to play with. August feels oddly touched.
Midnight is marked by the burn of a new line on his wrist. August stiffens, hands clenching the wheel. He rolls his forearm just in time to catch the ember-red fading into inky-black.
Kate is also staring at his wrist. August wants to turn his arm over again and hide the marks, but he resists. “Five,” he tells her.
“Five days,” she repeats. “Already feels like a lifetime, somehow.”
Two hours later, they see the first of the city lights ahead. The hunger wakes in him shortly after, like the tickle of a half-formed cough he cannot ignore.
+
Somewhere, there is a Kate who has never left the heart of V-City, who sharpens the steel in her soul while burning away the last shreds of those emotions her father would call weak. She plays his games and faces his monsters, all the while striving to prove her Harker blood.
Sometimes, in the earliest morning, she tucks her metal stakes into their sheaths on her belt and ventures down to the lowest levels of the tower. For all the monsters that dwell within this darkened space, she comes to see only him: the boy in the cage, the one she betrayed, the monster she delivered to her father by her own hands.
+
“There are monsters here,” says August.
Kate is guiding the truck into a parking space at the bland strip mall they’ve found on the edge of Prosperity, where a sign out front promises instruments of all types. She shoots him a look, and he clarifies, “in the city,” because he doesn’t want her to rethink this stop. He needs a new violin and he needs it fast. He is hungry, and tired of feeding through torture.
The shop is full of instruments and empty of people. August wanders down the aisle, eyes running over keyboards and flutes, guitars and drums. He cares for none of them. The violins are towards the back, reeling him in with a magnetic pull.
“Any of them speak to you?” asks Kate.
They all do, in their own ways. One is like a slow inhale, another like a sigh. One is thin and tired, another deep and aching. But the last calls to him with a hopeful anticipation, and it is this one he lifts to his shoulder.
He gives Kate a warning look. “I’ll be outside, then,” she tells him, tucking a wad of cash into the pocket of his coat. He waits until the door swings shut before drawing the bow across the strings.
He knows with the first note that this is the instrument for him. On the second, he hears the shopkeeper emerging trance-like from the back room. August breathes in with the third note, feeling the music sing through his veins. He lowers the violin then, because the shopkeeper has a white soul and because this is not the place for feeding, anyway.
“Beautiful music,” breathes the woman, coming slowly from her trance. August places the cash on her counter with a nod.
Kate is waiting on the sidewalk just outside, rubbing her arms and looking vaguely unsettled. He wonders if she heard those notes, if she saw her red-stained soul rising to the surface. He doesn’t ask.
“If there are monsters, there are sinners,” he tells her.
A sharp smile cuts across her face. “Then let’s go hunting.”
+
There is a Kate in another world who knows nothing of monsters. She lives in a lonely house in the middle of the wastelands with a failing mother. Sometimes, she watches the news for glimpses of her father’s face. Usually, she spends her days working the land and her nights watching the empty sky.
+
Where are you? wonders Kate. She stares up at the stars visible through the warehouse’s skylight, and then rolls her head to look at the boy polishing his new violin. There is a speck of dried blood on his neck, but his face is relaxed and almost content.
She aches all over, stiff from driving and bruised from the fight. She stretches her arms up, laces her fingers together, and then tucks her hands beneath her head.
Where are you, Kate? she asks again.
And the answer is: Here. I’m right here.
+