This Savage Song Read Online Free PDF

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.

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 yearsof 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 someonewilling 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