“I’ve always liked music,” said Kate, picking at the metal polish on her nails. August waited for her to go on, but the bell rang and she shook her head, settling her hair back over one eye. “Are you any good?”

“Yes,” he said without hesitation.

“Will you play for me?”

August shook his head, and the look she gave him made it clear—she wasn’t used to being told no.

“Performance anxiety?” she said blandly. “Come on.”

She was looking at him through the sweep of blond, waiting, and he couldn’t exactly say that he played only for sinners. He swallowed, struggled to find a lie that skirted truth.

“Go on,” she insisted. “I promise not to—”

“Freddie!” shouted a voice, and August turned to see Colin waving him toward the cafeteria. He rose gratefully to his feet.

“I better go,” he said, taking up the case as casually as possible.

“I’ll get you to play for me,” she called as he descended the metal steps. “One way or another.”

He didn’t say anything, didn’t dare look back as he jogged over to Colin, who was staring baldly. When August reached the sidewalk, the boy patted him down. “He lives!” he announced with feigned shock.

August waved him off, and Colin fell into step beside him. “But seriously, Freddie,” he said, shooting a glance back at the bleachers. At Kate. “Do you have a death wish? Because I’m pretty sure there are faster, less painful ways to go. . . .”

Kate got through the rest of the day without hurting anyone, so that was something. She didn’t know if it was luck, odds, or Freddie. Even though she’d teased him, there had been a moment on the bleachers where the answer to Where are you? had really been Here. She wasn’t sure why, only that for the first time in ages, sitting in that strange but comfortable silence, she felt like herself. Not the Kate who grinned at the rumors, or the one who held a knife to a girl’s throat, or drove a crowbar through a monster’s heart.

The Kate she’d been before. The version of her that made jokes instead of threats. The one that smiled when she actually meant it.

But this wasn’t the right world for that Kate.

She tossed her bag onto the bed, and the vial from Dr. Landry tumbled out.

Maybe it was the pills, smoothing her edges. Maybe . . . but there was still something about Freddie. Something . . . disarming, infectious, familiar. In an auditorium full of stares, his was the gaze she felt. In a classroom full of students learning lies, he scribbled the truth in the margins. In a school that clung to the illusion of safety, he didn’t shy from talk of violence. He didn’t belong there, the way she didn’t belong there, and that shared strangeness made her feel like she knew him.

But she didn’t.

Not yet.

She sat at her desk, tapped her computer awake, and logged into the Colton Academy website.

“Who are you, Mr. Gallagher?” she wondered aloud, pulling up the student directory and scrolling through profiles until she found the one she was looking for. She clicked on Frederick Gallagher’s page. His information was listed on the left-hand side—height, age, address, etc.—but the photo on the right was odd. She’d had half a dozen pictures taken, one for every school, and they always insisted on front and center, eyes forward, big smile. But the boy on-screen wasn’t even looking at her.

His face was in profile, eyes cast down, edges blurred, and lips parted as if he’d been caught midbreath as well as midmotion. If it wasn’t for the barest edge of a black tally mark where his cuff was riding up, she wouldn’t have been sure it was him.

Why hadn’t the office retaken the photo?

There was something teasing about the blurred shot, and Kate found herself craving a better picture, wanting the luxury of being able to stare at someone without being stared at. She booted a new browser on the city’s updrive, went onto a social networking site the students all seemed to use, and typed in his name.

Two matches came up in the V-City area, but neither one was the Freddie she’d met. Which was odd, but Freddie said he was homeschooled. Maybe he’d never joined the site. She opened a third browser and typed his name into the search engine. It landed half a dozen hits—a mechanic, a banker, a suicide victim, a pharmacist, but no match for her Freddie.

Kate sat back in her chair, and tapped a metal nail against her teeth.

These days, everyone left a digital mark. All day, every day at Colton, people were snapping photos, recording every mundane moment as if it deserved to be preserved, remembered. So where was he?

Something twinged in her mind. Maybe she was being paranoid, searching for a complicated answer when the simple one—that he was that rare teen who preferred staying off-grid—was probably true.

Probably. But it was like an itch, and now she’d started scratching . . .

The drive wasn’t the only place that information was logged, not in North City. She logged into her father’s private uplink, clicked on the archive labeled human. The screen filled with thousands of thumbnails, each with a name and date. Freddie wasn’t like the other kids at Colton, and maybe she wasn’t the only one who’d noticed. She typed his name into the search bar, half hoping his face would show up with a tag for some disturbance, even just an anomaly, but—nothing.

Exasperated, she clicked back to the school directory and reconsidered the picture, staring at it for several long minutes as if it might come to life, complete the arc of motion, meet her eyes. When it didn’t, Kate scrolled through his profile, scribbled down his address, and got to her feet.

There was still one place she hadn’t looked.

“Hello?” she called out as she crossed the penthouse. No answer. She did a quick lap through the open layout. No sign of Sloan or Harker. The door to her father’s office was locked, but when she pressed her good ear to the wood, she didn’t hear the hum of the soundproofing system that Harker activated when he was inside. She keyed in the code—she’d set up a camera on her second day, caught the motion and order of his fingers—and a second later the door opened under her touch.

The lights came up automatically.

Callum Harker’s office was massive, and strangely classic, with a broad, dark desk, a wall of bookshelves, and a bank of windows overlooking the city. She crossed to the shelves and ran her hand over the large black books that ran the wall. Ledgers.