“Quit staring,” Chill badgers me. “You should be looking for a way out.”
With a flurry of irritation, I turn my transmitter off.
I lick my dry lips and blow an icy breath across the clearing, rustling the fabric of her skirt and making her hunch deeper into my coat. The butterfly beats its wings once . . . twice . . . before falling, frozen, onto her cheek. I press back against the trunk, dizzy from the effort, kicking myself for my own stupidity. I don’t know why I did that. Maybe just to prove that I can.
She sits up and nudges the butterfly with a finger. Her cheeks pale as if touched by something cold, and she turns to glare in my direction. Cupping the butterfly in her hand, she blows into it. The space between her fingers glows, so faintly I wonder if it’s just my raging fever, if I’m imagining it, when she opens her hands and the butterfly bobs away on a breeze.
“You can’t keep running. You already know how this ends.” Her voice echoes, high and clear and annoyed, from every direction. “You’ve dragged it out long enough. If I don’t send you back soon, someone’s going to notice.”
“Notice what?”
She falls back in the grass, one arm thrown over her face. “That I don’t want you to go.”
It hurts to breathe. She’s never come out and said it before. “What do you want?”
“Does it matter?” she asks hopelessly. “Nothing’s going to change.”
“It matters to me.” I’m surprised by how much I mean it this time. I asked her this same question once, years ago, in a desperate attempt to stall her as she was trying to kill me. She’d just stood there, slack-jawed and blinking, as if she’d never stopped to consider the answer.
She flings her arm from her face and frowns up at the sky. “You don’t even know me.”
If she could see the size of the surveillance file Chill keeps on her, she probably wouldn’t think that. “Then tell me something about you.” Another cough takes hold. I press my palm into my side to slow the bleeding, but my fingers are numb and the ground is soaked red.
She doesn’t answer right away, as if she’s weighing how much of herself she’s willing to share. “What do you want to know?”
Everything. I squeeze my eyes shut, struggling to stay focused. There are so many things I want to ask her. Like why she carves my initials into a tree at the end of every spring. But I’ve already pissed off Poppy enough for one day.
“What’s your favorite food?” I ask, though I already know the answer.
She hesitates. “Pizza,” she finally says, swatting the red light in her ear.
“What kind?” I rasp.
“Mushrooms, peppers, onions, and sausage.” I wait. “. . . And extra cheese.”
“Favorite band?”
“U2.”
“Favorite movie?”
“Thelma and Louise.”
“Please tell me you’re kidding.” My laugh becomes a cough. Seasons aside, sometimes I think Fleur and I couldn’t be more different. I slump against the tree, too weak to hold myself together anymore. “Why do you read all those books, anyway?”
“What books?”
“All the ones with tragic endings?” Her library hold list is just depressing. I used to check them all out after she returned them each year, but I ended up throwing most of them against the walls.
“You read them?”
“Maybe,” I say, angry with myself for talking too much. I feel reckless—punch-drunk and a little delirious. “I might have read some of them,” I confess. “But I draw the line at poetry.” The poetry books she checks out of the library are old—like, seventeenth century old. And no matter how many times I’ve tried to understand what she sees in them, I just don’t. My head feels heavy. I lean it back against the tree and the world goes wobbly. “I guess 1984 wasn’t so bad, but Orpheus and Eurydice, Anna Karenina, and Wuthering Heights were horrible. And Romeo and Juliet were just idiots. I mean, who drinks poison and just gives up like that?”
“There was no hope for them,” she says, snapping the head off a weed. “It’s called a tragedy for a reason.”
“Of course there was hope! They just had a shitty plan.”
“And yours would be any better?” She sits up, ripping a fistful of grass from the ground. “No, seriously, Jack! What would you have done?”
Her tone’s sharp. Cutting. It brings the world back into focus. “I would have taken her and run!”
“There is nowhere to run!”
“But would you . . . if there was?” Shut up, Jack. I bury my head in my hands. Fleur’s quiet for a long time. Too long.
“Maybe,” she says, “but it doesn’t matter. It’s just a story. A dream. It could never actually happen.”
I hate how resigned she is to all this, that this is her life. Our life. But more than that, I hate that she’s right. We’re leashed to the Observatory by our transmitters. If we were to take them off and try to escape, we’d never survive off the ley lines. But that doesn’t mean I haven’t spent the last thirty years thinking about it, searching for a way out. I’ve done it before.
And look where it got you, I remind myself. “Romeo and Juliet just trusted the wrong people to help them. That’s all.”
“It’s a tragedy,” she says stubbornly. “They’re not supposed to have a happy ending.”
Something hot boils up inside me. I don’t know if I’m angrier at her for giving up, or at myself for dying. “Yeah? Well, if they were both just going to die anyway, maybe they should have gone down fighting!”
It’s only when she roars to her feet that I realize exactly what I’ve done.
FLEUR
“Is that what you think? That we should go down fighting!” I scrape up my knife and stalk toward the trees. The flash of crimson on snow gives him away as he scrambles deeper into the woods away from me. “Fine, then let’s give Chronos and Gaia exactly what they want!”
Poppy urges me on. “You’ve got him, Fleur. Do it now!”
“No,” he gasps, his black hair plastered to his pale forehead and his chest heaving. “No, no, no, that’s not what I—”
I lash out with my mind, my consciousness digging through the soft soil into the roots of a narrow sapling. My thoughts slide into it, the tree conforming to my intentions like a glove, the roots stretching out in the direction of Jack’s voice until they’re curled around his ankle.
His fingers struggle for purchase, his T-shirt riding up as I haul him viciously over the ground. He kicks at my snare. The force of it knocks me back a step. His body smears the grass red as he reaches frantically for the patch of blood-soaked slush behind him. I yank him toward me, but he manages to snag a handful, freezing it into a shiv as he jerks to a stop at my feet.
He points the makeshift blade at me. It trembles in his hands, the pink ice melting from its jagged tip and dripping down his knuckles. He could slash my roots to free himself, leaving me with a nasty scar. I wouldn’t stop him—Gaia knows, I deserve that and more—but he doesn’t. He won’t.
“Is this what you meant when you said we should go down fighting?” Tears well hot behind my eyelids, blurring his face. “Because that’s what they want, Jack.” That’s what Poppy and Chill want. That’s what Chronos and Gaia want. But Jack’s the only one who’s ever cared what I want. And I don’t want to fight anymore.