I don’t want to kill the boy who cares that hurting him makes me squeamish, who leaves me his jacket on cold nights, who’d rather die than lay a hand on me.
I release my roots.
Jack’s head drops softly to the ground and his fist falls open, his December-gray eyes glassy and slow to focus as the shiv rolls off his palm into a smear of blood on the grass. He turns away from me, curling in on himself with a violent shiver as a cough takes hold.
“Do it, Fleur!”
“Shut up, Poppy!” My voice quakes as I stand over him, fists clenched around the knife, searching for the right hold. The right angle. The right moment. He’s sweating, shaking like a wounded animal, and my throat closes. He chose the knife because it seemed quicker, less painful somehow. Maybe it would have been, if I hadn’t hesitated before.
“Quit dragging it out! If you take him down now, we might be able to salvage some ground.”
“I said shut up, Poppy!”
“It’s time, Fleur—”
I swat at my transmitter, cutting her off, even though I know she’s right. There’s nothing I can do for him. The stronger I am, the weaker he becomes. If I touch him, I’ll only make it worse. Just standing this close, my body temperature alone is probably a slow form of torture for him. And if I kiss him—Gaia, if only kissing him could fix this—we’d all be in so much trouble. I’m already under a microscope, and I don’t think Poppy and I can survive much more. Our rankings are low, dangerously close to the Purge line. Because my seasons are too short and the mid-Atlantic winters drag on. Because I wait too long, stall too often before sending him home. Because I let Jack run sometimes, just so I can spend a few more days chasing him, and Chronos doesn’t grant points for compassion. His rules don’t condone love. The entire system is rooted in opposition. In fear and animosity. The only way I survive is by killing Jack, but I don’t want to do it anymore.
I never wanted to.
His eyes are fading behind heavy lids. Blood slicks his ribs where his shirt’s ridden up, and I can’t stand the thought of causing him any more pain.
I fall to my knees beside him. His eyes flutter closed, his cool breath held and waiting, his blue lips so, so close as I lean over him, my blade pressed against his side. For a moment, it looks as if he’s sleeping. Like my job is already done.
“What are you waiting for?” he whispers. “We both know how this ends.”
2
Fifty-Five Days Later
JACK
The cloying scent of wildflowers sticks in the back of my throat. I blink myself awake, the glare through the window of my stasis chamber nearly blinding me. I stare up at the white drop-tile ceiling and the posters on the wall, struggling to remember how I got here.
“Welcome back, Jack.” Chill’s voice grates through the speakers beside my head. I wince, everything too bright, too loud, and too soon all around me. My fingers and arms tingle. There’s an ache in my chest, and I reach for the place under my ribs where Fleur stabbed me.
A cluster of flowers—tiny white lilies—falls from my hand. Across the room, Chill sits at his desk, logging data into his tablet: the date, time, and “conditions of my arousal.” While his back is turned, I raise the sagging stem to my nose. The flowers smell faintly like Fleur, a tenacious sweetness lingering in the pale, crushed petals.
Something Professor Lyon once told me springs suddenly to mind. The first time he caught me picking a lock to the catacombs under the Winter wings, searching for a way out of the Observatory, I told him I didn’t want to exist here, trapped in this stupid cycle, anymore. He quoted physics at me, insisting it simply wasn’t possible. The total amount of energy in a closed system cannot be created nor destroyed, he’d said. Like water that moves from sea to sky, we are merely changed from one form to another and back again.
Fleur must have put the lilies in my hand before I died. And somehow the flowers made it all the way here, their matter and energy tucked inside my own, becoming part of that same hopeless loop.
Chill’s chair swings around and I close my fingers around the petals.
“How long have I been out?” My throat’s dry, my voice hoarse from disuse.
“Just a cat nap.” I follow his movements through the lid of the plexiglass cylinder that surrounds me like a cocoon. He dims the artificial window, then lowers the thermostat, shrugging on an extra sweater to keep himself warm. “Fifty-five days. Your stasis times are getting shorter. Your off-campus times are getting longer. You’re getting stronger every year, Jack. Kicking ass and climbing the ranks.”
Only because Fleur’s been increasingly reluctant to kill me, and I’ve been increasingly reluctant to die. I lift my head as far as the confined space will allow, swearing when I smack it on the lid. I grope for the release bar, but the chamber’s still locked from the outside.
“Take it easy, Sleeping Beauty,” Chill says. “It’s only been fifty-five days. Give your brain a minute to engage before you come tumbling out of there.” He sets a bottle of pills and a glass of water on the steel cart by my feet.
I drop my head back against the platform, claustrophobic and sleep addled, impatient for the sound of the lock’s release.
“Don’t be so hard on yourself. You kept Fleur on her toes those last few days, and we climbed a few percentage points in the rankings. If we keep this up, we’ll be eligible for relocation.” The wall behind Chill is papered in maps of our assigned region, blue pins marking every place I’ve killed Amber, and red pins marking every GPS point in the mid-Atlantic US where Fleur’s ever killed me. He leans back in his chair with a gloating smile, but I don’t feel much like celebrating.
Chill frees the lock with a tap of his tablet screen. The lid of my chamber slides open around me, the cold air circulating inside rushing out and the familiar smell of our dormitory rushing in. I breathe shallowly against the pungent bite of the pine-scented cleansers the custodians use on the industrial tile floors and the peppermint air freshener they pump through the ventilation ducts in the ceiling. The artifical fragrance left behind by the detergent in the starched sheets on our bunk bed in the other room makes my tongue thick, and a sharp, cheesy smell spills from the open bag of smuggled Doritos hidden somewhere in Chill’s desk. It all makes me want to puke.
I sit up and swing my legs over the side of the chamber, careful not to tangle myself in the cluster of wires dangling from the adhesive pads on my chest. Head bent over my knees, the details of my most recent death come back to me like a bad dream.
The last thing I remember is Fleur’s knife between my ribs and the look on her face when she sent me back. I toss the lilies into the plastic bed before Chill can see them. Rubbing Fleur’s face from my eyes, I ease my feet to the floor. I’m hungry. Empty. Everything hurts. That’s the price of immortality, as Gaia likes to remind us.
When I open my eyes, Chill’s standing in front of me. “Missed you, man.” He holds up a fist. We bump knuckles, but my heart’s not in it. “I was about to lose my mind from the boredom. This place isn’t the same when you’re out cold.”
I try to smile for his sake. It’s the least I can do, since it’s more or less my fault he’s stuck here, thirty stories below the Royal Observatory in Greenwich and the Prime Meridian. As long as he’s my Handler, Chill will never leave this place. His sole purpose in this world is to drag out the length of my season—to keep my body alive out there as long as he can, then haul my matter back here through an underground network of electromagnetic energy lines so he can babysit me through my recovery.