It sounds complicated, but it’s really just a circuit. My remote transmitter is the antenna that connects me to Chill. Chill’s the wireless router connecting me to the ley lines. When my season is over, my physical body breaks down into a glowing ball of particulates, and Chill conducts all my matter, magic, and energy home. The circuit ends in my stasis chamber—a capacitor that stores my energy while it changes back to my physical form, exactly the way it remembers me. For the next few months, my plastic coffin acts like a giant battery charger. And I pop out good as new—my magic fully charged and my body immortally young, with an eternally adolescent neural system that’s uniquely responsive to risks and rewards, exactly the way Gaia and Chronos expect us to be.
Chill claps me on the shoulder. He’s my GPS, my cleanup crew, my roadie, and my pallbearer—the only person in this world I trust, which (by default) makes him my only friend. In 1988, I chose Ari “Chill” Berkowicz. And when it comes to choices, Gaia gives us only three.
Choice number one: live or die. But that’s not really a choice when you’re dangling by your nuts over the precipice. When we’re nose to nose with death, we all want to live. So when Gaia holds out her slippery hand with the promise of a second chance, we don’t stop to think of the consequences. We just take it.
Choice number two: our Handler. Save another young person from the brink of death, putting their life in eternal debt to us. Someone we don’t mind spending the rest of time with, because once the choice is made, we’re stuck with them. Forever. Ironically, there wasn’t much time to think about how long forever really was.
And choice number three: a new identity, any name we want, to prevent our old lives from finding us. But as far as most Seasons are concerned, our names are the only choices that are truly ours.
I chose Jack.
I’m not entirely sure I chose Chill.
He frowns through his glasses as he checks my vitals. There’s no prescription in them—they’re just empty black frames. He doesn’t need the lenses anymore. His perfect health is guaranteed by Gaia as long as we stay in the program. But thirty years ago, Chill made me fish them from the bottom of the frozen pond I pulled him from, insisting he felt naked without them. Even gods wear loincloths. This is mine, he said, dripping wet and shivering as he pushed them back on his face. I’m Ari. He reached to shake my hand, and I told him, Not anymore.
Chill’s never seemed to mind his life here the way I do. Never seemed bothered being stuck with me. I’m probably the best friend Chill’s ever had, which is sad, because I’m pretty sure I don’t deserve him. Most days, I don’t feel much better than the assholes from our school who made him walk that pond on a dare and abandoned him when he fell in. Sometimes, I wonder if he would have been better off if I’d never found him at all. In thirty years, he’s the only thing I’ve ever saved, and when he looks at me through those missing lenses as if I’m his own personal hero, it’s hard to look back. Saving Chill’s life never felt like a conscious choice. And yet for reasons I’ll never understand, he keeps choosing to save me, over and over, anyway.
Chill tosses me a pair of boxer shorts. “Now that you’re back, maybe Poppy will quit bugging me. She’s been hounding me every day, waiting for you to wake up, pestering me with questions. Speaking of which, are you going to tell me what that was all about?” Chill pushes his glasses up his nose, staring me down through the empty frames.
“What?” I wince, careful not to catch my IV cannula on the fabric as I drag on the boxers. I disconnect the catheter and roll out my shoulders, shaking fifty-five days of sleep from my bones.
“You. Tuning me out on that mountain pass.” He tosses me a bottle of vitamins and I catch them against my chest, nearly dropping them.
“What are you talking about?” I take the cup of water he offers, shake out a couple of pills, and slowly swallow them down.
“Do you have any idea how long it took me to find you and bring you back? That shit isn’t easy to pull off in the mountains, even with a transmitter.” My throat closes around the last sip. I nearly choke on it.
My transmitter was off.
My memories of that day are still hazy, shrouded in the fog of the fever. I remember arguing with Fleur . . . feeling desperate for a moment alone with her. I remember turning off my transmitter because I was angry at Chill, and I don’t remember turning it on again.
I sink down on the edge of the stasis bed. How the hell am I even here right now? Chill must have used Fleur’s signal to find me and route me home.
“You could have died out there,” he says sharply. “For good. Forever. Your magical ass would have been lost in the wind if Fleur hadn’t been holding—” Chill falls abruptly silent. I perch on the edge of the bed, waiting for him to finish. He fumbles for his tablet and pretends to study the screen.
“What?” My heart rate climbs on the monitor. Chill doesn’t answer, so I lean in closer. “What was she holding?”
“Back off.” He swats the air, wrinkling his nose. “Stasis breath.”
I fight the urge to punch the rest out of him.
“You.” Chill sighs, tossing his tablet aside. “She held you. For the three freaking minutes it took me to find you and get you back online.”
I touch the place where her knife pierced me.
I’d nearly bled out. As weak as I was, my death—my permanent death—should have been quick. Without a connection to Chill—without a leash to the ley lines—there would have been no way to bring me back. Chill’s right. My particles should have dissolved into the ether, lost in the wind, adrift somewhere high over the mountains of Appalachia long before three minutes were up.
“Why . . . ?” I rub at the soft spray of pollen inside my palm. Fleur must have realized my mistake. She must have turned my transmitter back on for me. Even so, it shouldn’t have taken three minutes to locate my signal, if Chill already had a lock on hers. “Why’d it take so long to find us?” But I know. Somehow, I already know the answer.
“Because Fleur turned off her transmitter, too.”
I’m still rooted to the spot beside the stasis chamber, processing Chill’s last words, when the monitor over his desk lights up.
“Turn on your camera, Chill. I know you’re in there.” Poppy Withers’s face fills the screen. She taps the lens of her video cam and drums her desk impatiently.
Chill heaves a sigh. “Every. Damn. Day,” he whispers.
“I heard that,” Poppy answers. “You do realize your microphone’s on.”
Chill mumbles to himself. I scrape the lilies off the stasis bed, hiding them in my fist as he switches on the camera.
Poppy leans closer to her monitor, her nosy blue eyes scanning the contents of our dorm room. They open wide at the sight of my open chamber.
“Thank Gaia!” she says through an impatient huff. “You’re finally awake.” Poppy’s prone to theatrics. Probably because her childhood was spent confined to a hospital bed and she missed all the drama in high school. She’s the most annoying sixteen-year-old I’ve ever met. And down here, that’s really saying something. “Is anyone going to tell me what in Chronos’s name happened up there? Why was Fleur’s transmitter off?”