“You’re her Handler,” I mutter. “Why don’t you ask Fleur?”
“I did! She won’t tell me.” She points a finger at the camera. “If you hurt her—”
“Ha!” I tear the adhesive pads from my chest, shoving the tangled pile of wires to the floor. “If I hurt her? This is earth science, not rocket science! She’s a Spring. I’m a Winter, Poppy! I couldn’t hurt her if I tried!”
She bites her lip, probably because I’m right. A rising Season is nearly impossible to kill. By the time they find the waning Season, we’re far too weak, and they’re far too powerful. Even if it was as simple as luck or circumstance, the punishment for breaking the cycle is enough of a deterrent to keep us from trying. We run, we hide, and eventually we die. Exactly as natural law commands us to.
“Back off,” Chill barks. “He just woke up, and you’re jacking up his vitals.”
Poppy’s eyebrows disappear under her white-blond bangs. “Or what? You’ll break down my door and make me?” Chill grumbles something unintelligible. Poppy knows this is as close as they’ll ever come to being in the same room together. “Exactly what I thought,” she says, leaning back from the camera. Behind Poppy, Fleur’s stasis chamber is dark, still empty, and my thoughts leap to the last moments I spent with her. To the things she confessed to me.
“Don’t you have someplace you need to be?” Chill snaps.
Poppy drums her chewed-up nails on her desk. Checks her tablet. She pushes her chair back from the camera with a sigh. “I have to go keep an eye on Fleur,” she says with a hint of aggravation. “Julio was scheduled for release this morning. She’ll be ready for transport soon.”
Meaning Fleur will be dead soon.
Something doesn’t add up. “Wait,” I say, my stasis-addled brain struggling through the math. “You said it’s been fifty-five days. It’s only the beginning of May. Why would Fleur be ready for transport?” Chill blinks at me, clearly as confused as I am. Fleur was strong on that mountain. As strong as I’ve ever seen her. There’s no way Julio could take her down so fast. She should have at least two, maybe even three more weeks out there before Poppy should have to bring her in.
“It’s Julio,” Poppy says, rolling her eyes. “She makes it far too easy for him.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Don’t look at me,” Poppy says defensively. “I don’t like Julio any more than you do. How do I know what she sees in him?”
Something green rears up inside me. Julio Verano (né Jaime Velasquez), that sweaty asshole of summer. I try not to imagine it—him riding in half naked on his surfboard, smelling like Coppertone and Sex Wax, or the infinite ways he might kill her. I hope she keeps her transmitter on. And he keeps his big, dumb lips to himself.
Poppy taps her pen on her desk. “What am I supposed to tell Gaia in my report?”
“How am I supposed to know?” I grumble. “I’m not the one with a soft spot for the Heat Miser.”
“I’m not talking about Julio! I’m talking about what happened on that mountain. With you.”
I rake my hands through two months of bedhead. Poppy’s right. Going offline is no small breach of the rules. If two opposing Seasons go offline together, that just looks suspicious. We’re supposed to hunt each other, kill each other, and send each other home. Any contact beyond that is expressly forbidden. The entire system is rigged to keep us apart. To keep us in line. “To maintain the balance of nature,” Chronos says. But sometimes I wonder if there isn’t more to it.
Poppy’s still waiting for an answer. Our stories will have to corroborate. And once Fleur’s in stasis, it’ll be months before she wakes up again.
“Did you get any footage you can use?” I ask.
She picks at a nail. Raises an eyebrow. “You mean that excellent ten seconds when she dragged you kicking and screaming from the woods? Yeah, I got it.”
I bite back a hostile retort. “So submit that. After she caught me, it was a normal takedown. We had technical difficulties, and I lost my signal.”
“And Fleur’s?” she asks, sucking a tooth like she’s not buying a word of it.
“Her transmitter dislodged when I kicked her. She stabbed me. Foggy conditions slowed the recovery. Chill brought me home. The end.” I reach around Chill and switch off our camera.
Chill rubs his eyes through the empty frames of his glasses. He blinks at the blank screen. “I hate her.”
“Keep an eye on her anyway.” I scrape off the last of the adhesive pads before heading for the shower. “Let me know when Fleur’s back.”
I pad into our adjoining bunk room and open my closet, accidentally crushing the lilies in my fist as I catch the rolled-up maps of the Observatory that come spilling out around my feet. I shove the dusty maps back into the corner. I haven’t bothered unrolling them in ages. I drew them all years ago, meticulously recording every elevator and ventilation duct and closet door. I mapped every exit from every wing to the city above and every passage into the catacombs I could find, sketching out what I could see through the plexiglass barriers at the end of our wing, re-creating what little I could remember of the administration levels below. It was pointless. Lyon told me as much every time he caught me picking a lock or crawling out of a tunnel I had no business finding. “Think hard, Jack,” he’d say with a provocative smile. “If you could find a way out of the Observatory, how would you survive?”
Fleur was right. There’s only one way out of this place. And only one way back in. Maybe there’s no use fighting it.
Using the closet door as a screen, I slip my lock picks from their hiding place inside an old pair of sneakers and pop the tumblers in a small metal footlocker on the floor. The lid creaks open and I lay the lilies on top of the collection of Christmas ornaments stacked inside—all twenty-seven of them, one for every year Fleur’s killed me. I find one every fall, hanging on a tree near the site of my last death beside a set of carved initials—J.S. I’ve never confessed to finding them, not even to Chill. Never told anyone it’s the first thing I hunt for every winter, or that I arrange to have each ornament shipped here, addressed to myself, every spring. The first year, when I found a fragile glass snowflake hanging by a red thread and I saw my initials and death date carved in the tree beside it, I assumed Fleur was mocking me. But with each passing year, the ornaments became more personal—a pink-haired girl made of frosted glass; a golden retriever made of clay with a name written on his collar; a silver angel stamped with the logo of a local children’s hospital; a stack of tiny porcelain books, the spines all painstakingly, tragically labeled . . . Each ornament revealed a new secret about her, little glimpses into her present or her past. Her hobbies, where she grew up, her favorite colors and flowers and subjects in school. But this past year’s ornament—a cherry tree in a snow globe of swirling pink blooms—had made my throat swell. It felt like a wish for the future.
Now, with the wilted lilies draped over the mounded contents of the box, the slate-gray footlocker looks more like a headstone. A place where wishes come to die.