“Poppy, I need an exit.” I may be a Spring, but there are three of them and one of me. And every weapon I could summon to defend myself in this city—every root, every branch, the trunk of every tree—is anchored in concrete. I’m too far from my hotel. I’ll never make it. “In half a block, I’m cutting east. Get me out of here.”
The deafening silence that follows is broken by the boy’s footfalls behind me. Where the hell is she? Poppy’s been quiet too long. She would never leave me alone in a situation like this, even if she’s pissed at me.
The stench of trash grows stronger. I hook a sharp right, following the smell into an alley. As soon as I clear the corner, I break into a run. The doors I fly past are bolted, the windows all boarded or spray-painted black. The dark path ahead of me grows clearer as I near the end of the passageway, and I jerk to a stop in front of a high brick wall.
Dead end.
“Poppy, where are you?” I turn, fists clenched. Three shadowy figures block my only exit. The one in the middle steps closer, until his blond crown becomes visible in the pale light ghosting over the wall. A spark ignites in his hand, the flame growing brighter as it hovers over his palm, illuminating the silver scythes embroidered on their sleeves. My blood runs cold.
Chronos’s Guards.
“Your Handler has been dismissed for the night,” says the Guard holding the flame. A heavy metal door swings open beside me. A fourth figure looms inside, bracing it wide.
The blond Guard juts his chin toward the condemned building. “Step inside, Fleur Attwell. We’d like a few words with you alone.”
My mind gropes for a root. For anything I can control. But it’s like searching for a match in the dark. The Guard’s eyes dip to my twitching fingers, and his fire sparks. “I’ll only ask once.”
There’s no point in running or trying to escape. I can’t smell them. Can’t overpower them with any elemental magic they can’t already tap. It would be far too easy for them to hunt me down, and my punishment for fighting them or trying to evade them would be far worse than whatever’s waiting for me on the other side of that door.
The Guard holds his flame aside as I pass. My shoulder jostles the female Guard in the doorway as I push my way around her into a pitch-black room. Water drips, the leaking pipe’s rhythmic spatter broken by the echoes of the Guards’ boots behind me. The air smells like piss and something putrid and rotten, and I plant my feet to avoid tripping over something gross in the dark. One of them shoves me deeper into the building, guiding me around debris, through narrow passages, and up two winding flights of stairs.
Ahead, a dim light grows steadily brighter until I’m standing in the doorway of an empty room. The walls are devoid of windows and covered in graffiti. A kerosene lamp burns on the floor in the far corner, casting ominously long shadows against the water-stained ceiling above me. A chair sits empty in the middle of the room.
The blond Guard gives me a final shove through the door. I avoid the chair, keeping my back to the wall. The light gleams off their patches as, one by one, the Guards filter in. The tall blond with the tousled spikes—the leader, I assume—is first, followed by the Guard who opened the door, a dark-haired girl with a spill of loose curls, holding a coiled length of rope. A chestnut-haired boy leans against the far wall, one leg propped behind him, cleaning his nails with a pocketknife. He glances up at me, one eye surveying me with clinical disinterest before returning to his nails. His other eye is nearly swollen shut, the skin around it darkened by deep purple bruises.
A wiry Asian girl with close-cropped hair is last to enter. She drops a backpack on the floor and checks a remote tracker around her wrist. I draw in a subtle breath, hoping for some clue to who they were before they were promoted to the Guard. But any traces of their former Seasons are long gone now. Now they’re Chronos’s lapdogs, gifted with all four elemental powers, their magic perfectly balanced to mask their scent—his perfect hunters.
“Sit down,” the leader says, dragging the rickety chair around to face me. I take a small step away from it.
“I don’t think we’ve been properly introduced.” I make my voice loud, as steady as I can manage. But it’s an obvious and pathetic stall. The leader raises an eyebrow.
“I’m Captain Douglas Lausks,” he says with a sardonic degree of emphasis. “And this is Noelle, Lixue, and Denver. We’ll be handling your Reconditioning.” The knuckles of the captain’s left hand pop softly at his side as I back farther into the corner.
“Reconditioning?”
That’s what Chronos calls it. The rest of us call it what it is—behavior modification through corporal punishment, a slow form of torture to remind us who we are. We’ve all heard stories of what happens to opposing Seasons who’ve grown too close. We’ve all been lectured on the risks—climate confusion, hurricanes and floods, failed crops that lead to famine. There is a natural order, Chronos tells us, a balance that must be preserved, boundaries that must be honored, but Julio and I have always been so careful not to disturb that order or hurt anyone. We’ve always been careful not to draw attention to ourselves. Is that why Julio’s late? Is that why he’s not here? My gaze leaps to the chestnut-haired Guard and his swollen eye, and my heart stutters. They must have found Julio before Julio found me.
“Don’t act so surprised,” the captain says, shoving the chair closer with the toe of his boot. “You can’t turn off your transmitter and expect no one will ever know.”
I shake my head, my heel connecting with the wall behind me. Julio and I have bent our fair share of rules, but I’ve only ever turned my transmitter off once . . . with Jack.
I drag the sleeves of Jack’s coat down over my hands, wishing I could disappear into it as I turn to look into each of their faces. Douglas Lausks, Noelle, Denver, Lixue . . . The captain emphasized each of their names. They all have cold names. Northern names. Winter names. And like all Seasons, their names give them away. These Guards were all Winters once, just like Jack; who else would be better suited to punish me? To make me fear the cold? To make me hate Winters enough to kill Jack and send him home with the detached, calculated efficiency that’s expected of me?
I steel myself and sit down hard in the chair. When I don’t proffer my hands, the captain inclines his head to the Guard with the rope—Noelle. She steps in front of me, refusing to meet my eyes as she pries my stubborn hands out herself. Her fingers are cold enough to burn, and I clench my teeth to keep from crying out as she wrestles my arms behind me. The rope chafes as she cinches it in place. Suddenly, she pauses.
The captain’s eyes darken as he studies her face. “What is it?”
Behind me, the scrape of Denver’s knife against his nails falls quiet.
“It’s nothing,” she says, trying and failing to harden her voice as she drags down my sleeves. Fear grips me as the captain steps closer. “I said it’s nothing,” Noelle insists through her teeth.
The captain nudges her out of the way. My shoulder wrenches painfully as he pushes up my coat sleeve, twisting my left arm toward the light to see the scar. An entire conversation seems to pass in the silence between them as he comes around the chair to face me.
“It seems someone on my team has been keeping a very close eye on Jack Sommers, and you by default.” The captain sniffs. His eyes dip to my coat as if he can smell Jack all over it. “I found the tree, the oak you carved with his initials and the date of his death.” I force myself not to flinch. Not to give away a single reaction as he paces in front of my chair. “It must be painful, memorializing him that way.” He circles back to face Noelle. “Imagine . . . being so fiercely loyal. So devoted to someone.” His cold, blue eyes land squarely on hers and she withers under his stare.