“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 youcouldfind 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 toChill. 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.
I slam the lid closed and grab a towel from the closet.
“Are you at least going to tellme?” Chill asks. I stop, unable to turn my back on him as much as I want to. “I’m your Handler, Jack. It’s my job to know where you are. And I can’t do that if you’re shutting me out. What really happened up there?”
I don’t want to lie to him. I just don’t know what to tell him. I don’t understand what’s happening between me and Fleur. Or why. Or what any of it means. I throw the towel over my shoulder and head for the shower.
“Give me a few years to figure it out.”
3
Hounds of Winter
FLEUR
There’s no sign of summer anywhere. The night’s too cool, too dismal. It smells too much like the city in spring. I jaywalk across all three lanes of Woodmont Avenue, my running shoes slapping against the shallow puddles that reflect the bright lights of the marquee where Julio and I usually meet. I press my back against the wall of the theater, taking shelter from the rain under the red awning out front. The faces rushing by are all half hidden under hoods and umbrellas.
“Do you see him anywhere?” I hunch into Jack’s coat, my collar raised against the windblown mist. My transmitter’ssilent in my ear.
“Come on, Poppy. You can’t possibly still be angry with me.” The incident on the mountain with Jack was almost two months ago. I didn’t tell her everything that happened after I turned my transmitter off so she wouldn’t have to lie for me. But I shouldn’t have to tell her everything just because she’s my Handler. There should be moments in my own life I’m allowed to keep for myself.
Poppy begs to differ.
Poppy was eighteen months younger than I was in 1991 when we died, back when eighteen months felt like an eternity, when just the number eighteen still felt like an attainable goal. Poppy must have seen Gaia that night in our room. Gaia sat in a beam of light from the parking lot outside our window, in a chair at the foot of my bed, nosing through my poetry books, waiting for me to die while the rest of the hospital slept. Poppy only pretended to sleep. She turned off her respirator the minute I flatlined, determined to come with us, as if she had nothing left to hold on to but me.
Sometimes, she just holds on too tightly.
“Don’t be like this.” I lean back against the brick under the shadow of the awning. “It’s one night—one stinking movie, for crying out loud. If I didn’t know better, I’d think you were jealous.”
“I’m not jealous,” she says begrudgingly.
A young couple rushes past, heads bowed, laughing as they jog to beat the rain. They’re so wrapped up in the moment, they fail to notice the low-hanging branch of the tree ahead of them. I slide my mind inside its roots, then up through its trunk, lifting the heavy limb just high enough for the couple to clear it. They don’t notice the small movement in the dark, and I feel a pang of loneliness when their lips meet as they dash beneath it.
“I bet he proposes over dessert,” I say, just loud enough for Poppy to hear, certain she noticed them, too.
Her sigh’s heavy. “Peanut butter cheesecake.”
“They’ll move in together. A condo in Georgetown.”
