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 DouglasLausks,” 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.Winternames. 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.
“It has nothing to do with loyalty,” I bite out. I’ve carved Jack’s initials into a tree near the site of every place I’ve ever killed him to assuage my own guilt. Because it seems wrong that Jack should be the only oneto bleed. “Only a monster could inflict pain on someone else and feel good about it.”
The captain stops pacing. He chuckles darkly. “Are you suggesting I’m enjoying this?” he asks through a grimace. “Because I can assure you, I find nothing about this situation amusing.”
I gasp as he jerks my transmitter from my ear.
Poppy!I can’t be sure I didn’t cry her name out loud. Frostbite blooms where the captain’s fingers brushed me. “Give it back!”
He tosses it over my head to Denver. “I was under the impression you like to live dangerously.”
I swallow sour panic, twisting in my chair as Denver tucks my transmitter into his pocket. The captain leans close and says through a cold breath, “Tell me what happened on the mountain between you and Jack Sommers and this will all be over quickly.”
Anger bursts from me like a white-hot fire. I throw my head forward. Feel his nose crack against my skull. The captain swears, the thick, warm smell of blood rolling over his lip. I’ve spent my whole life preparing to die, but I’ll be damned if I go quietly for Douglas Lausks.
The room stills, silent except for the sound of the captain’s pride spattering against the floor. I feel the others tense, the room practically crackling with magic. Thunder rumbles outside. My mind reaches out, groping blindly for signs of life—a tree, a root, anything growing under the building I can call to me.
The captain snatches my face in his hand, his breath tinged with the smell of iron. I recoil as his eyes glaze over with frost. “I have a deeply personal dislike of your kind. Be very,verycareful how you treat me.”
He releases me with a shove, his icy fingers leaving stinging weltson my cheeks. “I came here with every intention of letting you leave alive. Don’t make me change my mind. It would be easy to call it an accident.” He wipes his bloody nose on his sleeve, his voice thick. “Someone on my team recorded an interesting phenomenon—an interruption in two transmitter signals, fifty-five days ago—the same day you killed Jack Sommers and sent him home. The same date I found carved into the tree, and into your skin. There’s a three-minute gap in your surveillance feeds that coincides a little too neatly with the interruption in those signals. Now,” he says, the honed edge to his voice sharp enough to sever any argument, “tell me what happened on the mountain with Jack Sommers.”
I bite down hard on my cheek.
“Howexactlydid you kill him?”
“It’s all in my Handler’s report.”
“That report is a lie, and we both know it.” He shifts into my line of sight, the knuckles of his left hand popping softly at his side, same as they did a few moments ago when I asked for their names. Not a threat. More like a tell, hinting at his impatience. “Did you kiss him?” Noelle’s head snaps up, drawing the captain’s attention. His eyes linger on her, a hint of pain stirring in them when he asks, “Do you love him? Are you foolish enough to think he loves you?”
