“Took you long enough to get here,” I say without looking up. The long ends of my hair have escaped my hood, the damp wind blowing the strands across my face enough to hide my bruises. I left Jack’s coat at a secondhand store where I traded it for the hoodie, unable to tolerate the smell of it anymore.
“I went to your hotel as soon as I got here, but they said you checked out.”
I pluck a blade of grass from the ground between my feet and toss it away. “I had to move. The front desk staff started asking questions.” Wondering where my parents were, why I wasn’t in school, how I got the bruises. Decent hotels pay attention. For the last three days, I’ve been relegated to the kinds of cheap roadside motels that turn a blind eye to these kinds of things.
Julio reclines on his elbows, stretching out in the brightening sun. The lapels of his windbreaker fall open, the T-shirt underneath snug against the swell of his chest and the tight lines of his stomach. It may be early in his season, but he’s already strong, radiating heat. “Didn’t take long to track you here. You could at leastpretendto hide from me. If you give up too quickly, it takes all the fun out of it.”
Poppy doesn’t say a word, content to let Julio do her job for her.
“I was expecting you a week ago.”
“Admit it, you missed me,” he says with a lazy grin. He tips his bronzed face to the sun, the soft waves of his dark hair just visible in my peripheral vision.
“I want to go home.”
“Ouch!” he says, rubbing his chest. “I’ll try not to take it personally.”
I bite my cheek. Truth? I did miss him. I miss our lighthearted banter and his harmless flirting. He makes me laugh, and he never takes himself or anyone else too seriously. Normally, I look forward to his company. He makes me feel human. But this year, faced with the most painful parts of my inhumanity, I’d honestly rather sleep.
His face falls. “Sorry, I didn’t realize you were in such a hurry to get back. I scored us tickets to a Nats game on Thursday. You know,World Series champions? ‘Stay in the fight’?” The sun dims when I don’t answer. Poppy remains mercifully quiet in my ear.
“I waited for you at the theater,” I grumble. “Where were you, anyway?”
“I got held up. In-room suspension.”
“For what?”
“One of Chronos’s lackeys caught me coming back to my room after curfew.”
A reluctant smile pulls at my split lip. “Heartbreaker,” I mutter, peeking through my veil of hair. I shake my head at his rakish grin. Julio’s reputation at the Observatory transcends the barriers separating our wings. The Summer girls are the only ones who can have him. Still, I’ve heard the whispers in the Spring rec room. Read the confessions written in small, dreamy letters on the walls of the locker room stalls. After a handful of his surveillance pics started floating around the dorms, more than a few Springs swore they’d take a voluntary hit to their rankings for one dying night alone with Julio Verano.
“I was in my own damn wing. And this arrogant washed-up snowflake in a scythe patch threatened to strip my rec privileges just because I left some girl’s room after hours. I told him he’d need a better reason than that.”
“And then what?”
“I hit him.”
I stare at him, dumbfounded. “For Chronos’s sake, Julio! You hit a Guard? You’re lucky you only got suspended.” A week ago, I might have laughed. But now the prospect of never seeing him again feels too real, too imminently painful to think about. “If you’re not careful, you’ll be Terminated from the program.”
He sits up slowly, his face sobering as his eyes skip over my face. “I could say the same about you.”
I suck in a sharp breath as he reaches for my hood. It’s been years since Julio’s raised anything more than a kind hand to me, but Reconditioning has left me raw, defensive. A faint purple bruise colors the skin around his knuckles, and I fight off a flashback of that freezing cold room, my mind seizing stubbornly on a memory of the chestnut-haired Guard with the swollen eye—Denver, they called him. I let myself hope he was on the receiving end of the punch that landed Julio in suspension.
Julio slides my hood back from my face, his mouth a tight line as he takes in the worst of it. The sky darkens. A hot wind whips over us, conjured by the rush of his anger, scattering cherry blossoms over the river’s edge. A bright flicker of lightning clears the basin of tourists, making them run in search of shelter. A middle-aged woman with a camera around her neck slows as she passes us, her face a snapshot of motherly concern as she registers our bruises, probably assuming the worst. Julio kicks up a misty wind, and she retreats under her jacket. His voice is a low rumble once she’s gone. “Who did this to you?”
“Chronos’s Guards,” I say quietly. “Four of them cornered me in an alley last week.”
“For Reconditioning.”
I look up, not bothering to mask my surprise. The bitter look on his face suggests he’s had a taste of Reconditioning before.
“Was it because of me?” he asks.
I know what he’s thinking. I assumed the same thing, too, at first. There’s never a sign of struggle in our death reports. Never any blood. But no one in the Control Room has ever seemed to notice.
“No,” I tell him. “Not because of you.”
I prod my sore cheek, hiding the humiliating rush of blood to it.
