He looks at me like I’m nuts. “I blew any shot of that a long time ago.”
“How?” I rest my chin on my knee, my curiosity piqued by his reluctance to tell me. After a moment, he shrugs.
“Ditched my transmitter inside the territory boundary and started walking. It was June of ninety-one.” I do the math in my head. That was the year before I met him. “Figured if I hitchhiked, I could make it to the West Coast in three days and have a couple of months to surf before...” His voice trails off, his sea-foam eyes becoming glassy and distant. “Doesn’t matter,” he says with a shake of his head. “I made it less than ten miles into West Virginia before Gaia found me. There’s no way she’ll let me go home.”
Julio was lucky. Stepping one foot outside our assigned regions is grounds for Termination. And my heart hurts knowing that was probably the outcome he’d been hoping for. He pulls me closer to his side and rubs some warmth into my shoulder. “It’s not so terrible here. I like hanging out with you.”
Julio swears as another string of profanities screeches into his transmitter. He stifles Marie with a finger. “One thing’s for sure,” he says, fishing a piece of gum from his pocket and popping it into his mouth. He chews it hard. “If I ever do make it home, it’ll be on my own terms. And I’m not wearing a goddamn transmitter when I go.” He pulls the pink wad from his mouth and mashes half of it around the microphone in his ear. The other half, he mashes around mine. The resulting silence sets off warning bells in my head.
“Relax,” he says at the flash of fear he must read on my face. “Your transmitter’s still on. We’re not technically breaking any rules.”
I prod my sore cheekbone, searching for Gaia’s bumblebee spies in the grass. Our disparate magic, our conditioning, our segregated campus with its mantraps and cameras and Guards, and Chronos’s rules... It’s all working to keep us apart. And yet here we are, sitting close enough to touch through our clothes, muting our transmitters and confessing our secrets anyway.
“Why us?” I ask, letting myself huddle into the warmth of his side.
“What do you mean?”
“Why do we get along?”
“Weren’t you the one who just said fighting is stupid?”
“Yes, but it feels like more than that.”
Julio bites the wistful smile tugging on his lip. “Do you remember the night I caught you puking your guts out in the bathroom of that bar in Fells Point?”
I cringe. That was 1997, the year I realized I was falling for Jack. Numbing myself with frozen daiquiris had seemed like a good idea at the time. “It was nice of you to hold my hair back instead of drowning me in the toilet.”
“As far as I could tell, you were doing a fine job of killing yourself.”
My memory of that night is hazy at best. It felt like I sat on that cold tile floor, talking to Julio, for hours. When I was finally empty, he picked me up and carried me out of the bar. I was sure he’d kill me in the alley out back and I’d wake up in stasis three months later. Instead, I woke up the next morning, tucked into bed in my hotel room, hungover and still wearing my clothes.
“It’s hard to want to kill someone once they’ve saved your life,” he says solemnly.
“I never saved yours.”
“You’d be surprised.”
My thoughts rush back to the mountaintop with Jack. How we each foolishly turned off our transmitters without realizing the other had too, both of us hungry for a moment of privacy—a safe place to be vulnerable. Something happened in those moments when he lay dying in my arms. When we touched. When it was only the two of us.
I muster the courage to ask Julio the question that’s been eating at me for weeks. “At the end of your season, do you ever... feel something strange?”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know,” I say, struggling to find the words to describe it. “Like a weird surge that kind of leaves you weak when Amber touches you?”
“All the time.” He wags his eyebrows suggestively. Then wrinkles his nose at the absurdity of the question. It’s normal for him. He’s the waning Season in September when Amber finds him. She’ssupposedto drain his strength when they touch, same as I drained Jack’s in the moments after I stabbed him. His power passed into me, then through me like an electric current. That first touch hurt him, weakened him, the same as Julio’s would weaken me now if we weren’t being so careful.
“When I touch Jack,Ishouldn’t feel weak, but that’s sort of what happened when I held him,” I confess, careful to leave out the part about our transmitters being off. If he knew I’d been so careless, I’d never hear the end of it.
Julio heaves a sigh. It feels like he’s passing judgment. “You’ve got it bad for him, don’t you?”
“You would know.” I shrug out from under his arm as he gapes at me.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Don’t look at me like that. I’m not an idiot.” His face gives him away. His confident facade crumbles every time he hears Amber Chase’s name. “Does Amber know you’re in love with her?”
The tips of his ears turn red, and he jams his hands into his pockets. I recognize evasive maneuvers when I see them. “Does it matter? I’m pretty sure she hates me.”
