“Maybe she just feels guilty and doesn’t know how to say it.”
“Or maybe she justlikesstabbing me in the back.”
I pick at the grass, slipping just enough of my consciousness into each blade to feel the tear inside my chest. Is that how Jack feels about me? Does he wonder if I hate him?WillI hate him next time I see him? Will I ever be able to look at him without picturing a Guard’s face?
I have one spring left to save myself. I’ll have to be brutal when I wake. I’ll have to fight Jack while he’s still strong and kill him without hesitation. If I show him any mercy, it’s the end for me. If I ever want to see him again, I’ll have to push him away. I’ll have to do things that will make him hate me.
“You’ve been through it before, haven’t you?” I ask. “Reconditioning?” The clenched muscle in Julio’s jaw tells me everything I need to know. Julio’s got almost ten years on me. Amber has nearly twenty on him. They’ve been hurting each other since 1989, when Amber was reassigned here. “Does it ever get easier?”
A shadow passes behind his eyes. His forehead creases. “No. It never gets easier.”
The bus behind us pulls away, leaving a cloud of exhaust.
I sit up, my broken ribs protesting, wishing I could savor one last deep breath of fresh air, but it’s time. I hold out my hand, ready to go.
Julio swears quietly, withdrawing a vial from his pocket. He takes out the cork, reluctant to give it to me.
I lean in to take it from him. The clear liquid inside smells sweet and deadly. At the last moment, he holds it just out of reach.
“It’d be more fun just to kiss you,” he says, his face close as he pries the gum off his transmitter. Then mine. He raises one eyebrow, dragging a weary smile out of me.
“Not on your life.” I reach for the vial again, but something in his eyes makes me stop.
“Promise me,” he says with an earnestness that dissolves my smile. “Promise me you’ll save yourself, no matter how you feel about him. Promise me you’ll fight.” Julio ransoms my death, as if I have any choice. As if anything I do matters.
“I promise.” I take the vial, checking to make sure Poppy’s tuned in and no one’s watching before raising the poison to my lips. I feel Julio’s arm reach around me to catch me as I drop. And then, blissfully, I feel nothing at all.
5
Lions and Smazes
JACK
I’m eight days out of the chamber, a full week shy of Gaia’s guidelines for safe post-stasis reentry into the training program. No trips to the gym, no solid foods. I’m supposed to be recovering in my room, sucking my lunch through a straw like a post-op patient, but my growling stomach’s ready to tear through the walls and eat Gaia’s damn rule book.
Chill left for the cafeteria twenty minutes ago. As the door swung shut, food smells wafted in from the Winter mess hall, and I haven’t been able to think straight since. The faux window behind the sofa is illuminated to an obnoxiously bright midday setting, and I mindlessly flip the channels on the remote, searching for a landscape that doesn’t remind me of Fleur. The screen on the other side of the window frame flashes between snow-capped pines and frost-covered creeks. A phantom pain aches beneath my left rib and I flip past them, settling on a recorded loop of children sledding in Greenwich Park.
I adjust the thermostat on the remote, dropping the temperature in the room until rime builds on the vents and the metal starts to crackle. Then I bury myself under a comforter on our sagging, worn-out sofa, and stare a hole through the drop-tile ceiling. Greenwich Park feels like a world away, not an elevator ride above me through thirty stories of tightly packed earth and stone. Below me is a dead-end labyrinth of tunnels and catacombs. Even if I could find a way out, where the hell would I go? My life outside these walls was designed to last exactly one season. Maybe I could survive long enough to make it someplace perpetually cold. But what’s the point? I’d be stuck somewhere in outer Siberia, alone, hiding from Chronos and his goons, waiting for them to sniff me out. Without a transmitter, without some leash to a stasis chamber where I could recharge my magical batteries, I’d be doomed. Fleur’s right. We can look for a way out of this place all we want, but every exit leads to the same end.
I throw an arm over my face, the hunger headache gnawing at my mind and making me irritable. When I can’t take it anymore, I shove off the comforter and drag myself up, rubbing the stasis hangover from my eyes and waiting for the room to steady.
I need air. And food.
I slip on a pair of shoes and poke my head outside our dorm room. I don’t make it two steps into the hall before the first smaze finds me. The dark gray mist trickles like smoke through the vent in the wall. Gathering itself into a churning cloud, it tumbles to the floor and ghosts along behind me. I kick it, muttering at it to get lost, momentarily scattering it. But the persistent little shit only reforms, hanging back a cautious distance this time.
I hate smazes, almost as much as I hate the bees and flies and crows that seem to lurk around every corner down here. We’ve all heard the stories of what happens when Seasons are Purged, how Gaia reclaims our magic—magic that’s bonded to our human souls. She sucks it out of our empty husks. Breathes it into some other pathetic creature, doomed to become her pet. Our magic, memories, and souls belong to her, even in permanent death. Terminated Springs become the bees that spy on us from hives in the dormitory walls. Autumns get stuffed into the bodies of crows. The fate of the Summers is enough to make me shudder. Possessing the fat black flies that haunt the kitchens, they’re like maggots clinging to a corpse. But the smazes—the cold, restless ghosts of purged Winters—are creepiest of all.
I glance over my shoulder, unsurprised to see the little gray cloud still following me. Probably the same relentless shadow that’s always on my heels, as if it’s waiting for me to do something stupid. And why shouldn’t it? If it is the same one, it’s caught me plenty of times before.
When I push open the cafeteria doors, the smaze tumbles off and disappears into an air duct. I can’t say I blame it. A barrage of conversations in dozens of languages echoes off the metal benches and cinder-block walls. The fluorescent bulbs chafe against my stasis-sick eyes and I wince, struggling to take it all in. My reflexes are slow, and I duck a second too late. A snowball hurtles into my shoulder, ice spraying my face.
“Jack! You’re awake!” Gabriel drawls. The Louisiana Winter dusts snow from his hands. As if one snowball wasn’t enough to get my attention, he begins conjuring another, freezing the humidified air as it falls from the vents in the ceiling. A cafeteria attendant in a hairnet hollers athim, threatening to make him mop up his own mess. A rowdy knot of Southern Winters at the back of the room laughs her off, until a Guard stops chewing and looks over at their table. The group falls suddenly quiet, the snow forgotten.
The Guards are no better than the smazes. The only reason they eat in our cafeteria and sleep in our dorms is to keep an eye on the rest of us. The Winters settle, waiting for the Guard to lose interest. When he finally returns his attention to his meal, Yukio waves me over to their table.
I acknowledge them with a half-hearted wave and keep walking. I wouldn’t call them friends. Not really. They’re just the people I hang out with while our time here overlaps—Winters from similar climate zones in the same part of the world. Gabriel, Yukio, and the others... they’re all okay on the surface. Not much different from the boys I knew back in juvie boarding school. As much as we pretend to be on the same team, almost anyone in this room would kill the Winter sitting across from him if a Relocation—or Termination—came down to “him or me.”
The tables on both sides of the aisle are full of Handlers, but Chill’s easy to spot, surrounded by a clique of high-ranking Handlers, too busy regaling his friends with a new, improved story of my most recent death to notice me as I walk by. The story’s bloodier than I remember it, smoothly molding itself to fit the story he and Poppy put in their reports. I fight down a wave of nausea as I grab a tray and head for the lunch line.
