Julio’s file is thinner than the others, containing only tangential details I’ve never concerned myself with beyond the parts that pertain to Fleur. I collect the spilled contents, trying to see them from a different angle as I return them to the file, searching for facets of his life I may have missed before. Gaia picked him up in Southern California in 1983 after a surfing accident. As far as I can tell, he has no remaining family. His younger sister died of a brain injury shortly after Julio’s accident, and his parents split three months later. Both have since passed on.
I thumb through a few reports, but there’s nothing to suggest he has the same warm-fuzzy feelings for Amber that he has for Fleur. Their kill records are brutal and bloody. No ice cream receipts, no movie date surveillance. He has to havesomeweakness. Somewhere he aches to go. Something he desperately wants. Someone he yearns to be with, preferably who isn’t Fleur.
I drag Amber’s file out from under the others, collecting the last of the loose documents and pictures from the floor. A sheet of yellowing paper rustles under the coffee table and I slide it toward me.
A thin and brittle police report filed in Phoenix, Arizona, in May 1969. It’s so old, I’ve never bothered reading it before.
“What’s so important to you in Arizona?” I whisper, holding it closer to the light.
Missing: Claire Sanford, seventeen years old. The report was filed by Claire’s mother, her sole guardian.
The photo’s stained with ochre tints. Amber’s hair was longer, wavy and parted down the center, hiding the sharp lines of her jaw. But her full lips and catlike eyes are unmistakable. It’s definitely her. The report was filed by her mother, her sole guardian.
I flip back through Amber’s bank records. A revolving charge appears on the first of every month, paid to a nursing home in Phoenix. If Amber was seventeen in 1969, her mother could still be living there.
But maybe not for long.
I stuff the records back into their files and return them all to Chill’s drawer. This might not be a key to the surface, but it might help us make it that far.
10
Choice and Consequence
JACK
Professor Lyon studies me over the rims of his glasses as I enter his office and take my usual seat in the worn leather armchair in front of his desk. His blue eyes linger on the spectacular new bruises blooming on my face, which now overshadow the pale yellow ones Doug gave me less than a week ago.
Without a word, his attention returns to whatever task I’ve interrupted. I sink back in the chair, the book of fables he assigned me for homework resting in my lap as I stare at the posters on the wall to keep my eyes from closing. Last night was long. Fitful and full of nightmares when I finally slept. I woke to the sound of my fists against the wall. I dreamed I was trapped in a snow globe, a blizzard swirling around me. The pins and needles in my sleeping arm stung like angry bees.
A laminated poster of Cuernavaca, Mexico, hangs behind Lyon’s desk. “City of Eternal Spring,” it reads. The old city’s nestled in arolling green hillside, dripping with flowers, and all my thoughts run to Fleur... how quickly the lilies wilted after the stasis chamber was opened, the way the petals had inevitably shriveled and crumbled, like the Spring Chronos cut down in the Control Room.
“Why Cuernavaca?” I ask, interrupting the scratch of Lyon’s pen. Why not hang a poster of Harbin, Murmansk, or Saskatoon? Some frigid city where a Winter could last indefinitely?
“Why not?”
“It’s a weird choice for a Winter.”
“Is it, Mr. Sommers?” His lip twitches with amusement. “I’ve seen enough snow to last a hundred lifetimes. And last I checked, there were no rules that prohibit the admiration of flowers.” He throws me a brief but meaningful look. My face warms as Lyon returns his attention to the papers on his desk. A disciplinary report... I lean closer, surprised to find the name on the file isn’t mine.
“Why didn’t you turn me in?” I ask, when I can’t stand the silence any longer.
“Is that what you were hoping? That I would report you?” His pen’s still moving over the paper, as if he knew what I would ask and had already considered his answer. Which wasn’t really an answer at all.
“No.” Maybe. The guilt’s gnawing away at me. I’m here for a promotion I don’t deserve. One that will inevitably kill Fleur. “Are they always like that? The Terminations?”
Lyon sets down his pen. He removes his glasses and rubs his eyes. Then he looks at me as if this is a question he wasn’t prepared for. As if this one deserves more of an answer than he’s able to give. “Terminations are always difficult. Gaia and Chronos do not approach themlightly. Balancing the universe is a tricky thing. It’s heavier than you might imagine it to be.” He pulls a handkerchief from his breast pocket and cleans his lenses. “But you’re not here to talk about demotions today, are you?”
“I guess not.” I pick at a loose thread in the arm of the chair. I’m here to learn the things I’ll need to know to keep Chill and me safe in our new region. To keep him happy. But the last thing I want is a relocation to Alaska. It’s a distraction. A deadline. Just one more clock ticking.
“Yesterday in the Hall of Records, you told me you aren’t a child. And yet here you are, sulking like one. Tell me, are you a man, Mr. Sommers?”
It feels like a trick question. “I’m a Winter. A Season.” It comes out sounding impetuous.
“That’s not what I asked of you.” I shrink back in my chair, too ashamed to admit I don’t know the answer. I feel old and tired, yet somehow no more a man than I was the night I first died. “Seasons were not always so young,” he explains. “Chronos has only recently come to prefer teenagers, children who are physically mature enough to rise up and fight, yet young enough to still be compliant. When I was made a Season, we were a bit older. There were no rules. No rankings,” he says with a hint of bitterness. “There were no Purges or promotions.”
“When was that?”
Lyon’s eyes lift to mine, but I’m not making a dig about his age the way Doug did. His mouth turns up with a knowing smile. “Long before the book you went looking for was written. Our world was different then.”
