I sit up in my chair. “Different how?”
He glances at the closed door behind me, testing the point of a tooth with his tongue as he takes in my posture, my forward lean, as if deciding how much of the vault he’s willing to risk unlocking for me. “We didn’t have Handlers then. There was no need. Our magic was untethered. We weren’t told where we were permitted to live or whom we were allowed to take into our beds. We sought our own rewards, carved out our own regions. We made our own alliances and chose our own lovers. When we wanted more land, more power, more strength, we took it.” Lyon rises from his chair, the fire in his eyes growing brighter as he speaks. “If your heart beat for Alaska, then it was willing to kill and die for it. And if it ached for something else... someoneelse... then the risks, and the spoils, were yours to take.”
The hair stands up on my arms. I was right. They could go anywhere. With anyone. “So you weren’tassignedto Antarctica. You fought for it. Youchoseit.”
“I suppose you could see it that way.” He perches on the edge of his desk, rustling the contents of his pocket. “I was banished there by Chronos for three hundred years,” he confesses quietly, “forbidden to return to his house until I agreed to give up the power Gaia granted me.”
“But you just said there were no borders. No rules.”
The light in his eyes dims. “We don’t always win what we covet.”
I sink back in my chair, picturing it. Being dumped and abandoned in a strange, cold place. Spending three hundred years alone. No Chill. No Fleur. Not even Amber. I imagine the suffocating silence, the loneliness and homesickness picking away at me, stealing bits and pieces until there’s nothing left. Thinking about it feels a lot like dying. It’s no wonder Lyon gave up his...
I look down at the book of fables in my lap, remembering the warning growled into Doug’s ear.
You assume I’m frail? That I keep my teeth in a jar beside my bed?
“You’re the lion,” I say, putting the pieces together. “The lion who gave up his teeth.”
The professor’s smile is wistful. “Aesop’s story was written long before mine, but I won’t deny certain parallels.”
“But you were the most powerful Winter in the world. Why would you give that up to be... ?” I catch myself. His eyebrows rise expectantly, his slight grin suggesting he knows exactly what I was about to say.
“An old man? A teacher?” He runs a hand over his salt-and-pepper mane. “Sacrificing for another takes courage. Chronos believed that by stripping me of my power, his daughter would see me as less of a man. I had to believe she would see me as more of one.”
“You gave up your magic forGaia?” I remember the quick catch of their eyes in the Control Room, the furtive way their hands brushed.
“Only for a place in her world,” he corrects me. “Some choices have consequences. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t fight for them.” He leans closer, fixing me with the eyes of a hunter. “Tell me, young lion, is it Alaska your heart desires? Is it Alaska that keeps you up at night? That you ache to possess, body and soul?”
Heat floods my cheeks as the professor pulls back the curtain on thoughts I’m afraid to admit to.
“I didn’t think so,” he says. “And yet here we are. You with your assignment, and me with mine—to prepare you for your journey.” He studies me thoughtfully, as if he knows the answer to a puzzle I haven’t figured out yet. “As your adviser, entrusted by Gaia to impart to you all the wisdom of my many years, I submit that you already possess all theknowledge you need to survive the path that lies ahead of you. What you lack is the courage to choose it.”
He says it as if I have a choice at all. As if my path weren’t just predetermined for me.
Pity you have to die.
I scrub a hand over my face. Wipe the vision Chronos shared with me from my head. But I can’t shake the question that’s stuck with me since. “Chronos said something to me in the Control Room. He said he saw my future in his staff.”
Lyon tips his head. “What did he say, specifically? Do you recall?”
“He said that my rankings are at odds with every possible outcome.” I leave out the vision and the part where I died. Saying it out loud would only give more weight to it. Make it feel inevitable. “What did he mean?”
Lyon slips his hands into his pockets. He stands with his back to me in front of a frosted artificial window, as if he’s seeing through it. As if there’s a whole landscape on the other side I can’t see. “You know how the Staff of Time works, yes?”
“Not really.” I mean, we all know Chronos has the power to see the future in his staff, that it’s driven by magic. But none of us know exactly how it works.
“He who possesses the Staff of Time holds the power to maintain the natural order of our world. He controls the throne, and therefore everything and everyone in its domain—the Observatory, the Seasons, the revolution of the Earth, and Gaia....” Lyon’s brow pinches, his voice trailing on the last syllable of Gaia’s name. He clears his throat softly and continues. “The scythe itself belongs to Michael, or as he ismore commonly known by his title, Chronos: Father of Time, Keeper of Order, Ruler of the Throne of—”
“Michael?”
Lyon raises an eyebrow, amused by my disbelief. “As you are well aware, Mr. Sommers, few of us use our given names here.” He pauses, as if giving me time to wrap my mind around that. It’s not that I can’t believe Chronos could have another name. It’s just thatMichaelseems so... mundane. So ordinary. Lyon continues, pulling me out of my thoughts. “Chronos’s staff controls time and immortality. But the eye—the ability to see the inevitable—that belonged to his bride, Ananke. He took possession of it when she died.”
“You mean when he killed her.”
Lyon nods gravely. “Chronos sought to control Ananke, but Ananke would not be controlled. Her magic and her mind were her own. One day, he struck her. Enraged, Ananke clawed out his eye, leaving the other intact. To punish him, she revealed to her husband a future he didn’t wish to see. Terrified of the inevitability of it, he cut her down, not realizing that her absence would do little to change the ending.” The professor’s sigh is deep and unsettled. “Some say Chronos took Ananke’s eye as a token, a reminder of his love for her. Others say he took it in recompense.”
“What do you think?”
