“Did you tell him about Fleur?”
She nods, jabbing her straw in and out of the lid of her cup. “He took it pretty hard. He just kept saying it was his fault. I’ve never seen him so upset before.”
“So you waited, right? You tried again?”
“Not exactly.” She looks up at me through her lashes, still stabbing her drink. “He didn’t give me a chance. He just said, ‘Thanks for coming, Red, but I’ll find my own ride home.’ Then he turned his back on me, like he didn’t even care if I came after him. I didn’t know what to think. He reached for his transmitter and I panicked. I was afraid he was going to turn it off and do something stupid. So I sent him home.” She winces, as if that last bit hurt her as much as it hurt me.
I fall against the wall beside her. “Poppy still refuses to take my calls or return Chill’s emails, so I paid Boreas to smuggle a letter to Fleur.”
“Did she read it?”
I shake my head. “Poppy intercepted it, shredded it, and sent it back to me in about a hundred pieces.” I scrub a hand over my face. “She’s going to push Fleur to come at me hard. How the hell am I going to slow her down long enough to listen to me?” I only have three months to cash out my investments, tie up loose ends, and convince Fleur to come with us. I’ll need every possible hour I can steal from what’s left of Amber’s season to pull this off.
She stares into the swirling remnants of her cup. “You’ll find a way to get through to her,” she says through a wistful sigh. “She’ll listen to you. And Julio will listen to Fleur, I’m sure of it. If there’s a way to save her, he will.” I glance over at her. I’ve killed Amber dozens of times, but I’ve never seen her look so defeated.
“Were you able to handle the rest?” I hope she at least managed to secure a getaway vehicle.
“I found us a—” I hold up a hand before she can tell me anything more. The less I know, the safer we are. She presses her lips tight. Nods in understanding. “Boreas is handling the arrangements.” Boreas is a necessary risk, an outside mind to insulate us from the details of our own plan until we’re clear of the Observatory. “How about you? Did you find a safe house?”
“It’s handled,” I tell her.
I haven’t been to my grandfather’s cabin since the winter Gaia first found me. The property’s been abandoned since he died. The cabin itself was simple and rustic, but it had been shrouded in trees off an unmarked road, making it the safest possible place for Fleur. There had been no house number or mailbox. No distinctive features that would make it easy to identify. No recent receipts or transactions Chronos might pick from my memories. My recollections of the place are fuzzy at best—me and Chill huddled by the fire after I pulled him from the pond, trying to make sense of what had happened to us. I shake off the memory, forcing all thoughts of the safe house from my head.
“I’ll book us a few flights out of London,” I say. To Zurich, Toronto, Amsterdam... From those cities, I’ll buy train tickets, bus tickets, reserve a few rental cars. I’ll line up a few apartments and hotels. The more possible escape routes Chronos sees in my memories, the harder it will be for him to find us. “That should keep him busy for a while. By the time we make landfall, he’ll probably assume we’re in the wind and stop looking.”
“And if he doesn’t?”
I shut my eyes against the vision in Chronos’s staff. Of Kai Sampson sighting me down the length of her arrow. Of the ice cracking under me, drowning me. I will myself to change it. “Then we keep running.”
Amber kicks off the wall with a firm shake of her head. She sticks a finger in my chest. “Let’s get something straight, Jack. I’m notrunningfrom anyone.”
I nod, careful not to say anything else that might piss her off. This truce between us feels shaky at best. Claire Sanford ran away from home. She froze to death on the streets of New York, and she’s never kept her contempt for me a secret. I know what it’s like to fear the cold. To die by its hand. It’s costing her more than she’s letting on to make this fragile peace with me.
“Then why are you doing it?” It feels like I should know. Like she deserves that much. She eases away from me.
“I’m doing this for Woody and my mom.” She picks at her straw, her jaw set around whatever it is she’s not saying. I haven’t seen my own mother since the day she dumped me on the front steps of my boarding school, and I can’t think of a single reason I’d go looking for her now.
Amber’s throat is tight when she finally breaks the silence. “I left home when I was seventeen,” she says. “I ran off with some boy because my mom told me not to. The last words she said to me were, ‘You only ever think about yourself. You’ll never change.’” There’s a hint of irony in the hopelessness of her laugh. “If only she could see me now. I’m autumn incarnate—the very embodiment ofchange. For fifty years, I’ve tried to be the person she wanted me to be. I’ve gone to school even when I didn’t have to, I’ve come home on time, I’ve followed the rules... Sowhy the hell do I still feel like she’s right?” She tosses her empty cup into a mop bucket. “I’ll get you as far as Arizona,” she says. “I’m not making any promises after that.”
She draws a folding knife from her backpack and drops the backpack to the ground.
She holds the weapon out to me, bracing herself as I take it.
But the knife feels heavy and all wrong somehow.
With an impatient sigh, she flips open the blade and presses the grip into my palm. “They’re counting on you. Don’t fuck this up.” Chin held high, she stares into the distance over my shoulder. For a flash of a second, I think I see the desert—the glimmer of heat waves like a mirage on its surface—or maybe it’s her soul in her eyes.
15
One Final Hunt
March 11, 2021
FLEUR
“We can still do this. Be ruthless.” Poppy thrusts a suitcase in my hand. Everything I need will fit inside a backpack, which means she’s probably stowed a few weapons that would never make it onto an airplane in a carry-on bag. “Find Jack as soon as you land and get it over with. The sooner his season is over, the better. We need all the days we can get.” I nod, for Poppy, even though my stomach turns at the thought of it. We both know what’s at stake this time.
I take the Spring transport elevator at the end of our wing to the surface. It opens inside a small rowhouse just east of Greenwich Park. All the blinds are drawn, daylight seeping in around the edges of the windows. A Guard’s stationed at the desk in the parlor. She checks my papers and my transmitter before signing me out.
