“I wasn’t yelling at you. I’m sorry.” I push to my feet, feeling like an asshole. Of all the hundreds of Springs Gaia could have chosen to stick in my tiny corner of the globe to kill me, why did she have to choose one who’s managed to wedge herself into every corner of my mind? One who’s interesting and beautiful and impossible not to think about? Why’d she have to pick one who might feel the same way about me? It just makes everything worse.
“Touching sucked,” I tell her, holding the tree for support. “And we should definitely, definitely not do it again.” I’ll take the knife over slow death by electrocution any day.
Fleur hugs her arms to her chest. “I didn’t mean to cut you. If I’d known you were going to chicken out—”
“I didn’t chicken out!”
“Why are you so afraid of dying, anyway?” She bends to pick up her knife, and I stumble away from it as she gesticulates wildly. “I mean, how many times have we been through this? I’ve killed you, like, twenty times.”
“Twenty-seven.” Her eyebrows rise. She lowers the blade. “And I’m not scared of dying,” I lie. “I just wasn’t ready to go back yet.” I sound pathetic and overtired, like a kindergartner fighting naptime. She’s right. If I had any balls, I’d get it over with. She probably doesn’t run from Julio when he comes for her every summer. According to Chill, she doesn’t even seem to mind. And I’m not sure which is worse: that she’s not afraid of dying, or that she actuallylikesJulio. “You know what? I just...” I press the heels of my hands into my eyes. It’s too hot. Everything hurts. “I can’t be this close to you right now.”
I turn and climb the rough trail up the slope behind me.
Chill cheers me on. I hear his hand smack the desk through my transmitter, followed by frantic keystrokes in the background as he monitors my progress from our dorm room, probably recording every humiliating second of this. “That’s it, Jack! Go!”
Fleur calls my name and I push myself faster. The wound in my side feels like it’s tearing wider with every step. My boots slip on the soft, wet ground, and Chill curses me for leaving such obvious tracks for her to follow.
Higher. I just need to get higher. If I can get someplace colder, I can buy myself more time. My side pulls painfully as I slip off my jacket and drape it over a tree limb for Fleur. The cold is hard on her. It drains her magic and slows her down.
I keep climbing, wheezing and dizzy when I finally collapse into a patch of snow lingering at the foot of an evergreen. I listen for Fleur’s footsteps as the last drops of winter slip from the tree’s needles. The steady patter smells all wrong, and I look down, surprised to find a puddle of crimson slush. A crippling cough takes hold of me. I press back against the trunk, holding the skin around the wound together, but it’s no use. I’m only putting off the inevitable.
There’s no point in hiding from her. Her magic is drawn to mine like a magnet. She’ll know exactly where to find me.
“I know you’re there, Jack,” she says through a weary sigh. “I can smell you.”
I reek like fever sweat and blood. I’m long past my expiration date.
“Stay calm,” Chill whispers in my ear. “I’ll find a way to get you out of there. You’ve got enough juice left in you to make it another day, easy.”
I shake my head. My power’s almost gone, draining like a dying battery. I’m on stolen time and we both know it. I could keep running, but what’s the point? The only thing worse than being killed by Fleur is suffering a slow death alone.
I peer around the trunk of the tree as she slides her arms into the sleeves of my jacket and draws it around herself, hugging it close. She slumps down in a clearing a few yards away, stirring an explosion of butterflies from the wildflowers that have sprung up around her. I dig my hands into my shrinking island of snow, willing it to stay. To freeze. To keep me here.
“It’s the end of March, Jack. Winter’s over,” she says sullenly. She wipes my blood from her knife and falls back on the grass, her boots thumping the ground and making the long, loose fabric of her skirt pool around her knees. A bright orange butterfly alights in her hair and she huffs an irritated breath at it. A long, pink strand flips back from her eyes, but the butterfly only stirs and lands there again.
“Quit staring,” Chill badgers me. “You should be looking for a way out.”
With a flurry of irritation, I turn my transmitter off.
I lick my dry lips and blow an icy breath across the clearing, rustling the fabric of her skirt and making her hunch deeper into my coat. The butterfly beats its wings once... twice... before falling, frozen, onto her cheek. I press back against the trunk, dizzy from the effort, kicking myself for my own stupidity. I don’t know why I did that. Maybe just to prove that I can.
She sits up and nudges the butterfly with a finger. Her cheeks pale as if touched by something cold, and she turns to glare in my direction. Cupping the butterfly in her hand, she blows into it. The space between her fingers glows, so faintly I wonder if it’s just my raging fever, if I’m imagining it, when she opens her hands and the butterfly bobs away on a breeze.
“You can’t keep running. You already know how this ends.” Her voice echoes, high and clear and annoyed, from every direction. “You’ve dragged it out long enough. If I don’t send you back soon, someone’s going to notice.”
“Notice what?”
She falls back in the grass, one arm thrown over her face. “That I don’t want you to go.”
It hurts to breathe. She’s never come out and said it before. “Whatdoyou want?”
“Does it matter?” she asks hopelessly. “Nothing’s going to change.”
“It matters to me.” I’m surprised by how much I mean it this time. I asked her this same question once, years ago, in a desperate attempt to stall her as she was trying to kill me. She’d just stood there, slack-jawed and blinking, as if she’d never stopped to consider the answer.
She flings her arm from her face and frowns up at the sky. “You don’t even know me.”
If she could see the size of the surveillance file Chill keeps on her, she probably wouldn’t think that. “Then tell me something about you.” Another cough takes hold. I press my palm into my side to slow the bleeding, but my fingers are numb and the ground is soaked red.
