She doesn’t answer right away, as if she’s weighing how much of herself she’s willing to share. “What do you want to know?”
Everything. I squeeze my eyes shut, struggling to stay focused. There are so many things I want to ask her. Like why she carves my initials into a tree at the end of every spring. But I’ve already pissed off Poppy enough for one day.
“What’s your favorite food?” I ask, though I already know the answer.
She hesitates. “Pizza,” she finally says, swatting the red light in her ear.
“What kind?” I rasp.
“Mushrooms, peppers, onions, and sausage.” I wait. “...And extra cheese.”
“Favorite band?”
“U2.”
“Favorite movie?”
“Thelma and Louise.”
“Please tell me you’re kidding.” My laugh becomes a cough. Seasons aside, sometimes I think Fleur and I couldn’t be more different. I slump against the tree, too weak to hold myself together anymore. “Why do you read all those books, anyway?”
“What books?”
“All the ones with tragic endings?” Her library hold list is just depressing. I used to check them all out after she returned them each year, but I ended up throwing most of them against the walls.
“You read them?”
“Maybe,” I say, angry with myself for talking too much. I feel reckless—punch-drunk and a little delirious. “I might have read some of them,” I confess. “But I draw the line at poetry.” The poetry books she checks out of the library are old—like, seventeenth century old. And no matter how many times I’ve tried to understand what she sees in them, I just don’t. My head feels heavy. I lean it back against the tree and the world goes wobbly. “I guess1984wasn’t so bad, butOrpheus and Eurydice,Anna Karenina, andWuthering Heightswere horrible. And Romeo and Juliet were just idiots. I mean, who drinks poison and just gives up like that?”
“There was no hope for them,” she says, snapping the head off a weed. “It’s called a tragedy for a reason.”
“Of course there was hope! They just had a shitty plan.”
“And yours would be any better?” She sits up, ripping a fistful of grass from the ground. “No, seriously, Jack! What would you have done?”
Her tone’s sharp. Cutting. It brings the world back into focus. “Iwould have taken her and run!”
“There is nowhere to run!”
“But would you... if there was?”Shut up, Jack.I bury my head in my hands. Fleur’s quiet for a long time. Too long.
“Maybe,” she says, “but it doesn’t matter. It’s just a story. A dream. It could never actually happen.”
I hate how resigned she is to all this, that this is her life.Ourlife. But more than that, I hate that she’s right. We’re leashed to the Observatory by our transmitters. If we were to take them off and try to escape, we’d never survive off the ley lines. But that doesn’t mean I haven’t spent the last thirty years thinking about it, searching for a way out. I’ve done it before.
And look where it got you, I remind myself. “Romeo and Juliet just trusted the wrong people to help them. That’s all.”
“It’s a tragedy,” she says stubbornly. “They’re not supposed to have a happy ending.”
Something hot boils up inside me. I don’t know if I’m angrier at her for giving up, or at myself for dying. “Yeah? Well, if they were both just going to die anyway, maybe they should have gone down fighting!”
It’s only when she roars to her feet that I realize exactly what I’ve done.
FLEUR
“Is that what you think? That we should go down fighting!” I scrape up my knife and stalk toward the trees. The flash of crimson on snow gives him away as he scrambles deeper into the woods away from me. “Fine, then let’s give Chronos and Gaia exactly what they want!”
Poppy urges me on. “You’ve got him, Fleur. Do it now!”
