“No,” he gasps, his black hair plastered to his pale forehead and his chest heaving. “No, no, no, that’s not what I—”
I lash out with my mind, my consciousness digging through the soft soil into the roots of a narrow sapling. My thoughts slide into it, the tree conforming to my intentions like a glove, the roots stretching out in the direction of Jack’s voice until they’re curled around his ankle.
His fingers struggle for purchase, his T-shirt riding up as I haul him viciously over the ground. He kicks at my snare. The force of it knocks me back a step. His body smears the grass red as he reaches frantically for the patch of blood-soaked slush behind him. I yank him toward me, but he manages to snag a handful, freezing it into a shiv as he jerks to a stop at my feet.
He points the makeshift blade at me. It trembles in his hands, the pink ice melting from its jagged tip and dripping down his knuckles. He could slash my roots to free himself, leaving me with a nasty scar. I wouldn’t stop him—Gaia knows, I deserve that and more—but he doesn’t. He won’t.
“Is this what you meant when you said we should go down fighting?” Tears well hot behind my eyelids, blurring his face. “Because that’s what they want, Jack.” That’s what Poppy and Chill want. That’s what Chronos and Gaia want. But Jack’s the only one who’s ever cared whatIwant. And I don’t want to fight anymore.
I don’t want to kill the boy who cares that hurting him makes me squeamish, who leaves me his jacket on cold nights, who’d rather die than lay a hand on me.
I release my roots.
Jack’s head drops softly to the ground and his fist falls open, hisDecember-gray eyes glassy and slow to focus as the shiv rolls off his palm into a smear of blood on the grass. He turns away from me, curling in on himself with a violent shiver as a cough takes hold.
“Do it, Fleur!”
“Shut up, Poppy!” My voice quakes as I stand over him, fists clenched around the knife, searching for the right hold. The right angle. The right moment. He’s sweating, shaking like a wounded animal, and my throat closes. He chose the knife because it seemed quicker, less painful somehow. Maybe it would have been, if I hadn’t hesitated before.
“Quit dragging it out! If you take him down now, we might be able to salvage some ground.”
“I saidshut up, Poppy!”
“It’s time, Fleur—”
I swat at my transmitter, cutting her off, even though I know she’s right. There’s nothing I can do for him. The stronger I am, the weaker he becomes. If I touch him, I’ll only make it worse. Just standing this close, my body temperature alone is probably a slow form of torture for him. And if I kiss him—Gaia, if only kissing him could fix this—we’d all be in so much trouble. I’m already under a microscope, and I don’t think Poppy and I can survive much more. Our rankings are low, dangerously close to the Purge line. Because my seasons are too short and the mid-Atlantic winters drag on. Because I wait too long, stall too often before sending him home. Because I let Jack run sometimes, just so I can spend a few more days chasing him, and Chronos doesn’t grant points for compassion. His rules don’t condone love. The entire system is rooted in opposition. In fear and animosity. The only way I survive is by killing Jack, but I don’t want to do it anymore.
I never wanted to.
His eyes are fading behind heavy lids. Blood slicks his ribs where his shirt’s ridden up, and I can’t stand the thought of causing him any more pain.
I fall to my knees beside him. His eyes flutter closed, his cool breath held and waiting, his blue lips so, so close as I lean over him, my blade pressed against his side. For a moment, it looks as if he’s sleeping. Like my job is already done.
“What are you waiting for?” he whispers. “We both know how this ends.”
2
Fifty-Five Days Later
JACK
The cloying scent of wildflowers sticks in the back of my throat. I blink myself awake, the glare through the window of my stasis chamber nearly blinding me. I stare up at the white drop-tile ceiling and the posters on the wall, struggling to remember how I got here.
“Welcome back, Jack.” Chill’s voice grates through the speakers beside my head. I wince, everything too bright, too loud, and too soon all around me. My fingers and arms tingle. There’s an ache in my chest, and I reach for the place under my ribs where Fleur stabbed me.
A cluster of flowers—tiny white lilies—falls from my hand. Across the room, Chill sits at his desk, logging data into his tablet: the date, time, and “conditions of my arousal.” While his back is turned, I raise the sagging stem to my nose. The flowers smell faintly like Fleur, a tenacious sweetness lingering in the pale, crushed petals.
Something Professor Lyon once told me springs suddenly to mind. The first time he caught me picking a lock to the catacombs under theWinter wings, searching for a way out of the Observatory, I told him I didn’t want to exist here, trapped in this stupid cycle, anymore. He quoted physics at me, insisting it simply wasn’t possible.The total amount of energy in a closed system cannot be created nor destroyed, he’d said. Like water that moves from sea to sky, we are merely changed from one form to another and back again.
Fleur must have put the lilies in my hand before I died. And somehow the flowers made it all the way here, their matter and energy tucked inside my own, becoming part of that same hopeless loop.
Chill’s chair swings around and I close my fingers around the petals.
“How long have I been out?” My throat’s dry, my voice hoarse from disuse.
“Just a cat nap.” I follow his movements through the lid of the plexiglass cylinder that surrounds me like a cocoon. He dims the artificial window, then lowers the thermostat, shrugging on an extra sweater to keep himself warm. “Fifty-five days. Your stasis times are getting shorter. Your off-campus times are getting longer. You’re getting stronger every year, Jack. Kicking ass and climbing the ranks.”
Only because Fleur’s been increasingly reluctant to kill me, and I’ve been increasingly reluctant to die. I lift my head as far as the confined space will allow, swearing when I smack it on the lid. I grope for the release bar, but the chamber’s still locked from the outside.
