“Take it easy, Sleeping Beauty,” Chill says. “It’s only been fifty-five days. Give your brain a minute to engage before you come tumbling out of there.” He sets a bottle of pills and a glass of water on the steel cart by my feet.
I drop my head back against the platform, claustrophobic and sleep addled, impatient for the sound of the lock’s release.
“Don’t be so hard on yourself. You kept Fleur on her toes those last few days, and we climbed a few percentage points in the rankings. If we keep this up, we’ll be eligible for relocation.” The wall behind Chill is papered in maps of our assigned region, blue pins marking every place I’ve killed Amber, and red pins marking every GPS point in the mid-Atlantic US where Fleur’s ever killed me. He leans back in his chair with a gloating smile, but I don’t feel much like celebrating.
Chill frees the lock with a tap of his tablet screen. The lid of my chamber slides open around me, the cold air circulating inside rushing out and the familiar smell of our dormitory rushing in. I breathe shallowly against the pungent bite of the pine-scented cleansers the custodians use on the industrial tile floors and the peppermint air freshener they pump through the ventilation ducts in the ceiling. The artifical fragrance left behind by the detergent in the starched sheets on our bunk bed in the other room makes my tongue thick, and a sharp, cheesy smell spills from the open bag of smuggled Doritos hidden somewhere in Chill’s desk. It all makes me want to puke.
I sit up and swing my legs over the side of the chamber, careful not to tangle myself in the cluster of wires dangling from the adhesive pads on my chest. Head bent over my knees, the details of my most recent death come back to me like a bad dream.
The last thing I remember is Fleur’s knife between my ribs and the look on her face when she sent me back. I toss the lilies into the plastic bed before Chill can see them. Rubbing Fleur’s face from my eyes, I ease my feet to the floor. I’m hungry. Empty. Everything hurts. That’s the price of immortality, as Gaia likes to remind us.
When I open my eyes, Chill’s standing in front of me. “Missed you, man.” He holds up a fist. We bump knuckles, but my heart’s not in it. “Iwas about to lose my mind from the boredom. This place isn’t the same when you’re out cold.”
I try to smile for his sake. It’s the least I can do, since it’s more or less my fault he’s stuck here, thirty stories below the Royal Observatory in Greenwich and the Prime Meridian. As long as he’s my Handler, Chill will never leave this place. His sole purpose in this world is to drag out the length of my season—to keep my body alive out there as long as he can, then haul my matter back here through an underground network of electromagnetic energy lines so he can babysit me through my recovery.
It sounds complicated, but it’s really just a circuit. My remote transmitter is the antenna that connects me to Chill. Chill’s the wireless router connecting me to the ley lines. When my season is over, my physical body breaks down into a glowing ball of particulates, and Chill conducts all my matter, magic, and energy home. The circuit ends in my stasis chamber—a capacitor that stores my energy while it changes back to my physical form, exactly the way it remembers me. For the next few months, my plastic coffin acts like a giant battery charger. And I pop out good as new—my magic fully charged and my body immortally young, with an eternally adolescent neural system that’s uniquely responsive to risks and rewards, exactly the way Gaia and Chronos expect us to be.
Chill claps me on the shoulder. He’s my GPS, my cleanup crew, my roadie, and my pallbearer—the only person in this world I trust, which (by default) makes him my only friend. In 1988, I chose Ari “Chill” Berkowicz. And when it comes to choices, Gaia gives us only three.
Choice number one: live or die. But that’s not really a choice when you’re dangling by your nuts over the precipice. When we’re nose to nose with death, we all want to live. So when Gaia holds out herslippery hand with the promise of a second chance, we don’t stop to think of the consequences. We just take it.
Choice number two: our Handler. Save another young person from the brink of death, putting their life in eternal debt to us. Someone we don’t mind spending the rest of time with, because once the choice is made, we’re stuck with them. Forever. Ironically, there wasn’t much time to think about how longforeverreally was.
And choice number three: a new identity, any name we want, to prevent our old lives from finding us. But as far as most Seasons are concerned, our names are the only choices that are truly ours.
I chose Jack.
I’m not entirely sure I chose Chill.
He frowns through his glasses as he checks my vitals. There’s no prescription in them—they’re just empty black frames. He doesn’t need the lenses anymore. His perfect health is guaranteed by Gaia as long as we stay in the program. But thirty years ago, Chill made me fish them from the bottom of the frozen pond I pulled him from, insisting he felt naked without them.Even gods wear loincloths. This is mine, he said, dripping wet and shivering as he pushed them back on his face.I’m Ari. He reached to shake my hand, and I told him,Not anymore.
Chill’s never seemed to mind his life here the way I do. Never seemed bothered being stuck with me. I’m probably the best friend Chill’s ever had, which is sad, because I’m pretty sure I don’t deserve him. Most days, I don’t feel much better than the assholes from our school who made him walk that pond on a dare and abandoned him when he fell in. Sometimes, I wonder if he would have been better off if I’d never found him at all. In thirty years, he’s the only thing I’ve ever saved, and when he looks at me through those missing lenses as if I’m his own personalhero, it’s hard to look back. Saving Chill’s life never felt like a conscious choice. And yet for reasons I’ll never understand, he keeps choosing to save me, over and over, anyway.
Chill tosses me a pair of boxer shorts. “Now that you’re back, maybe Poppy will quit bugging me. She’s been hounding me every day, waiting for you to wake up, pestering me with questions. Speaking of which, are you going to tell me what that was all about?” Chill pushes his glasses up his nose, staring me down through the empty frames.
“What?” I wince, careful not to catch my IV cannula on the fabric as I drag on the boxers. I disconnect the catheter and roll out my shoulders, shaking fifty-five days of sleep from my bones.
“You. Tuning me out on that mountain pass.” He tosses me a bottle of vitamins and I catch them against my chest, nearly dropping them.
“What are you talking about?” I take the cup of water he offers, shake out a couple of pills, and slowly swallow them down.
“Do you have any idea how long it took me to find you and bring you back? That shit isn’t easy to pull off in the mountains, evenwitha transmitter.” My throat closes around the last sip. I nearly choke on it.
My transmitter wasoff.
My memories of that day are still hazy, shrouded in the fog of the fever. I remember arguing with Fleur... feeling desperate for a moment alone with her. Irememberturning off my transmitter because I was angry at Chill, and I don’t remember turning it on again.
I sink down on the edge of the stasis bed. How the hell am I even here right now? Chill must have used Fleur’s signal to find me and route me home.
“You could have died out there,” he says sharply. “For good.Forever.Your magical ass would have been lost in the wind if Fleur hadn’tbeen holding—” Chill falls abruptly silent. I perch on the edge of the bed, waiting for him to finish. He fumbles for his tablet and pretends to study the screen.
“What?” My heart rate climbs on the monitor. Chill doesn’t answer, so I lean in closer. “What was she holding?”
“Back off.” He swats the air, wrinkling his nose. “Stasis breath.”
I fight the urge to punch the rest out of him.
“You.” Chill sighs, tossing his tablet aside. “She heldyou. For the three freaking minutes it took me to find you and get you back online.”
