Kai tiptoes up behind me, both of us listening as the can falls. After a long, long time, I hear a faint echo of it rattling at the bottom.
I scrub my face with a muffled swear. Getting up an elevator shaft as a Season was one thing. Getting down an elevator shaft as a human feels like stepping out of a plane without a parachute. I stare at the heavy cables that disappear into the blackness below. We could slide down them for a story or two . . . but thirty? It’d be far too easy to lose our grip and fall.
Kai hauls a length of rope from her pack. Without warning, she grabs me by the front of my shirt and pulls me toward her, working the rope into a series of knots.
“What are you doing?” I swat at her hands as she runs the rope around my backside and cinches a knot at my groin.
“Making you a harness. I’m strapping you to the cables.”
“No,” I tell her, wishing we had infiltrated the Winter portal instead. “This is a very bad idea.”
“You have a better plan? This is the only way down.” She repeats the process with a second length of rope, creating a sling around her own midsection. Satisfied, she moves to the folding table beside the door. With a sweep of her arm, she clears the clutter from its surface. “Help me with this,” she says as she flips the table and collapses its legs.
I grab the other side. Together, we position it inside the open doors of the elevator. Kai slides it across one side of the shaft, avoiding the cables. Resting it on the thin lip on the opposite side, she forms a shelf across the opening. She slings her pack on her back and shrugs her bow over her shoulder. Putting one foot out onto this makeshift bridge, she tests her weight. I feel sick as she takes another cautious step. Then a third. Until she’s standing beyond reach of the shaft’s walls, clutching the cables for balance.
“Come on,” she says in a shaky voice, “before I lose my nerve.” She ties the free end of her rope around the cable.
I point my flashlight down into the dark hole below her.
“Don’t,” she says, swallowing hard. “Don’t look down.”
“This is nuts.” I slip my flashlight into my front pocket, shining it upward toward the ceiling. Breath held, I take a tentative step out onto the table.
We both freeze when it creaks, bowing slightly under our weight. I take another cautious step, trying not to think about the thirty stories of open air below me.
Kai works fast, tying the free end of my rope to the cable above hers. “This is a friction knot. It should be secure enough to hold your sling in place—”
“Should be?” She ignores the crack in my voice.
“You loosen it like this,” she says, demonstrating the release technique. “Slide a few feet down and it will tighten again. We’ll take it slow. If you slide too fast, you’ll burn through your cord.” She waits for my nod. Panic grips me as I realize what I’ve just agreed to. “I’ll go first,” she says. “Wait for me to call up to you, then come down behind me. Slowly,” she emphasizes.
Kai swings off the platform and leans back into her sling. She slides a few feet. Then her knot cinches around the cable, stopping her descent. She nods up at me, flashing me an exhilarated smile as she tugs her rope and starts down the shaft. I glance back into the cellar, listening to Kai’s knot cinch and release, cinch and release, as the slide of her rope fades into the darkness. The cone of my flashlight casts eerie shadows around me.
A faint voice reaches me. I tip my head over the ledge, but the voice isn’t coming from below. It’s coming from the floor above me. The voice grows louder as boots storm down the cellar stairs. I grab my flashlight from my pocket, fumbling for the power switch with both hands.
“He’s in the elevator shaft!” A gun discharges. I duck as a bullet whizzes past my head. It lodges in the stone wall, pelting me with shards. My flashlight slips. I lunge for it as it tumbles down the shaft. Another gun fires. Pain rips through my upper arm, and I leap off the table into the darkness below before I realize what I’ve done.
I fall, grasping thin air. My harness slides a few gut-twisting yards before jerking to a stop at the same moment my hand closes around the rope. The force of my momentum triggers the release, and suddenly I’m falling again. Cold air whips over me. The rope whines, burning against the cable as I plummet through the blackness.
Bullets ping the walls of the shaft above my head. Kai shouts instructions, but I can’t hear them past the pop of guns and the scream of the rope. I reach for the cable to slow my fall, jerking my hands back when it tears the skin from my palms.
The smell of burning nylon fills the shaft, and Kai shouts my name as the ground rushes up to meet me.
23
First to Yield
DOUG
My eyes fly open at the jarring knock on the door of my apartment.
“Food service.” The muffled voice on the other side is gruff and familiar. I rub my face and push myself upright on the couch, groggy and unrested, then get up to let Boreas in. The retired Winter wheels a meal cart over the threshold, his cheeks ruddy from the walk from the north kitchen. “Where do you want it?”
I gesture loosely around the room, the universal sign for I don’t fucking care. “Put it anywhere,” I mutter.
The doors to the bedroom swing open. Fleur blows through them in a clean jumpsuit, scowling as she scrubs a towel over her damp hair.
“There’s only one toothbrush in there, and I’m not using . . .” Her rant trails off, and Boreas glances up from his cart. With a polite nod, he lowers his head back to his task, locking the wheels of the cart in place and removing the silver domes from the serving plates.
The dining hall manager clears his throat. “Call the kitchen when you’ve finished your meal, Douglas. I’ll return to pick up the cart.” Fleur’s breath quickens as the old man turns to go.
“Chronos,” I correct him, blocking his exit. “You’ll address me as Chronos if you want to keep your job.”
Eyes downcast, he dips his head. “My apologies, Chronos. It won’t happen again.”
I stand aside. Fleur clutches her damp towel to her chest as she watches him shuffle out.
She starts when I slam the door.
I steal a peek at her eyes as I return to the couch, sifting clumsily through flashes of jumbled memories, but Boreas’s face doesn’t appear in any of them.
“Eat,” I tell her, jerking my chin at the plates. We’ve already wasted too much time, and I won’t be summoning him back anyway. His offer to return for the cart was clearly a message for her.
Her stomach growls. She drops the towel on the arm of the sofa and lunges for the cart, grabbing a glass of orange juice and downing it in four huge gulps. It spills down her chin. She doesn’t bother to wipe it away before piling vegan sausage, fruit, and pancakes onto a plate and drowning it all in syrup. She folds a dripping pancake into her mouth with her hands before she makes it to the sofa.
It hurts just watching her. I haven’t eaten a real meal in days, and the constant burn in my chest isn’t helping my appetite. “You just came out of stasis two days ago. I don’t have time to wait while you make yourself sick.”
Fleur’s chewing slows. Her eyes move back and forth as if she’s calculating in her head.
“You were in stasis for eighteen hours,” I say, answering the unasked question in the crease of her brow. She frowns, shoving another bite into her mouth, her eyes closing with her greedy swallow.
I yank her plate away, dropping it onto the cart. “Now,” I tell her, shoving the potted plant toward her and sitting opposite her. “Show me.”
She glares at me over a napkin as she wipes the syrup from her chin. “I can’t show you,” she says sharply. “It’s not something you can learn that way.”
I slam my palm against the coffee table. “Then tell me!”
Her expression’s hard to read—anger, hostility, impatience maybe, but not fear. Never that.
I drag my hands through my hair, reining in my temper. The angrier she becomes, the har
der she’ll fight me. “Tell me how to command the plant,” I insist with forced calmness.
She shakes her head at me, as if I’m some kind of idiot. “That’s just it. You can’t command it. Plants aren’t human. They don’t care who you are or how much power you have or what crown you think you’re wearing. You can’t boss them around like they’re members of your kitchen staff.”
I leap off the couch, jerking her up by her arm as I summon a flame and hold it close to her face. “Fire’s not human, either, but it comes when I call it.”
She watches it, clenching her teeth. “That’s just it. You strong-arm your way through the world, taking what you want and shoving people around, threatening and yelling and demanding they obey you. . . . That’s not how earth magic works. You can’t just barrel your way into a living thing, exert control through brute force, and expect it to cooperate with you.” She reaches for my arm to push away the flame, but I hold it closer, tightening my grip.
“I’m running out of patience.”
“Plants are living things,” she says through a wince, her cheek flushed from the heat. “They breathe, they eat, they reproduce, and they suffer, just like we do. And the best way to understand how to move them is to make yourself feel what they feel!”
“Stop fucking with me and tell me how to control the goddamn—”
The plant stirs in its pot.
I turn toward the sound, going still as Fleur’s eyes take on a faraway look. No visions. No memories. Just the dark void of her irises, as if her mind has left and gone someplace else. My fire gutters out.
The plant stretches awake. A vinelike stem slithers toward me, reaching up for my free hand as I lower my arm to my side. I don’t move as it creeps over my wrist, coiling slowly around it, dragging its pot over the table inch by inch. It’s nothing I haven’t seen before. Nothing as impressive as the video footage of the earthquake Fleur started in Tecate or the entire grove of cedars she commanded to take down Michael. But as the pot scrapes toward me, a shiver crawls up my neck, and I’m careful to check my grip on her.
The vine climbs higher in a serpentine pattern, the pot sliding closer in small, predatory movements.
“This is Epipremnum aureum,” Fleur says as the plant circles my forearm, “commonly known as devil’s ivy. It’s nearly impossible to kill.” Her vacant gaze slides to my throat as the plant winds around the crook of my elbow. “Its heart-shaped leaves stay green, growing to surprising lengths, even when it’s kept in the dark. This species climbs by clinging to surfaces,” she explains. “It’s been known to cover entire forest floors, suffocating entire ecosystems. And its leaves, deceptively harmless in appearance, are deadly to weaker species. So you see,” she says with a menacing smile, “she doesn’t need you to command her. She’s perfectly capable of hanging you, suffocating you, or sickening you all on her own, with or without your consent or participation.”
The pot scrapes over the edge of the table. I turn in time to see it tip, then crack against the floor, scattering soil over the carpet. The roots of the plant dangle stubbornly from my arm. Tightening its hold, it drags itself to the crest of my shoulder, dangerously close to my throat.
I drop Fleur’s arm, a section of her hair catching on my wristwatch as I scrabble to fend off the vine. She yelps as a pink lock of it tears from her scalp.
Ripping away the ivy, I toss it, roots and all, onto the table. “That stupid performance of yours just cost us a lot of time. I don’t have any more plants down here. Now I’ll have to send Lixue to the gallery for another one.”
“You don’t need another one.” With an exasperated sigh, she kneels, gathering the dirt into the cracked pot.
“What are you doing?”
“Fixing it.”
“You can’t fix it. It’s dead.”
“It’s not dead,” she snaps, delicately setting the sagging vine back in the soil. “If you could feel it, you’d know.”
“You keep saying that like I know what it means!”
“It’s empathy, Doug!” She shoots to her feet, her voice rising. “The basic human ability to share someone else’s feelings! But clearly the ability to feel is beneath you, since you’re too busy playing god and renouncing your own humanity!”
“I’m not playing anything!”
“No? Prove it!” She points at the broken pot, a challenge in the lift of her chin. “Fix something.”
I get up in her face, resisting the urge to throttle her. “If I could do that, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”
“You can,” she says, shoving a finger at my chest. “Gaia gave you that power when she made you a Guard. It’s inside you, whether you choose to use it or not.”
“I did choose it! It didn’t choose me!”
I turn and pace to the other side of the room, disgusted by the flash of curiosity in her eyes. Massaging the flare of pain where she poked me, I drag my phone from my pocket to call Lixue.
“You can have a thousand plants delivered to this room, but you’re only going to kill them all,” Fleur says irritably. “You’ll never learn how to control the magic that way. The nature of earth magic is creative, not destructive. It’s different than fire. It doesn’t respond the same way water and wind do. Learning earth magic isn’t the same as learning to fight.”
She draws a deep breath through her nose and stares at the broken pot. Her arms fall loose at her sides, and her eyes take on that faraway look again as they slowly drift closed.
Magic crackles through the room. I lower my phone, cautiously returning to the couch as the plant begins to stir. Fleur gasps. Her eyes pinch with pain, then deep concentration, as the plant pulls itself upright in its pot. Its roots dig into the soil, tiny nubs appearing on the stem and unfurling into bright new spades that spill over the edge of the pot. I grab Fleur’s arm as the stems creep toward me.
“That’s close enough.”
The plant stills. Fleur’s eyes open. Her lids are heavy and her arm slides from my grip as she sinks onto the couch, drained and shaken.
“Why did you do that?” That plant had been ripped from its pot. I tore its stem when I threw it. Why would anyone subject themselves to the effort of trying to fix that?
She shakes out her hands, massaging some phantom ache from her muscles. “You can’t fix something if you can’t acknowledge that it’s broken. Before you can heal pain, you have to be willing to feel it, whether it’s your own or someone else’s.” She raises an eyebrow at my blank expression. “Gaia’s power wasn’t rooted in conflict and dominance. Her magic was rooted in synergy . . . in connection. That was how she achieved balance. Until you come to terms with that, her magic isn’t going to work for you.”
Her gaze drops to my chest. I hadn’t even realized I’ve been rubbing it and I quickly drop my hand.
“The pain you’re feeling—”
“I’m not in pain,” I snap.
“I’ve seen it before. It happened to Lyon.” My hands curl into fists at the mention of Lyon’s name, but she presses on. “After he took Michael’s power, he grabbed his chest the same way you did earlier. Gaia said the magic of the Seasons is incompatible with the magic of Time. Their natures are too different. That’s why Gaia had to take Lyon’s Winter magic from him; he couldn’t have both. Eventually, they would have killed him.”
“That’s a lie!”
“It’s advice, Doug! Maybe you should consider that you’re in over your head!” She points to the muted satellite images on the TV.
“And why would I listen to any advice from you? You think I’m that much of a fool that I’d give up a single element in my arsenal because you tell me I should?” I choke out a laugh. “You just want me weak when your boyfriend comes. You want to give him a fighting chance. But guess what? He doesn’t have one. Jack is fragile. He’s powerless. I will destroy his weak mortal body from the inside out. And then I’ll destroy everyone he’s ever cared about, beginning with you.”
Static crackles between us.
Fleur’s eyes lower to my lip as warmth trickles over it. I touch it, my face heating when my fingers come away red.
“You go on believing that,” she says. “Go ahead and hold on to all that magic. We’ll see who you manage to destroy first.”
24
Like Ghosts by Night
JACK
Ears ringing, I lie on the wavering top of the elevator car, palms resting against the cool metal, blinking up at the faint swing of flashlight beams cutting through the dusty shaft. Kai works fast, jerking the harness from my legs and cutting me free of the rope. “Get up. We have to go.”
My head feels foggy, disconnected from the rest of me. I cry out, pain ripping through my arm as she latches on to it and hauls me up. She hefts open the access hatch. It falls against the elevator car with a rattling smash. Fragments of stone and dust shower around me, and a bullet plinks down beside my foot.
“Come on,” she urges, shoving me toward the hatch as another bullet pings beside us. I drop into the elevator car, hitting the floor with a thud. The compartment shakes as Kai drops in beside me and the hatch slams closed.
The darkness inside the elevator car is disorienting. My arm’s wet, the sleeve of my jacket sticky and warm. I reach out to steady myself as Kai shuffles away from me.
Her hands slide over the walls. With a grunt, she pries open the elevator doors. Dim red light from an emergency exit sign spills into the car. Broken glass glitters like rubies in the hall. The floor is littered with plaster and debris, and the air is thin and heavy with dust.
Kai crouches beside me. “You okay?”
I manage a shallow nod. She slings my good arm over her shoulder, easing me upright. My head pounds as I follow her to a set of double doors at the end of the hall.
Seasons of Chaos Page 16
