Seasons of Chaos

by Elle Cosimano

  “Hang on, Jack. I’m coming,” I whisper as I crawl through the air duct after it.

  36

  Before I Sleep

  JACK

  Two years ago, the prospect of hunting wouldn’t have been so daunting. It would have been as simple as drawing a breath. Now I don’t even know where to start.

  “Where are we going?” Kai’s voice echoes through the tunnel, the toes of her shoes catching on my heels as I walk. I glare over my shoulder and she hangs back a bit. Just enough so she won’t keep tripping me.

  “We’re going to my room.” In his letter, Lyon said I should go back to my beginning to find what I seek. My old dorm room was the first and only home I ever knew here.

  “Are you crazy?” Kai squeezes alongside me, forcing me close to the wall. “Doug knows we’re here! He’s probably got Guards staking out your room. What makes you think he won’t be waiting for us inside?”

  “You have a better suggestion?” I pause at a fork in the tunnel. Flashlight clamped between my teeth, I peel open Lyon’s hand-drawn map and hold it in front of me, comparing it against the two paths ahead. I turn left. After a few paces, the tunnel ends abruptly.

  Kai huffs. “Give me the map.”

  “Not on your life.”

  “Clearly, we’re lost.”

  “You’re lost. I know exactly where I am.” I shine the light at the wall in front of me, turning slowly in the confined space. The walls are solid, but there’s supposed to be some kind of stairwell here. Or at least, there was once. I run my fingers over the grooves in the stone, wondering if Chronos cemented over the whole thing years ago. That would be just my luck. I bring Lyon’s drawing close to my face, squinting to read the tiny lines.

  “For Chronos’s sake, would you give me the damn map already? Why are men so reluctant to ask for help?”

  “I’d as soon let you take my smaze as let you take this map.”

  “I’d never take someone else’s magic.”

  I’m grateful she can’t see my wince in the dark. “You’d be surprised what you might do if you thought someone you loved was going to die.”

  “What you’re doing isn’t the same, Jack. That smaze belonged to you. Reclaiming something isn’t the same as stealing it,” she says thoughtfully. “Besides, I can’t take anyone’s magic. I’m human.”

  “So am I.”

  “But your magic is part of you. It has a connection to you. It should be drawn to you. And Lyon already said it was possible for you to reclaim it.”

  “He never said it would be easy.” I scratch the back of my neck, finding it hard to look her in the eyes. “What about yours? It must be in the Observatory somewhere.”

  She shakes her head, resting her weight against the tunnel wall. “The orbs were all smashed in the quake. It was lost during the Dismantling.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s okay,” she says with a tight smile. “I’ve made my peace with it.”

  “How do you make your peace with something like that? Doug promised you he’d help you and he lied through his teeth. Because of him, you’ll never have it back.”

  “Maybe I don’t deserve it,” she says quietly. “I didn’t have to help him. I made that choice. And now I have to live with the consequences. It’s too late to save my magic. The only part of me left here that matters now is Ruby.” She pushes off the wall and shifts her bow higher on her shoulder. “I guess we’re kind of like you and your smaze. . . . Ruby and I haven’t been together in a long time, but we’ll always be connected. I have to believe I’ll find her. That when I do, she’ll come with me.”

  Guilt lodges in the back of my throat as she turns to walk back the way we came.

  “Kai, wait. There’s something I need to tell you—”

  A low rumble starts under my feet. The ground begins to shake. I brace my hands against the sides of the tunnel as dust and pebbles clatter over us. Kai ducks, her eyes wide with panic.

  “What’s happening?” she asks. The ground shudders once more, then goes eerily still.

  “Pretty sure that’s Fleur.” An awed smile tugs at my lips. “And I’m guessing she’s pissed.”

  Kai watches the ceiling, swallowing hard. “Maybe when you find her, you can ask her not to do that again.”

  We wait, listening for an aftershock. The cave whistles softly. The edge of the map flutters as a cool draft hisses through a new crack in the wall. I trace it with my light to a hole in the ceiling. Kicking aside a pile of fallen stones, I stand underneath the hole and shine my light up. The beam reflects off a short metal rail.

  Those weren’t stairs on the map. It was a ladder.

  “Give me your bow,” I say, tucking the flashlight in my shirt pocket so the beam points up. Reluctantly, Kai shrugs out of her bow and hands it over. I lift it high, catching the bottom rung with the hooked end. The ladder slides down with a shriek.

  Dropping to a crouch, I lace my hands together and boost Kai up. She scales the rungs ahead of me, as eager to be out of the dusty, claustrophobic space as I am. I jump, and the ladder trembles as I snag a rung and haul myself up after her. My shoulder aches, and with a pang, I wonder where Amber, Julio, Poppy, and Marie are. If they felt Fleur’s quake and experienced the same relief I—

  An aftershock rocks the ladder, raining loose shale over our heads. Kai shrieks, losing her grip. She grasps a rung as she slides, her foot catching on my shoulder as she scrambles for leverage. We hold fast, waiting for the tremor to still.

  “Hurry,” I tell her. “Before the next one.”

  We clamber up the last few feet to an opening in the floor above us. Kai wriggles out of the tunnel, then reaches down and helps me through. My light bounces off walls of metal shelving.

  “Where are we?” Kai asks.

  “If Lyon’s map is right, we’re in a maintenance closet close to the Crux.” I dust myself off and crack the door. The overhead lights in the hall flicker like strobes. I duck back from the opening as a team of Guards ushers a group of Seasons and Handlers out of their rooms toward the Crux. The Winters’ arms are weighed down with backpacks and luggage, as if they’re being moved to another hall. I recognize a few of them. Kai peeks over my shoulder through the crack, hoping for a glimpse of her sister. Guards holler to each other on the other side of the plexiglass port at the end of the corridor. One of them points to his computer monitor, smacking its side. I glance up at the nearest camera, but there’s no blinking red light.

  “The quake must have taken down the network. Come on.” Once the group has cleared the Crux, I lead Kai through the corridor, away from the Guards. Voices bark down the hall. My hands shake with adrenaline as I kneel in front of the door to my old dorm room and slip a set of picks into the lock. Kai draws her bow, aiming it toward the sound of approaching boots.

  “Jack?” she whispers.

  “I’m hurrying.”

  “They’re coming!”

  A flashlight beam rounds the bend as the final pin slides home. I turn the knob, dragging Kai inside and shutting the door behind us. I fall back against it as the Guards thunder past, only flipping on my flashlight once I’m certain they’re gone.

  The sight of my old dorm room brings a rush of memories. I do a quick pass through each room, tearing open the shower curtain, swinging open every door and checking under the beds, trailing a string of soft curses when there’s no sign of my smaze anywhere.

  Kai’s sprawled on the floor, staring at the ceiling as she recovers her breath.

  “Looks like someone beat us here,” she says. Piles of loose papers and files are scattered around her. Our ratty old couch is flipped upside down, the hard drive’s dismantled, and the glass top of Chill’s desk is cracked. My stasis chamber is gone, its wiry guts dangling from the wall.

  I kick aside Chill’s keyboard, a sudden heaviness settling in my chest. The room still smells faintly like him. Like Dorito cheese and contraband beef jerky. With a pang, I bend to pick up the remains of his plush polar
bear. Its seams are ripped open, the stuffing spilling out. I carry it into our old bunk room and set it back on his bed. My closet doors hang open and my old rolled-up sketches of the Observatory are gone. And the footlocker where I kept Fleur’s ornaments . . .

  I slam the closet door and drag my hands through my hair. I should have paid Boreas to pack them up and store them. Should have asked Lyon to ship it all to our home in Cuernavaca. And now Doug’s taken them. I can guess why he’d want the maps, but why her ornaments?

  Rubbing my eyes, I lumber back to the front room. Kai’s righted Chill’s desk chair. She plops down into it, tearing open a bag of chips. She holds one out to me. “I found them in a drawer. Candy bars, too,” she says. “And there are some bottled waters in the mini-fridge under the window—”

  “I know where my own mini-fridge is,” I say irritably, ripping the bag from her hand. “These are Chill’s.”

  With a scowl, she snatches it back, tucking a chip forcefully into her mouth. “In case you haven’t noticed, we haven’t had anything to eat besides bread and water since we got to London. I don’t care whose chips they are. I’m hungry. And you should eat, too.” She pitches a Twix at me, and my stomach grumbles like a damn traitor for it. With an infuriated sigh, I tear into the wrapper, jamming a whole candy bar in my mouth.

  “We should stay and rest for a while,” she suggests. “Maybe your smaze will come.”

  I answer around a mouthful of chocolate. “We’ve been down here for more than a day already, and it hasn’t bothered to show itself.”

  “Maybe we’re moving too fast. Like, remember when you were little and your mom would tell you if you ever got lost, just stay put so it’d be easier for her to find you?”

  I choke on a dry laugh. “I stayed put for years waiting for my mother. I promise, she never came looking for me.”

  “Oh,” Kai says quietly. I hate the undercurrent of pity in it. The last thing I need or deserve is Kai’s sympathy. “Either way, it wouldn’t hurt to rest,” she suggests. “Aside from that nap in the catacombs, you haven’t slept since we left Cuernavaca. And you lost a lot of blood.”

  I pace the room. If I sit down, I might not get up again. “We don’t have time to rest. We need to find my smaze. And then I need to find Fleur and Chill.”

  She stares into the bag of chips, searching for a whole one in the crumbs. “Relax. He won’t kill them. Not yet, anyway,” she amends. “He’ll wait until he finds you.”

  I watch her face, wondering what kind of relationship she and Doug had for the short time they were here, planning their escape. She talks as if she knows him intimately. And I can’t reconcile that with the person Lyon trusted with those maps.

  I pluck the second Twix from the wrapper and chase it with a bottled water. Thirst slaked and hunger momentarily sated, fatigue finally digs in its claws. I slip off my jacket and holster, the air too thin and warm in the powerless room.

  The sleeve of my jacket sticks to the crusting blood on my shirt. I peel aside the tear in the fabric, unsurprised to find two popped stitches and a hell of a bruise.

  “How are you feeling?” Kai asks.

  “Like I got shot and fell down an elevator shaft.” My stitches pull as I flip the sofa right-side up and drop into the sagging cushions. It sucks me deep into its familiar embrace and I breathe in the smell of it. Kai crunches the last of Chill’s chips, shaking the bag upside down over her mouth. I throw an arm over my face, pretending she’s not here, pretending it’s Chill sitting across from me, reeking like Doritos and trying my patience.

  They’re alive. They have to be, I tell myself as I fall asleep. Because I can’t picture a world without them in it.

  37

  Waste them All

  FLEUR

  The light at the end of the duct grows brighter. I crawl toward it faster on aching hands and knees, following the smaze around a final turn before tumbling into a cavern somewhere in the catacombs.

  A single torch lights the chamber, casting eerie shadows over the archways carved into the stone. I’m surrounded by a maze of cold, damp options, each pathway darker and more uninviting than the next. The smaze brushes my ankle, nudging me into one of the narrow tunnels. I pluck the torch from the wall, uttering a swear when the flame begins to shrink and the tunnel ahead dissolves into a drafty black hole.

  “You’ve got to be kidding.” The air smells like moldering bodies. A steady drip, drip, drip bounces off the floor, and an animal skitters somewhere close. I move slowly through the tight passage, my fingers trailing over the mossy surface of the walls. I can hardly see my hands in front of my face, and I drag my feet to avoid tripping or plunging into a hole.

  The smaze zooms around me, making the last of the torch fire waver. “I’m going as fast as I can. I can’t see. It’s too dark.” This has to be Jack’s smaze. It’s too impatient to be anyone else’s. It swerves back through the tunnel, chilling the air as it whips past me.

  Abruptly, the smaze stops. It hovers perfectly still, alert for something I can’t sense. I draw in a breath, smelling nothing but the musty foulness of the catacombs.

  “What is it?” I lower my voice to a whisper as it occurs to me that the things I should fear most in this place aren’t easily tracked by scent. The Guards could be anywhere. Or Doug.

  The smaze surges past me, back the way we came, the breeze strong enough to lift my hair as the tiny flame at the end of my torch blows out. Breath held, I wait for my eyes to adjust to the darkness. But there’s no light here. None at all. As the silence stretches out indefinitely, my other senses sharpen to compensate.

  “Come back here!” I whisper, groping at the walls, taking a few cautious steps forward. The temperature in the tunnels grows warmer, and I panic as I realize the smaze must really be gone. “Wait! You can’t leave me alone in here! Where are you?” My voice echoes differently here, as if I’ve entered a larger space. I reach out, taking tiny steps. A low hum vibrates in the distance. A dim glow burns through the blackness ahead, and I head toward it, desperate for light.

  Slowly, the glow begins to brighten and the hum grows louder. After a few more steps, I can clearly see the outline of an arched opening into another room.

  At first glance, the room seems empty, and I step cautiously toward the hulking shadowy shapes inside. The hum is almost deafening now.

  Stasis chambers.

  Dozens of them. Lined up in rows. Most of them dark. A handful of them are plugged into generators. The room’s thick with the smell of exhaust that’s being sucked by huge fans into a hole in the cavern’s ceiling.

  I move toward a row of lighted chambers. The faces of sleeping Seasons are silhouetted inside, their control panels blinking. I recognize one of them—a Spring who lived across the hall from Poppy and me. Poppy had heard rumors that she’d met a girl and moved to France. That she’d been freed by Lyon and Gaia. If the rumors were true, why is she here, in the belly of the Observatory? If she did decide to come back, why isn’t she sleeping in her dorm?

  Voices and laughter carry through the chamber, along with the squeak of a rolling cart. I duck down, scurrying on hands and knees between two unlit stasis chambers. Breath held, I press back against a stone slab as the voices grow louder.

  “How many more chambers does Chronos want us to bring down?”

  “As many as we can fit.” I can hear their grunts as they heft a chamber off a cart. It scrapes against the stone as they ease it onto a slab. “We lost another six Seasons yesterday. Control Room says they’re all in the wind. He’s dispatching another hunting party tonight.”

  “I don’t understand why he’s going to all the trouble of rounding them up and bringing them back. Why not just make more?”

  “Commander Lixue says he’s not ready yet. Besides,” he adds over the hum of the fans, “Chronos says they’re the property of the Observatory and they belong here. He wants them all brought in for Reconditioning and Reassignment. Here’s a list of the ones he’s bringing in to
night and the chambers he wants on standby.”

  I crouch low as a switch flips and a soft halo of light washes around the slab. I draw my knees tight against my chest, pulling the toes of my sneakers out of the light.

  “Do you smell that?” one of them asks.

  “Smell what?”

  “Something sweet.”

  I breathe shallowly, reaching into my pocket for the nail file.

  “Can’t smell anything over the fumes.” The Guard flips on a few more switches.

  “Hey,” another one says. I catch the reflection of his transmitter light in the chrome frame of the stasis chamber across from me. I don’t dare move. “Control Room’s calling. Commander needs us upstairs. She says it’s urgent.”

  The Guards’ boots move away from me. My held breath pours out of me as their voices disappear. Lifting my head, I peer over the stasis chambers. A few are still dark, but several more are lit, the blinking yellow lights on their control panels set to standby.

  My stomach turns. This room . . . it’s just a giant holding cell.

  Doug’s Guards are hunting freed Seasons, forcing them back, abducting them through the ley lines and tearing them from their new lives, as if he could ever put this place back the way it was. As if any amount of Reconditioning could ever make a freed Season forget what they had.

  Enraged, I look around at the dozens of chambers waiting to be occupied. How many, like Jack and me, like Chill and Poppy, will be ripped out of each other’s arms tonight?

  I grab a heavy fire extinguisher from its mount on the wall. Careful to avoid the occupied chambers, I swing it into the closest empty one, shattering the dome and smashing the control panel. If the stasis chambers aren’t online when the hunting party sets out, they’ll have no way to bring those Seasons back. I ruin every empty chamber in the cavern, one by one.

  When I’m done, I stare at my bleeding hands. I won’t let Doug turn this place into the prison it was. We worked too hard and gave up too much for that.