Seasons of Chaos

by Elle Cosimano

  I scoop the black sash from the floor and tie it hurriedly around the hole in the head of the staff where the crystal used to be, hoping everyone but Lixue has been too distracted to notice it’s gone. I don’t need anyone challenging me before I have a chance to find it. The staff is so cold, it burns to the touch, and I grit my teeth, determined not to show it.

  “Lixue. You’re Commander of my new Guard,” I announce as I descend the dais. “I want all the wings and portals locked down. No one is to leave their dorm rooms. You have two hours to screen and deputize a new squad. Only the strongest Seasons. And none with questionable loyalties.” I stop in front of her, the head of my scythe close to her face. She doesn’t blink. “Anyone who declares an intent to rebel will be ashed. I assume you can handle that.”

  She gives a short, tight nod, her voice cracking as she says, “Yes, sir.”

  Her eyes are a flickering jumble of memories, moving too fast to read. I grab one fleeting image as it flashes by. All I get is the past, a moment—an image of her rushing the frozen lake in Cuernavaca alongside me. The effort I expend for that single second leaves my head splitting. Satisfied for now, I dismiss her.

  My pulse slows, my mind sharpening as I focus on the logistics of operations. These are things I know. Things I’m good at. Things I can control.

  “Bradwell.” I point my scythe at a lanky, baby-faced kid standing closest to the Control Room. “Congratulations. You’ve just been promoted. I want all tracking systems back online within the hour. And check that we have power and ventilation to all the wings.” Every Season we lose is a Season I have to find and replace, and I don’t have time for that. The sooner I get this place stabilized, the sooner I can hunt for Jack.

  “Yes, Chronos.” Bradwell bolts, nearly mowing over a muscular girl with a shaved head and gauges in her ears as he rushes out the door.

  The girl glares at his back as he leaves.

  “Jora,” I bark, startling her to attention. She uncrosses her arms, her face paling as I gesture to the sickly, sweating humans in the room. The Guards who had their magic stripped by Lyon look empty and lost, their hands shaking uselessly at their sides. “Take them to the infirmary. After they’ve been treated and cleaned up, they’re to report back to you. Put them in charge of the support staff . . . kitchen, custodial, and maintenance crews . . .” I pause, catching a flicker of a vision. A memory from Jora’s past that leaves me unsettled; she has sticky fingers. “And send a maintenance technician to my office. I want every one of Lyon’s locks re-keyed. Until I say otherwise, access to my office and apartment will be restricted.”

  “Restricted to whom, sir?”

  “Me.”

  “What about your security detail? How will we—?”

  I turn, fixing her with my strange new eye. She withers under it as if she knows what I’m seeing. “Was I unclear?”

  “No, sir,” she says weakly.

  “Then what are you still doing here?” My eye trails her as she double-times it to the hall. I turn, surveying the last Guard in the room.

  “Zahra.” The fierce-looking girl wipes blood from her cheek. She was new to Michael’s Guard before the rebellion started, but she was sharp. Good with a computer. “I want a full report on the whereabouts of every freed Season up top. I want every single one of them found and a recovery team assembled. Once that’s done, you’re going to find Jack Sommers and Fleur Attwell and locate their former Handlers. I want to know exactly where they are. And bring Kai Sampson’s personnel file to me.”

  Kai may be gone for now. But she’ll be back for the one person she cares about—her sister. And when she comes, I’ll be ready for her.

  But first, I have a crystal to find.

  March’s size is the only bright spot on his résumé, but I didn’t have much of a candidate pool to pick from when Lixue found him and brought him to the Control Room, and I appointed him head of my security detail. Jora may be a dishonest thief, but she was right; I’m Chronos now, and I should have a bodyguard. There’s no telling when someone—even among those closest to me—might try to slip a knife in my back.

  Orb curled in one arm and staff in the other, I retrace my steps back to my new office, taking inventory of the visible damage along the way. March trods behind me, struggling to keep up. His pride radiates from him, nauseatingly sweet, and I’m already regretting my decision to hire him.

  I station him outside the door, dropping the staff on the carpet the moment the locks seal behind me. My hands are blistered where they gripped the handle and I gingerly prod the angry, raw skin. I don’t remember Lyon’s hands being scarred when he’d reached for the staff during our meeting last week. And I never saw a single blemish on Michael’s manicured fingers. So why are mine being destroyed? Is this some kind of test?

  I set the orb on the desk, bracing it between a few hardback books to keep it from rolling off. Gaia’s magic thrashes inside it, sparking and hissing whenever I get close to the glass. My throat starts to hurt again just looking at it.

  My head pounds and a persistent pain has been spreading in my chest. Denver once confided to me that acute panic can feel like a heart attack. I dig frantically in Lyon’s desk drawer for Xanax or antacids, kicking myself for my stupidity when I find absolutely nothing. This place is shrouded in magic. Heartburn and myocardial infarctions don’t exist here, so why do I feel like I’m dying?

  Determined to ignore the nagging burn, I rummage through Lyon’s cabinets, searching every drawer and niche for the missing eye, certain I’ll feel better once it’s in my hands. The crystal will show me how to control Gaia’s magic. It will show me where to find Jack. And how to get the staff to stop burning the crap out of me every time I touch it.

  I sling open a cabinet door, muscles tensing when a prismatic rainbow dances over the wood, but it’s only the light bouncing off a crystal decanter. I swirl the amber liquid inside. The pungent whiff of alcohol stings my nose before I even break the seal, and my eyes water at the burn as I greedily swallow some down. Falling into Lyon’s leather chair, I tip my head back and wait for the liquor to hit my blood, begging for it to numb the pain and wrap me in a hazy layer of gauze. But it only makes the burn in my chest worse and exacerbates my headache.

  I rub my sunken eye socket. Maybe Kai was right about stolen magic being cursed. But if that’s the case, then why didn’t Lyon lose an eye when he stole the magic from Michael? What was his curse? Lyon didn’t even want the power of the eye. He put a blinder over the most powerful tool he’d stolen from his predecessor. Maybe that was Lyon’s curse—he was too fearful of it, too weak to wield so much power. He hadn’t even bothered to take Ananke’s. Instead, he’d left it trapped in a cage in his office. But then, so had Michael. . . .

  I pivot in the desk chair, staring at the hole I made in the snake’s enclosure.

  When I left this office, I had both my eyes. I had Ananke’s ability to see the future. To see it clearly. But the moment I took Lyon’s magic, that ability was gone. And so was my eye.

  If the old stories are true, Ananke had gouged out Michael’s eye to punish him for coveting her power and seeking to control her. He had stolen her eye as payback and put it in his staff. I rub the stubborn pain in my chest. Is this my curse? Is their magic fighting inside me now? Did Ananke’s magic burn out my eye just to spite Michael’s?

  It takes two eyes to see clearly. . . .

  The eye. I need to find it and put it back in the staff. Maybe then I’ll get my vision back.

  I tear through every corner of my new office, only pausing when a maintenance tech comes to re-key the locks. The missing crystal isn’t anywhere here, but there are only so many places the old man could have hidden it. I’m just about to lift the throw rug from the floor when there’s a knock on the door.

  “Chronos?” Lixue steps over the threshold, a tablet under her arm. Her attention drifts to the broken terrarium and the pile of ash on the floor.

  “Sit.” I point to the chair in fron
t of my desk.

  She perches on the edge of the seat, as far from Gaia’s magic as she can manage. The staff leans against the wall beside me, and she darts an anxious glance at it. I hesitate, trying once more to pick through Lixue’s memories. The images are slippery, hard to grab. Choosing one, I chase it and focus, forcing it to slow, but I’m only able to hold it for a moment before it’s lost in a tidal wave of others. But that one moment, a flicker of her in her new role over the last hour, was enough. It has to be.

  I reach for the scythe. “No one else is to know about this.” I wait for her small nod before tearing the sash from the staff.

  A glimmer of understanding passes over her face.

  “From now on, you have one job. Lyon must have hidden the eye. It has to be in the Observatory somewhere. You, and you alone, are to search for it. Jora can’t be trusted with this.” She nods as if she’s already surmised this much. “Lyon’s apartment, his old office in the Winter wing, his old staff quarters . . . I want them all turned upside down until you find it.”

  “Yes, Chronos. But what about Jack?”

  “What about him?”

  “We think we’ve located Jack, Fleur, and the others.”

  “What do you mean, you think?” I growl.

  “Their personnel records have all been wiped from the servers. It’s as if Gaia and Lyon didn’t want anyone to know where they are. But Zahra pulled up all the Observatory’s expense reports since the rebellion. We found some unnamed purchases in the books. The amounts matched the ones on these deeds.” She holds out the tablet.

  I set down the staff and snatch the device from her hand, scrolling through land title records and deeds of trust. Lyon and Gaia purchased three properties less than a month after Michael’s death—one in Southern California overlooking the coast; one in Fairbanks, Alaska; and a villa in Cuernavaca, Mexico.

  “Give Zahra a promotion,” I say under my breath as I study a map of the layout of the villa.

  “There’s more. Kai’s personnel records have been wiped from the servers. But we tracked down her former Handler. She’s a teacher in the Summer wing. We got her to cough up an old repurposed hard drive from their dorm. We were able to recover some deleted files.” Lixue reaches across the desk and taps open another folder on the tablet. I scroll through exchanges between Kai and her sister, skimming dozens of scanned handwritten letters between them. Plans and bargains, memories and arguments . . . promises made, going back nearly fifty years.

  These mistakes she’s atoning for—the redemption she’s seeking—go back much farther than Cuernavaca. They go back to the very beginning.

  Kai’s been scheming all along, fighting to be with her sister since the year they first got here.

  Kai’s never been loyal to Michael. Or Lyon. The only person who ever mattered to Kai was Ruby.

  “The sister . . . Where is she?” I ask.

  “We don’t know. We can’t find any Summers named Ruby who have any documented connection to Kai.”

  “Keep looking.” Lyon probably wiped all those records from the servers, too. He had no intention of making this easy for me. “I want a report the minute you find her.”

  Kai Sampson walked out of here with nothing. Nothing but a pack of lies and the clothes on her back, exactly like I told her she would if she put her trust in Lyon. She has no money, no passport, no food, no weapons. She’ll have to stop somewhere. It’s bound to slow her down. All I need to do is stay one step ahead of her.

  “Any sign of Sampson?” I ask.

  “Bardwell got a hit on a street cam in Peckham,” Lixue offers quickly. “She got off a bus there an hour ago.”

  I hand the tablet back to my Commander. “How fast can you assemble a search-and-capture team?”

  “Right away, sir. Should I dispatch them to Peckham?”

  “No, not to Peckham.” I may not be able to see the future, but I don’t need a crystal to see the long game in front of me. “Have your team in my office in an hour. Before this is over, Kai Sampson will come to me.”

  12

  Snatch Me Away

  JACK

  The brush of Fleur’s lips over my scars sends a shiver through me. Her fingers trace the tight skin, awakening a longing that erases everything else. I close my eyes, soaking up the warmth of her body behind me. Suddenly, she goes still.

  “Jack?”

  My throat tightens as she whispers my name. Every nagging thought I’ve had over the past few weeks quiets as I turn toward her.

  She glances up from the passports in her hand. Tears gather in her eyes as she sets them down on the blanket. Inching up on her knees, she places her hands on my chest, bringing her face close to mine.

  “I changed my mind about the s’mores.” She leans into me until our foreheads are touching and my nose brushes her cheek. It’s wet with tears. I follow one as it slides toward the edge of her lips. Achingly slow, she tips her head, her mouth moving softly over mine.

  I toss the skewer into the fire. My hands find her waist, tracing her shape. Her mouth tastes like salt and want.

  A low groan rises inside me as the kiss deepens. My hands climb up her back as we rise to our feet. Unwilling to break apart, we stagger across the grass, bodies pressed together, fingers tangled in each other’s hair, all tongue and teeth and touch and breath, until her back collides with the wall of the villa and I can’t get any closer to her.

  My cell vibrates in my front pocket.

  “Your phone,” she pants.

  “Don’t care.”

  “What about the fire?” she whispers, her head thrown back against the side of the house.

  “It’ll burn out.”

  She gasps as my teeth graze her neck. Her hands slide under my shirt as we stumble into the house.

  “What about the breakers?” she rasps. Her breath in my ear nearly undoes me. I can’t even form a coherent thought.

  “Leave them off.”

  We fumble through the dark, tripping into furniture as we maneuver blindly up the stairs, knocking over the burned-out votives on the landing as we slam into the wall. I’m desperate for air, but too hungry to let go. She peels my shirt over my head. Unfastens the top button of my jeans as we trip up the rest of the steps. I pull her hair free from its tie, the long pink ends tumbling down around her face, traces of her shampoo sweetening the air. I toss the lily carelessly to the floor as we reach the hall.

  My fingers dig into her hips as I walk her backward into our bedroom.

  “Jack . . . ?” she whispers as her heel bumps the foot of the bed. “Did you hear something?”

  My mouth is buried in her hair, kissing the soft groove where her shoulder meets her neck. “Just your foot,” I murmur, snaking my arms around her waist, ready to lift her onto the bed.

  “Not that. Listen.” She presses me back by the chest. Her body goes rigid in my arms and her eyes shimmer in the dark. “Did you hear that?”

  I pull back to listen, both of us breathing hard. A soft clatter echoes in the hall, the same sound the glass votives had made when we’d knocked them over in the stairwell.

  A chill snakes up my spine as I unwind myself from Fleur.

  I turn for the door. A sudden burst of sound and movement rushes in from the hall. Someone grabs my hands and jerks them behind my back. Fleur shouts as I’m dragged across the floor, the terror on her face captured in the moonlight as she’s surrounded by three shadowy figures. I thrash, managing to free one arm. There’s a grunt as I drive my elbow back hard. One of the shadows whirls toward me and I wind back a fist. As I swing, someone kicks my legs out from behind. My knees smack down onto the tile, and my arms are wrenched painfully behind me.

  “What do you want?” I shout as two of the figures grab Fleur by her wrists, holding her immobile against the wall. I count at least four shadows in the room. They’re not Seasons. Fleur would have smelled them coming. We would have known they were close. The weather would have given them away hours ago. “Take whatever you wa
nt and get out! Leave her alone!”

  Fleur throws her weight forward, but one of the figures lashes an arm across her chest, holding her back. A silver scythe is embroidered on his sleeve, the familiar outline of the metallic threads sharp and clear, even in the semidarkness.

  These aren’t burglars or thieves. These are Guards.

  A red light blinks in the periphery of my vision. A transmitter. Fleur’s eyes widen as they find mine.

  Panic swells inside me. I lurch against the Guard behind me, but he holds me down. “Take your hands off her!”

  “Target in custody,” one of them says in a rasping voice I’ve heard before, but my brain’s too scrambled to place it.

  Fleur fights, wrenching to get free of them. One of the Guards grunts and curses when her fist smacks into his jaw. Her knee swings up, connecting with a groin. The temperature in the room plummets as the Guards summon their magic to subdue her. Rime crackles over the villa walls. The warm air condenses, filling the room with cold, dense fog. A scream erupts from Fleur’s mouth, streaming out in a thick white cloud as the frost creeps over her arms.

  I suck in a frigid breath. The cold . . . it’s going to kill her.

  Surging upright, I tear myself free of the Guard. Something breaks over the back of my head, the shatter of glass ringing in my ears as my knees give out.

  Fleur shouts my name, her voice distorted and far away. I shake my head as the room wavers in and out of focus.

  Glass cuts into my knees as I push myself upright. A violent wind whips through the house, brushing away the fog. The smell of ozone fills the air. It crackles with static. My hair stands on end as Fleur’s magic electrifies the room.

  The Guards turn toward a sudden rustle outside the open windows. They lurch back as thick, ropy vines rush in over the sills. The vines slither over the floor, darting toward their ankles. One of the Guards reaches for a sheath at his waist as the plants coil to strike.

  “No! Stop!” I surge forward as he draws the blade, but a vine throws me away from the fray, sending me skidding across the floor. Fleur cries out as the Guard slashes viciously at the vines. The plant falls limp, tumbling back over the ledge.