Seasons of Chaos

by Elle Cosimano

  DOUG

  The faux window in Sommers’s old dorm room flickers on when I step inside and switch on the light. Lixue slips in behind me and moves past me into the adjoining bedroom.

  I run a finger over a low set of shelves, pausing at a vintage turntable and thumbing through a collection of old vinyl punk albums. A stack of video game cases topples over as I reach for a peeling Rubik’s cube.

  Jack Sommers and I lived in the same wing, walked the same halls, and ate in the same cafeteria together for decades before I became a Guard, without ever really getting to know each other. There had been the occasional Winter social event or clandestine dorm party, where Noelle would inevitably gravitate toward him and start a conversation, and that was usually about the same time I left. Something about the way she had looked at him—the way everyone had looked at him, as if he was some mystery everyone wanted to solve—had always pissed me off. Lyon had been my faculty adviser when I first became a Winter, years before Jack. But then Jack came along, and every time I turned around, there he was. It was as if Lyon had some low-key obsession with the new kid; he was always playing favorites, devoting all his time to “help Jack acclimate” because Sommers was too much of a whining brat to realize he’d won the fucking lottery when he died and got to come here. The next year, I requested a change of advisers, just so I wouldn’t have to listen to it.

  When Michael invited Sommers to join the Guard, I was sure it was because Lyon had given Jack a leg up. Only later did I come to realize why Michael had tried recruiting him . . . because he had seen something in Jack’s future, or maybe in his own, and was attempting to derail a runaway train before it even left the station. And yet, Jack turned him down.

  I toss the cube. Dust scatters where it lands on the sunken cushions of a crappy old sofa. I move to the desk in the corner. Chill’s workstation is the most impressive thing in the room—three sleek, high-end monitors, a pricey ergonomic keyboard, and a carefully dismantled hard drive. Guts and wires spill out of its shell, ensuring it’s completely useless to me.

  I dump out a desk drawer. Crumbs spill from an open bag of chips and a roach skitters out, disappearing under a pile of empty file folders. The trash can under the desk is mounded with shredded documents and photos. Jack and his Handler were careful when they left.

  I follow the sound of Lixue’s rustling to their shared bedroom and watch her tear through what little Jack and his Handler left here. Unlike Jack, his Handler seems to have amassed a few personal possessions over the years. Jack’s side of the room feels stark by comparison—no framed family photos, trinkets, trophies, or hobby paraphernalia that might reveal more about him than the bits and pieces I’ve managed to string together from the few insignificant records Lyon didn’t waste time purging from the servers. It’s as if Jack Sommers never bothered to settle in. As if, from the very beginning, he’d never intended to stay.

  Lixue is thorough, picking through the guts of abandoned electronic devices for anything worth saving. She overturns the beds, ripping apart pillows and cushions and checking the spaces between. Suddenly, the rhythmic sounds of her rummaging quiet. I turn to find her talking in a low voice, one hand pressed to her transmitter. Her eyes snap to mine. “It’s Zahra. She says Sampson and Sommers boarded a flight out of Mexico City. They’ll be landing at Heathrow in twelve hours.”

  Which means they’ll be at our front door soon. “Then you’d better hurry and find me that damn crystal. I want it in my hands before Jack makes it down here.”

  “Yes, sir.” Lixue disconnects and starts ransacking Jack’s closets and drawers. It has to be somewhere in this room. We’ve searched everywhere else.

  “Chronos, in here.” Lixue drags a metal footlocker from the bottom of the closet, kicking aside rolled tubes of drawing paper as she hauls the box to the middle of the room.

  I stoop to pick one up. The curled pages are reluctant to unroll, and the dark, sketched pencil lines smudge where I hold the edges down.

  Barely legible notes fill the margins. The intersecting lines are marked with x’s and question marks. I recognize the shape of the structure in the drawing before I’m able to decipher Jack’s handwriting. A circular hall fills the center of the first page, the radiating spokes of each wing spreading over the next four sheets.

  These are sections of a map. A map of the Observatory.

  The pages are marked with dates, as details were added or erased over time. The earliest goes back to 1989. The section of the catacombs under the north wing is roughly sketched, the tunnels under Jack’s dorm room meticulously labeled. Some are marked with obvious dead ends. Others are left unfinished with question marks.

  He’s been plotting the exits from the Winter wing—tunnels and access points, stairwells and closets—since the year he first arrived. Before Fleur even got here. As if he was itching to break free of this place since day one. But the catacombs were off-limits to Seasons and Handlers, which means Jack had help.

  And I can guess who it was.

  I toss the maps to the floor. “I want every tunnel under the north wing searched as soon as we’re done here.”

  “What should I do with these?” Lixue squats in front of the open footlocker. Something clear and shiny dangles from her hand, casting rainbows over the floor. Lixue starts as I snatch the object from her hand, but it’s just a Christmas ornament, a snowman bearing no resemblance to the missing crystal from the staff. One segment of the snowman’s body is too small, another too large, all of them too round to be the eye.

  I loop the ribbon around my finger and study the snowman. From what little I’ve seen of Jack’s room, he doesn’t strike me as the sentimental type, but the footlocker is full of keepsakes . . . ceramic, glass, and silver trinkets. There must be close to thirty of them. . . .

  I kneel beside the box as I realize what I’m staring at.

  “What is it?” Lixue asks.

  “These aren’t Jack’s. They’re Fleur’s.” These are the memorials she made for him each spring after she killed him.

  In Lixue’s eyes, I see a reflection of a shared memory. The day our team found one of the ornaments hanging from a pine tree in some backwoods town in Virginia. Jack’s initials had been carved in the bark. That was all the evidence I’d needed to justify Fleur’s Reconditioning. Lixue had been with me that day when we cornered Fleur in an alley and confronted her about her feelings for Jack. And Noelle . . . she had been the one to deliver Fleur’s punishment. Clearly, she hadn’t learned anything from it; she’d helped them escape anyway. And it got her killed.

  “Why would he leave them here?” Lixue asks. “I mean, it’s obvious why he abandoned the maps—he would have known he’d never have use for them again. But why keep these here when he was so careful to shred everything else?”

  Unless he cared about them too much to destroy them.

  I fish a silver angel from the box and hold it dangling from its ribbon as I read the inscription.

  Love, all alike, no season knows, nor clime, nor hours, days, months, which are the rags of time . . .

  The line of old poetry reads like a love note. Or a code. Regardless, if these ornaments are meaningful to Jack, all the more reason for me to hang them like bread crumbs throughout the Observatory, just to taunt him when he gets here.

  “Take the box and the maps to my office.”

  “Yes, Chronos.” Carefully, she places all the ornaments back in the footlocker and collects the maps.

  I slip the silver angel into my pocket, certain I have all I need to find Jack once he gets here. He and Kai will probably hide in the catacombs under the Winter wing. Kai will break off in search of her sister while Jack forms a plan to find Fleur. With any luck, Jack won’t be the only thing I’ll uncover down there. The maps are all it would take to find him and smoke him out of his hole, but I won’t need to. I’ll have the eye. And I’ll have Gaia’s magic. Then all I’ll have to do is dangle his shiny angel in front of him and Jack Sommers will come to me.
>
  20

  Into the Storm

  JACK

  Rain pours down in billowing gray sheets when we duck out of the terminal at Heathrow and jump into a waiting cab. I give the driver an address on Park Vista, a row house on the north side of Greenwich Park. The entry portal to the north wing is familiar ground, and once I’m in, the Winter wing will put me closer to Lyon’s old office.

  I wipe my face on my sleeve, but my jacket’s just as soaked. The familiar damp cold is as bone deep as it is depressing, and every inch of me aches for our home in Cuernavaca. For Fleur.

  I drag my phone from my pocket. As Kai makes small talk with the driver, I use the last of the dying battery to check my messages. My last voice mail came hours ago, right after we boarded our flight.

  “Jack, it’s Amber. I’ve been trying to reach you. We found Poppy. She’s on her way to London. Please don’t do anything stupid until we get there. Call me when you get this.”

  I try reaching each of them, but my calls go straight to voice mail, and then my battery dies.

  Kai pulls back her wet hood, stripping off her wig as soon as we’re clear of the airport. She shoves it inside her backpack, the zipper catching carelessly on a long pink strand as she closes the bag around it. The sight of it invites mental images that make my stomach turn.

  I lean against the window, willing the cab to move faster as beads of rain slide sideways across the glass. It’s nearly an hour’s drive to the Observatory, and then there’s the matter of figuring out how to get in without being spotted.

  Kai stares straight ahead, her thoughts unreadable in the dark. I don’t know what she’s expecting once we get through the portal, but as far as I’m concerned, once we make it into the Winter wing, she’s on her own.

  I turn to read a sign as it rushes past.

  “Hey,” I call up to the driver, rapping on the partition as he detours toward Peckham. “Where are we going? This isn’t the way to Greenwich Park.”

  The driver’s eyes flick to Kai in the rearview mirror.

  “We’re making a stop first,” she says.

  “We don’t have time for any stops.”

  She pitches her voice low. “You may think you have it all figured out, Lancelot, but I know what’s waiting for us in there, and I’m not stepping foot in that place without a weapon. Neither should you.” Brightly colored streetlights reflect off her face as we approach a part of town I’d prefer not to venture into at night.

  The driver turns down a narrow alley, and the cab lurches to a stop in front of a closed steel door. Everything about the place feels like a warning. I don’t even know where we are, but the security bars covering the door and the broken bulbs above it tell me enough. “It’s three o’clock in the morning. The place is obviously closed. We should just—”

  Kai passes a wad of bills through the partition to the driver, slings her backpack over her shoulder, and gets out. The driver glances at me in his mirror, waiting for me to do the same. With a muttered swear, I grab my own bag and follow her.

  I watch the alley as Kai leans on the buzzer. A panel slides open in the door. An eye peers through it, the dark pupil bouncing to Kai, then to me, before the panel snaps closed.

  Kai grabs the bars and gives them a violent shake. “Come on, Auggie! Open the damn door!”

  A dead bolt screeches and the door swings open. The man’s gray whiskers catch the low light as he jerks his chin toward me through the bars. “That one’s not welcome.”

  “Great, we’re all in agreement.” I tug Kai by the sleeve. “Come on, let’s go.”

  Kai shakes me off. “I just need to pick up a few things, and we’ll be out of your hair, Auggie. I promise. Augustus Poole, meet Jack Sommers,” Kai says, as if the guy didn’t just tell me to fuck off. “Jack Sommers, meet my good friend Auggie.”

  Augustus Poole’s name tells me everything I need to know about him. He isn’t a Summer—at least not anymore—but he was probably someone’s Handler once, a long time ago, if the lines around his eyes and the silver in his scruff are any indication. Some of the tension leaves my shoulders. He doesn’t seem like much of a threat.

  Auggie grumbles to himself as he unlocks the security door and ushers us inside. We follow him down a dark hall into some kind of shop. Two cracked glass display cases sit in the middle of the floor, the mildew-stained walls behind them piled high with boxes and loose junk. The shadows sway with the swing of a lone lightbulb, making it hard to focus.

  Auggie settles himself onto a stool and leans an elbow against a display case. A huge black fly alights on a stain on his shirt. “I told you it’s not safe for you to come back here, girl.”

  “I don’t have a choice. My sister’s down there, Auggie. I can’t leave her.”

  He shakes his head. “It’s suicide, whatever you’re planning.” The fly takes to the air and hovers around me. I wave it away, but it circles back. “There’ve been more quakes,” Auggie says.

  “Bad?” Kai asks.

  “Aftershocks, mostly. I can’t reach anyone in the Summer wing. Power must be down. That place is going to self-destruct, and you don’t want to be anywhere near it when that happens. That Lausks boy has no idea what he’s done—”

  I wind back to swat the fly as it buzzes past me again. Auggie’s hand shoots out, trapping my wrist. “Don’t.” There’s a firm pressure in his grip and murder in his eyes. The fly takes one more pass around me and alights on Auggie’s shoulder before I realize what it is—or rather, who it is. It must be a Summer. Maybe Auggie’s.

  I lift my hands to show I mean no harm as Auggie lets go. “Sorry, didn’t realize.”

  Kai touches his sleeve, drawing his attention. “We only need a few things,” she says, gesturing to a stack of boxes behind him. “Then we’ll be gone.”

  Auggie eases off his stool and retreats behind the display cases, shoving aside a pile of boxes to reveal a panel in the wall. It opens to a dark stairwell, and Auggie motions for us to follow as he starts to descend. I duck my head, the wooden risers creaking under my weight, the low ceiling nearly brushing my head as we enter a cellar. The room is dimly lit with pull-chain lights, the walls lined with racks of wooden shelves. It’s like a doomsday prepper’s arsenal, every surface cluttered with collections of simple weapons.

  Kai pulls a sleek black recurve bow from a rack on the far wall. Her hands pass over it, inspecting it under the light. I freeze as she draws back the string, so focused on her task, it’s as if she’s forgotten I’m here. Our eyes catch over the imaginary arrow she’s aimed at me, and color rushes to her cheeks.

  “This’ll do,” she says, clearing her throat as she sets it down beside her backpack. She pulls a quiver from the shelf and stuffs it full of arrows. The silver points are tipped with wicked retractable barbs, and I get a little nauseated just looking at them.

  “You can’t go parading through Greenwich Park carrying that,” Auggie scolds her. He digs around in a cabinet and pulls out a tactical case. It could be a trombone tote, for all I know, and I’m guessing he figures most other people would assume the same. Kai packs up her bow and slings the case over her back. Pacing the long shelves, she settles on a hunting knife with jagged teeth. “How about for him?” Auggie asks as she fastens on a leg strap.

  She jerks her chin at me. “Go ahead. Take whatever you want.” To Auggie, she says, “Put it on my tab.”

  “You won’t live long enough to pay it,” he grumbles, teasing a smile out of her. She reaches into her pocket and presses something into his hand. “What’s this?” he asks, the color draining from his face.

  “Your money.” She pats his shoulder. “I won’t live long enough to need it, right?” She slips another knife from the display and tucks it in her pocket.

  Auggie’s eyes well, but his expression’s stony when he turns to me. “Go on, boy. You heard the lady. Find something you like.”

  Kai stuffs her backpack with gear as I strip off my coat and slip my arms through a leather sho
ulder holster. Two hunting knives hang snugly against my ribs, their leather grips within easy reach. Their shape reminds me of a knife Amber once gave to Woody, and I feel the familiar pang of his loss as I secure the knives back in their sheaths.

  Exploring the racks and displays, I step through a beaded curtain into another room. The tight rows of shelves are stocked with survival gear: canned food, jugs of water, batteries and generators, lanterns, medical kits, compasses, fire spits. I pause in front of an empty glass display case, eyes widening as I realize what I’m looking at: the domed lid of a stasis chamber. It looks like some kind of Frankensteinian junkyard creation, cobbled together from the parts of models I haven’t seen in the Observatory since before the turn of the millennium.

  “It’s a beauty, isn’t it?” Auggie says, coming up behind me. “I hear the new ones have all kinds of fancy bells and whistles. But this one’s really something. Found all the parts and built it myself.”

  “Does it work?” I ask, tracing the surface with a finger.

  “The chamber itself powers up just fine. Without a transmitter, it’s hard to know if it actually works.” He shrugs. “I’m good with a pair of pliers and a screwdriver, but I’m no expert in computers. Never have been able to get the thing online. When you all are done with whatever nonsense you’re up to, maybe you can come back and show an old man how it’s done.” He turns to leave with a plaintive nod, and the beaded curtain rustles in his wake.

  I load my jacket down with matches, a flashlight, a roll of electrical tape, a handful of smoke grenades, and a small utility knife. Patting my pockets, I still feel ill-equipped.

  A flicker of movement catches my attention. I turn in time to catch a black leather case against my chest. “I heard you’re good with these,” Kai says.

  The case rattles softly as I turn it over and unzip it, revealing a set of the most beautiful lockpicks I’ve ever seen. “Who told you that?”

  “Lyon might have mentioned it once,” she says, looking down at the floor. “Let’s go,” she says with a pained smile. “Don’t want to keep Doug waiting.”