Seasons of Chaos

by Elle Cosimano

  I awaken sprawled on the floor, gasping and coughing as the tremors quiet. Glass tinkles as I push myself upright, brushing shards of porcelain and plaster from my shirt. My throat burns. I ache everywhere, and there’s an acute, pulsing pain under my breastbone that’s hard to breathe through. I blink, but there’s not a speck of light in the room.

  My leg brushes against a shoe. I scoot away from it, bumping into the desk. I hear Doug’s slow, steady breaths, and I hold perfectly still as they become irregular and shallow.

  He groans. I grope around me for his staff, my hands moving wildly over the carpet. Doug sucks in a sharp breath as a shard of glass catches my palm. Ignoring the sting, I feel around me on hands and knees. My fingers close around a cold metal pole as Doug’s clamp down next to mine.

  “Don’t be stupid, Fleur.” His voice is gravelly and tight, his grip on the staff unbreakable. I throw my weight backward, but Doug rips the staff from my grasp, leaving me dizzy and unmoored in the dark. I back away from the direction of his voice. My heel connects with the desk. Feeling along its edges, I trace my way to the leather chair. Then to the wall.

  “Where are you going?” He grunts, glass crackling as if he’s sitting up.

  The door is right behind me. I reach for the knob. As my hand closes around it, a tight fist seems to grab my mind. I cry out as the muscles in my legs contract and my backside hits the floor. My head smacks against the desk as I fall back on my elbows. Stunned, I rub the throbbing ache at the base of my skull, struggling to figure out what just happened.

  Doug goes very still.

  I roll onto my side and push myself upright. I reach out with my magic, but it feels caught on something, like a loose thread of a sweater that’s snagged on a nail. The more I try to reel it back to me, the harder it pulls.

  Closing my eyes, I trace the magic to the point where it’s stuck. It’s like chasing a string through a dark tunnel. Nothing about this place feels familiar. I’m not inside a root. Or a rhizome. But this place is alive. Breathing. A rhythmic thump beats inside the walls.

  A dim light glimmers at the far reaches of my consciousness, and my mind follows it into a glowing chamber. My thoughts jolt to a stop. My magic is coiled in the middle of a vast space, surrounded by glittering stars.

  No. Not stars. . . .

  Twinkling lights drift around my magic like fireflies. The way they move reminds me of the magic in Gaia’s orb. I tug the thread of my magic, backing my mind slowly out of the cavernous room. I don’t know where this place is, but I know I shouldn’t be here. As I retreat, the lights swarm me, agitated and buzzing. I pull, but my magic doesn’t budge.

  “What are you doing?” Doug’s voice seems to reach me in stereo, both inside and outside my head. I give my magic a hard jerk, and Doug roars. “Knock it off!”

  My thoughts slam back into my body. I recoil against the side of the desk, shielding my eyes as a flame ignites in Doug’s palm. He shines it over me. “What are you doing in my head?” he yells.

  “Your head?” Oh, Gaia, no! I cast out my thoughts, feeling for the place where my magic ends and Doug’s begins, but I can’t untangle the two.

  “Get out!” he snaps.

  “Believe me, I would love nothing more than to be anywhere other than trapped inside your screwed-up, sadistic mind, but I can’t. I’m stuck. Stop messing around and let me go!” I yank hard on my magic.

  Doug lurches and swears, clapping a hand over his forehead. My knees buckle and I drop like a stone, as if a cold hand is holding me down by my head. I kneel, frozen, unable to move. “What the hell did you do to me?” he roars.

  “What did I do? This isn’t my fault.” My heart hammers. It’s like my knees are glued to the carpet.

  “This is your affinity! Your magic. You taught me, remember?”

  “I never taught you this. I can’t even do this! This isn’t . . .” My breath stills as all the pieces come together. My magic is trapped inside Doug, but those lights I saw were Gaia’s magic. Doug’s using it to manipulate me. “This is your fault. You took Gaia’s magic. You’re holding on to too much power. You can’t control it. Neither could Lyon.”

  Suddenly he’s in my face, his glittering eye wild. “Don’t you ever compare me to him.” His magic releases its hold on me with a shove. But no matter how hard I pull it back, my magic can’t break free.

  My hand closes around a thick shard of glass. I swing it into the side of Doug’s leg. Pain rips through my thigh as we both scream, and he drops to one knee in front of me.

  Matching red stains seep through our clothes. Teeth clenched, Doug jerks the shard free. I gasp, pressing my hand to my wound as his murderous eye lifts to mine. He rubs his chest. A dark smear stains the front of his shirt. Frowning, he stares at the slash across his palm. My mouth thins as I register the matching cut on mine.

  I’m stuck. Shackled to him by our magic. “This was all part of your stupid plan, wasn’t it?”

  “This was definitely not the plan! How am I supposed to kill you if I can’t hurt you without hurting myself?” His face reddens in the warm glow of his fire. He bends to pick up the overturned lamp, setting it on the desk and resting his flame in the cradle of the broken bulb. Hands on his hips, he paces the demolished room, his staff abandoned on the floor.

  “We can fix this,” I say with a forced calm. “We just have to figure out how we became connected in the first place and back our way out of it. It must have happened while we were fighting. Our magic has touched before, when we fought in Cuernavaca.” In a fit of rage, Doug had attacked me during the battle. I summoned a root to hold him back, and he pushed it away. Not with his hands, but with his mind. Overwhelmed by grief, he probably hadn’t even realized he’d been using his earth magic. I’m sure we weren’t connected then, but this time, I felt it when his will wrestled with mine for control of the plant. “We must have crossed some kind of barrier this time. Opened some kind of pathway between each other’s magic.”

  He paces like a caged tiger. “I’ve never heard of that happening before.”

  I think back to all my years of training. “It’s possible for the minds of two Springs to occupy a physical space at the same time, but I’ve never heard of anyone getting stuck like this.”

  I massage my sternum, wondering which one of us the dull ache belongs to. Doug stops pacing, surprise coloring his cheeks.

  “The pain, it’s not as bad as it was,” he says, leaning back against the wall, watching me with a curious expression.

  “How is that even possible? If anything, you should feel worse. I saw Lyon after he took Michael’s magic.”

  “I’m stronger than Lyon,” he says, practically spitting Lyon’s name. “I wasn’t just a Season. I was a Guard. I had far more magic.”

  “You took far more than anyone should be able to handle. You should be writhing in agony. The magic should be clawing and fighting its way out of you. How is it even possible that you’re holding Gaia’s magic, too?”

  I feel a shove against my mind, as if he’s trying to push me out. His gaze snags on a piece of the shattered orb. An emotion flusters my thoughts, and it takes me a moment to realize it isn’t mine. It flickers through his mind, almost too quickly for me to identify it. Resentment? Jealousy? With a sudden shock, I realize I can feel him. Not just his physical pain, but his mood.

  “Gaia’s magic,” he says bitterly. “It . . . responded differently that day you came to the Control Room. It seemed . . . drawn to you.”

  “So?”

  “So maybe I’m not the one holding on to you.”

  I think back to the way Gaia’s light had surrounded me in Doug’s mind. How it had seemed to cling to me when I tried to back myself out of it. Doug had been the one who breathed Gaia’s magic in, but we’d both been fighting for it right up until he took that breath. Could Gaia’s magic have followed that connection to mine? Could it have bonded to me and trapped me with it inside him? Is my presence inside Doug keeping the fragile peace, maki
ng it possible for him to contain so much magic? And if so, which one of us controls it?

  Reaching out with my thoughts, I prod the magic that connects us, attempting to manipulate it, but it doesn’t respond. Doug’s head snaps up, as if he knows what I’m up to. His thoughts slide into his new power like a cold hand into a glove. Doug’s mind is clearly the vessel, and it seems to have control over both me and Gaia’s magic.

  His head tips toward the door as I hear a soft knock. Distracted, he loosens his grip on my mind.

  “Leave us,” Doug barks.

  “But sir,” Lixue says, her voice muffled through the ironwood, “you asked me to report in as soon as we found something.”

  An emotion washes over me—hope. Not my own. Doug’s. His mind prickles with it as he yanks open the door. “You found the eye? Where is it?” My gaze flicks to the staff on the floor, surprised to see the sash is gone. And so is the eye. There’s a hole in its place.

  Lixue’s brows pull down as she looks past him to the shattered orb on the floor. “No, Chronos. I haven’t found it yet. We found the sister.”

  He snatches her tablet from her hands. As his eye skims it, I feel a flash of surprise.

  “What’s going on?” I ask as he angles the tablet away from me. “Whose sister?”

  “Take the Spring to my suite.” Doug talks about me to his Guard as if I’m not even in the room. “Make sure that air vent is sealed and every inch of the place has been checked for other possible escape routes. No one is to lay a hand on her. If a single hair on her head is harmed, there will be hell to pay. Am I understood?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  He bends to pick the black sash off the floor. I bristle at the sudden, dark urgency I feel inside him as he reaches for his staff. I wedge myself in front of the door, blocking his path. “Where are you going?”

  He shoves me into Lixue’s arms and walks past me out the door.

  42

  Snow for Dust

  DOUG

  Flame in hand, I move through Névé Onding’s darkened dorm room. According to the personnel records Bradwell uncovered, Névé’s been dead for more than a year and a half, killed by Amber Chase while Jack and his friends were on the run. Névé’s Handler, detained along with all the others who had hunted for Jack, was given a custodial job after the hearings, and was moved to a room in the staff quarters, leaving this one abandoned.

  I trail a finger through the dust on Névé’s desk. Oddly, nothing on Névé’s side of the bunk room has been removed. Either Lyon was too busy to bother with it, or he wanted someone to find it like this. Messy. Lived in. Warm, even though the room still smells stubbornly like Winter. The blue paint on the walls feels distantly familiar, from hall parties when I was a Season in the same wing.

  I drop into the fuzzy blue reading chair in the corner and rest the staff across my lap, grateful not to be holding it. The damn thing feels heavier every time I touch it, and in my rush to get here, I forgot all about my gloves. I wince as I rub the chill from my palm. The cut Fleur gave me is still angry and raw. When I left her in my office, her shouts had given way to a persistent pounding against the walls of my mind that I’d felt all the way to the Crux. I still feel her there, seething in a remote corner of my thoughts, but the farther away she is, the easier it is to think, and the weaker my ability to sense her seems to be. Still, I find myself checking to make sure she’s there.

  There’s a strange static hum inside my chest. Head tipped back against the chair, I rub it, thinking about what Fleur said back in my office. Gaia’s magic doesn’t sting—not like it did before—and the persistent pain that’s haunted me since I took the staff has dulled, as if a sharp corner’s been broken off and given to someone else.

  Somehow, I have to get Fleur out of my head and end this. As the host, my mind might be in control of Gaia’s magic, but clearly that magic feels connected to Fleur. The possibility that Gaia’s magic is holding on to her like a security blanket poses a problem. How do I untangle us and still hold on to the power? And if I do manage to push Fleur out, will Gaia’s magic fight me once she’s gone?

  I sit up with a sigh. A dead plant sags over the edges of a pot on a bookshelf beside me. The brown leaves are rigid and brittle, the soil so dry it’s sunken and cracked. I prod its edges with my mind, feeling for signs of life. When I touch it with the tip of a finger, a dried leaf breaks away from the stem and drifts to the floor. I’ve seen Gaia breathe life into things a million times. Watched Fleur revive a frozen butterfly on an old video feed. Leaning close to the plant, I blow a gentle breath. The dead leaves rattle, and two more fall.

  If I’m truly in command of Gaia’s magic, I should be able to breathe life into something. Me, not Fleur. If I can’t bring back something as small as a houseplant, what hope do I have of creating new Seasons?

  Soft footsteps pause in the hall, just outside Névé’s room. Fingers on the doorknob. A tentative knock.

  I snuff out the flame as metal scratches against metal. A key—no—a lockpick slips into the lock. I take up the scythe, listening to a series of scrapes and clicks. After a few failed attempts, the knob turns, and a dim cone of hallway light stretches across the floor.

  The door shuts quietly.

  “Ruby?” Kai’s voice cracks. The narrow beam of a flashlight shines out in front of her, catching on the furniture in the sitting room. She follows the light into her sister’s bunk room, completely unaware of me, pausing when it reaches the Handler’s stripped mattress and empty shelves. “Ruby?” she whispers, her voice trembling as the beam moves over the line I drew in the dust on her sister’s desk.

  The light swings toward me.

  I stop time before our eyes can catch.

  Dust particles hang suspended in the beam of her flashlight. A thin cobweb dangles, frozen, in the corner of the ceiling above her head. Kai’s completely still, as if she’s made of wax. I rise from Névé’s chair and circle around her, my movements reflected off the dark surface of her eyes.

  “You lied to me,” I whisper. “You betrayed me. And for what? Because you made a deal with Lyon? Lyon was dead! There was nothing he could give you! Nothing he could promise you that I wouldn’t have offered you, and you chose him anyway.” Deep in my head, I feel Fleur’s mind go still. Her pacing has stopped, her consciousness listening, as if she senses something is wrong. I lower my voice. Whisper in Kai’s ear, “I came back. I honored my promise. I offered you her magic. We could have fixed all of this together. But instead, you ran to Jack.” I come around her, putting my face close to hers. “You thought you could trust him. But the joke is on you.”

  Easing upright, I push time forward. Kai sucks in a sharp breath. She drops her flashlight. I grab her by the wrist as she reaches for her bow.

  Her eyes dart to the scythe. She knows better than to ask what I’m doing here.

  “You never should have killed them,” she says, as if that justifies her betrayal.

  “Someone had to stop them. You’ve seen the storms. The disasters. The fires and floods. They’re only getting worse.”

  “Because of what you’ve done!” In her eyes, I see the flash of a memory—a sick girl, huddled under a thin blanket on a sidewalk, sleet bouncing off her shoulders as she coughs.

  I shake my head. “You know as well as I do that Lyon put all this in motion a long time ago.” She turns away from me, a guilty flush sweeping across her cheeks. “If it weren’t for Sommers’s rebellion, everything would be like it was. Lyon is ultimately responsible for this.”

  “Lyon was only trying to free us!”

  “Really?” I ask. “Who was it who put you in that holding cell with me? I was the one who let you go!” She glances sharply at her wrist, and I drop it with a shove. I wander to her sister’s bookshelf, trailing a finger over Névé’s trophies and figurines. “I see you and Jack made an alliance. Does he know who you are?”

  Her pause is too long. “Of course he knows.”

  “Not who you were when
you shot him in Cuernavaca. Does he know who you were supposed to be? You and your sister?” I circle behind her as she holds a breath. “Does he know about your secret alliance with Lyon all those years ago?” I lean in and whisper, “I do.”

  I come around to face her. “All that time, it was supposed to be you. Before Sommers arrived. Before Fleur came along. It was supposed to be you and your sister breaking the system to be together. Lyon saw something in you, didn’t he?” Kai’s unwillingness to look at me is answer enough. “So Gaia turned you and Névé into Seasons, but she made you both different. She split you into different wings, knowing how much you’d fight to be with your sister. Lyon groomed you for years. He played off your guilt about the fire, making you feel like you had to redeem yourself for it, delivering those stupid letters for you and planting thoughts in your head, hoping you’d convince your sister to run, expecting you’d be the pair who’d start his rebellion. But Névé was the weak link, wasn’t she? She didn’t care enough about you to risk what she had.”

  “She loves me,” she says, her voice quivering. “She was just scared.”

  “Or maybe she was just too angry at you.” Kai flinches, staring at the floor. “Then Sommers and Fleur came along, and Lyon had new puppets to play with. And suddenly, you weren’t the professor’s pet project anymore. So what happened? You were bitter and jealous and joined the Guard out of spite?”

  “No! I joined the Guard because it was the only way I could think of to see Ruby.”

  “Because Lyon had given up on you, and you’d lost your chance. And when you had an opportunity to bring down Lyon’s star pupil—the person who’d accomplished what you couldn’t—you took it.”

  “I didn’t want to!”

  “Does Jack know? Did you grovel on the doorstep of Jack’s villa and confess that it was your failure that brought him here?” A bead of sweat trails down her temple. “Did you tell Sommers that you shot him for doing what you couldn’t? That the only reason you joined the Guard was to be closer to your sister, and that’s the only reason you’re helping him now?”