Page 38 of Seasonal Fears

The air conditioning is running so high that even she can feel it, like an ice cube dropped down the back of her shirt, and for a moment, she shivers. There are four people already there: the man behind the counter, a woman clearing tables, both of them wearing the familiar polyester uniforms of the chain, and a pair of teens a few years older than her, probably a year or so younger than Harry and Mel, lounging in a corner booth like bored cats, all long limbs and arrogant expressions. Jack envies them, a little.

She didn’t know how profoundly she was stopping her own clock when she agreed to carry the winter (and it’s more of a choice for the ascendants than it is for the incarnates, although she knows better than to tell them how long they’re going to be teenagers); she only knew that if she had to stay where she was, she would explode, she would light a match and burn the whole place to the ground with her entire family still inside, she would kill or she would die or she would do both at the same time. And so when the woman with the snowflake pattern in her irises came to her and said that she had a way to get her out, she didn’t hesitate, not even for a second, not even when the woman told her she’d have to give away her name, the only thing she had remaining from her grandmother. Understanding came later, in long sessions at the kitchen table, her tutor trying to impart every scrap of wisdom she was going to need.

Ascendants know when they’re approaching a natural end. It can be put off for a long time, but not forever, and in the end, Irene went into the long winter that waits for them all at the end of their service.

Jack has no intention of seeing it for a long, long time. She’s happy to stay where she is, to let the missing-child posters fall further and further out of synch. But she looks at teens old enough to walk the world without arousing suspicion and she can’t help but wish the call had waited just a little longer before it came to fetch her home.

She sidles up to the counter and waits for the bored man behind the register to acknowledge her. That’s one more mark in favor of McDonald’s and other chains like it: there’s nothing the people who work there haven’t seen, nothing that impresses them anymore. She could walk in with a live gorilla and they’d just tell her there were no pets allowed.

If the man thinks anything of her age and apparent lack of adult supervision, it’ll be that her parents are in the car, or that they’ve dropped her off to treat the McDonald’s like a daycare while she does neglected homework. “Welcome to McDonald’s may I take your order,” he finally drones, all without taking a breath or fully registering her as a unique individual. (When the police speak to him in an hour, he won’t be able to describe her beyond “Young kid, pigtails, I think, ordered chicken nuggets and a strawberry milkshake.” He won’t even remember the fries, unremarkable as they are.)

Jack smiles, places her order—extra fries to take back to the motel with her, after she’s had her nuggets hot and crisp from the fryer—and waits politely to receive her tray before she heads for one of the many open booths. She chooses one that’s well away from the lounging teens, preferring a little privacy while she eats.

She doesn’t get it. She’s barely pulled the skin off her first container of honey mustard when one of the teens slides in next to her. The other settles directly across from her, and that’s that: she’s boxed in.

Not only boxed in, but in the company of her own kind. They radiate summer and winter, not like the Incarnates do, but the same way she does, captive and chained and unwelcome here. She should have felt them sooner. She should have been paying attention. The ice cube down her back had been a warning, and she ignored it in favor of her stomach.

Foolish Jack. Bad Jack. And maybe doomed Jack, depending on how this plays out.

“Alone?” asks the one beside her. “That’s a sad story. Little girl all by herself at nine o’clock at night, something’s gone really wrong.”

“Someone should call your parents,” says the other teen, voice dripping faux concern.

“Maybe someone already has.”

Jack looks between them, a small frown on her lips and as much casual disdain as she can summon in her eyes. “I don’t recall asking you to join me,” she says.

“Oh, but you did.”

“When you stopped in our town during coronation, you did.”

The teen next to her steals a nugget from her box and dips it in the honey mustard. “Where’s your Jenny?”

That confirms the boy’s identity. He’s all long, lean power and hostile grace, bubbling with the kind of resentment that burns anyone who gets too close. She would have felt them sooner if she hadn’t been flush with the presence of her own Incarnate, half-drunk on her season. He’s her opposite number, and he’d destroy her if she let him.

“I don’t have one,” she says curtly, pulling her tray away from him. “I don’t know anyone by that name.”

“Least believable lie ever,” says his counterpart, snapping the words like chewing gum. “It’s not where it was, but ‘Jennifer’ is still one of the most popular names in the United States. You can play at being ignorant, but for the love of the laboring wheel, don’t pretend to be stupid. You know someone named Jenny. You know a dozen people named Jenny.”

“Jack,” says Jack, meeting the other girl’s eyes for the first time. They’re wide and round and hazel brown, the irises patterned with snowflakes. She’s been ascendant for a few years at least, then; it takes time for the eyes to frost over. Jack’s own eyes haven’t started yet, and probably won’t until she’s seventeen by the calendar and fourteen by the clock. “What are you doing here with this loser? He your boyfriend or something?”

The Corn Jenny by her side flushes red, offense and indignation in his face. The Jack Frost across from her sighs, looking put-upon. “Please. I have standards, and he doesn’t suit them. I like my dates hot, happy, and human, not pasty, petulant, and…” She stops there, seemingly at a loss for how to finish her own sentence.

Jack takes pity. “Perennial?” she suggests.

The other Jack nods, expression going smug. “That works good. No, we’re not dating. Met this morning, in fact. My Winter and his Summer both hit town about the same time, following a rumor that a parallel pair was heading down the coast from Portland. You know anything about that?”

“Parallels? Really?” asks Jack, making her eyes huge, trying to play on the teenage sense of superiority when talking to anyone younger than themselves. Maybe she can convince these people she doesn’t know anything. They already know she’s an Ascendant, but that was unavoidable once they got close enough to start eating her food.

“As if you didn’t know,” scoffs the Corn Jenny. “How’d they get this far with only you? You’re just a kid. How young are they hiring these days?”

“I’m fourteen,” says Jack. Age is a function of the calendar, and the calendar is what calls them. It tries not to call them too young when there’s a coronation on the horizon, but this one was unexpected, and so she’d been called as soon as the winter blossomed in her bones. Everyone incubates at their own speed and in their own time. The youngest she’s heard of had been seven when the summer called him to service, and had been one of the best Corn Jennies in the world for the time he spent with the season.

Age is just a number on a chalkboard somewhere, and it doesn’t matter nearly as much as these two overly arrogant examples of the Ascendancy want it to.

“Fourteen,” scoffs the Jack Frost. “I’ve been sixteen for fifty years.”

That doesn’t make sense with the rate at which they age. They’re still mortal, after all. Jack doesn’t reply, just makes a politely noncommittal sound before taking an entirely impolite slurp of her milkshake.