Page 85 of Seasonal Fears

“He ignored Harry, though,” says Jenny. “Maybe he’s not aiming for the Summer candidates.”

“If he doesn’t have access to a Corn Jenny, he can’t spot them,” says Jack. “And if he’s pulling them off the highway, he’s not surveilling them first. Not like Matthew was. He may not realize you two are anything more than passengers on a road trip to hell.”

“I’ll have to kill him,” says Melanie dreamily. Harry realizes with horror that the air in the car is cooling rapidly, like she’s pulling all the heat out of it and dropping it straight into a freezer. It’s still not cold, not with him and Jenny both there, but it will be soon if this doesn’t stop. She’s retreating into the depths of Winter, into the place where she’s less a girl and more a force of nature, and he doesn’t know how to stop her.

Descending into his own season wouldn’t solve the problem. He’s not sure whether or not it would actually make it worse at this point; they balance each other, they aren’t obligated to oppose. But he doesn’t really see anything else that he can do. “Jenny—”

“You can’t.”

“Why not?”

“Because you’re not crowned yet, doofus.” Leave it to Jack to put things as bluntly as possible. The officer is still driving along the highway, heading, it seems, for the nearest exit, which is one of those barely labeled country roads that crop up between cities, reminding anyone who drives this way that much of California is rural. As if the rolling farmlands and crumbling barns lining the road wouldn’t already have told them, already made it more than perfectly clear. “Every time you go down, there’s a chance you don’t come back up. If you both descend at once, we’re not going to have any leverage we can use in convincing you to come back to the surface.”

The air is getting still colder. The officer puts his blinker on, drifting toward the exit, and Harry does the same, schooled to respond to authority, not sure what good it would do to start a car chase on a crowded highway when he’s not driving anything designed for speed. He can’t save them this way. He’s not sure he can save them at all.

“Once I am crowned, will I be able to go down after her if necessary?”

The answer feels terribly important. In the backseat, Jack and Jenny exchange a look. “We don’t know,” says Jenny. “We haven’t had a functional monarchy in centuries. Maybe you’ll be able to and maybe you won’t, but right now, we know you can’t. Please don’t try.”

“If you lose control of the car because you forget how hands work, we’ll all die,” says Jack more bluntly. “We need you to be a boy right now, not a season in a vaguely bipedal shape.”

“I’m all right,” says Melanie. Her voice is distant, dreamy, but clear. “Can you maybe try talking to me, not just about me?”

“Mel, are you sure you’re okay?” If she says she’s not okay, he doesn’t care what their attendants say, he doesn’t care if he’s supposed to let this run its course and allow her to learn to control her season in her own way and her own time. He needs her to be okay more than he needs to reach their stupid labyrinth or claim its stupid crowns. All those things are problems for someone else, problems for someone who agreed to do this voluntarily, and not for him.

He’s just a boy who’s spent the better part of a week driving down the coast. He’s tired and he itches and his hair smells funny no matter how many times he washes it with cheap motel shampoo. He’s tired of lying awake and listening to Jenny snore, tired of wondering if he’s ever going home, tired of missing his family. He needs Melanie to be okay.

“I’m fine,” she says, and her voice is distant and dreamy, yes, but it’s still her own. She hasn’t been lost yet. Whatever else is happening to her, she hasn’t been lost. “He’s trying to take what belongs to me. I can feel him in the frozen places.”

“What?”

“Don’t worry. You’ll understand when you meet another Summer challenger, now that you’ve gone deep. It only has to happen once for you to know the way through the woods, although I don’t know whether the woods are there for you. I suppose they might not be. Maybe you have a field, like the one I see you in…”

Her voice slips even farther away, like she’s talking down a tunnel, distant and fading fast. Then she coughs and shakes her head.

“I’m okay,” she repeats. “I’m fine, and this is all supposed to happen. This has all happened before. I can handle it.”

The officer takes the exit. Harry follows, and marvels at how quickly the civilized mask of California drops away, replaced by twisting trees with clawed branches, a rusted-out old rail car, a collapsing bridge. It’s like they’re driving into farmland as defined by a hundred horror movies, and if someone showed him a picture of this place and asked how far it was from a major highway, he’d say a hundred miles at minimum. He’d swear he was looking at the absolute middle of nowhere, and that this is was one of those places where no one would ever find the body.

The officer pulls onto a wide patch of gravel—he can’t charitably think of it as a parking lot—in the shadow of what looks to be roughly half a barn and stops the car. For a moment, Harry considers hitting the gas and jetting away. They’ve done nothing wrong. Even if the officer hops on his radio, he won’t be able to describe their supposed arrest to anyone who might come after them. They can still get away.

He pulls up next to the patrol car and turns off the engine, resting his hands on the wheel and staring straight ahead. It’s so cold inside the car now that he can see his breath in the air in front of his face, colder than air conditioning could ever have made it, freezing solid. A fire seems to be stirring in his own bones, refusing to let him surrender completely to the cold, and he does his best to tamp it down. Melanie is falling. He needs to let her fall.

But oh, it hurts to sit here while she moves further and further away from him.

The officer gets out of the car, his passenger once again staying behind as he approaches the car. Harry rolls down the window, putting on his best expression of amiable innocence. He thought he was done playing for the fool for authority figures when they ran away from home, but here he is again, and some things never change.

“What’s the problem, officer?” he asks, politely.

The officer snorts. “Don’t play dumb with me, son.”

“Don’t use the word ‘dumb’ to mean someone who’s not acting like you want them to,” says Harry, keeping his eyes on the officer as Mel unbuckles her seatbelt, unlocks her door, and oh, God, she’s getting out of the car; she’s going to confront the man. He can’t sit here doing nothing while she does that. He can’t just sit by while she puts herself in danger.

He’s not sitting here doing nothing. He’s keeping the man occupied. He forces his expression of genial incomprehension to stay in place, even as he frowns and continues, almost chidingly, “It’s ableist and wrong. You should be more careful with your words. Was I speeding?”

Do police in California usually pull speeding teenagers off the road, leading them down backroads to places that look perfectly designed to serve as body dumps? He knew California was weird. He had no idea how weird. He briefly considers vocalizing that question, and decides it wouldn’t end well for him, choking the thought back into the dim, dark place where it began.

“No, son, you weren’t speeding.” The officer seems more exasperated than angry, a state that continues as Melanie gets out of the car. “Miss, get back in the car. You need to stay with the vehicle.”