Page 90 of Seasonal Fears

It’s been almost a full day since the Arizona border, since the Winter candidate who sparked Mel’s plummet into her own personal freeze. She hasn’t slipped back under since coming back to them, has been clinging to the present and her own existence as a flesh-and-blood person with both hands, smiling and laughing and talking with as much enthusiasm and vigor as she can dredge up, but Harry knows her. He’s seen her put on his routine before, when she had to be hospitalized again, when there was another surgery scheduled and she wasn’t sure she’d be coming home. This is her brave face. She’s not doing as well as she wants everyone to think she is, and while he can’t fault her for trying to seem like she’s all right, he wishes she didn’t feel the need.

But then, it’s not like they’ve known Jack or Jenny long enough for trusting them to come naturally, or easily. He mostly manages it, because he’s exhausted and he’s scared and now that they’re off the coast, he’s constantly on edge, waiting for the next attack, but it’s not because he really knows them, not the way he knows Mel.

It’s a little odd, how quickly and completely Jack seems to have shed the girl she was before the Winter chose her. Jenny at least acknowledges his old name, even if it doesn’t fit him at all, like trying to make someone put on the shoes that fit their feet when they were a toddler. Jack seems to have decided her life began the day she ran away from it, and while he wants to ask her more, he’s also a privileged child of a remarkably stable and healthy family, and he knows better than to cross certain lines. It may have taken him years to learn, but no one has ever said that Harry March didn’t retain his lessons once they were beaten into him.

Mel emerges from the rest stop, a low concrete building with signs on the walls exhorting travelers to check for scorpions before they lower their trousers. It’s American brutalism, same as it was in California, in Arizona, all the way back up the coast, and he loves it a little. For the rest of his life, he supposes that when he thinks of safety, he’ll think of public rest stops along the sides of America’s highways, solid enough to double as storm shelters, no frills and no decoration, broken glass in their parking lots and ancient vending machines sputtering by their sides.

They’re certainly more like a slice of safety than the motels they keep cramming themselves into, all four of them in a single room for the sake of security; splitting up would mean twice as many doors to watch, twice as many windows to barricade against attack from outside. Harry’s only hope is that once they reach the labyrinth, they’ll be able to relax. He’s traumatized. He knows Mel is too. They need to catch their breath and find a way to go home.

Her father may be an alchemist, but he can’t fight her once she becomes the Queen of the Winter, and he won’t control her, not when she has a full court, a crown, and those weirdoes in Berkeley on her side. They can get through this. They have to.

Melanie waits by the rest stop until Jenny emerges, and the two of them walk back toward the car with their heads close together, gossiping about something Harry can’t hear from where he’s sitting in the driver’s seat.

He’s never been the jealous sort, but having a girlfriend with an attached expiration date has always made the other boys a little more respectful of his relationship than they might have been. They can snipe and swipe from one another, but not from him; Melanie is off-limits. It would be only natural if he looked at Jenny with Mel and felt jealousy stirring in his chest, waking from its long slumber. But he doesn’t. On some level, he recognizes Jenny as an extension of himself, a valid surrogate in almost all situations.

Some of the things he’s coming to quietly understand as this goes on are unnerving and even frightening, but he doesn’t see where he has a choice.

The pair of them reach the car and get in, Mel leaning over to kiss him on the cheek before she fastens her seatbelt. Her skin is cool but still a reasonable temperature, given the chilliness of the night, and he knows she kissed him just for the reassurance of letting him feel her, and he’s grateful for it, even as he starts the engine and pulls out.

They’re getting closer to the labyrinth all the time. It’s only going to get worse from here.

After another eighty miles he pulls off at a motel that looks like something from a horror movie, all one level, hugging the ground, with a flickering neon sign out front and too much cactus in the landscaping. The room costs less than half of what he’d expected, and comes with less than half the water pressure. But there are two beds, and none of the four of them can feel any other contenders close enough to pose a threat, and the road to the labyrinth is clear. Harry climbs into bed and is asleep almost before his head hits the pillow, Melanie curled up close and lukewarm against him, smelling of soap and stillness.

The room is quiet.

Harry opens his eyes on a sunlit meadow, green grass and blooming flowers all around him, and the air rich with the scent of strawberries. He pushes himself into a sitting position, then clambers to his feet, looking bemusedly around. He’s been here before, in his dreams, but this doesn’t feel like a dream. This doesn’t feel like a dream at all.

Slowly, he turns. There is nothing but open meadow as far as the eye can see. As a child of the western mountains, this doesn’t feel like his dream landscape. Something should be breaking it in at least one direction, something should be varying the horizon.

He has time for that thought to coalesce into something coherent and then his next turn brings a distant mountain into view, one he certainly didn’t see before, black and white against the sky. He stops turning to blink at it. The idea of a mountain appearing just to make him more comfortable is ridiculous, but that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.

He’s getting more and more accustomed to the idea that sometimes things happen because they want to, and not because they make any sense at all. Making sense is not high on the priority list for the universe. Maybe that’s why he doesn’t jump, or flinch, or even really blink when he turns one more time and there’s a man standing there, a man with his face and his build and his, well, everything; the only reason they’re not identical is that he’s dressed in jeans and a woefully stained shirt—this road trip has been hell on his normally strict standards of grooming, and while Mel’s just becoming more and more charmingly disheveled, he’s starting to look like he has questionable personal hygiene—and the other man is wearing Harry’s football uniform, purple and yellow and pristine. No grass stains. No mud or sweat either.

So he’s not a football player, and this is a performance for Harry’s benefit. Harry knows about performances for someone else’s benefit. He slaps an amiable smile onto his face, assuming the sort of relaxed posture he takes with adult authority figures, and meets the man’s eyes for the first time.

This time he does flinch, although he’ll be proud of himself later for how well he manages to keep it together, because the man’s eyes break the impression of identicality: his eyes are like a slice of high summer sky, blue and clear and inhuman, streaked with skidding lines of fast-moving cloud that blow in some unfelt, internal wind.

“Guh,” says Harry.

“It’s almost spring,” says the man. “The Wheel’s turning. The sun’s coming back from its long celestial journey.”

“Actually, the Earth rotates around the sun,” says Harry, not sure why pedanticism seems like the correct response in this moment.

The man laughs. “Actually, the sun rotates around the galaxy, but it took a long time for the humans to figure that out,” he says. “For centuries you thought the sun revolved around the Earth, and one of your only failures was not believing it hard enough that the universe reordered itself to make it so. Human belief is a beautiful, terrible thing.”

“Mel’s told me about this,” Harry says, folding his arms. “She says sometimes when she sleeps, she dreams about a forest filled with black trees and snow and a woman who looks like her but with midnight in her eyes. That’s how she talks to the Winter. So I’m guessing you’re the Summer, then?”

“Most candidates take longer to reach that conclusion,” says the Summer. “I’m impressed, or I would be, if you weren’t running in tight parallel with a frozen maiden. You have certain advantages you didn’t earn.”

Harry shrugs. “Seems to me they’re balanced out by the disadvantages. If you’re talking to me the way Winter’s been talking to her, does that mean I’m closer to claiming you?”

“We aren’t singular the way those people in Berkeley were singular: for them, there’s only one at any given time. For us, there’s more than one of everything. If you claim my crown, you’ll be one of seven Summers walking the world. You’ll need to be able to be comfortable with them. You’ll need to work with them, even when what they want is to burn.”

Harry blinks. The idea of climate by committee should be ridiculous … but then, haven’t the oil companies been doing effectively that for decades? They make decisions that impact the whole planet, and they do it in boardrooms filled with stockholders who are innately biased, because doing the thing that kills the coral reefs or raises the sea level or whatever will also make them buckets and buckets of money. He’s aware, in the way of someone who has never needed to worry about money in his life, that worrying about money is a major source of stress for most people. He wonders how many of those people would be able to look at a report explaining that their comfort and absolute security would come at the expense of a bunch of marine mammals they’ve never met, and not choose the option that keeps them where they want to be.

Probably not many. So this system is as fair as any other. It’s as fair as any system humanity has been able to come up with on its own. He still frowns at the Summer.

“You didn’t answer my question. Am I getting close?”