Doug stares at me, his hands flexing at his sides. I can’t tell if he wants to strangle me or he’s resisting the urge to wipe the blood from his nose.

His phone lights up in his hand and he paces away from me, wedging it in the crook of his shoulder. “I told you I didn’t want to be disturbed,” he snaps, tearing at the loose pink hairs dangling from his watch and stuffing them in his pocket. “How long ago? . . . Where are they now?” His jaw hardens. “You had one job, Lixue. I want this handled. What about the storms? . . . How many more?” He swears quietly, pinching the bridge of his nose. “Get an escort team ready. The Spring and I are leaving, and I want the situation in the south portal under control before we return.” He starts to disconnect, then changes his mind. “And bring a toothbrush and some clothes. I can’t take her out of here looking like this.” He disconnects and drops his phone on the side table.

“Where are we going?” I ask.

“Above ground,” he says, dabbing at his nose.

I resist the urge to look at the door. If I can get close to a park or a forest, I can overpower him and escape. I can find Jack before Jack finds me, and get him someplace safe. If Amber and Julio are already on their way here, we can come up with a plan to rescue Chill and figure out what to do with Gaia’s magic.

“Don’t get any stupid ideas,” Doug warns me.

“What are you going to do? Put me in time-out in your big scary bedroom with your ginormous, intimidating four-poster bed and your traumatizing room service? You and I both know you don’t want to hurt me.”

A few tense minutes pass before there’s a loud knock on the door. The taut wire between us snaps as he turns to answer it.

He comes back with a stack of clothes and drops them in my hands.

“Get dressed,” he says.

The clothes smell like Gaia. The thought of putting them on makes me ill. When I don’t move, Doug pushes me toward the bedroom. I stumble into the breakfast cart, dropping a blouse. As I kneel to pick it up, my gaze catches on the side of the cart. A sticker says it belongs to the north kitchen.

I stand slowly, clutching Gaia’s clothes.

The dining hall manager had smelled faintly of Winter. When I lived in the Observatory, I never met Boreas, the retired Winter who helped Jack and I escape through the freight elevator behind the north kitchen, but Jack had described him to me once. The man who delivered the cart fit Jack’s description, and he had looked at me strangely when he offered to come back for the cart, as if maybe he knew who I was.