In the wake of that rebellion, freed Seasons are required to check in weekly with an assigned staff member back at the Observatory. We’re supposed to report any planned trips outside our regions and submit to careful monitoring. When our friends Julio and Amber want to come visit, it’s no big deal—just a few phone calls, some added security measures, and a few plane tickets. But if Fleur and I want to escape off the grid, just the two of us—a Season alone with her nonmagical Handler—things get a whole lot trickier to plan. I don’t know if Lyon’s just paranoid about the handful of rogue Seasons they haven’t been able to round up, or if he received some kind of specific threat, but for the last few months, he’s seemed more and more on edge, and not a week goes by that he doesn’t offer to have a team of escorts bring us home.

But the Observatory under Greenwich Park in London isn’t home anymore.

I duck into my office and settle into my chair. My state-of-the-art computer setup boasts three sprawling flat-screens and a sound system that could knock the terra-cotta tiles off the roof of the house. The walls above the monitors are decorated with old posters of classic 1980s films and obscure punk bands. An old crushed-velour couch with pink cushions lines the opposite wall. I don’t know why I bought it from the flea market downtown, except that the frame sags in places that remind me of the couch Chill and I left behind in our dorm room at the Observatory, even if the color’s all wrong. Above it, jammed between Dead Kennedys and A New Hope, hangs one of Fleur’s first paintings: a lopsided evergreen capped in snow.

I wiggle the mouse, rousing the wall of monitors above my desk. The security panel beeps as the front door opens and closes again.

A moment later, Fleur appears on a black-and-white monitor in front of me. I slip on my headset as she makes her way down the cobbled driveway, the low heels of her sandals clacking and the long waves of her pink hair playing on a breeze. My chest aches every time I watch her walk out of here.

She turns and blows me a kiss. The red light linked to her transmitter moves briskly over a map on the next screen, her GPS tracker displaying every turn she makes between here and her favorite café. I’m only half listening as she enters the coffee shop and places her usual order in stilted Spanish. A new barista’s working the counter. I glance up at the footage from her body cam in time to see him wink as he hands over her cappuccino. I don’t know much Spanish, but I manage to pick up the gist of his question in the hopeful lift of his brow.