“How long will you be out of commission?” I move to my desk chair and switch on my monitors.

“Only a couple of days. Why? Are you going to miss me?”

“You wish.”

“I programmed my face on your phone so you won’t be too sad while I’m gone.”

I bark out a laugh. “I noticed. How’d you do that, anyway?”

“A hacker never reveals his secrets.” A bird calls somewhere in the background. Chill’s breaths come through the phone in ragged pants, as if he’s climbing steep terrain. The world feels upside down, with me in front of a computer screen and Chill huffing up a mountainside.

“A couple days, huh?” A sour jealousy washes over me. When I was a Winter, I’d spend months in stasis healing from the trauma of my injuries, and waking up in my girlfriend’s arms had never been an option.

“No blood will be spilled. Just need to sleep long enough to charge my magical batteries,” he says, referring to the discovery that helped us figure out how to survive out in the world without running out of power. The Seasons’ magic operates like a rechargeable battery. We were intended to work in groups, our opposing charges designed by nature to heal each other and replenish each other’s magic. The stasis chambers were Michael’s twisted solution for keeping Seasons apart—controlling us by leashing us to the Observatory by transmitters and making us dependent on those stasis chambers for power—rather than allowing us to coexist. We were too strong together, too much of a threat, capable of toppling the system that repressed us.

Those of us who left the Observatory have all come up with our own solutions. Amber and Julio can charge each other just by touching—something they never seem to stop doing, regardless of the weather in California. Fleur, on the other hand, doesn’t need a Season to partner with, as long as we stay in a climate that favors her. But Chill, choosing to live with his human Handler in Fairbanks, with its short, warm summers, relies on a stasis chamber for a little juice once in a while.

“Huh.” I fiddle absently with the mouse. The violence of the hunts, the pain of killing Amber and being killed by Fleur, the length of stasis and the sickness that followed, the loneliness and isolation of it all . . . those were the parts of being a Winter that sucked—the things I’d told myself I was glad to be done with. And now those things aren’t even an issue anymore.

“You okay, Jack?” Chill spent too many winters listening to my voice through his headphones, sifting through nonverbal cues for signs that something was wrong. That I was in danger—too tired, too sick, too angry at the world . . . ready to give up.