Page 1 of Winterveil

Part One

The School

One

Winter 2037

Boston, Massachusetts

There were bars on the window of the mayor’s office. Stark, black, and placed exactly six inches apart. The architect of Boston City Hall had clearly intended them to be more than an aesthetic feature.

Or maybe they’d been recently installed. To accommodate the city’s newest mayor, its youngest mayor in history, who journalists couldn’t seem to decide whether to refer to as a boy or a man. He’d seen himself called both in the same article. In the same headline, even.

JULIAN JOYCE-YOUNG III, 18, ELECTED AS BOSTON’S YOUNGEST MAYOR IN LANDSLIDE—

A dare, he’d told the late-night talk show host, sweating under his stage makeup.

Like the rest of the media coverage, it was only half true. Landon, jackass that he was, had found an article titled “notable Joyce-Youngs” and started quoting it in a lockjaw accent. He’d amassed a small audience by the time Julian found him there, drunkenly recounting the exploits of his ancestors to an equally drunken crowd of their fellow Exeter students.

Julian had tackled him out of his chair and snatched the phone from his hand. Lying beneath him on the patio, his grin slackly triumphant, Landon wheezed, “None of them have ever been mayor, though.”

Later, after pitching his friend’s phone into the lawn fountain, Julian had opened the article for himself. Scrolling through more than a dozen names of university presidents and corporate founders, federal judges and charity trustees, he realized that there was, indeed, no Joyce-Young who had ever held the office of mayor. And the most precocious Joyce-Young of note had been thirty-three when elected to the Massachusetts state legislature.

It started as a dare.

Now a crowd was gathering on the street below. Julian could hear the rising hum of their voices from the fifth floor. He couldn’t make out their words, but the tenor and volume communicated enough. It took him far too long to turn away from the window, heartbeat scraping at the base of his throat.

He lowered himself into his chair. The mayor’s desk—his desk—was a jumble of loose papers and manila folders, uncapped pens bleeding ink. Three hardback books were stacked in an unusually orderly fashion on the far left, books that Julian had never touched. Vogue had come to do an interview and wanted to photograph his desk. His strategist, Cafferty, had advised him on what books to pretend to be reading. A trendy biography on Thomas Jefferson that promised to “break new ground,” a memoir from an up-and-coming congressman about his deprived Rust Belt childhood, and, for his contingent of young female fans, a collection of Byron’s poetry.

“Make sure to show them your sensual side,” Cafferty said.

“Do you mean sensitive?” Julian asked.

“Sure, kid.”

The family photographs had also been Cafferty’s idea. Three of them, in brand-new, gleaming golden frames. His mother holding Olivia in her lap, both of them dressed in crisp Easter white. His father shaking hands with Harvard’s dean at his graduation. A group photo of the Exeter lacrosse team, Julian in the front row, squinting without his glasses.

Vogue was long gone. Julian turned the photos face down.

“Mr. Mayor? Can I still call you that?”

Lambert Quinn stood in the doorway. Lank-haired, snub-nosed, and with the gangly, underfed look of a scholarship student, despite being a decade Julian’s senior. He’d been employed at the mayor’s office since his graduation from some provincial state college, working his way up from unpaid intern to minimum-wage executive assistant.

In four months of delivering Julian’s coffee and picking up his dry cleaning, Quinn had never looked this thrilled.

Julian ignored the jape, straightening in his seat. “Get Cafferty on the phone.”

“Of course.” Quinn dipped his head and scurried off, still smirking.

As soon as he was gone, Julian bent over and pulled open the desk’s lower left-hand drawer. He took out the pack of cigarettes, broke the seal, and put one to his lips. The gold monogrammed lighter (J.J.Y.) clicked three times before it caught.

After a single drag, Julian deteriorated into a fit of coughing. He didn’t even smoke.

And it did nothing to settle his stomach or still his racing heart. Why had he decided to take advice from Landon—whose sour-apple-flavored vape was never far from his mouth—now? Julian dropped the cigarette and ground it into the carpet, where it left a black stain on the Boston city seal.

The landline on his desk vibrated.

Julian snatched up the receiver. “Cafferty. Where the hell are you?”