Zodiac (32 page)

MATHIAS.

I grip the view screen with such force, the plexine housing creaks.

For an instant, I consider turning my Wasp around and diving into those methane clouds to find him. I almost do it.

My hand’s on the tiller, ready to make the turn. “Mathias,” I whisper, closing my eyes. I was scared, too. It was easier to focus on the things that stood between us—his doubt, our disagreements, the age difference—than explore how I truly felt about him.

I loved him my entire adolescence.

I love him still.

Sirna hails me from the Ariean destroyer. “Guardian, stay on course. I’m trying to find the encryption key you need.”

On course?

What course?

My hand falls off the tiller, and I let my body sag loose and weightless in the seat belt. Colors fade to gray. Losing consciousness would be a relief.

“Alert,” announces Lord Neith. “Psynergy attack incoming.
Xitium
, you’re the target.”

No.

Not Sirna, too.

I sight the Ariean ship through my scanner and see a burst of wreckage rising from the weapons array mounted on her hull. The destroyer’s engines fire.

She’s taking evasive action, and
Equinox
circles her like a tiny dune spider wrapping a fat beetle in silk.
Xitium
’s
fast; they have a chance. They’re going into orbit, probably to gain more speed. As they dip behind the planet, I lose sight of them.

I draw a sharp intake of breath. “Hysan, stay with them,” I whisper.

“I will,” he says, his voice low and grave. “Are you all right?”

Am I all right?

Mathias’s baritone breathes through my memory. His words warn me to be cautious, to think my plans through, to gather more information before pushing ahead. “I’ve been so blind.”

The moment I say it, I’m reminded they’re the same words Moira spoke when Ochus attacked. Only in my case, it’s not stars I misread, but hearts. My own and Mathias’s.

We were too stubborn to give each other a chance, and now I’ll never know what that kiss truly meant . . . for either of us.

I slam the Wasp’s console with my fist. “Take me to the Sufianic Clouds. Maximum speed.”

Acceleration pushes me back in my seat, and I rocket out of the Kyros Belt toward the Thirteenth House. What’s my plan now? Shoot Ochus with my laser? Dive-bomb him like a suicide pilot?

Reckless adrenaline fuels me now, not logic—until another memory jerks my head around.

My Wave.

I unzip my compression suit and pull it out from my pocket. I call up the tutorial Ephemeris. The star map swells out of my palm-size screen, small and low resolution.

“Face me, coward!” I yell at the small flickering orb of starlight. “Come on!”

All I see is the clam in my hand, the whirling map, the chaos of overlapping patterns half-hidden in Dark Matter. In a fit of rage, I hurl the Wave against the side of the Wasp, cracking its golden shell.

I didn’t stand a chance anyway. I never got the Abyssthe from Hysan.

A prickle spreads through the back of my skull, and I know what’s happening before I hear him. Ochus is calling me.

I reach back to retrieve my Wave. Swelling from the cracked screen, the small holographic map stutters like a lopsided clock. My fit of temper broke it.

Vicious laughter grates my ears.
How droll. You struggle with the most basic skills. I wonder, will you ever understand your own gift?

There he is, swelling out of the cracked Ephemeris. He looks different, grainier, like a blast of cold sleet.
Ask me your questions, little girl. I know you’re dying to.
How is Dark Matter ruled by Psynergy?
Ask me.

I swipe at his eyes.
This is for Mathias!

He shifts aside with ease.
Keep trying. Everything is Psynergy. This universe is a figment. And I’m the supreme illusionist.

If I’m going to meet him on his plane, I need to Center myself. I stare at the faint lights of the Ephemeris and immediately find the one I’m looking for. The place that gives me peace and power, the home that will always be my soul.

I open myself up to Psynergy from Cancer, only instead of using it to read the stars, I pull on it to feed my presence on the astral plane. And as the star map swells in size, I feel my surroundings changing, until I’m no longer trapped within my body on the Wasp—rather, I’m facing Ochus in the wind tunnel where I first met him, the slipstream in Space where he’s been hiding.

That’s right, little crab . . . crawl out from your shell
, he teases.
Let’s see how strong that inner flame is.

I root myself more firmly in my Center—breathing deeper, feeling Cancer, tapping into my innermost voice. Ochus’s icy form swells before me, and I reach into my store of Psynergy. This time when I strike, my hands close on something solid.

He feels like icy bone, and he’s freezing my skin. My palms blister and blacken, but I know the pain isn’t real. Ochus tries to move away, but I grit my teeth and hold tighter. I’ve got him.

Then the bone melts in my hands, and I’m grasping empty air.

Behind you
, he says, taunting me.
Don’t give up yet. You’re doing so well. But you are going to have to be stronger than that.

The effort of Centering myself so deeply leaves me weaker than before. I see him rising over me, a gruesome carcass of ice, and I ask,
Why are you doing this?

I was a healer once. I restored life with these hands.
His fists grow to the size of small moons.
I was beloved . . . and then I was punished for it.

He swings at me with one of the chilly fists, and I close my eyes, steadying myself in my Center, until I feel control of the Psynergy surrounding me. When I look again, time has elongated between us, stretching his punch so that his fist is still inches from my face.

Dodging it, I say,
So now you punish innocent people in return?

He stumbles when his fist doesn’t connect with anything, and then he glares at me, his fists shrinking back down.
You made me what I am. You and all the Guardians. You twisted my miracle into everlasting bondage.
His primordial eyes burn at me through the ice.
You can’t conceive the torture I have endured, the unbearable solitude of my exile, desolation without end.

His body twists and deforms as he moves, and to my surprise, it looks like he’s suffering genuine distress.
You are the strongest of the twelve, but even you can’t kill me. Each time we meet, I hope.

You hope?
I ask.
That I’ll kill you?

End my torment, yes.
He disintegrates as he speaks, and his icy form evaporates. For an instant, I almost pity him. Then he rematerializes and with a mocking hiss says,
I
dare
you.

His eyes flare blacker than pure Space—like Dark Matter itself. He swells into a giant ice wraith, and reflected in his glassy stare are the faces of his victims. Mathias. My father. My friends. I force myself to remain still.

Fight me!
he roars.

All I want is to batter his desiccated corpse with every fiber I possess. But instinct warns me that’s useless, so I hold steady. I need to regain my strength in the Psy, so I play his psychological game.

Besides, as long as he’s with me, he’s not sending Psynergy strikes on the rest of the armada. I won’t survive this, but maybe I can buy Hysan and Sirna a chance to escape.

Ophiuchus, I want to set you free.

Do you? How kind you are.
He morphs into a blast of needle-sharp sleet that cuts into my face. I turn aside, and a spray of red droplets trails me. The sting is agony, and I clench my muscles tight, struggling to keep sane through the pain.

Then I hear him cough. I look over, and now he’s stooped and gaunt, an old broken man, half-eaten by time.

Even though I loathe him, even though his thirst for slaughter revolts me, the wetness of that cough and the droop of his crippled spine tug at my compassion. And for a fleeting instant, I actually feel the visceral agony of his never-ending death in life.

How old are you?

Ah, now you begin to understand.
His eyes grow dull, and his long, bony arm stretches to point toward Helios.
Ask the Lord of Light what eons I have endured.

The cuts on my face throb, and a bloody film swirls in the air around my head. Ochus withers away, then reforms.
When I was a young man, I was as fresh and idealistic as you are now. I was an alchemist, striving to heal the sick and find a cure for death. I dreamed of a never-ending galaxy as the highest blessing mankind might achieve.
He eases into a new position, grimacing as if his tortured body might break.
Now I know. Immortality is hell.

Then let me help you die
, I offer too eagerly.

Halt.
I can’t move. He’s trapped me in a coat of ice. His laugh blasts through my frozen bones, and then he says,
You think this is real? How easily you fall for my cunning. I have no wish to die, mortal!

When he morphs back into a man’s shape, he’s larger, stronger, more heavily muscled in rippling ice. I can’t believe I tried to help him.

Paralyzed, my hatred comes raging back. I strain to break free and strike him, but his iceberg of Psynergy holds me rigid.

Are you comfortable, little girl? You look quite fetching in your glossy new skin.
His booming laughter vibrates in my ears.
Why should I wish for death when the glory of my House will soon be restored? You read the prediction written in the stars. I will endure any torment to get what’s been promised to me.

I jerk and wrench, but I can’t escape. I can’t even speak.

You have amused me long enough, child. Let’s end this battle.

He’s going to kill me now. When he raises his hand for the deathblow, I stare at him through the glaze of my frozen blood. I see the murder in his eyes.

“Cancer sustains you.” Mathias’s words whisper through my mind, and I sink into my Center. There, I pull on Cancer’s Psynergy with everything I’ve got, until time lengthens again, only now it’s moving so slow, it’s practically stopped.

Light waves bend, and Space curls in on itself. Milliseconds stretch toward infinity, and my breathing slows. My muscles relax. I’ve never experienced life like this before—it’s as if time is a rubber band being stretched to its limit—and I’m seeing every particle that makes up every instant of our existence.

Somehow, it transforms into my own timeline, and I think about how strange my life has been. The one thing I knew for certain growing up was that I loved Cancer—and that I left it. The one person I never wanted to be like was Mom, then I followed her footsteps and abandoned Dad and Stanton. The first guy I ever fell for was a university student whom I watched silently for years, loved silently for weeks, and then let die in silence, without giving either of us a chance to say our goodbyes. I was in too much of a hurry to reach my own death.

Everything starts to connect in the air around me, as though a new Ephemeris were swelling out, only it’s a map of my life and how it’s led me to this moment, my death.

Time is three-dimensional, and it forms its own galaxy of lights and connectors, not like the music of the stars, but more like a brain’s neuron network. Only it’s never-ending and ever-expanding, like our universe. As it rotates round and round, the image of a worm eating itself comes to mind.

Everything is connected, cyclical, eternal. Time, Space, Ophiuchus. And somehow I understand what integral element the Thirteenth House brought to the Zodiac. The thing missing from our galaxy today.

Unity
.

At Helios’s Halo, I felt something electric in the air, something I’ve never felt before. It’s not just our trust that Ophiuchus stole from us—there’s something more powerful he took, something we glimpsed for a minute that night, when we came together.

It’s hope.

And in a universe of people that spend their
todays
searching for
tomorrows
, hope is the most powerful weapon you can have.

Ophiuchus was supposed to bind our solar system together. His defection left us imbalanced and broken. Fighting him will require a force of souls from more than just House Cancer.

I’ll need to fuse with Psynergy from the whole Zodiac.

SOMEHOW, OCHUS’S ARM IS STILL
SWINGING
.
I dig deeper into my Center, staring into the blinking lights of the twelve constellations, until I’m fusing with the Psynergy flowing from the whole solar system.

I’m borrowing psychic energy from people all over, the way Ochus does, so my pulling tugs on his own store of Psynergy, and his fist falls.

What is this?
he demands.
You can’t do this!

We wrestle for power, each of us gaining and losing physical strength. Ochus has an easier time retaining his hold on this dimension, and I don’t have Abyssthe, or even my Ring, to help. All I have is me—so it’s a good thing I’m an
everlasting flame
.

I keep holding on, knowing it’s only a matter of time until Ochus’s gradual change comes over him—the burden of time—and he grows old. When eventually he curves into his hunched form, he lets go. He can’t defeat me in this shape.

So. You have won a round. Perhaps you will even become a worthy opponent in time.
His body grows less visible every moment, but his black-hole eyes remain dark, churning in midair.

This game never ends, but you have earned a respite. House Cancer has nothing further to fear from me.

I glare at him.
You’ve already destroyed it. What about the other Houses?

Hear me well, child.
This game never ends.
I serve a master who has more surprises in store.

He wheezes a fading laugh. Then he blows me a kiss. A sharp, white-hot kiss of pure Psynergy.

I dodge, but the poison dart burns a glancing blow across my neck, etching my skin like acid.

Remember me
, he says, vanishing.

I feel myself plummeting downward through burning gases and dust, flailing my arms, and then solidifying into a mass of pain. My head smacks the deck of the Wasp, and I touch the throbbing wound on my neck.

As soon as I look up, my Wasp’s mechanical voice chirps. “Warning. Hydrogen leak.”

I look around. I’m alone in Space.

“Passenger eject,” says the voice. “Eject urgently.”

The console buzzes with emergency messages. My Wasp’s powertrain is about to rupture.

On autopilot, I zip my suit up all the way and put my helmet back on, wincing from the pain in my hands. Then I cinch the belt tight and speak the final command.

With a detonating crack, my cabin capsule separates from the engine assembly and tumbles away. Soon the orange flash of the rupturing powertrain spins across my porthole like an angry sun. The capsule has no navigation, so I can’t direct it. I just turn over and over on end, until—

Thump.

I’m caught in the claws of a grappling arm, which has appeared out of nowhere. I’m not spinning anymore, so I watch the arm haul me in, holding my breath, unsure who’s got me.

And then a much smaller ship coasts into view. A skiff, its lights blinking.

Tears fill my eyes. It’s Hysan.

• • •

As soon as my capsule’s inside the
Xitium
’s
bay, Hysan’s skiff glides in and docks, and Sirna pries open my hatch. When she sees my face, her helmet shield rests against mine, and I hear her voice. “Praise Helios, you’re alive.”

Hysan springs out of his skiff and lifts me from the capsule, clasping me in his arms. The outer bay doors shut, and the three of us cycle through an airlock to the ship’s interior. We rip off our helmets. “How did you find me?”

Sirna touches a spot at the center of my chest. “I’ve followed all your movements, Guardian. The pearl I gave you is a tracker.”

Spyware?
She lied to me? I look up at her, the indignation building in my chest—and when I see the expression of exhaustion and determination on her face, I realize I should be grateful. She saved my life. “Thank you.”

We’ve entered what looks like a metal shop. Shears, rollers, punchers, and drills are clamped to the walls, and two uniformed soldiers wield a plasma cutter to slice a sheet of steel. The air smells of ozone. “They’re making repairs to the ship,” says Sirna. “Let’s stay out of their way.”

I peel off the constricting gloves, wincing.

“Rho, your hands,” says Hysan, gingerly holding my wrists so he can survey the damage without inflicting more, then examining the rest of me. “Your neck, too.”

“Frostbite,” I say. “Ophiuchus. He injured me with Psynergy.”

“How is that possible?” asks Sirna.

Hysan wraps me in his arms again. “I’m so relieved you’re okay,” he says, his voice husky. “We should get you into a life-support pod and heal your hands.”

We weave along a narrow passage cluttered with crates of food, water, and gear lashed to the walls. The
Xitium
’s a large ship, but its neutron drive and weapons take up most of its volume, and the spaces left over for humans are dim and cramped.

On the bridge, I greet the Ariean Captain Marq, a dark, leathery man built like a boulder. At the start of this mission, Marq seemed enthusiastic, but now when I thank him for rescuing me, he examines me with bloodshot eyes.

“Guardian,” he snarls, making my title sound like an insult. “The shields your colleague provided were worthless. Our ships are rupturing from the inside out. Reactor meltdowns, fires in munitions bays, unexplained hull breaches. We’re in full retreat.”

“The shields were obviously sabotaged,” says Hysan, iciness in his tone. He glares at the captain. “Rho had nothing to do with that.”

Marq’s maroon cheeks flush a deeper shade. “Go with your ambassador,
Guardian
. We have enough to do.”

Sirna hurries me out of Captain Marq’s sight. “The Arieans have lost many comrades,” she whispers.

“They don’t want me on board, do they?”

Sirna sighs. “Marq gave me a stateroom. You can stay with me.” We skulk away from the bridge, and when soldiers meet us in the passageway, they glare.

“Where’s Rubi?”

Sirna’s face falls. “We lost contact.”

“Rho, I’m going to check with Neith, and then I’ll come find you,” says Hysan. He kisses my cheek before hurrying down the corridor.

Sirna’s stateroom is narrow and barren. She offers me a squeeze-tube of salmon roe. “Protein,” she says. “Eat as much as you can. You’ll need strength.”

She activates her Wave and calls up a scanner view of the fleet, then enhances the image with false color to make the ships easier to identify. Over half our vessels have been destroyed. Sirna magnifies the view of a wrecked pleasure yacht, and I bite my lip until I taste metal. “Those drifting particles, are they . . . bodies?”

Sirna nods and closes her eyes. “The Capricorns were assisting a disabled freighter when their steering went out. Head-on collision.”

She tells me our ships have scattered all over the sky, and every vessel still under power is limping back to its home world. Only two of the five Ariean destroyers survived. When Sirna shows me the latest casualty figures, the air in my lungs turns to sand.

I choke out a cough, shut my eyes tight, and see Mathias standing before me, ramrod straight in his dark blue uniform, strong and serene, only twenty-two years old.

How is it possible I’m still alive? It wasn’t supposed to end like this.

“Rho.” Sirna takes my wounded hands in her own. Her expression’s sober, weary. “There’s something else you need to know. The Marad has come out of hiding. While we’ve been away, they joined the conflict on the Sagittarian moon. They’re arming the rebels, threatening to invade the planet below. We think they have hadron bombs. It seems what the army was waiting on . . . was for us to go.”

“You mean—this was a distraction?” I blurt. “
Ochus
used a feint?”

Sirna sighs. “We’re all in the dark here, Rho. But right now, we’re going back to Phaetonis. You’ve been summoned.”

• • •

Right now
is a relative term in space travel. Lightspeed and relativity, time warps, wormholes. Ochus’s game is far more complex than I thought. He didn’t just manipulate Psynergy—he manipulated
us
.

He turned our own tactic against us.

Caasy’s warning echoes through my mind. He was right: I was deceived. Maybe I still am.

Time is my enemy now. We’ll need four galactic days to reach Phaetonis, and waiting is torture. I’ve been forced to spend the first eighteen hours cooped up in a life-support pod getting my hands repaired. Apparently, Psy wounds take longer to heal than normal injuries.

But time can be an ally, too. My long hours alone in the healing pod have given me a chance to mull things over. In particular, something Ochus said:
Why should I wish for death when the glory of my House will soon be restored? You read the prediction written in the stars.

I think back to the vision I was seeing in the Ephemeris all along, past the Twelfth House. The smoldering mass where the constellation Ophiuchus used to be.

It wasn’t just appearing to me—it was doing more: It was warping the other constellations out of shape. Like they were making room for something.

The Thirteenth House is coming back.

• • •

When I leave the pod, it’s late. The ship’s bell just rang twelve chimes, and the interior lights have been turned low. Sirna’s working an extra shift.

In her room, I pull up some research on one of the ship’s screens, looking for clues about the Dark Matter. I still don’t understand how Ophiuchus was able to destroy our planets with Psynergy—or how he managed to take out most of our fleet.

It turns out our own Holy Mother Origene delivered a lecture on metaphysical time, speculating that it might be reversible, asserting that time is nothing but a mental construct we create to make sense of the physical world. Theoretically, we should be able to travel through time in all directions, even sideways. She was running tests to confirm this theory when she died.

Empress Moira, still in a coma, was also doing work on metaphysical time. She believed that since time has neither beginning nor end, it must be linked in a smooth, continuous circle. In that case, we probably travel through the same points in time repeatedly.

I think about the vision of time I saw in the Ephemeris. It fits both theories.

But if Origene and Moira were both running active experiments on metaphysical time . . . that must be why they both built the quantum fusion reactors. They were collaborating. Were they on the trail of the time-worm? Could that be why Ochus awoke?

There’s a knock on the door. “My lady?”

“Come in.”

When Hysan walks inside, the first thing I want is to feel his arms around me and his mouth on mine, to be embraced in his warmth and light. But as soon as the impulse manifests, a competing one is born. A faction of dissent—the part of me that can’t let Mathias go.

Thanks to Hysan’s keen people-reading skills, it’s hard to take him by surprise. “What is it?” he asks, standing at the foot of the cocoon where I’m sitting.

I look down at the screen in my lap and shut it off. “I can’t.”

Hysan perches on the edge of the bed, leaving space between us. “I’m sorry he’s gone, Rho. He deserved better.”

Tears start running down my cheeks, and I’m helpless to stop them. “I . . . I closed the airlock door on him,” I say through the sobs—sobs that rattle my ribs and break my bones and stab my soul. “I didn’t let him come—I left him on that—I—I killed him.”

Hysan crushes me to his chest, and I crumble there, shaking and screaming and slobbering, and I can’t stop. Then I start to worry I’ll never stop.

The tears can never end. Dad and Mathias are gone. Cancer is barely hanging on. And for some reason, I’m still here.

“You were protecting him.” Hysan kisses my hair and strokes my back. “He had a way out, Rho. He had a skiff, and he was the best pilot of us all. If he didn’t leave, it’s because he was helping others, and he didn’t want to abandon them. Like you, he chose to do the honorable thing. Don’t take that from him.”

I really love the fairness of the Libran outlook. Or maybe it’s just Hysan. His special way of seeing the world makes me want to experience life through his eyes.

Our past and personalities couldn’t be more different, and yet everything about him resonates with me on a level that feels soul-deep. Mathias I’d been sure I liked since I was twelve . . . but Hysan was a complete surprise. Even now, I feel the same electric chemistry his closeness always produces. Any time we’re in the same room, there’s a magnetic pull between us, and my blood craves the Abyssthe-like buzz of his touch. Like he’s a real drug.

“There’s something else,” I say, pulling away from his hold and forcing myself to put more room between us. “Before the attack. Mathias and I . . . kissed.”

Hysan doesn’t react. He doesn’t move away or get angry, he just stares at me in silence.

“And I realized I have feelings for you both. I always have. And now . . . I can’t do this. With you.”

He nods. Even though he’s not emotional, I know he’s hurt because he’s retreating. His eyes are dimming, growing as light as air, until he’s so far removed from this moment that the only visible part of his right iris is the golden star.

He takes my hand and brings it to his lips. He presses his mouth to my skin and whispers, “At your service, my lady.”

When he gets to the doorway, he says, “My skiff’s been repaired. I’m leaving to help with the rescue. Take care of yourself, Rho.”

Without waiting for a response, he leaves.