Zodiac (4 page)

WHEN I OPEN MY EYES
,
the dome is dark. All I remember is a fireball . . . and then the world went white.

I reach out and feel pieces of my drum set scattered across the floor. “Nishi? Deke? Kai?” I rise and pick my way through the rubble of stuff, toward the others.

“I’m okay,” says Nishi, her back against the wall, head buried in her hands. “Just . . . dizzy.”

“A-live,” spits Deke from somewhere behind me.

“
Holy Helios
,” I whisper, scanning the scene outside through the crystal window. The sight is terrifying. The crowd of Acolytes that was jumping and cheering moments ago is now floating unconsciously a few feet off the ground. Whether they’re passed out or worse, I don’t know.

Chunks of metal, plaster, and other materials clutter the air, swimming along with the limp bodies. The debris looks familiar.

I try to see what’s happening by the compound, but I can’t. The window is fogging up fast.

A high-pitched noise grows louder, and I catch a crack creeping down the side of the crystal. As I watch, the fracturing spreads into a spider web of lines, and when the whinnying pitch reaches a new high, I realize what’s about to happen.

“RUN!”

I reach for my helmet and toss Nishi hers. Deke grabs his, and I cast my gaze around the room, realizing I never heard Kai answer.

He’s still passed out, his body a small heap. I shove his helmet on his head and pull him up. Hooking a shoulder under his arm, I take him with me through the door Deke is holding open.

Deke comes through last—right as the crystal window blows.

Nishi screams, and Deke shoves the door, slamming it shut just in time. Shards of crystal stab the other side.

As soon as we’re on the moon’s surface, the lower oxygen lightens my load. I try using my helmet’s communication system, but it’s not working. Since the dome is blocking our view of campus and the compound, I signal to Deke and Nishi that we should go around.

When we reach the crowd, the sight is so devastating my vision blurs, like my eyes don’t want to see more. It takes me a moment to realize I’m sobbing.

Bodies are everywhere. Floating past each other peacefully, three or four feet above the ground. None of them have woken up.

A pink space suit no bigger than Kai drifts past my head, the person light enough to rise higher than the others. I reach for the girl’s leg and pull her closer. Where a face should be, there’s only frost.

Her thermal controls stopped working. . . . She froze to death.

Shaking, I look around at the suspended space suits surrounding me.

They’re
all
dead.

Everything within me goes so cold, my suit might as well have stopped working, too. I suck in lungfuls of oxygen, but still I can’t breathe. There are too many bodies here . . . more than a hundred . . . more than two—

I can’t
.

I can’t count. I don’t want to know.

A generation of Cancrian children who can never go home again.

It’s only when I see Deke and Nishiko move in my periphery that I look up. They’ve both turned and are surveying the damage behind us, at the compound, their gloved hands gripping the sides of their helmets like it’s the only way they’ll keep their heads. My gut clenches with dread, and I already know what horrors await if I turn to look.

I know the debris in the air isn’t all from Elara’s surface.

There are papers and notebooks and bags. Chairs and desks and books. And other bodies . . . bodies not wearing compression suits.

Faint shadows move in the distance.

Squinting, I see a small trail of people bounce-jumping toward the spaceport from the far side of the compound.

I decide not to look back. Right now, I need to get my friends and myself to safety—and to do that, the suffering has to stay behind me. I have to wall off the pain.

If I turn around, I might not be able to.

I nudge Deke and signal to the spaceport. Through his helmet’s visor, his face is pale and wet. He takes Kai off my shoulder, and I get Nishi’s attention, and together we follow the other survivors.

The spaceport’s floodlights are dark, but when we reach the edge of the launchpad, there’s a man directing us with a laser torch. When he sees Deke carrying an unconscious Kai, he motions for us to climb into the small mining ship parked in front of the hangar.

I help Deke get Kai on board, and when we’ve cycled through the airlock, we gently lay him down on the deck and remove his helmet. Then I yank off my own and take deep gulps of air.

We’re alone in a cargo hold full of spherical orange tanks of liquid helium from Elara’s mines. Frost webs the dark walls, and our breath makes puffs of vapor. The other survivors must have gone deeper into the hangar, toward a larger passenger ship.

The man who was guiding us emerges through the airlock and rushes up to Kai. His compression suit bears the insignia of the Zodai Royal Guard. When he takes off his helmet, I see a pair of indigo blue eyes.

Lodestar Mathias Thais.

Gently, he listens for breath, checks Kai’s pulse, and peels open an eyelid. “This boy has fainted. Can someone pass me the healing kit?”

I reach for the large yellow case hanging by the airlock door and hand it to him. When his eyes meet mine, he holds my gaze an extra-long moment, the way he did forever ago in Instructor Tidus’s room. Only this time, the surprise in his face doesn’t warm my skin. I’m not sure I’ll ever be warm again.

He rifles through the vials and packets, then breaks some kind of glass ampoule under Kai’s nose. It must be wake-up gas, because Kai jerks up, swinging a punch.

The Lodestar dodges. “Relax. You lost consciousness, but you’re going to be fine.”

“Lodestar Thais,” I say, my voice rough, “what’s happened?”

His brow furrows, and he blinks like I just did something unexpected. Maybe he really did think I was mute.

“Please, call me Mathias.” Even now, his voice is musical. “And I think it best that we wait to discuss,” he adds, looking pointedly at Kai.

“Mathias,” I say, a hardness in my tone that wasn’t there before, “
please
—we have to know.” When I say his name, color rushes to his face, like a match sparking, and I wonder if I’ve offended him. Maybe he was just being polite offering his first name. “Lodestar Thais,” I say quickly, “does it have to do with Thebe?”

“Mathias will do.” He turns from me and surveys my friends. I follow his gaze. They look as broken as I feel, and yet they’re staring at him just as defiantly.

When his eyes meet mine again, I say, “We don’t deserve to be kept in the dark after everything we just saw.”

That seems to convince him. “There was an explosion on Thebe.”

I turn my head so fast, everything spins. Somehow, I knew it the moment I saw the fireball. I knew it would land on Thebe.

Stanton.

My insides twist like sea snakes, and I snap open my Wave to reach my brother, but there’s no connection. I try checking the news and my messages, but nothing’s coming through. It’s like the whole network has gone offline.

“Rho, I’m sure he’s all right,” says Nishi, massaging my back. She’s the only one of my friends who’s met Stanton before. The only one who knows how much he means to me.

Mathias stares at me questioningly but doesn’t ask.

“What about the people on Elara?” I whisper. He shakes his head, and I’m not sure he’s going to answer.

“The pulse killed the power in their suits . . . everyone outside froze to death.” He takes a shaky breath before going on. “Pieces of Thebe entered our atmosphere and crashed into the compound. It’s . . . hard to tell how many survived.”

Something jolts our ship and knocks me into a helium tank.

Deke helps me up and we all look around apprehensively as the metal hull creaks and the orange tanks bump together. The vibrations intensify, building into a tremor, until the ship is quaking from side to side.

“Shockwave from the explosion!” Mathias calls over the noise. “Hold onto something!”

Nishi shrieks, but Deke steadies her. I grip a handrail and close my eyes. If
we’re
having moonquakes, what must be happening on Thebe? Close to three thousand people work at the moon base there.

Stanton told me they have shelters—please let him be in a shelter right now. . . . He has to be in a shelter right now . . .
please
.

With one last convulsion, the shaking ends as abruptly as it started. I watch Mathias move his lips, speaking soundlessly to someone we can’t see. Only the Zodai can communicate that way. When his invisible conversation is over, he says, “A meteoroid may have struck Thebe. This ship is launching now. We’re heading home to Cancer.”

THE TRIP WILL TAKE TEN
HOURS
.

Mathias moves us into the crew’s bunkroom, where we’re belted into oil-stained hammocks that stink of mildew, while he goes to the bridge. When we’re alone and buckled up, I can’t look my friends in the face. Somehow, seeing them will make the bodies on Elara real.

Every House has a different outlook on death. We Cancrians send our dead into space, toward Helios, the gateway to the afterlife. We believe those who pass on with settled souls are at peace and gone for good, while the unsettled soul lives on in the stars as a new constellation.

The hope is that one day, the unsettled soul can return to live again on Cancer.

I picture the girl in the pink space suit. Where will her soul go?

I chase the thought from my mind by trying to Wave Stanton and Dad, but there’s still no connection. I wonder if Dad even knows what happened. He doesn’t watch the news, and his Wave is so old he sometimes has to open and close it twice to get the holographic menus to pop out.

G-forces press us down as we lift off Elara. The ship’s engines rumble, loud and ferocious, but I can already hear the ocean’s everlasting breath. Maybe Stanton wasn’t on Thebe. Maybe he’s home right now, waiting for me. The last time we spoke, he told me he was visiting Dad soon.

The hull of the mining ship groans and creaks as we accelerate upward from the moon, leaving the past five years of our lives behind.

“It’s okay, Nish,” says Deke, squeezing her hand. She gives him a weak smile, her eyes rimmed red and puffy.

At last, the engines cut off, signaling our escape from Elara’s gravity, and in the sudden quiet, my ears tingle. Gripping my Wave, I unclasp my belt and float out of the hammock, weightless. So do the others.

“I don’t understand why Mother Origene didn’t warn us,” says Kai, speaking his first words since waking. He tries Waving his parents, but there’s no connection. “The stars must have shown signs.”

“To see a meteoroid that big, I doubt you’d even need an Ephemeris,” says Deke, scrolling through his Wave contacts, trying to get through to anyone on Cancer. “Any telescope should have caught it.”

I’ve been wondering the same thing. The Guardian has two main duties: representing her House in the Galactic Senate and protecting her people by reading the future. So what happened?

“Rho.”

Nishi’s whisper is so frail, it’s the first thing about tonight that seems real. “The omen you saw during your test, the one you’ve been seeing when you read my future for fun, the one you won’t talk about”—she chokes back a sob, tiny weightless tears slipping from her amber eyes and scattering through the air—“could it be . . .
real
?”

“No,” I say quickly. Her expression hardens with distrust, which hurts because Cancrians don’t use deceit. “It
can’t
be,” I insist, spilling my evidence: “When I saw the black mass today, at my retest, even Dean Lyll said it was nonsense. He made me use an Astralator, and it confirmed—”

“
You saw it again today
,” says Nishi, like she hasn’t heard a word past that admission. “You’ve been seeing it for days, and then you saw it again today, and now
this
—Rho, take another look in the Ephemeris.”

“Why don’t one of you look, you’re better with an Astralator—”

“Because we didn’t see a dark mass in our readings.”

“I failed and had to take the test twice, Nishi,” I argue, my volume rising. “My reading was
wrong
.”

“Oh, really? So nothing bad happened tonight then?” Her voice breaks, and more tears slip into the air, like tiny diamonds.

I look over at Deke, hoping he’ll disagree with her. After all, he’s always the first to dismiss my reads as silly stories.

Only he’s not paying us attention. He’s just staring at his Wave blankly.

He couldn’t get through to anyone.

“Okay,” I whisper with a sigh. “I’ll do it.”

I scroll through my Wave and find my copy of the Ephemeris. It’s just a tutorial version, so it doesn’t have all the detail of the Academy’s, but it still works. Stanton gave it to me last year, for my sixteenth birthday. When I whisper the command, the star map swells out in a holographic projection the size of a puffer fish. I relax my vision until my eyes cross, and then I reach into my pocket for my drumsticks.

Only they’re not there. Like everything else I own, they’re gone.

My eyes burn.

“I’m sorry, Rho, I shouldn’t have asked,” says Nishi, hugging me in midair. “Just forget it.”

“No, you’re right.” My voice comes out steady and determined. I give Nishi a squeeze back, and then I face the map again. “I have to do something. I have to help—if I can.”

I summon up one of my usual melodies, sans sticks—but the music reminds me too much of our show. I can’t find anything in me to call on.

A blaze of blue flashes through the cabin’s small window, and I look up from the map to the real thing.

Even from this far, after so long of only seeing it in the Ephemeris, Cancer is breathtaking. Ninety-eight percent water, our planet is painted every shade of blue, streaked with barely perceptible slices of green. Cancer’s cities are built on massive pods that float calmly on the sea’s surface, like giant, half-submerged anemones. Our largest structures—buildings, commercial centers, schools—are secured with anchors.

The pods that hold the most populated cities are so vast that whenever I visit one I forget I’m not on land—except when a shift in the planet’s core triggers powerful ripples. We have security outposts in the sky, reachable by aircraft, and a handful of underwater stations that have never been used. They were mainly built for protection, in case life above water is ever threatened.

My home is my soul: Cancer is my Center.

I turn back to the star map, and I gaze into the blue orb as though I could see every detail, down to the tiny whirlpools of color that fleetingly form on the sea’s surface. The longer I stare, the deeper and wider the map seems to grow, until I’m Space-diving through the stars.

All around me, millions of celestial bodies ascend and decline, and as their paths shift in response to distant events like gamma bursts and supernovas, they leave faint arcs in the sky. They almost look like musical notes.

Music of the night
, Mom said the ancients called it.

I look to the side of Cancer. Thebe is gone. Then I survey the moons we have left—and all three begin to flicker.

Like any one of them could be next.

Pulse pumping, I pan away from our House and search beyond the twelfth constellation, where the omen appears. It’s not there.

Has it finally disappeared? Or has it moved closer?

I scan the whole solar system, desperately searching for a hint of the writhing blackness, a sign of the opposition in our stars.

Nishiko glides over to me. “You see something. What is it?”

“I . . . don’t see the omen anymore. . . .”

As soon as I leave my Center, the map shrinks back down to the size of a puffer fish—the way it’s appeared to the others this whole time.

“
But?”
she asks. “Why do you sound bothered by its absence?”

“Because I still felt the sense of danger, only I couldn’t see the source. And there’s . . . something else.” I dread speaking the words, but I have to. Maybe if I’d spoken up earlier, we would have had warning. If I’d just told Instructor Tidus—

“What else? Rho, tell us!” Nishi squeezes my shoulder urgently.

“Sorry—I didn’t mean to keep you in suspense, I’m just—okay, listen. Earlier today, at my retest, I saw . . . I saw Thebe’s light flickering, and then it vanished. Like, disappeared from the map.”

My three friends exchange awed looks. Deke is the first to turn away. “Rho, this isn’t time for one of your tales.”

“Deke, you’re my best friend. Would I really be messing with you after what’s happened?”

He glares at me but doesn’t say anything. He knows I’m right.

“And what’d you see now?” whispers Nishi.

“Thebe is gone . . . and our other moons have started to flicker.”

None of us speaks. My friends are still caught in the gravity of my revelation, but I’m thinking of Instructor Tidus. She was the first grown-up since Mom who saw any potential in me.

Please let her have survived the blast.

Kai floats away from us, to a corner of the bunkroom. “I hope you’re wrong,” says Deke, following Kai and offering words of comfort.

“Maybe you’re not wrong,” whispers Nishi. “The omen and the flickering of the moons could be connected. Did you see anything else?”

“Nish, I don’t know anything,” I whisper back, growing unexpectedly angry. “None of what I saw was real. The Astralator
proved
I was wrong. I have no clue what you expect me to do.”

Deke frowns at us from across the room. “What are you gossiping about now, Nish?”

“I’m being serious,” she says. “I don’t care how, but Rho saw a threat, and we can’t ignore that.”

“It wasn’t in the stars, it was in my head,” I say, my words fueled by more hope than certainty.

“What about all the tragedies in the news?” she asks. The last couple of years, there have been a slew of natural disasters in the Zodiac. Mudslides in House Taurus. Dust storms and drought in the Piscene planetoids. Forest fires raging out of control on a Leonine moon. The past year alone, millions of lives have been lost.

“Maybe it’s the Trinary Axis again,” whispers Kai, like the thought itself is dangerous.

“Don’t even say that,” snaps Deke. “Events go in cycles, Kai, that’s all. It’s nature.”

We fall silent, and I wonder if we’re all still thinking about the Trinary Axis. A thousand years ago, the axis started a vicious galactic war that raged out of control for a century. When we studied it at school, it seemed unreal—just as unreal as the bodies on Elara.

“Those terrorist attacks in House Aries,” I say, “and those suicide bombers on the Geminin space freighter—that’s not nature’s way.”

“Fringe fanatics,” says Deke, sounding just like Stanton. “We’ve always had our share of lunatics.”

Nishiko draws me to the far end of the bunkroom, darts a wary glance at Deke and Kai, then whispers in my ear. “What if there is an enemy? Think about the timing of the blast.”

“You mean the Lunar Quadract?”

“Almost every Zodai and high-ranking government member in your House was on Elara tonight to hear your Guardian’s speech—”

“And our moons were at their closest conjunction,” I say, completing her thought. I chew on my lower lip as the full magnitude of her theory sinks in. If someone planned this, they really thought it through. A well-timed blast in exactly the right place, and our moons could crash into each other like marbles.

I feel myself blanch. I don’t want to consider this. Cancer has no enemies. Humanity has been at peace for a thousand years. “This was a tragedy . . . no one could have orchestrated it.”

Nishi frowns at me. “You’ve been seeing an omen.”

“Yes, and the experts at the Academy who teach classes on this stuff don’t find my methods reliable, so neither should you.”

Nishi’s voice rises higher, and now Deke and Kai are listening again. “Rho, they just don’t understand your methods, that’s all! I know you’ve been taught to trust your elders, but on Sagittarius we’re raised to question everything—it’s the only way to get to the truth of a thing. You and our instructors are being blinded by prejudice right now. You’re so distracted by
how
you got the right answer that you’re missing the point that you are
right
—”

An alarm blares across the room, and an automated voice echoes through the ship: “Debris field ahead. Brace yourselves.”

A heavy object jolts against our hull, and Nishi and I grasp hands just as the retro engines fire, flinging all of us to the ceiling. We must be flying through Thebe’s rubble. “Grab something and hang on!” I shout, wrapping my fingers around a handrail.

The engines thunder so loud, my teeth vibrate. We hear the thuds of more space rocks striking our hull, and we cling to our handrails while the ship veers in every direction, blowing our bodies around like seaweed in a riptide.

Kai looks green, so I pull myself over to him and tug on his elbow. “Come on!” I call over the thunderous rumbling. “We have to belt in.”

As the ship rolls and swerves, I help him into the nearest hammock and squeeze in beside him, hooking the belt tight across our ribs. An especially large chunk of debris slams our hull, and Kai clutches my hand so hard, I wince.

The ship keeps lurching unpredictably, the wreckage so extensive it feels like we’ve been bumping through it for hours. After a while, Kai starts singing an old Cancrian seafaring song:

“The wind she blows from north to east.

Our schooner flies ten knots at least.

So ever forward we shall roam,

Until the sea shall bring us home. . . .”

I join in, flat and off-key. When Deke’s voice seeps in, he meets my gaze for the first time. His eyes look like dying stars, nebulas of turquoise whose lights are fading.

Now I’m the one crushing Kai’s hand.

We sing the song so many times that Nishi memorizes the words. After so much crying and shouting, her voice is nothing more than a soft purr, but it’s still beautiful. Gradually, the rest of us drop out so we can listen to her mournful tune.

The ship’s trajectory starts to smooth out. When the engines cut off, Nishi’s voice fades away, and we wait in tense silence.

“All clear,” the automated voice announces.

I take a deep breath, free my fingers from Kai’s grip, and undo my belt. When I’m in the air, Nishi’s already by my side. “Let’s find the Stargazer and tell him what you saw.”
Stargazer
is the Sagittarian word for Zodai.

“He told us to stay here,” interrupts Deke.

“Nishi’s right,” I say, taking her hand and digging into my pocket for my Wave. “Besides, I want to know what’s happening.”

Nishi and I zip up to the hatch in time to barge right into Lodestar Mathias Thais. With a frown, he motions us back into the bunkroom. Inside, dim light falls across his face, shadowing his cheekbones. “We’re making a course change.”