Page 12 of The Bound Zodiac

She winked and turned to me then, and up close her face was a map of deep lines, but her eyes were as alert as a twenty-year-old. “Tala,” she said, taking my hand in both of hers. Her palms were dry and warm. “Phoenix’s grandmother if you haven’t guessed already. I’ve been alive for eighty years, girl, and I confess I did not think I would see this day inside them.”

“Maybe I should have worn my going-out boots then,” I said, before I could stop myself.

Tala laughed. “Oh, I like her,” she said, to no one in particular. “You didn’t tell me she was funny, boys.”

Arthur Bennett stepped forward next. Everything about him was composed and expensive. I could see Lucas in the set of his shoulders and the way he took a half second before speaking, as though every sentence was well-thought-out.

“Ms. Black,” he said in a very posh English accent. “Thank you for coming. I recognize that trusting us does not come easily to you, and that we have done little as an institution to deserve it.”

I gave him my most polite smile, mentally telling myself not to be a bitch. “You’re right. I wish I’d been told about this Order when I first arrived. I had to come to my own conclusions while reading archived journals. But I guess I can understand. You don’t know me yet, or my intentions. For all you know I could be evil.”

Somewhere behind me, I heard Jamie exhale something that might have been a laugh.

Arthur took it without flinching. If anything, something in his face eased, like he’d been braced for worse. “Then I’ll be direct with you. We are not going to ask you for anything tonight. No oaths, no rituals, no signatures in blood. Tonight we want to give you the truth first. And then an offer you are free to refuse.”

They didn’t make me stand in the middle of the scorch mark like some sacrificial centerpiece, which I appreciated. Instead, chairs were brought in by a few of the cloaked individuals. Ordinary wooden chairs. The elders settled themselves in a wide circle.

“You know pieces of the puzzle,” Tala said. “My grandson and his shield have been feeding them to you slowly, on our instruction of course. But you’re exceptionally smart, and you’ve been finding others on your own too. So tonight we give you the facts, and you may ask anything you like. Agreed?”

“Agreed.” It’s all I wanted. Information, Truths. Anything to tell me that what they were going to ask of me would actually be achievable.

“Then let’s start with the enemy, because everything else follows from them.” She folded her hands in her lap. “What do they teach you about the bane, in your classes? At Dominion, at Imperium. What are they?”

It felt like being called on by a professor, which, considering my parents, should have been comforting. “Dark matter entities. They come through portals, feed on life force and magic. They’re classified by size and threat level, and before the First Crossing, they nearly wiped out the Aelari on the home worlds, and they’ve been coming to Earth ever since.”

“All true,” Tala said. She leaned forward. “Here is what the Assembly does not teach, because it stopped being convenient for them once they settled on Earth. The bane travel between worlds the same way you travel through portals. But their portals are not like yours. A bane portal is a violent tear in the fabric of space. They chew through that fabric, and like anything with teeth, they can only bite so far. A few light-years at a stretch, no more, and the energy it takes costs them. They must stop. Feed. Rebuild their strength on whatever living world they’ve landed on, sometimes for decades, sometimes for a century, before they can bite again.”

Her dark eyes held mine. “That is why the home worlds took generations to fall instead of days. The bane came through the outer worlds first and ate their way inward, world by world, jump by jump, and our people could not stop it. Do you understand what I am telling you?”

“They’re slow,” I said. My mouth had gone dry. “They’re devastating, but they’re slow. It takes them lifetimes to cross what I could cross in a step.”

“What you could cross in a step,” Tala repeated softly. “Yes. That is precisely the point.” She sat back. “The home worlds are empty, Jupiter. Not dead. Empty. The bane are eaters, and an eaten world holds nothing for them. There is no more magic to sustain their hunger. The swarms that consumed our worlds moved on long ago, chasing richer feeding grounds toward the galactic core. What they left behind is thirteen worlds’ worth of ruins. Cities with no one in them. Places where the doors were sealed from the inside and nobody ever came back to open them.”

I realized my hands were gripping each other in my lap hard enough to hurt. Jamie had shown me the Pisces world in the dream, and I’d thought of it as something beautiful and lost, like a black and white photograph of a dead relative. Not as a door standing open. Not as somewhere you could go physically. Somewhere that waited and waited while nobody returned.

“You want me to take you home,” I said, already knowing it was my sole reason for being here. Both in this room and on this planet.

“We want,” Arthur Bennett said carefully, “you to try. For ten thousand years there was no such person with the right magic to do so. Now there is you, and you did not ask for it, and we are painfully aware that this is unfair to you.” His jaw tightened, and for a second I could see exactly where Lucas got that, too.

I’d spent days thinking it over, and I’d already come to the conclusion that I was going to do this. If not for myself and my own abilities, but for our people. For the worlds we left behind. We were strangers orbiting a star we did not belong to, and we could never truly be a free people until we returned.

So I asked my questions. All of them. For the next hour I peppered the elders with them, and they answered every single one as if they’d been expecting exactly this.

I asked why the Assembly buried most of the knowledge, and got the answer I expected, which somehow didn’t make it less infuriating to hear confirmed. Because a people with a homeland is a people with somewhere else to go, and the Assembly’s entire authority rested on there being nowhere else. Because Ophiuchus was a dead designation right up until it wasn’t, and by then the leaders in Geneva, Antarctica, Russia and New York had spent so many generations teaching everyone the home worlds were unreachable. They held power here on Earth, and my presence was throwing it all into question.

I asked how they knew the bane had really moved on. Tala explained the incursion records going back centuries. The way each wave of bane arriving on Earth came through starving, which meant long jumps from depleted territory, which meant the feeding grounds behind them were bare. The way the waves themselves were spreading further apart, decades becoming half-centuries. The bane hadn’t given up on Earth. But the great mass of them, the tide that had drowned thirteen worlds, had rolled on toward richer waters a long, long time ago.

“They left the lights off and the doors open,” I said, half to myself, raking my fingers through my hair. My eyes were getting heavy, and I knew I needed a long nap to recover from the information overload.

“And it will take them a very long time to come back,” Tala said. “Distance protects the home worlds now. If our people returned, if the cities were rebuilt, the wards raised anew, the old defenses remembered, we would not be the cornered refugees our ancestors were. We would see them coming, across all those slow, hungry jumps. Generations of warning, instead of none. With our shield teams, we could spread out across the home worlds again and build new training academies on our own turf. We could create a society of warriors ready to defend our people and protect our way of life. No longer hiding away on Earth, afraid of what the humans would think or do if they knew about us.”

“You are the strongest raw talent any of us has ever seen,” Arthur said plainly, “and you are running on instinct. What you did across the Atlantic should not have been possible for someone with no formal Ophis instruction. We have texts no one else has. Techniques recorded by the last Ophis’s own hand. Scholars who have spent their lives studying the mechanics of what you do naturally. We are offering you all of it. The elders will mentor you directly, here, in this chamber, where the magic is strongest and the wards are oldest. No Assembly oversight.”

It was a big offer and a bigger ask. But it was a good one. When it came to dealing with the Assembly, there was always a layer of distrust and secrecy. There was none of that here. I looked around at the faces of the elders surrounding me and saw people. Just people, who spent their entire lives working to preserve the sacred knowledge of our people, selflessly and at great personal risk.

“And if I take everything you teach me and decide the portal never gets opened?” My gaze flickered around the circle, one by one.

“Then the knowledge continues with us. With our Order. We pass it to the next generation, and one day, if another Ophis is born, maybe we can have another chance.”