Page 74 of The Bound Zodiac

Ten portals. Twenty. Thirty. My hands were steady. My breathing was controlled. But beneath the surface, the magic was a living thing, a current threatening to rip out of my grip if I lost focus for even a second.

Forty. Forty-five.

Sweat beaded along my hairline as my jaw locked. The harmonic climbed, a frequency that made the crystal glasses on the nearest tables vibrate. I could feel the bond tugging at my mental focus, Percy’s armor magic wrapping around mine, Lucas’s water tempering the heat, Aiden’s fire feeding the stability. They were doing exactly what they were supposed to do. Holding me up. Holding me together.

Fifty.

People were on their feet, whistling, cheering, screaming. I heard someone, a woman’s voice, shouting, “It’s real! Oh my god, it’s real!” The applause rolled through the space like a tidal wave, crashing against the stone walls and bouncing back, doubling, tripling. Camera flashes strobed so fast I could barely make out faces.

I held the portals open for a full minute. Sixty seconds that felt like an eternity. My arms shook. My knees threatened to buckle. But I held, because for the first time in my life, I was showing them something they’d only ever dreamed about. Not a myth. Not a bedtime story. Not something locked away in ancient texts that the Assembly kept under glass. This was real, and there was hope.

I started to merge them. The smaller portals folded inward, their light bleeding together. Twenty became ten. Ten became five. Five became one massive, roiling sphere of silver-white energy that pulsed and breathed like a living heart.

The applause faltered, then surged again, louder than before. People were crying. Actual tears, streaming down faces I didn’t recognize. I caught Tala’s eye across the room. She was standing, hands clasped under her chin, tears tracking mascara down her cheeks. Malakai beside her had his arm around her shoulders, his own eyes bright.

The merged portal stabilized, and then widened. The light burned white-hot for one blinding second, and then the image on the other side resolved. A vast, endless desert of rust-colored sand and rock stretched to every horizon. Craters pockmarked the surface, and in the distance, a mountain rose so high it scraped against the thin, pinkish atmosphere. The sky above the pinkish line was black and star-dusted.

Mars. I’d opened a portal to fucking Mars.

People were out of their chairs, rushing toward the stage, phones raised, mouths hanging open. I heard my father’s voice cut through the noise, saying, “That’s my girl! That’s my baby girl!”—and I almost laughed, almost cried, almost collapsed right there on the stage.

I let them look through the portal, but not touch it. Let them see what an Ophis could do. Let the Assembly watch from their front-row seats and understand, for the first time, that Earth was not the final frontier.

I took a breath, steadying myself, preparing to close the portal with one clean, elegant snap. My hands rose, fingers splaying, and I reached for the threads of the bond.

The sound that shattered the ballroom was not applause. It was a crack. Like the entire building had been split down the middle. The floor bucked beneath my feet. The chandeliers swayed, crystal shards raining down like daggers. The temperature plummeted, not the cold of my portals, but something darker, something that sucked the warmth out of the air and replaced it with nothing.

Darkness descended.

Dozens—no, hundreds—of pitch-black tears ripped open across the ballroom. They bloomed from the walls, the ceiling, the floor, and through them, the bane poured out. They came in a flood. Multi-limbed constructs of dark matter, bodies shifting and reforming as they moved, no fixed anatomy, no faces, just limbs and teeth and an overwhelming, soul-crushing wrongness. Class Two and Class Three, from the look of them. Dozens. Hundreds. The room filled with them in seconds.

People scrambled. Chairs overturned. Glass shattered. The crowd surged toward the exits in a panicked stampede, but the bane were already between them and the doors, cutting off escape routes with walls of writhing shadow.

I slammed my portal closed and the Mars desert vanished, and the last of the starlight winked out, plunging the stage into near-darkness broken only by the red emergency lights and the sickly darkness of the bane portals.

“Formation!” Percy shouted. He was already at my right shoulder, crimson light blazing around his fists, his eyes burning red. “Now!”

My shield moved as one. Percy and Aiden at my flanks. Draco and Eris behind me. Lucas and Rowan on the outer edges. Theo and Phoenix and Jamie filling the gaps. The bond locked into place, all nine of us connected mind to mind seamlessly, as if we were suddenly one soul in ten different bodies.

Across the ballroom, every other shield team was doing the same. The Duskfall Shield had already engaged, Cassia’s water magic slamming into a cluster of bane near the east wall. The Sapphire Shield formed a defensive ring around a group of civilians. The Emberlight Shield was cutting a path toward the main exit, clearing a corridor for the fleeing crowd.

But the bane kept coming. They poured through the black portals in waves, likely drawn by the astronomical surge of magic I’d been building for months. My power. My starlight. I’d been a beacon, and they were starving for it.

Starlight erupted from my palms. Two short swords formed in my grip, each one a blade of compressed starlight, humming with enough energy to cut through dark matter like butter.

The silk dress I wore was beautiful and completely useless. I grabbed the hem and ripped it. The fabric tore with a satisfying shred, splitting from my ankles to mid-thigh, and I kicked the excess away, baring my legs to the cold air.

The first bane reached the stage. It was a Class Three, a massive, six-limbed monster, its body a shifting mass of darkness. It moved on too many legs, too fast, and it was coming straight for me.

Red laser-like fire erupted from Percy’s palms in a concentrated beam that punched through the bane’s center mass. It shrieked and kept coming. Aiden’s Leo fire bloomed around him, and he slammed both hands into the floor. The heat wave that erupted from his palms rolled across the stage and hit the bane like a wall of liquid sunlight. It screamed again, its limbs curling, and this time it staggered.

I moved, the starlight swords like extensions of my arms, and I cut through the bane’s remaining limbs in two clean strokes. It dissolved into ash and shadow, the dark matter dispersing like smoke.

More were coming. They were climbing the stage from every direction, swarming over the overturned tables, crawling along the walls. The ballroom had become a nightmare of screaming civilians, flashing magic, the wet, tearing sounds of combat.

Draco was throwing shadow constructs at the bane. Venomous, corrosive substance that ate through bane flesh like acid. Eris split into one, two, three, four, ten copies of himself, materializing in a ring around the stage, each one armed and moving independently. His duplicates fanned out, engaging bane on multiple fronts, buying us space.

Lucas’s water magic flooded the floor, creating a slick barrier that the bane couldn’t grip. Rowan’s gravity manipulation cracked the marble beneath their feet, swallowing limbs and bodies into fissures that sealed shut as Phoenix closed the stone. Theo was a blur of movement, their confusion letting him strike and retreat before the bane could react. Vines like tentacles erupted from the floor. Thorned vines and carnivorous blooms that wrapped around the bane and squeezed as Phoenix roared.