Thirteen Rising

by Romina Russell

Yet as I near the cell, for the first time, I start reviewing and reconsidering my plan. Whatever Hysan might think of me, I’m not going to doom the Zodiac with my actions. Once I’ve freed Nishi, I’ll do whatever it takes to find out if Aquarius truly plans to go through a portal in Helios—and if he does, I won’t leave his side until I’ve stopped him or he’s killed me, whichever comes first.

  After that the stars can have what’s left of me.

  The metal door to Ophiuchus’s cell scans me, and then it slides open. I step into the blindingly white room and find the Thirteenth Guardian asleep on his back just as he was in the surveillance footage I saw earlier.

  Even though he’s in mortal form, he doesn’t look human. He’s even larger than an Ariean, and the subtle patterning of his textured skin is indescribably delicate.

  The metal cuffs confining his movements are still in place, as is the needle keeping him sedated. Once I pull it out, I won’t undo his bonds with my Barer until I’m sure he’s onboard with my plan; I’m hoping I won’t need the weapon for self-defense since last I checked, Ophiuchus and I were on the same side.

  Watching him sleep it’s hard to reconcile the shape-shifting ice phantom that’s been haunting me with this overgrown, otherworldly teenager. And as the seconds tick by, something starts to feel wrong.

  I should have woken him up by now, only my hand won’t move to the needle. All I can think of is Hysan.

  Is he trapped in a cell just like this one? Did they do him the favor of sedating him, too, or is he stuck with nothing but his memories of my betrayal for company?

  I had him arrested. I almost divulged his identity. I made him the scapegoat for my sins. Just like Aquarius did to Ophiuchus, and the Plenum did to me.

  I’m acting exactly like the crooked leaders I was supposed to replace. I’m going behind everyone’s backs to defy a democratic decision just because I believe I know better. That’s the act of a tyrant, not a leader. And if I keep making the same mistakes as the politicians who came before me, what hope does the Zodiac have?

  But I need to save Nishi.

  My hand trembles as I reach for the needle, only I still don’t touch it. Maybe I can find Mathias and ask for his help. He told me earlier that I could come to him about anything, and I should have spoken up then. He’ll understand when I explain to him why Nishi can’t wait—after all, he was tortured by Corinthe, too.

  I drop my hand, and with a last look at Ophiuchus I turn to go. But a deep, booming voice stops me in my tracks.

  “I knew you wouldn’t do it.”

  I gasp and wheel around. Ophiuchus is still lying in bed, his face angled up at the ceiling, but he’s awake.

  “Though I also didn’t think you would make it this far.”

  My throat dry, I take a few steps closer and meet a pair of eyes that are wider and longer than any human being’s, with vertical slits for pupils. “You know why I’m here?” I ask, my voice insubstantial when compared to his.

  “Undo my binds and let’s go,” he commands.

  “I c—can’t,” I stammer, my skin breaking into a chilly sweat. “I changed my mind.”

  His silver irises glow like starlight, and flecks of platinum swirl around his pupils, like worlds orbiting elliptical black holes. “Are you certain?” he asks, his words reverberating through me long after he’s spoken.

  I think of Nishi, and most of me wants to scream NO. But I force myself to jerk a nod instead.

  Without warning Ophiuchus sits bolt upright.

  A mere flexing of his muscles and he blasts apart the metal cuffs holding him. I leap back until I’m pressed against the wall, too stunned to run out or raise my Barer.

  “Y—you had the power to escape this whole time?”

  His bare feet fall to the floor, and he tugs off his crinkly hospital gown and tosses it aside. I drop my gaze to the ground to avoid staring at his naked body, and I notice his toenails are curved like claws.

  In the fringe of my vision, I watch him dig into a hidden drawer beneath the bed and pull out white healer’s scrubs. The textured patterns of his skin gleam in the room’s blinding brightness, and once he’s stepped into the too-short pants, I look up again.

  “Why didn’t you leave before now?” I ask as he pulls on the shirt. His body is so powerful that his muscles ripple through the fabric, straining every thread.

  “I was weak. While I waited for you, I focused on regaining my strength.”

  “For me? You foresaw I’d come?”

  His starry eyes lock onto mine, and the shading of his thick skin shifts from light to dark as he moves toward me.

  I try retreating even further into the wall until the back of my skull starts to ache from the effort. “W—why do you need me?”

  “If I’m going to bargain for my House,” he rumbles, “I’m going to need something Aquarius wants.”

  I have to tilt my chin up to keep my eyes on his. “Your plan is to use me?”

  “Just as yours is to use me.”

  “No.”

  And before he comes any closer, I raise my right hand to his face, tapping into the Barer’s buzzing until my fist grows a set of electric brass knuckles. “I came to my senses in time. I’m not going with you.”

  Hands as strong as stone grip my arms, and my head bashes into the wall.

  Pain blasts through me, and the Barer fizzes out as my body is pinned in place, my scalp stinging and eyes streaming tears. A boulder presses into my chest, knocking the air from my lungs, and through my bleary vision I see Ophiuchus, his body pushed up against me, his lustrous snakeskin face just inches from mine.

  “I’m not one of your little boyfriends,” he hisses, his swirling silver irises rampaging with rage. “You don’t turn me down.”

  17

  MY HEART RACES, AND ITS ferocious pounding feels foreign and new. I can’t remember the last time I heard it this clearly.

  Fear coats my tongue, releasing gallons of adrenaline through my veins. And though my head is in agony, this is the first time I’ve felt something real since the Sumber.

  The first time I’ve felt alive.

  Ophiuchus steps back, and without him to hold me up I crumple to the floor. My pulse fades away, and as the emotions recede I’m left even emptier than I was before.

  He reaches down for me again, and I scream as he bundles up my limbs as if I’m weightless. He cradles me to his chest like a newborn, wrapping me completely in his arms, and then he rams his back into the cell’s door.

  The slab of metal goes flying and slams into the rocky passage.

  And then we’re racing through the mountain, and I feel like I’m moving as swiftly as when Candor carried me. Ophiuchus pushes my head down with his chin, and I’m like a turtle being shoved into her shell until I can’t see anything. An instant later shots explode all around us, and I squeeze my eyes shut, waiting for a bullet to lodge into me.

  Soon the air changes from warm and musty to cool and earthy, like we’re aboveground and soaring across Phaet’s surface. Ophiuchus’s grip is as firm as stone, his hold steady and his stride stable, but I can’t see what’s going on.

  When he finally slows down, I peek my head up. We’re on a landing pad filled with ships from across the Zodiac. He sets me down roughly, and I’m dizzy on my feet, so I drop to the ground and close my eyes to get my bearings.

  “There’s no time for weakness,” he barks, and I glare up at him. But he’s not watching me—he’s looking behind us. I follow his gaze, but I don’t see anything.

  “They’re coming. The Bellow’s guards have alerted the whole base. We only have minutes. Let’s go.”

  He strides up to a round red ship with twisty wings that look like ram horns, and as I get up to follow him, I notice the Ariean pilot pointing his pistol at Ophiuchus’s chest.

  Even though the man is nearly a giant
by human standards, he’s still a full head shorter than the Thirteenth Guardian. “Stand back!” he warns him, his hand trembling.

  But Ophiuchus keeps moving forward, and the man begins to discharge his weapon. The bullets burn through the white healer’s scrubs but bounce right off of Ophiuchus. When he’s just a foot away, the man throws the whole gun at the Guardian’s head, but the latter merely tilts his face to avoid it.

  Then he curls his fingers around the man’s neck, and the Ariean’s knees buckle as he runs out of air. I want to tell him to stop, but I can’t find my voice. When the man finally faints, Ophiuchus lets go, opening the ship’s door with brute force and motioning for me to follow.

  I feel like I’m wading through water as I wind around the man’s comatose body. Part of me wants to drop to the floor and make sure he’s still breathing—but a smaller, newer part of me wonders if it even matters.

  Everyone here has committed their lives to this cause. Didn’t Fernanda say teamwork meant making sacrifices for the greater good? Besides, if I can’t defeat Aquarius, we’ll all be blown to pieces and none of this will matter.

  I board the ship, which is much smaller than Equinox, and Ophiuchus shuts the door behind me. But instead of accessing the control helm, he turns toward the nose’s glass window and closes his eyes. He looks like he’s Centering.

  The engine fires up.

  He’s not touching any buttons or speaking any commands—he’s navigating the ship with his mind.

  “How are you doing that?” I ask, clinging onto a handrail as we shoot into the air.

  “I’ve told you before,” he says, his eyes still shut. “Everything is Psynergy.”

  I hold on tightly as the ship shudders through Phaet’s atmosphere, and I’m relieved when my feet don’t float off the floor. Though the walls are shaking, Ophiuchus stays completely still, even without holding onto anything. Once we jump into hyperspeed and the ride stabilizes, I finally let go of the railing, and while Ophiuchus remains Centered, I check out the rest of the ship.

  My tour is brief: All I see is a lavatory, a galley, and a cabin. This is clearly a one-person military vessel.

  I take a moment in the cabin to catch my breath. The Zodai were right to sedate and restrain Ophiuchus, but they should have realized that if he’s really as powerful as they feared, those measures might not be enough.

  Since the master already knows everything about me, I decide to learn everything I can about him, from the only being alive who knows the true Aquarius. So I return to the front of the ship, determined to yank Ophiuchus out of the astral plane and back to reality—but when I see him, I freeze.

  A shadow has fallen over Ochus, and he’s curved and hunched over, the way he was when time took its toll on him in our battle during the armada. I keep as far back from him as possible as he suffers in soundless torture, his expression contorted with misery, and I desperately hope this doesn’t affect his ability to navigate the spacecraft.

  I don’t know how many hours pass, but gradually, Ophiuchus reverts to his full strength. When the process finishes, he’s breathing heavily and his eyes fly open.

  “What was that?” I whisper from my spot on the floor against the far wall. We’ve been silent for so long that the sound of my voice feels intrusive.

  “All power has a price,” he murmurs, his gaze turned toward the stars.

  “So—does that mean—Aquarius has a weakness, too?”

  “Whatever he’s doing is warping the Psy and undoing the astral plane. I have no idea what he’s capable of, or how to stop him.”

  I think of Hysan’s theory about the portal through Helios. I’m sitting next to one of the only two souls still around to confirm or debunk it.

  “Where do humans come from?”

  A dreamy expression relaxes Ophiuchus’s features, and he closes his eyes again. He’s silent for so long that he’s either asleep or deeply Centered, and I’m about to call out to him when the ship goes completely dark.

  “What’s happening?” I whisper.

  The darkness begins to recede from the center of the room, like curtains being drawn, and a rocky landscape unfolds around us. I feel like I’m viewing a Snow Globe.

  The nose fully vanishes as the memory overtakes everything, and I get to my feet and scan the vast, barren terrain. Above us is a high-tension fabric dome that seems to be held aloft by air pressure, like the domes of Phaetonis.

  That’s where we are. Where history says the humans first landed.

  As soon as I have the thought, I begin to notice an antiquated fleet of ships on the far horizon, high above the dome’s protection. There must be thousands of vessels. They look like metallic insects getting ready to launch an attack.

  Time takes one stride forward, and now the people have disembarked and they’re packed inside the dome. There must be a million of them.

  I’m not sure how I come up with the number—it’s like I’m not simply seeing our history, but embodying it. Hysan once told me the Guardian’s Talismans contain the essence of a survival skill—the meaning of the thing itself. And that’s how this feels.

  Which makes sense, since Ophiuchus is a living representation of his Talisman.

  The humans are all standing around anxiously, as though they’re waiting for something. They were invited here, I realize. Some still have their air masks on, like they distrust this dome. I look around me just as they do, trying to find the reason for this gathering. And then I see them.

  Fourteen silhouettes grow clearer in the distance beyond the dome, all equally spaced out and encircling the whole human population. Through some trick of Psynergy, they’ve made it so that every person has a clear view of every Original Guardian, even if that person is short and standing in the middle of a million-person crowd.

  I turn in a slow circle, observing them—the Geminin Twins are so perfectly identical they look like clones—and I see that the humans around me are doing the same thing. Some Guardians look more masculine and others more feminine, but most are so androgynous they don’t seem to have a gender. And just like the ice carving of Sagittarius that Nishi showed me in Starry City, these mortal stars have an amalgamation of features that probably represent the ultimate evolution of their people. No human I’ve seen in modern times looks anything like them, yet somehow I can still find traces of all my friends’ faces in theirs.

  I stop studying the fallen stars and stare instead at the humans around me. Unlike the Guardians, these beings all look more or less the same. They have a small range of skin tones, and hair shades, and eye colors, and body types. They’re not all that distinguishable from each other—they must hail from a single planet.

  Earth.

  At least our history records seem to have gotten that much right.

  The humans also look unhealthy. Thin, tense, tired, terrified, tiny—and as they behold the majestic Guardians and their magic tricks, they don’t seem all that inclined to trust them.

  “Welcome to the Zodiac Solar System,” says the tallest Guardian, who’s draped in red fabric. I get the sense that everyone understands him, like he’s somehow speaking to them in their own language. “When our Thirteen Constellations foresaw your arrival through Helios, each of our Houses gave up its Guardian Star—us.”

  Gasps rise from the crowd, but when he speaks again, a million people fall to instant silence.

  “We shooting stars crashed onto planets in our own Houses, and we arose in human form, each of us with a Star Stone, or Talisman, that stores our particular power—the strength we bring to the Zodiac.”

  I thought the Talismans were secrets entrusted only to the Guardian of each House—and yet Aries is freely telling everyone about them. Is this another one of Aquarius’s manipulations? Did it occur to him that knowledge of these Talismans would one day inspire another ambitious soul to attempt the same theft he committed?

>   “In these mortal forms, we have been charged by the stars to work together and harness the powers of our Stones to protect our planets, and, hopefully—if you’ll have us—our people.”

  I can barely process any of this.

  Humans came through Helios—Hysan was right. Which means there’s really a portal in our sun, and it could lead anywhere. This might not even be the largest solar system—our Zodiac could be another offshoot from something bigger.

  And that has to be what Aquarius is dying to find out.

  18

  A DIFFERENT GUARDIAN STEPS FORWARD and enters the dome, walking through the barrier like it’s not even there. I know I didn’t notice him earlier, because if I had I wouldn’t have been able to take my eyes off him.

  My amazed reaction is reproduced through the crowd, as everyone’s eyes find Ophiuchus. If his appearance is striking now, it’s nothing to what he looked like then, in his original form. He’s as tall as Aries, maybe taller, and his skin seems to contain every color imaginable and unimaginable. When he moves, he glimmers and shines like he’s made of pure light—even the day’s shadows don’t seem to touch him.

  “Friends, I have come to tell you that you have nothing to fear from us,” he says in a voice that emanates strength and warmth and trust. “If you choose to form your own society, we will honor your wishes and leave you in peace.”

  Murmurs of shock and relief break out, but they die down as soon as he speaks again.

  “We have no desire to hurt or control you. We are the stars of the Zodiac, and we are here to watch over you. It’s our fate to steer you toward your passions and your purpose and your soul mates—but ultimately, your destiny is designed by your decisions.”

  He bestows on the humans a dazzlingly brilliant smile that could make the sun swoon. “We would never take your free will from you. Nor are we unknown to you. We are manifestations of universal concepts, and if you search yourselves, you’ll find you’re more drawn to one pursuit or pastime or value than all others, and therein you will find yourself and your Center.