Everyone seems to view this with more cynicism than shock, as if these kinds of attacks happen often at the Plenum. Suddenly I remember Mom telling me something about these sessions. She said the Plenum meetings were a waste of time because the ambassadors don’t work well together. She claimed the system had been corrupted. Turf grabs. Partisan squabbling. Bribes not paid.
Apparently things have gotten worse in the decade since our lessons ended.
“I see a lot of soldiers, but where’s the local Zodai Guard?” I ask Hysan.
“The Ariean Zodai were marginalized when the junta seized power. Even General Eurek is little more than a figurehead, living under house arrest. The military employs its own astrologers, and so do the warring militias.”
“Can we visit Guardian Eurek?”
Hysan whispers to his Scan, and a small hologram floats before his eyes. It’s a miniature figure of a plump man wearing extravagant robes trimmed in sheepskin. He looks like he was once a bodybuilder whose muscles have since melted into folds of skin from lack of use. Hysan spins the hologram so I can see the man’s face.
“This is Albor Echus, the Ariean ambassador. He’s more a mouthpiece for the generals. You can meet him, but General Eurek receives no one.”
On Stanton’s tenth birthday, the same year she left, Mom gave me a necklace. It was the only gift she ever gave me that wasn’t from Dad, too. On a strand of silver seahorse hair, she had strung together twelve nar-clam pearls, each one bearing the sacred symbol of a House of the Zodiac.
“We share the same universe, but we live in different worlds,” she used to often remind me.
Yet despite her insistence on the Houses’ differences, I never saw the Zodiac as a collection of multicolored pearls caught in the same necklace’s orbit—I saw us as one necklace. Each pearl has its purpose, but no one is more important than another, and every pearl is integral to the beauty of the whole, and to our calling ourselves a necklace at all.
I’m embarrassed that it’s taken this trip to show me how naive that sounds. Mom was right: Every House I’ve visited functions as its own, separate world; even Cancer operates that way, only I never thought of it like that before. We don’t generally go around thinking of ourselves as one piece of a larger whole.
But now I have to address all the Houses and find a way to convince them we are one necklace. Every pearl matters. What happens to one star in our universe can and does affect every other.
That’s the advantage Ophiuchus holds over us: As long we keep on distrusting each other, we’re easier to pick off, one pearl at a time.
26
WHEN WE GET TO THE VILLAGE, we have to remove our collars. The community is enclosed within a solid black fence, and guards barricade the only entrance, so we can’t sneak past without alerting them.
We’re immediately asked for proof of identification. An Aerian soldier holds out a small screen for our thumbprints. His colleagues scowl at the grime on our clothes.
As soon as Hysan’s thumb hovers over the screen, a hologram pops up of his face, and beneath it the words Hysan Dax, House Libra, Diplomatic Envoy. Plus a bunch of facts like his astrological fingerprint, birthdate, schooling, and other information I can’t see. Mathias goes next. Lodestar Mathias Thais, House Cancer, Royal Advisor. Then me. Mother Rhoma Grace, House Cancer, Guardian.
The soldiers look at me curiously.
“Thank you,” says Hysan, reaching out to bump fists with each of them. I spy glints of gold in the soldiers’ hands when they pull away, and each slips what look like galactic gold coins in their pockets. Then Hysan takes my hand and hurriedly pulls me through the entrance, Mathias following close behind.
On the other side of the wall, the International Village looks like a smaller version of our solar system. The village is round, like a clock, and divided into twelve embassies. At its center is an inter-House market with food and amenities from across the Zodiac.
The look, style, and operation of each House is so diverse that the effect is dizzying. The only thing I can compare this place to is an amusement park, where every section has a different theme. The embassies are considered sovereign territory, so they don’t fall under Ariean rule.
We pop in on the Libran side. Their building is a sleek-walled, armed fortress, surrounded by surveillance cameras and Zodai from their Royal Guard. To our other side is Virgo. The round, golden embassy looks like a beehive, and its recessed entrance gives way to a colorful fruit-and-vegetable garden on its front lawn.
Mathias runs ahead, and I break into a sprint after him. We both sense the Cancer Sea’s call.
We rush past Leo, an elevated theater house with live lions prowling the front—a couple of them are ripping into a hunk of raw meat—and then we see the Fourth House. The Cancrian embassy looks like an island villa: Instead of one building, we have four multilevel bungalows, each draped with airy curtains, the structures built from sand and seashells.