He moves so swiftly that I have to run to catch up. The soles of my feet sting from stepping on sharp objects, and my sore muscles scream in agony. I’m going to need a pain tonic to sleep tonight.
The clouds above are growing as dark as charcoal, but the red sun is still burning in the twilight sky, its laser-like light a fiery torch illuminating our way. We cut through the woods, and I fall as far back as I can so the crunching of copper leaves won’t give me away.
I speed up once we’re out in the grassy field, in the shadow of the mountain. Up ahead a dozen rivulets tangle through the hilly landscape, delivering fresh water from the cobalt sea to the three fortresses.
I follow Hysan along the banks of the closest stream. The water wraps around the smallest hill and disappears behind it, and as we trace the curving shoreline, I spy a man in a navy blue Lodestar suit.
Mathias.
I stop moving so they won’t hear my heavy breathing. Mathias has trimmed his hair in a Zodai style again, and he’s smooth-faced, like the days before his capture. It’s Hysan who looks disheveled now, his locks too long and poking into his eyes, his features masked in facial hair.
“How is she?” asks Mathias while Hysan is still far away.
I edge as close to them as I dare, keeping my breaths as subtle as possible. “Devastated,” says Hysan once he’s in front of Mathias. Sadness floods his voice, and he doesn’t sound anything like the person he was moments ago.
“I should go see her,” says Mathias, squaring his shoulders like he’s ready to march to my tent right now.
“Give her a moment . . . and maybe a head’s up,” says Hysan, and I wonder if he’s picturing the state in which he found me.
Mathias nods, the furrow of his brow forming a wall between his eyes. “Did you ask what she wants to do about the . . . body?”
Everything in me hardens, and I almost gasp. The thought of my brother’s corpse makes the world spin around me, and I force myself to fall a few more steps back.
“I couldn’t—not yet,” says Hysan, and he clears his throat like he’s trying to cut a path through a wave of emotion. “He’s frozen, so there’s no rush to decide.”
“What about—”
“No.” Hysan’s voice is almost forceful as he anticipates whatever Mathias was about to ask. “In fact, I think we should push that news to tomorrow.”
“Okay,” says Mathias, who’s suddenly comfortable taking orders from Hysan. “I’ll let her know.”
So Hysan and Mathias are working together to keep information from me? I guess my nightmares weren’t so far off the mark after all.
I lower my gaze to the green ground to calm the icy storm rising within me. Somewhere in my subconscious, somewhere so deep I needed the Sumber to unlock it, I must have known they never fully trusted me. And that means they can’t be trusted.
“All she cares about is Nishi,” I hear Hysan say, and I look up to see Mathias blowing out a hard breath.
“You were right, then,” he says. “For a Cancrian, the loss of a loved one is . . . well, when we succumb to an emotion as powerful as grief, it can completely overtake us if we’re not careful. I’d hoped, since she coped so well with her father’s death, that she might rise from this loss as well—”
I fall back a few more steps, enough that they can’t hear me when I crumple to the ground.
Coped so well? What is he talking about?
“It’s too much,” says Hysan mournfully. “She’s lost too much, she’s been put through too much, and now she’s drawn the line at Nishi—she’s all that anchors her, and Rho’s determined to locate her. Once she does, she’ll go to her straight away, everyone else be damned.”
“So what you’re saying,” says Mathias almost too softly, “is you don’t think we should give her a full report.”
My eyes latch on to Hysan’s face with an intensity that should be able to ignite fires. His jaw tightens, like he’s tasting something bitter, and he says, “We can’t tell her where Nishi is . . . not yet.”
The rest of my body suddenly comes into sharp focus, shattering the shell of numbness that had been shielding me from this nightmare.
Despair clangs through my bones, and I try to keep listening past the pain, past the déjà vu of the dream that prophesied Hysan and Mathias’s betrayal.
“She’s not going to like that plan,” says Mathias. “And I can’t say I’m a fan either.”
“Nor I,” says Hysan, his voice growing more forceful, “but unless you have a better one, I don’t think Rho is in the right mind to hear this information, not when Nishi and Aquarius are in the same place. We can’t just show up on Leo and start shooting—Aquarius will See us coming.”
Leo.
That’s where Nishi is.
“We need a real plan,” Hysan goes on, “one we coordinate as a team with the other Houses, and that will take more time.”
“Can Rho be convinced of that?” asks Mathias hopefully. “Can we explain the importance of combining Nishi’s rescue with our strike on the master?”
Hysan shakes his head, and after a moment Mathias says, “Okay then. I’ll talk to the others about redacting the report we give her at tonight’s meeting.”
I push down on the outrage surging up from my core, and I turn back the way I came. Invisibly, I stalk through the field, then the forest, then the keep, until I’m back inside my sapphire tent, and only then do I bury my face in my pillow and scream.
When my throat is a raw flame of pain, I fall limp on the bed and wait for the aching to crush my heart, for the tears to flood my eyes, for the loneliness to scorch my soul.
But nothing happens.
I’m not even angry anymore.
I’m just done.
I’m sick of being handled by the people around me. Since becoming Guardian, everything I’ve done has been dictated by someone else—Crius, Mathias, Hysan, the Plenum, Ophiuchus, Aquarius. Most of them men, all of them older, and each one convinced they could decide what’s best for me.
On Scorpio, Strident Engle told me I’ve been playing someone else’s game, and he was right. Everyone thinks they’re so much smarter than me. They’re so sure they know better. Even though I’m the one who uncovered Ophiuchus. I’m the one who Saw the Dark Matter. I’m the Wandering Star.
And I’m sick of their condescension. I’m sick of them. I’m done being a pawn in everyone else’s game—now it’s time to make everyone play my game.
I don’t need Hysan or Mathias or a Zodai army.
I can save Nishi on my own.
8
I MAKE MY WAY TO the keep after changing into my Lodestar suit.
In the entrance hall, I follow Skarlet’s instructions and turn down the corridor she pointed to earlier. Red flames flicker from torches bracketed high up on the stone walls, and the passage ends in a vast dining hall lined with long communal tables. I go straight to the buffet bar and stack my plate with hunks of unidentifiable meats and rainbow-colored vegetable cake.