“But are you sure she’s in love with you?”
Skarlet asks the question with the same gentle voice she used when describing to me what Phaet means to Arieans.
“I’ve made it clear I’m challenging her, and she doesn’t seem bothered by it. Or, who knows,” she adds with the flicker of a dangerous grin, “she might even be open to sharing you.”
Hysan’s jaw tightens, and his words come out slightly clipped. “Why are you messing with her? I thought you said you admired her.”
“I do,” she says, shrugging. “You know I only pick on people my own size.”
“You have a strange way of making friends.”
“What is it about her?” she asks, bringing her mouth right up to his, so close that the slightest movement would bring them together. She’s wearing so little clothing that Hysan can’t avoid touching her bare skin. “I know she’s not the best-looking woman in the Zodiac,” she adds with a sultry smile.
“But she is the most beautiful,” he says, all traces of good humor gone from his voice.
Skarlet takes a surprised step back, and for a moment she just stares at him, while he calmly holds her gaze.
“You really are in love,” she says at last, tacking on a small shrug. “Pity.”
As she sashays past me out the doorway, her expression crumbles with the pain she’s too proud to let Hysan see, and I turn back to watch him.
His skin’s golden glow is dull, like a lamp that’s been put out, and he hasn’t moved at all. He seems more affected by Skarlet’s presence now that she’s gone.
I wonder if he regrets rejecting her, or if he’s just thinking of what she revealed about me.
But is it true?
I know on a rational level that I once loved Hysan, yet I’ve lost the memory of the way it felt. It’s like my emotions have been muted; I know they exist, but I can’t tap into them. Maybe this is what it’s like to be Libran.
I’m so lost in my head that it takes me a moment to realize he’s moved. Hysan digs into his bag and removes something I can’t see. After pulling on a shirt he’d draped over one of the machines, he turns toward the door to go and looks at me.
I freeze in place, until I remember I’m invisible and he can’t see me.
“Hi, Rho.”
“What—” I cut myself off when I see the collar he’s just fastened around his neck, peeking out from beneath the shirt’s neckline. The Veils are networked.
“Been here long?” he asks.
“I—”
“Actually, I’m glad,” he says quickly, like he’s not at all interested in discussing what I just witnessed. “There’s something I’d like to show you—but I should shower first.”
“Shower later,” I say impatiently. “We’re invisible anyway.”
“Follow me then,” he says, and we take off down the hall, away from the room with the terminals and into a different, smaller space that smells musty and old. “This is where the Zodai keep this House’s earliest records, the ones they didn’t turn over to the Zodiax. It’s all the data from when our ancestors first landed on Phaetonis.”
He clicks keys on a screen embedded into the wall, until a hole opens up in the floor at the center of the room. A platform rises up, and all that’s on it is an open manuscript, its pages yellowed and wispy and faded. The book is encased in light, and unintelligible words begin to rise from it into the air, a holographic recreation of the text, which is written in some archaic language.
“Do you remember when Sirna read that story to us, The Chronicles of Hebitsukai-Za, the Serpent Bearer?”
I’m instantly intrigued, and I start regurgitating what I remember. “Sirna said Holy Mother Crae sent Lodestar Yosme to House Aries seventy-seven years ago to study the first version of the myth, about the time-worm—but the report was buried because there were details too alarming to be made public. Details having to do with time.”
“You really weren’t lying about your infallible memory,” says Hysan with a half-smile.
“What have you found?” I press.
“Apparently this story dates back to the days of the Original Guardians,” he says, growing businesslike again and not meeting my gaze. “I’ve found more texts with allusions to Ophiuchus; sometimes he’s represented with one snake and sometimes with two, like the Caduceus symbol.”
“On Cancer, the Caduceus is just one snake.”
“That’s because the Thirteenth House’s mythology has been so twisted over time that we can’t be sure what’s true. In the Tale of Hebitsukai-Za, thirteen travelers traverse the time warp to enter the universe, and the last one gets wrapped in the coils of a giant worm biting its own tail—so it looks like two snakes, but it’s really just one.”
“But what’s important about this?”
“The fact that this version of events circulated at the beginning of time means there must be more truth to it than we realize.” The holographic text begins to translate itself as Hysan recounts the story, and I see the images Sirna once projected for us at the Libran embassy.
“Za was the last to come through, and when he did his body was entwined in the ropey coils of an enormous worm biting its own tail—Time. Passing though the time warp created an unstable leak between the old universe and ours, and they were in imminent danger of sliding together and collapsing, so the travelers sealed off the warp, but only after Za had brought the time-worm through. The travelers recognized the chaos this would cause and tried to kill the worm, and by accident bludgeoned Za to death. The worm needed a host, so it reversed time and resurrected Za.” It ends with what looks like the glyph of House Ophiuchus.
“I remember all this,” I say impatiently, “but I still don’t understand why it’s been filed as dangerous—”
“Because it’s true,” he says, his large green eyes sparkling with excitement. “Ophiuchus’s Talisman lets him control Time—namely, his own time line. And the other Guardians felt threatened by this, so they killed him. Only the Talisman—the time-worm—never truly let go of Ophiuchus. It resurrected his essence and kept him tied to our universe.”
“So you’re saying it’s just like the Ochus stories of every House—more evidence hidden in our art that there was a thirteenth world—”
“Yes, but I think there’s another secret in that story,” he says carefully. “Travelers came from another universe through a time warp to settle the Zodiac . . . sounds a lot like the universal myth about the first humans arriving here through a portal in Helios, doesn’t it?”
“Myths speak to us through metaphor,” I whisper, recalling Hysan’s words when Sirna first told us this story.
His ears turn pink, but he doesn’t comment on my memory again. “Rho, I think the gateway through Helios might be real.”