“No.”
It’s actually pretty liberating not to care about myself anymore. I’m free to run my body down completely because I have no future to save it for. Once I get Nishi away from here, all that matters is gaining Aquarius’s trust and thwarting his plans, or relaying what I learn to my friends so they can stop him.
“So, any more questions, or are we about done with the dullatry?” I ask.
His pink eyes sparkle with delight when he hears me using his vocabulary. “You eat, I’ll talk,” he says, and he waits for me to take a bite of toast before he keeps going, as though to remind me that all the power lies on his side of the table.
“I’m sorry it’s proven so difficult for us to get together. I’d meant to avoid that by giving you the pearl necklace at the Cathedral.”
“The necklace?”
“It was a Psynergy device of my own design that enabled us to communicate privately.”
Hysan was right. As usual.
“I’m guessing your boyfriend interfered.”
I cross my arms. “How did you know about Lord Neith?”
“Now that was a clever trick,” he says, sitting up and leaning forward. A strand of silver hair falls over his face, and he brushes it back. “I can’t believe it got by me for so long. Any other era and I would never have been caught unaware by a human, but, as you know, I’ve been a bit . . . distracted.” He smiles indulgently, like I’m an amusing pet he loves but doesn’t respect.
“I figured it out the day Neith malfunctioned at the Hippodrome, when he answered Insufficient data. At first I thought Neith had built a robot decoy for his own protection at Plenum meetings—so I watched him closely after that, and soon a golden-haired boy caught my eye. It wasn’t hard to figure the rest out.”
I think back to that day on Aries, my second attempt to convince the Plenum that Ophiuchus was real. Hysan got Tasered when he tried standing up for me, so he has no idea what happened while he was unconscious. I should have mentioned Neith’s malfunction to him.
Why didn’t I say something?
“I managed to get my hands on Neith for a day,” Aquarius goes on, and I know he’s now referring to the day Hysan was supposed to fly me to meet the Marad, when Twain replaced him as ’Nox’s pilot. “When I inspected the android, I realized the Psynergy around him was being artificially attracted to cover for the fact that he has no soul. His insides were designed to look human—only instead of blood, his heart pumps Abyssthe through his veins. It’s really quite clever.”
The day Hysan started helping me, his own life starting falling apart.
I’ve done nothing to aid him.
I’ve done nothing to deserve him.
“After all, androids are my specialty,” he adds, and I stare at him in wonder. “How else could I be multiple people at once?”
“You mean you had android versions of Morscerta and Crompton?”
“Naturally. Only unlike Neith, I don’t imbue them with artificial intelligence—I inhabit them myself through the Psy. It took me centuries of training and studying to perfect my technique, and unfortunately I haven’t found a way to permanently install my essence in a more sustainable vessel, but no matter. I won’t need to do that anymore now that my secret is out.”
What the Helios is happening here? I feel like I’ve entered some kind of alternate dimension. Why is my enemy being more honest with me than my own friends?
He nudges my plate closer to me, and I look down at my toast; I’ve taken exactly one bite. “Would you like to see your mom?”
“What do you want from her?” I ask, forcing the bread to my mouth, even though my stomach’s sealed itself off.
“Information she doesn’t possess,” he says dismissively, looking disappointedly at my plate.
I swallow, and the bite of bread slowly descends down my dry throat. “Did you hurt her?” I ask, my tone tight.
“That approach would have been a waste of time,” he says matter-of-factly. “You can’t break someone who has always been broken.”
I don’t like thinking of Mom that way, and suddenly I want to see her.
“Well, if you’re not going to eat, shall we get started?” he asks, linking his hands together on the cold table. “This has been a charming chat, but I would hope you have more important questions to ask me, and I’d like to get through most of my answers before your fifteen-hour window closes.”
I make a point of pushing the plate aside, scraping it across the stone, and I lean forward. “Really?” I ask dryly. “You’re actually going to answer my questions and tell me everything I want to know?”
He leans in, too. “Try me.”
“Okay,” I say, sitting back. “What’s your master plan?”
“Like your ancestors, I am going to travel through the portal in Helios to colonize a new galaxy, and I hope to save as many samples of the Zodiac’s species as possible when I go. Because Helios is dying.”
“Our sun isn’t dying!” I snap, straightening my spine. “You’re killing it.”
He sighs and says, “You’ve already come this far. Will you at least hear my side before condemning me?”
I’m not going to get anything I want by antagonizing him, so I force myself to nod. “Okay.”
He seems to think for a moment and then rises. “Let’s speak elsewhere.”
I follow him up the closest pink spiral staircase, and we cut through a series of passages to the north wing. The Mothership’s sand-and-seashell floors and walls remind me so much of Cancer that by the time we step out onto a higher deck of the ship, I could be convinced that I’m actually home—if not for the second sun in the sky.
The deck is secured with a crystal railing, and the space is small enough that there’s only room for a handful of benches. We’re so high up that we can see the curving tops of the giant shells on either side of the ship, and I realize we’ve been moving this whole time.
I lean against the crystal railing, and the wind blows strands of my hair in my eyes as we sail into the blue horizon. Aquarius joins me, and he’s so tall that he has to fold half his body down to lean on the banister.
“At the turn of the first millennium,” he says, his pink eyes gazing at Helios, “I began to notice a change in our solar system that was brought on by the presence of Dark Matter. Helios was losing her strength—the Dark Matter was sucking her energy, and her light was dimming. I alone noticed her weakening. I, who had watched her all this time. I hoped it was only my imagination, but then came the year when Helios’s Halo stopped taking place altogether.”
Despite my hatred for him and everything he stands for, I’m instantly sucked into his story. I flash back to when I asked Sirna why she thought that phenomenon had vanished from the sky, and she said, I think it’s because we don’t look up as often as we used to.
She was kind of right.