I blink. I’m certain I didn’t hear him correctly.
“Opening the portal requires an enormous release of energy,” he explains. “The death of a star. Ophiuchus must be killed on his own soil.”
Ochus knew.
He told me on the way here that Aquarius would sacrifice him.
How much more has he been keeping from me?
“You know everything now,” says Aquarius, offering me the one thing I could never get from Hysan or Ophiuchus or Kassandra: transparency.
Now I understand how Traxon must have felt when Blaze approached him at the royal palace and offered to tell him the truth, just moments after I refused to open up to him.
“Rho, I believe you’re ready, the Tomorrow Party believes you’re ready, so the last person you have to convince is yourself. You’re no good to any of us if you give up or give in. I want you to want this the way you wanted to stop Ophiuchus months ago.”
Aquarius’s eyes glow like the holographic globes from last night’s party, and I see a new universe of worlds swirling in their depths. “I want you to believe in yourself and in your species’ future. I want you to care about what lies beyond that portal, to be excited to discover what kind of planets we’ll find.” Even his skin is blazing with light, and more than ever he looks like the fallen star he is. “Will they be ruled by scientific laws we’ve never heard of? Will we meet new life forms? Will there be colors and dimensions and substances we’ve never seen before? Will we find the answers to existence’s deepest questions?
“I know you feel finished,” he says, his voice becoming more Crompton-ish than godlike. “But if you’re willing to depart from the mortal plane, then you’ve already abandoned your friends. So don’t hold yourself back on their account.”
Abandon. That word has always tugged at me, ever since childhood. But that’s not what I’m doing. I’m helping them. I’m here gaining Aquarius’s trust so I can relay his plans to them.
I’ve given up on myself, but not on my friends—I will always root for them.
“Death is a given, Rho,” he says soothingly. “It will happen whether you race into its arms or inch toward it slowly. It’s waiting for you, and it’s forever. Even I cannot hope to grasp eternity.
“You have all of existence to spend in Empyrean—so why hasten to get there? It’s coming no matter what. Life is like a candle’s flame: It waxes and wanes until the wick is devoured, and then it’s gone. You have so much more light to give; don’t extinguish yourself.”
I don’t say anything, but I don’t get the sense he expects me to.
“I have to take a trip to planet XDZ5709 to inspect our fleet for the final time, and then the Party will commence shuttling passengers over while I come back for you and Ophiuchus. Once the portal’s been activated, we’ll regroup with the others, and at the end of the seventh day we’ll be on the first ship through Helios.”
This is it.
He’s leaving, and I know his plan. It’s my chance to let Hysan and the others know what’s going on.
And yet, instead of feeling energized for this last act of my life’s story, I feel less sure of myself than ever. I’ve been pretending to be on so many sides that I’m not sure which one I’m really on anymore. Just like the artists of Artistry, I can’t tell where my performance ends and the real me begins.
“Rho, this is the only chance humanity has. I know you want to believe the whole universe can be saved, but it can’t, and I’d rather some survive than none at all.”
What if he’s right? asks a small voice in my head.
I may disagree with the violence of his methods, and I may regret the fact that he didn’t warn us sooner so that we could have saved more people, but does that mean that everyone in the Zodiac should die just because Aquarius handled things poorly?
Even after I relay this information to the Zodai, I still don’t see how they will be able to stop him—the master is too smart, and he’s been planning this for too long. But maybe I can at least try to convince them to listen to Aquarius and give him a chance.
It has to be worth a shot.
“I know I’m asking more from you than anyone else,” he goes on, “but I wouldn’t ask if I didn’t believe in you. Time is running out, and I need to know where you stand.”
I feel like a once-finished puzzle that’s just been disassembled into thousands of tiny pieces. I used to be so sure of what was right and what was wrong . . . and now I don’t even know who I am.
“Okay,” I say at last, and I know as I speak the words that I’m no longer acting. “I’ll go with you.”
He knows it, too, because the light in his eyes blazes back, full blast. “Then I’ll see you in three days, and we’ll set out for the Thirteenth House.”
? ? ?
“Wake up.”
I’d just fallen asleep when I’m shaken awake. The sun isn’t even up yet, so my room is in complete darkness as I shove someone’s fingers off my arm.
“Get off me!” I wave my hand over my head, in front of the bed’s headboard, and it lights up revealing a teen girl with a mahogany face and a head full of braids.
“What did you do?” demands Ezra. “What did you tell him?”
“What are you talking about?”
“I haven’t been able to reach Hysan since I led you to his hologram—our signal’s jammed. Did you tell Aquarius anything about Gyzer and me?”
“Of course not. Hysan probably cut off communications after his broadcast as a precaution. Calm down.”
She glares at me. “Gyzer was so certain you were just playing Aquarius. He insisted you’d turn around and come back to us the moment you learned his secrets. But looking at you now, you seem just as brainwashed as all the other elitists here.”
“You don’t know anything about me,” I growl. Just like Traxon and Skarlet, Ezra is able to bring my anger out better than most people, and before I can think anything through I command, “Go commandeer us a bullet-ship.”
Ezra crosses her arms defiantly. “What for?”
“What do you think for? We’re getting off this planet.”
? ? ?
Just minutes later, Ezra and I meet Gyzer in the hangar deck, and we board one of the Party’s black bullet-ships. They’re a third the size of ’Nox and so dark that they probably blend in perfectly with Space.
“It’s one of Aquarius’s own designs,” Gyzer says as we climb onboard. “It’s the fastest interplanetary vessel in the Zodiac. We’ll make it to Aries in just about fifteen galactic hours.”
Hysan would probably flip for this ship, I think, and then my gut clenches at the thought of facing him.
The spacecraft’s interior is as black as its exterior, and it has no cabins—just two individual sleep capsules built into the concave walls.