My wristband buzzes—we have fifteen minutes left before Hysan lands. “Okay, fine, but we have to hurry.”
Ophiuchus leads us out of the room, and I keep close to him as we meander through the Mothership. I hear Party members talking and dragging luggage as they outfit ships for tonight’s takeoff, yet somehow we manage to avoid running into any of them. I wonder if the reason we’re taking such a roundabout path is that Ophiuchus can sense their Psynergy signatures.
We end up on the ship’s top level in the Holy Mother’s reading room, the round hall with crystal windows where we met Aquarius when we first arrived. “It’s in here?” I ask, staring skeptically at the open space. I don’t see anywhere to store anything like a Talisman.
Ophiuchus closes his eyes and concentrates, like he’s trying to pick up his Stone’s scent. Outside, the smaller Leonine sun is already out of sight, and Helios has mostly set, so the skyline is tinged with pinks and purples. The blue sea beneath us is dark and still, and the horizon is flat on every side.
Aquarius could return at any moment. The Mothership is already crawling with Party members making preparations. And Hysan is going to land in the hangar in under fifteen minutes.
Success is sounding less and less probable by the second.
“Where is it?” I demand impatiently, glancing at my wristband in anticipation of the five-minute warning. “We have to get going!”
Ophiuchus’s eyes open, and he looks deliberately behind me like he’s spotted the Talisman. I turn to follow his gaze, and I see it, too.
Nestled in Aquarius’s hand.
31
“RHO, PLEASE GO TO THE hangar deck and board our ship with Blaze,” says the master in a parental tone. “Ophiuchus and I will join you soon.”
How will Hysan land if the Tomorrow Party ships are already here?
A pair of Marad soldiers marches into the hall to escort me, but Ophiuchus says, “She’s part of this now.”
He stares down the masked Risers—his people—and they stop moving. They look from one Original Guardian to the other, and then they leave the room without me, apparently obeying their true master.
Aquarius looks impressed, and I’m reminded of the way he and Ophiuchus used to take pride in each other’s victories. “It appears you are ready to return to your world.”
Now Ophiuchus directs his stony stare at him. “I have been waiting in the room where you left me for a week, and you have yet to come see me.”
“I’ve been busy.”
“Will you speak to me now, or did you only bring me back to life to murder me again?”
Aquarius’s expression is pleasant, but a muscle quivers in his cheek. “We have a long trip to your House—why don’t we speak on the way?”
But Ophiuchus moves toward him, and as I watch his powerful strides I wonder how Aquarius intends to see his plans through since the Thirteenth Guardian physically outmatches any mortal I’ve ever met.
“After you and the other Guardians assassinated me, my Talisman alone wasn’t enough to retain my essence. Especially not when most of my people were gone and the whole Zodiac had forgotten me. I knew someone powerful had to be anchoring my soul.”
He stops when he’s face-to-face with Aquarius. “The only reason I didn’t completely lose myself was the hope that you couldn’t let me go. But it was your pragmatism, not your heart, that held on to me.”
“All this time and you still try to attach sentimentality to my motives,” says Aquarius in a pitying tone. “I may have lived among humans for millennia, but I am not one of them. If I were, I would be unable to push forward with the plan you thwarted three millennia ago.”
“That’s because you have never given people a chance. You never let anyone in. It’s why you have followers but no friends: You can’t trust anyone who isn’t you. Not even your soul mate.”
The term seems to anger Aquarius because his velvety voice unsheathes a sharp edge. “I know you want to think you operate from a place of moral supremacy, but let’s not forget that you were always guaranteed immortality. You knew the rest of us would perish and you alone would live on, and you were fine with that. It’s easy to be grandiose when you have nothing to risk.”
My wristband buzzes with Hysan’s five-minute warning, but before I can tell Ophiuchus, his booming voice cuts through the air.
“It took me just as long as the rest of you to uncover the secrets of my Talisman!” His words make the crystal walls around us quiver. “When I learned of this power and my ultimate purpose, I immediately set to work trying to harness it to share with others. Had you ever known me to think only of myself?”
Aquarius shakes his head resignedly, like he doesn’t want to argue. “Why do you insist on the past so much when it’s just dead time? Even we do not possess the power to change it.”
“If the past poses no threat, why do you refuse to look back?” asks the Thirteenth Guardian, still staring at him intensely.
“Because the present is all that matters. I don’t concern myself with anything beyond my control—it’s just a distraction.”
“If that were true, moments wouldn’t leave imprints. Our minds wouldn’t make memories.”
“Careful, you’re starting to sound like an old man,” Aquarius cautions him. “Memories are all mortals have left in the end, so they have to assign them importance. Otherwise, they’d have to face the futility of their lives and how truly meaningless they are.”
“Yet memories were all I had for millennia,” says Ophiuchus softly. “And I found them to be loopholes in the construct of time. We can’t change the past, but we can relive it. Memories store the answers to the riddles of the present. It’s just as the wisest of us, Capricorn, always said.”
“House Capricorn’s obsession with the past will cost them the future,” says Aquarius disdainfully. “It’s how I’ve kept Sage Ferez distracted for months—I made him think I stole a Snow Globe from one of his precious Membrexes so he’d be so focused on uncovering what it was that he’d disregard the present.”
I gasp.
He tricked Ferez.
“Would the mere memory of me have sufficed for you?” Aquarius asks Ophiuchus, and for the first time the master sounds as breakable as the rest of us. “When we passed on and you remained with the humans, would remembering me have been enough?”
Ophiuchus moves closer, leaving too little space between them, and though he’s physically superior, I’m scared for him. No one in the Zodiac has managed to outwit Aquarius in the history of humanity; I wouldn’t get that close to him if I were the Thirteenth Guardian.
Yet the latter seems willing to accept any destiny Aquarius wants to deal him. The original Ophiuchus would probably be appalled by the new him. How far I—
How far he’s fallen.
“I would never have abandoned you,” the Thirteenth Guardian murmurs.