Zodiac (Zodiac, #1)(10)

“Please, call me Mathias.” Even now, his voice is musical. “And I think it best that we wait to discuss,” he adds, looking pointedly at Kai.

“Mathias,” I say, a hardness in my tone that wasn’t there before, “please—we have to know.” When I say his name, color rushes to his face, like a match sparking, and I wonder if I’ve offended him. Maybe he was just being polite offering his first name. “Lodestar Thais,” I say quickly, “does it have to do with Thebe?”

“Mathias will do.” He turns from me and surveys my friends. I follow his gaze. They look as broken as I feel, and yet they’re staring at him just as defiantly.

When his eyes meet mine again, I say, “We don’t deserve to be kept in the dark after everything we just saw.”

That seems to convince him. “There was an explosion on Thebe.”

I turn my head so fast, everything spins. Somehow, I knew it the moment I saw the fireball. I knew it would land on Thebe.

Stanton.

My insides twist like sea snakes, and I snap open my Wave to reach my brother, but there’s no connection. I try checking the news and my messages, but nothing’s coming through. It’s like the whole network has gone offline.

“Rho, I’m sure he’s all right,” says Nishi, massaging my back. She’s the only one of my friends who’s met Stanton before. The only one who knows how much he means to me.

Mathias stares at me questioningly but doesn’t ask.

“What about the people on Elara?” I whisper. He shakes his head, and I’m not sure he’s going to answer.

“The pulse killed the power in their suits . . . everyone outside froze to death.” He takes a shaky breath before going on. “Pieces of Thebe entered our atmosphere and crashed into the compound. It’s . . . hard to tell how many survived.”

Something jolts our ship and knocks me into a helium tank.

Deke helps me up and we all look around apprehensively as the metal hull creaks and the orange tanks bump together. The vibrations intensify, building into a tremor, until the ship is quaking from side to side.

“Shockwave from the explosion!” Mathias calls over the noise. “Hold onto something!”

Nishi shrieks, but Deke steadies her. I grip a handrail and close my eyes. If we’re having moonquakes, what must be happening on Thebe? Close to three thousand people work at the moon base there.

Stanton told me they have shelters—please let him be in a shelter right now. . . . He has to be in a shelter right now . . . please.

With one last convulsion, the shaking ends as abruptly as it started. I watch Mathias move his lips, speaking soundlessly to someone we can’t see. Only the Zodai can communicate that way. When his invisible conversation is over, he says, “A meteoroid may have struck Thebe. This ship is launching now. We’re heading home to Cancer.”





4


THE TRIP WILL TAKE TEN HOURS.

Mathias moves us into the crew’s bunkroom, where we’re belted into oil-stained hammocks that stink of mildew, while he goes to the bridge. When we’re alone and buckled up, I can’t look my friends in the face. Somehow, seeing them will make the bodies on Elara real.

Every House has a different outlook on death. We Cancrians send our dead into space, toward Helios, the gateway to the afterlife. We believe those who pass on with settled souls are at peace and gone for good, while the unsettled soul lives on in the stars as a new constellation.

The hope is that one day, the unsettled soul can return to live again on Cancer.

I picture the girl in the pink space suit. Where will her soul go?

I chase the thought from my mind by trying to Wave Stanton and Dad, but there’s still no connection. I wonder if Dad even knows what happened. He doesn’t watch the news, and his Wave is so old he sometimes has to open and close it twice to get the holographic menus to pop out.

G-forces press us down as we lift off Elara. The ship’s engines rumble, loud and ferocious, but I can already hear the ocean’s everlasting breath. Maybe Stanton wasn’t on Thebe. Maybe he’s home right now, waiting for me. The last time we spoke, he told me he was visiting Dad soon.

The hull of the mining ship groans and creaks as we accelerate upward from the moon, leaving the past five years of our lives behind.

“It’s okay, Nish,” says Deke, squeezing her hand. She gives him a weak smile, her eyes rimmed red and puffy.

At last, the engines cut off, signaling our escape from Elara’s gravity, and in the sudden quiet, my ears tingle. Gripping my Wave, I unclasp my belt and float out of the hammock, weightless. So do the others.

“I don’t understand why Mother Origene didn’t warn us,” says Kai, speaking his first words since waking. He tries Waving his parents, but there’s no connection. “The stars must have shown signs.”

“To see a meteoroid that big, I doubt you’d even need an Ephemeris,” says Deke, scrolling through his Wave contacts, trying to get through to anyone on Cancer. “Any telescope should have caught it.”

I’ve been wondering the same thing. The Guardian has two main duties: representing her House in the Galactic Senate and protecting her people by reading the future. So what happened?

“Rho.”

Nishi’s whisper is so frail, it’s the first thing about tonight that seems real. “The omen you saw during your test, the one you’ve been seeing when you read my future for fun, the one you won’t talk about”—she chokes back a sob, tiny weightless tears slipping from her amber eyes and scattering through the air—“could it be . . . real?”