Zodiac (Zodiac, #1)(43)
He moves closer, and the raw look from earlier comes over his features. Seeing how much he cares about me makes my heart pump at hyperspeed. If he would just trust me in equal measure, things could be different.
Trust . . . the word reminds me there’s something I haven’t told Mathias yet. And it’s time I confide in him fully—after all, even without believing, he’s come this far.
“Mathias, I’ve put you in more danger than you know by letting you join me on this trip.” I hesitate a moment, then I confess. “I didn’t tell you earlier, but Ochus threatened to kill me if I spoke of him. In fact, if I do exactly what I’m doing now—warn the other Guardians—he pretty much guaranteed it.”
Mathias blanches. “You predicted the attack on the ship? And you chose to do this anyway?”
“To warn the other Houses,” I say, nodding. “Otherwise they’ll be unprepared . . . like we were.”
The mysterious expression that comes over him is like the one he wore when I mastered the Ring. “You’re a truer Cancrian than I realized, Rho.” Even though it’s a compliment, his severe tone makes it sound like a criticism.
Crius and Agatha may disagree with me, but they stopped questioning my qualifications for Guardian when I passed their test. Sometimes I feel like Mathias is still evaluating my candidacy.
“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you about the risk sooner,” I say.
He sighs, softness coming to the surface of his midnight-blue eyes. “I might not have believed you.”
The ship rolls to the left, and we both reach out for the handrail. There’s a change in the atmosphere, like we’ve just crossed an invisible barrier.
Real gravity is weightier than the ship’s imitation brand, and our muscles grow heavier. I feel every part of my body, like I’m becoming more alive by the second. It’s my first time on an alien world.
“Entering orbit,” announces Hysan from the helm. “When we land, stay alert. . . . This is a place where nothing is as it seems.”
16
AFTER STUDYING THE PLANET’S TERRAIN, Hysan decides to dock in a wooded park outside the capital city. No one will see our ship, he says, thanks to the cloaking veil. Argyr is a lush garden planet with plenty of breathable air and decent atmospheric pressure, so we won’t need compression suits. It’s also massive enough to exert a reasonable level of gravity.
I change into the Zodai suit Lola and Leyla made me, with the four silver moons on the sleeve. Before leaving the ship, Hysan activates our veil collars. The collars are networked, which enables us to see each other, but to anyone else, we’re invisible.
When the outer hatch opens, we’re embraced in a warm bath of humidity, and the first thing I notice is the sweet smell of the air. I step onto loamy earth, birdsong echoing through a grove of enormous tree trunks. Our Cancrian trees are mere reeds compared to these giants.
“Let’s be quick.” Hysan sets off at a fast trot. He’s lighter and thinner than Mathias, and he runs impressively fast in his expensive boots. The forest gives way to a belt of meadowland circling the capital city. We sprint single file through feathery, knee-high grasses, and when we draw close enough to see the buildings, I have to stop and shade my eyes.
Every surface ripples with stripes of color. Orange, blue, green, white, purple, brown—the color bands swirl in sinuous patterns over the rounded domes.
“Like it’s made of rainbows,” I say, repeating what I used to tell Mom when she’d show me pictures.
“It’s agate,” says Hysan, “mined from their other planet and transported at tremendous cost.”
Mathias puts on a pair of lightweight field glasses and scans the east and west. He’s holding that silver oval thing that may be a weapon, and when we take off running through the grass again, he stays close beside me.
The buildings are shaped like globes, with fanciful cupolas bulging in all directions. Windows bubble outward, gleaming in the sunlight. The city has no wall, no apparent defenses, and since we’re invisible, it’s easy to walk in. I think about our own unfortified islands, and I wonder how often Hysan, or other veiled travelers like him, has wandered unseen through our villages, spying on us.
With a shudder, I glance up at the sky. Does Ochus already have us in his sights?
Hysan winds us deeper into the city, through a warren of curving lanes, where we constantly dodge little kids on skates and hover-skis. From my lessons, I already knew the people of Gemini have coffee-colored eyes and lustrous tawny skin, ranging from salmon pink to deep burnt orange. What I didn’t know was how bizarre it would be to walk through a world overrun with children.
In the shops and residences, I glimpse adults working as salespeople and household servants, but the streets are filled with kids, and their formfitting suits gleam in metallic patterns of brass, nickel, and platinum with accents of glittering jet. They’re so androgynous it’s hard to tell girls from boys.
Soon, we arrive at a broad plaza, dazzlingly white, where hundreds of small, elaborately dressed Geminin dash about, all wearing thick sunglasses and interacting with unseen people and things.
“This plaza is Gemini’s Imaginarium.” As Hysan explains, I remember. “People come here to interact with their own imaginations. When you’re wearing the glasses, anything you envision in your mind becomes real . . . but only to you.”