Zodiac (Zodiac, #1)(68)
Hysan surveys his grimy suit. “They’ll never let us on the train looking like this.”
Mathias scrapes his boot soles clean with his knife, but we’re all so mud-splattered, the effort’s futile. Hysan draws something from his pocket: our veil collars.
“It’s your decision, Rho. Do you want to reach the Plenum or not?”
Mathias and I share a questioning glance, and without a word, we each take ours. No one seems to notice when we waver out of sight.
We slip into the first train that stops, then huddle in the aisle, trying not to bump anyone. The train has an air supply, so we stow our masks, which are now gray and damp. I can only hope the veils cover up our odor, too.
Some of the Ariean passengers around us are hooded and concealing what are obviously weapons. They look like muggers, though they’re too clean to be from the slum. Their complexions range from tones of dark pink to wine, and they’re all built like soldiers. Arieans are the most physically fit people in our galaxy.
No one on the train talks aloud or makes eye contact. Most people are listing to the right, enthralled by their Earpiece—a small device Arieans get pierced into their right ear when they turn seventeen, an age when every Ariean commits to two years in the army.
The Earpiece functions like a Wave, only its images aren’t projected as holograms: They’re screened inside the person’s mind, where no one else can see them. Arieans are masters in the art of war, and troops need to communicate with each other discreetly in the field.
Mathias hands me a tiny squeeze-tube, then passes another one to Hysan. “Antiviral,” he says. Holding his own gingerly by one corner, he bites off the tip between his teeth, then sucks the contents into his mouth. Hysan and I do the same. The syrup tastes like sea cherries.
It’s late at night when we reach the city center, but I don’t feel sleepy. My internal clock must be out of order. The enormous central train station is crowded with passengers and soldiers, all heavily armed. So far, I haven’t seen any wallscreens where we might get news from home.
As we wind through the labyrinthine station, Hysan says, “We’ll find sanctuary at the International Village. Every House has an embassy there.”
“Let’s go to Cancer’s,” I say, the thought of seeing my people giving me new strength.
Marson’s city center is sheltered under a high-tension fabric dome, held aloft by air pressure, like a giant inflated beach ball. Buildings squat like bunkers, especially the hulking hippodrome where the Plenum meets. Soldiers in armored vehicles barrel along the dark narrow streets, billowing fumes. They stop and hassle people at random, like they’re looking to pick fights. Hysan was right—I’m glad we’re veiled.
When we get closer to the hippodrome, the crowd of Arieans surrounding us begins to thin. People from all over the Zodiac are here to observe the Plenum in session. I see mystics from Pisces veiled in woven silver. Dark-haired Sagittarians in levlan suits that remind me of Nishi. Olive-skinned Virgos, too, as well as blond Librans and petite pairs of Geminin. On every street corner, red-suited Ariean soldiers stand guard.
The hippodrome’s been blockaded. Around us, people are talking about a bomb threat. The ambassadors and their aides have been taken to an underground shelter while bomb squads scan the building for explosives.
Everyone seems to view this with more cynicism than shock, as if these kinds of attacks happen often at the Plenum. Suddenly I remember Mom telling me something about these sessions. She said the Plenum meetings were a waste of time because the ambassadors don’t work well together. She claimed the system had been corrupted. Turf grabs. Partisan squabbling. Bribes not paid.
Apparently things have gotten worse in the decade since our lessons ended.
“I see a lot of soldiers, but where’s the local Zodai Guard?” I ask Hysan.
“The Ariean Zodai were marginalized when the junta seized power. Even General Eurek is little more than a figurehead, living under house arrest. The military employs its own astrologers, and so do the warring militias.”
“Can we visit Guardian Eurek?”
Hysan whispers to his Scan, and a small hologram floats before his eyes. It’s a miniature figure of a plump man wearing extravagant robes trimmed in sheepskin. He looks like he was once a bodybuilder whose muscles have since melted into folds of skin from lack of use. Hysan spins the hologram so I can see the man’s face.
“This is Albor Echus, the Ariean ambassador. He’s more a mouthpiece for the generals. You can meet him, but General Eurek receives no one.”
On Stanton’s tenth birthday, the same year she left, Mom gave me a necklace. It was the only gift she ever gave me that wasn’t from Dad, too. On a strand of silver seahorse hair, she had strung together twelve nar-clam pearls, each one bearing the sacred symbol of a House of the Zodiac.
“We share the same universe, but we live in different worlds,” she used to often remind me.
Yet despite her insistence on the Houses’ differences, I never saw the Zodiac as a collection of multicolored pearls caught in the same necklace’s orbit—I saw us as one necklace. Each pearl has its purpose, but no one is more important than another, and every pearl is integral to the beauty of the whole, and to our calling ourselves a necklace at all.
I’m embarrassed that it’s taken this trip to show me how naive that sounds. Mom was right: Every House I’ve visited functions as its own, separate world; even Cancer operates that way, only I never thought of it like that before. We don’t generally go around thinking of ourselves as one piece of a larger whole.