Zodiac (Zodiac, #1)(73)
“Your family? I hope you’re referring to the entire population, Holy Mother. As Guardian, you’re Mother to all Cancrians, or did you forget?” She exhales loudly and stares at the scrambler, pursing her lips.
My heartbeat is suspended in her silence.
In a milder voice, she says, “Your father and brother are missing. I’m sorry, Guardian.”
27
MISSING?
I’d just recovered them. I didn’t even get to see them when they were found—how can they be lost again?
My heart feels like it’s doubled in size, and my ribs can barely contain it. I squeeze my eyes shut to keep the tears back because I don’t want to give Sirna more reasons to look down on me. But the biggest thing fueling my journey was the fact that Dad and Stanton were alive. I couldn’t have found the strength to leave Cancer, to draw Ochus away, if I hadn’t seen with my own eyes that my family was safe.
How can home ever be home without them?
I feel the way I did my first night on Oceon 6: bereft, Centerless, alone. Like once again, I’m being asked to give more than I have left. Only this time, it’s not just Cancer at stake. It’s the whole Zodiac.
“We have a larger problem,” says Sirna, as though my family were just a bullet point on a long list of items. “Did Crius inform you of my duties here?”
I blink a few times, letting the pain fill me a little longer, and Nishi’s words come back to me: It’s okay to feel your pain before walling it off.
The thought of her makes me almost smile, and it reminds me that she hasn’t given up. She hasn’t gone home to see her family, even though there’s trouble now on Sagittarius, too. She’s still out there, still fighting for me. For our cause. For our world.
I can’t fall apart now.
“You’re our ambassador,” I say, straightening in my seat, my voice steady and brisk. I haven’t heard myself sound this way before. “You represent our interests at the Plenum.”
Sirna seems to consider the change in me before speaking again. “Then Crius didn’t tell you.” She crosses her arms with a frown. “I’ll have to educate you myself. But first, you’ll swear on your Mother’s life never to reveal what I’m about to say.”
“I swear.”
She leans close and whispers, “I oversee a group of agents in the Cancrian Secret Service. My agents have uncovered information about a clandestine army gathering on the Aeriean planet Phobos.”
The thought of Cancrian spies is still more funny than interesting, and I don’t have time to worry about a gang of humans speaking surreptitiously when there’s an immortal Guardian bent on our destruction. “I don’t know anything about an army. My goal is to warn the Plenum about Ophiuchus.”
“Oh, grow up!” she shouts, springing to her feet. I jump up, too, and we both glare into each other’s faces. “You’ll find an army can be a hell of a lot more destructive than a children’s-book monster,” she growls.
“Then I hope you never have to meet that monster face to face, Ambassador.”
I blast out of the room, banging the door shut behind me.
? ? ?
Our sea is in turmoil. Our people are in exile. My brother and dad can’t be found. In a daze, I wander beneath the colossal steel globe of the arenasphere, stumbling into people and kiosks.
Dozens of Aerian Acolytes race past, conducting the Plenum’s urgent errands, but to me they’re just shadows. Mathias would advise me not to dwell on individual grief, and yet, oddly enough, I’m thinking about my mother.
She feels more present today than she has in years. After all, she’s the person who taught me to believe in my fears.
I’ve never told anyone, but when Mom left, I wasn’t upset. I was free.
For Dad, the change was overnight. He was quiet to begin with, but he barely spoke again. For me, the sadness started later. First I rejected the things that reminded me of her—Yarrot, Centering, reading the stars—then I clung to them like they could bring her back.
Stanton missed her the most. She was different with him. When it came to me, she was more instructor than mother, but with Stanton, she was a friend. She would ask him to tag along with her on errands, and she’d pull him into arguments with Dad, as if Stanton were an adult who could referee. When she would get to that point, Dad usually let her win.
After she left, Stanton began telling me stories about her, ones I hadn’t heard before. His favorite was the one about Hurricane Hebe.
Mom had seen it coming in her Ephemeris, so she warned our neighbors and filled our storm cellar with bags of fresh water, dried kelp, and medical supplies. But Hebe didn’t strike our atoll. It only blew a few trees down and knocked over the nar-clams. Dad teased her all day for overreacting.
Mom didn’t defend herself. She was seven months pregnant with me at the time, and while Dad rescued his nar-clams, she loaded up her schooner with the supplies she’d set aside. Six-foot waves still roiled the sea, and when she placed little Stanton in the schooner’s front seat, Dad railed at her and tried to stop my brother from going.
“Stanton has to come,” she said. “It’s fated.”
So they set off to Naxos, the next nearest island, eighteen kilometers away. The stars had told her Naxos would take a direct hit, and it had. For five days, she and little Stanton helped the Naxos families dig through the ruins for survivors, and on the fifth day, Stanton wriggled down through a tiny hole into a collapsed cellar and found an infant still alive.