Page 14 of The Bound Zodiac

Watching them at my new school did something to my chest that I hadn’t prepared for. At Dominion I’d been simply following in their footsteps, walking the same halls they walked at my age. But here, I was discovering a whole new world and I could finally share something with them in return. Somewhere in the last few months, without my noticing, Imperium had stopped being the place I’d fled to and started being the place I lived. My… home.

The guys were waiting for us at the greenhouse. All five of them, and I could tell at a glance they’d made an effort. Lucas had dressed like he was presenting a dissertation. Rowan looked like he’d stepped out of a photoshoot. Theo had tamed his hair into a casual, charming man-bun, Jamie had his hood down. Voluntarily too. Phoenix stood at the greenhouse door in a clean white t- shirt and jeans, with his dreadlocks tied back, holding the door open.

“Mr. and Mrs. Black,” Lucas said, stepping forward with his hand out. “Lucas Bennett. It’s a pleasure to finally meet you. Jupiter’s told us a great deal about you both.”

“She’s told us almost nothing about you,” Dad lied, shaking it. “So we need full names, designations, intentions, the works.”

“Dad.”

“He’s been rehearsing that line since we took off,” Mom told them. “Let him have it or we’ll all suffer.”

Rowan shook Dad’s hand. “Rowan Nightingale. Capricorn.”

Dad worked his way down the line like a general inspecting troops, and I watched my mother watch the guys, which was infinitely more dangerous. Dad’s interrogation was theater and everyone knew it, including him. Mom just observed, arm still looped through mine.

“Well,” she murmured, low enough that only I heard it. “None of them can take their eyes off you for very long, and all of them are trying to hide it for our benefit. That’s already an improvement on the last batch.”

“Mom, there is no last batch. Nightfall will literally be here in a couple of days.”

“I said what I said.” She waved me off.

Phoenix thankfully distracted my dad by showing him the stone garden, and some of the rare plants that have been salvaged from the Scorpio home world. I knew without asking that dad was going to have a million questions.

We broke for lunch in the dining hall. We claimed the end of the second table, all eight of us, and the guys fanned out around my parents, attempting to make them feel as welcome as possible. Theo got Mom. Lucas and Rowan flanked Dad. Jamie sat across from me, and Phoenix filled the whole end of the bench.

It struck me, for a moment, that this was more than likely going to be what the rest of my life looked like. Obviously not at Imperium, but in a family of sorts. Because that’s what shields were in the end. An extended family that you devoted your entire life to trusting. Now if only I could find some way of learning to trust Eris, Percy, Aiden and Draco again… I wasn’t sure that was possible. Not yet.

Mom had discovered that Theo’s mother translated Libra poetry from the original Aelari, and the two of them had gone somewhere the rest of us couldn’t follow, trading fragments of verse and arguing gently about whether translation was preservation or reinvention. I caught pieces of it between bites. Theo quoted two lines from memory about twin suns setting over a canyon, and my mother closed her eyes to listen, and when she opened them she looked at him differently than she had all morning.

“Your mother taught you that,” she whispered wistfully.

“Every summer she would recite it like it was the first time any of us had ever heard it, even though a solstice on Earth isn’t quite as beautiful as on Libra.” Theo turned his water glass slowly. “I used to think it was a chore. Then I got older and realized she wasn’t teaching me poetry. She was teaching me the sound of a place nobody’s heard in ten thousand years, because if the sound dies, the place dies with it.”

Mom was quiet for a moment. “I’d like to meet her someday.”

“Careful what you wish for. She’ll have you translating with her down in the archives by dinner.”

Noodle’s head emerged over the table’s edge beside my mother’s plate. ‘She has chicken,’ he announced, to me, while staring at her.

“You’ve had enough mice this morning to put them on the endangered species list.”

‘She. Has. Chicken.’

My mother, who could not hear him but had never once needed to, was already cutting a piece into snake-appropriate portions. “Don’t look at me like that,” she told me. “He’s a growing boy.”

‘A growing Noodle,’ he echoed smugly.

“You’re both impossible.” I gave up and watched my mother hand-feed a black mamba several slivers of chicken breast, while two seats down my father attempted to explain New York pizza culture to Rowan, who was listening with rapt attention.

“You fold it,” Dad said. “That’s the whole thing. If you’re eating it flat, you’ve already ruined it.”

“And this is crucial to the experience…” Lucas raised a single brow.

“It IS the experience. The crust is simply the vessel in which to deliver the toppings.”

It was such a peaceful hour of my chaotic life. The normality, the way my two worlds had finally merged. When lunch was winding down, mom insisted on going back to the greenhouse before anything else. I didn’t mind because I found it peaceful there. Taurus students wandered in and out occasionally, but for the most part it was private and quiet.

Phoenix walked my mom down the rows, naming every salvaged Aelari species, and Mom asked question after question. She gasped and laughed when Phoenix coaxed a curtain of silver-veined vines aside to show her the seedlings he’d been nursing from home-world stock.