Page 60 of The Bound Zodiac

Jupiter went quiet again. I could sense the shift in her mood, the way old anxieties tried to creep up. But here, in this dream, they never got far. My presence pushed them back, smothered them before they could really take hold. That was the gift I gave her here, and she knew it.

“Do you think,” she asked, hesitating, “there will be ghosts? I mean… like echoes of the people who were lost there?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I think you’ll feel it when you walk through those cities. Like old music in the walls, or fingerprints in the dust. Not ghosts, but something close to memories.”

She leaned into me, and I let the dream flex, let the surface of the moon go soft and the air grow warmer, let the sounds of what might have once been a city drift up out of the cracks in the dust. Laughter, chimes, something like voices echoing from far away. It wasn’t concrete, just impressionistic, but it was enough to give her a taste. I molded the dreamscape, filling it with smells of spices, perfumes, and lush greenery. Everything I imagined would come alive down on the surface of that once thriving planet.

She shivered, but it wasn’t fear. “That’s… haunting. But also kind of nice.”

“I think we can revive it,” Draco said. He was standing now, pacing restlessly along the edge of the ridge, hands in his pockets. “If we can figure out how to reawaken the ambient magic, we might even be able to restore some of the old technology. The Ophis star-maps imply there are dormant nodes under every major city. Reconnecting them could re-activate the planet’s shield network.”

She sucked in a breath. “Wouldn’t that draw the bane, though? If we light up the system again, won’t they sense it?”

“Not immediately,” Draco said. “They’re still stuck on the outside rim of the galaxy, and you can portal us thousands of years ahead of their current incursion point. They can’t travel as fast as we can, so we’ll have time to fortify, maybe even time to evolve new tactics before they catch up. A few hundred years head start.”

“That’s a hell of an advantage.”

I’d grown up on tales of the old-world shield battles, the kind of mythic blood-and-dust stories that were supposed to scare you straight at eight years old, but the moment I set foot in training at Imperium, I understood for the first time why the Order had survived when every other tradition died.

The walls down here were twelve feet thick. The stone was dark, pitted, stained with old magic. Every cold corridor twisted off into a maze of tunnels, chambers and old forgotten alcoves. During the day, we trained in the arena, practicing with the other shield teams fighting class one and two bane under the ever watchful eye of Professor Saris, but in the evenings, we were down here in the forgotten part of the academy, where we would practice dangerous magic in peace.

Jupiter stood in the center of the room, hair braided down her back, face set in that look of utter, terrifying focus that still managed to be sexy as hell. The rest of the Horizon shield formed a loose semicircle along the outer ring of the room. Lucas, Rowan, Theo, Phoenix, Aiden, Eris, Draco, Percy, and me. We were all on edge, exhausted, but the moment Jupiter started calling up her magic, every single one of us locked in.

Samuel and Jareth were present today too. My uncles from the Zenith Shield team, and at almost fifty-five years old they were still built like tanks. They’d been training the new shield teams for decades, both at Dominion, Imperium, and at Paragon Academy, a smaller institution in Russia.

I could feel the emotions in the room like a color. My Pisces magic hummed at the base of my skull, picking up on every ripple. At first, it was the usual cocktail of nerves, anticipation, and stark fear. But everyone in the room today mostly just radiated excitement and hope.

She knelt on the stone floor and closed her eyes. “Ready?”

“Ready,” each of us called back, letting Jupiter know that we were here to brace her when she needed the power boost.

She exhaled slowly, and the temperature in the room plummeted. The first portal opened at chest height. The size of a coin, and it made every hair on my arms stand up. She held it there, fingers splayed, and then without pause, opened a second. Then a third.

Within thirty seconds, there were fifteen perfect pinpricks of starlight suspended in the air in front of her. They shimmered, lining up with geometric precision, orbiting an invisible center of gravity.

Soon, there were twenty. Thirty. By the time she hit seventy-five, sweat beaded along her brow, a single dark strand of hair stuck to her cheek. Her hands didn’t tremble. Not once. The only sign of strain was the way her jaw locked, lips pressed tight.

I heard Jareth whisper, “Christ above,” under his breath.

Samuel just grunted, but his eyes were wide.

It took a lot to impress my uncles who’d seen their fair share of shit in their lives. The rest of the Order was gathering at the edges of the chamber now. I could feel them, even if I didn’t look. The magic in the air was a beacon. There was no way anyone upstairs missed it either.

Eighty. Ninety portals, each one identical, each one connected to the same anchor point. The glow was blinding now, bright enough to fill the room with starlight. The bond raged between all ten of us, strengthening as we slowly fed her bits of our magic.

This was what we were built for. Together we were a force of fucking nature, and she was our center of gravity.

A hundred portals. She drew the last portal out with a shuddering breath. Then, with a slow sweep of her palms in a tight spiral, the portals began to converge. They were merging, folding into each other, their barriers blurring, the light pressing inward. The harmonic climbed, the pressure building, an unholy frequency that made my bones vibrate. The smaller circles fused into larger ones, twenty at first, then ten, then five.

Jupiter’s whole body trembled now. Her face was white, lips drawn back from her teeth. At the edge of my vision, I saw Uncle Samuel’s hands clench so hard his knuckles went white. Jareth shifted nervously on his feet, but he didn’t say a word. There was a low murmuring from other members of the Order, and even Tala had a look of naked fear on her face as she watched.

The final fusion happened so quickly if I blinked I would have missed it. The last five massive portals twisted together, the light flaring so bright it felt like a sun igniting inside the chamber, and then⁠—

Silence.

One portal remained. As wide as a door. Stable and shimmering, and so dense with energy it made the whole room crackle with magic. Through it, I caught a glimpse of…something gray, dark and... I couldn’t quite make it out past the bright light.

She held it open for thirty seconds, and then finally let go. The portal winked out and the light faded. Jupiter sagged forward, catching herself on one hand, breath coming in harsh, uneven bursts. Sweat dripped from her chin onto the stone.