Page 78 of The Bound Zodiac

We were not leaving her. This was not going to be the First Crossing all over again. She was not going to be the last Ophis. She was not going to seal the portal from the wrong side and die in this room while we stood on the other side.

“Phoenix, bring her down!”

Phoenix didn’t hesitate. He didn’t ask if it would work. He didn’t ask if the magic would hold. He just dropped to one knee, planted both palms flat on the shattered floor, and reached inside. The marble split, and a massive root erupted from the ground, thick as my thigh, dark and gnarled and alive with green light. It shot upward like a spear, twisting and growing as it climbed, and Phoenix’s jaw was locked, his eyes burning emerald, every muscle in his arms and back straining as he poured everything he had into the vine.

It reached her, the root wrapping around her suspended body in a tight, careful spiral around her waist, her ribs, her shoulders—and Phoenix pulled.

A scream came from somewhere beyond her body, somewhere in the starlight itself, and it tore through the room. Phoenix was on his feet now, both hands gripping the vine, his feet braced, his body shaking with the effort of dragging her out of the magic’s grip.

She came down, but not gently. Not slowly. The root yanked her out of the column of light like pulling a fish from water, and she dropped, the starlight clinging to her like threads of molten silver, and Phoenix caught her full weight against his chest, and his knees buckled, but he didn’t fall. He held her, one massive arm wrapped around her back, the other cradling her legs, and she was limp, unconscious, blood and light still weeping from the fissures in her skin.

“Go!” Phoenix roared, and he was already running.

Aiden and I moved with him. We ran flat-out toward the portal, the bane closing in from every direction. They’d breached the starlight perimeter, the repulsion weakening, failing as Jupiter’s magic faded. They were pouring through the gaps, swarming the floor, climbing the walls, and the portal was flickering faster now, the violet-green world on the other side stuttering.

The bane were everywhere. I felt claws rake across my back, tearing through my suit jacket, and I didn’t stop. Aiden’s fire erupted in a wide, desperate arc, buying us a heartbeat.

Phoenix hit the portal first, Jupiter cradled against his chest, and he leapt. Aiden went next, diving headfirst through the shimmering disc. I was last, and I felt the bane at my heels, felt the cold, wrong pressure of dark matter closing around my ankles as I threw myself forward.

Everything went white. Blinding, absolute, total white. The kind of white that wasn’t a color but an absence of everything. The absence of sound, sensation, thought, time.

I was nowhere.

I was nothing.

I was a point of consciousness suspended in pure, featureless light, and for one endless, weightless second, I couldn’t tell if I was falling or flying or if I existed at all.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

JUPITER

The white swallowed me. Devoured me. I was nothing and everything and somewhere in between, a single point of light in an ocean of light, and I couldn’t feel my body, couldn’t feel my hands, couldn’t feel the fissures splitting my skin or the blood weeping from my wounds. I was just... gone.

And then I wasn’t.

The first thing I registered was the sky. Violet, not the orange-blue twilight of Earth. It stretched above me in a vast, cloudless dome, and there were two suns hanging in it, one slightly larger than the other, casting light that was warm and golden and somehow softer than anything I’d ever felt on my skin.

The second thing was the sound. Sobbing, gut-wrenching sobbing that came from every direction. Shouting. People calling names, over and over, voices cracking with terror.

“Mara! MARA, ANSWER ME!”

“Has anyone seen my son? He’s eight, he has dark hair⁠—”

“My husband was right behind me, he was RIGHT BEHIND ME⁠—”

The murmur of hundreds of voices overlapping, some praying, some weeping, some just repeating the same word like a mantra, alive, alive, we’re alive.

The third thing was the grass. It was soft. Like lying on silk, and it was cool against my bare skin. My skin, which I could feel again. The air smelled like flowers. Not one flower. Every flower. Roses and jasmine and something sweeter, something I didn’t have a name for, something that made my chest ache with a homesickness I’d never felt before for a place I’d never been.

Something tickled my cheek. A small, cool body, coiled tight, scales brushing my skin. “Noodle,” I said, or tried to. My mouth wouldn’t work. My throat was raw, like I’d been screaming for hours.

‘Never do again. I bite you.’ His voice in my head made my entire soul relax.

I tried to laugh. It came out as a wheeze. The tickling came again. His tongue, flicking against my cheekbone, tasting the salt of tears I hadn’t realized I was crying.

Sound rushed in all at once. The sobbing, the shouting, the wind in the grass, the distant cry of something that was definitely not a bird. My body jolted, every nerve firing at once, and I sat up.

The world spun. Colors blurred. My stomach lurched and I gagged, but nothing came up. My body was too empty, too wrung-out, too utterly spent to even manage vomiting. I pressed one hand flat against the ground, and I breathed.