Chapter 4
CHAPTER FOUR
JUPITER
My parents arrived at the main gates the next morning looking way too excited. That never meant anything good. Being professors, they went a little bit crazy for ancient places with stories to tell, and Imperium Academy was full of them.
“So this is it,” Dad said, tipping his head back to take in the towers. The fog had burned off early for once, and all thirteen of them stood out against a pale blue sky, each one built in a slightly different style, making the academy an odd silhouette.
“They actually built thirteen towers.” He scratched his head and let out a low whistle. “Dominion only has twelve houses,” he told Mom, as if she hadn’t gone to school there with him. “You spend six long years there and it never once occurs to you anything’s missing.”
“It occurred to me,” Mom said defensively.
“I wrote a paper on pre-First Crossing calendar systems in third year and the professor handed it back with the thirteenth month circled and a note that said ‘stay curious, but not in writing.’” Her eyes were moving over the towers in fascination.
“I still maintain I deserved an A on that paper.”
Her gaze came down from the towers and landed on me, and softened. “And then twenty-some years later my daughter declares as the thirteenth designation in front of the entire Assembly. So maybe the universe has a sense of humor after all.”
“You never told me that,” I said.
“You never asked what your mother was like before she was your mother.” She looped her arm through mine. “Come on. Show us everything. Your father promised me he’d behave.”
“I promised nothing of the sort.”
We started with the main building, the vaulted dining hall with its long tables where the sound of our footsteps carried up into the rafters, the narrow high-ceilinged corridors with their flaming sconces.
In the entry hall my dad stood for a full minute in front of the great carved arch with its thirteen interlocking sigils and said nothing at all, which from my father was the equivalent of a standing ovation.
He was nerding out so hard I almost wanted to tell him he could indeed breathe.
Mom lingered at the library doors, looking down the length of the stacks with naked longing.
“We don’t have time for the library,” I said with a chuckle at the stars in her eyes.
“Ten minutes?”
“Mom. I’ve seen you in a library. There’s no such thing as ten minutes. I’m sure they wouldn’t mind you coming back this evening and spending however long you want in there.”
“She once lost me in the Bodleian for an entire afternoon,” Dad said. “I had campus security involved. She’d been sitting in the same chair the whole time and nobody noticed.”
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.
“These existed on a whole other planet,” she said in awe. “You’re growing a living thing whose ancestors grew under a different sun.”
“Under three of them, for this one.” Phoenix set the little pot into her hands like it was made of glass. “Leo world stock. It photosynthesizes so aggressively that if you leave it in direct light too long it grows out of control. It used to be considered an invasive species.”
Mom got a far away look in her eyes. “It’s so strange to imagine how many were unable to be salvaged. How many might have gone extinct by now.”
Phoenix gave my mom a soft smile and gently laid a hand on her shoulder. “That’s the thing about plants and animals. They tend to thrive in the absence of people. I’d be willing to wager they’re doing just fine back on the home worlds.”
A tightness swelled up in my chest and I had to look away before I did something embarrassing like shed a tear.
Dad, meanwhile, had drifted into an argument with Theo about whether healing magic constituted a violation of thermodynamics, and it was the happiest I’d seen him in years oddly enough. I caught fragments of it as we moved down the rows.
“But the energy has to come from somewhere, that’s my whole point.”
“It does come from somewhere. It comes from me, that’s why it hurts so bloody bad.”
“Okay, but then what you’re describing is a transfer, not a violation of physics, and I reserve the right to withdraw the objection—”
By the time we reached the far doors they’d moved on to the ethics of playing God. Dad had his hands clasped behind his back in full seminar mode.
“Has your father has adopted him?” Rowan asked, falling into step beside me. I glanced up, meeting his eyes, and nearly missing a step because fuck he was handsome. His dark hair was shiny and his beard had been trimmed neatly that morning. His muscles strained under the black Henley he wore.
I cleared my throat, trying to keep the blush at bay. “He collects people who’ll argue with him properly. Mom says it’s because all his colleagues gave up years ago.”
Rowan shook his head. “Well he may have met his match with Theodore.”
Three hours later, we found ourselves at the top of the Scorpio tower since I promised to let my dad see the Constallarium.
Scorpios had traditionally been the keepers of celestial knowledge, and back home, we’d spent a lot of time in observatories.
Especially dad. I hadn’t been to Imperium’s yet, which was my bad for being so distracted.
The climb up the spiral stairs nearly finished off both my parents, who complained the entire way about needing an elevator. Then we came out through the low door into the dome, and they both went silent, eyes wide.
The dome was old brass and dark wood, ringed with star charts hand-drawn on panels that had gone amber with age, and in the center stood the great telescope, a beautiful antique instrument polished by generations of hands.
Someone, centuries ago, had inlaid the entire dome with a map of stars that didn’t match Earth’s sky, but rather thirteen constellations picked out in tiny chips of something that caught the light, arranged around a center point that was not our sun, but a black hole in the center of the Milky Way.
Dad turned slowly, tracking the constellations. “The home systems.” He stopped, and I saw his throat work. My father, who had a joke for everything, was getting teary-eyed. “I never even considered the possibility of seeing them with my own eyes someday.”
His eyes met mine, and I had to swallow past the lump in my throat.
There was so much riding on this. On me.
On my ability to open this portal. If I failed, then none of us would ever see those stars.
We’d never step foot on the planets that gave us this magic.
We’d never breathe the air we were meant to breathe.
That was certainly a burden I never asked for, but I was realizing every single day that if someone had to bear it, it might as well be me.
Later, at the inn, I said goodnight to my parents.
They were flying back home in the morning at first light.
Dad hugged me hard enough to lift my feet off the floor and told me that if the Order tried anything cult-adjacent I was to portal directly into the living room, he didn’t care what time it was, he’d leave the lamp on for me.
Mom held both my hands and didn’t say anything at all for a long moment. She had that way about her. Of communicating everything she needed to say with just a look.
“Next week,” she finally said. “When they arrive.” She didn’t have to specify who. “You don’t owe anybody forgiveness, Jupe. Not for their comfort, not for the team, not for anyone. If it comes, it comes on your schedule. And if it never comes, that’s okay too.”
“I know.” I looked away, my stomach doing an annoying little flip.
“I know you know. I’m your mother. I know everything.” She kissed my forehead as I laughed. “Go home. Get some sleep. Feed my grandson.”
I groaned. “Please don’t call him that.”
‘Thank you, Grandmother,’ said Noodle, slithering around my shoulders until his face was level with hers. She bent in and kissed him right on his snoot.
“There will be no living with him now. Bye mom, text me when your plane lands.”
I walked back through the village in the dark, past the pub and the flower boxes and the amber pools of the streetlamps.
The ache in my chest was the good kind and the bad kind at once.
Behind me, the inn’s lamp glowed in the downstairs window.
A car waited for me, and I slid in, reveling in the feel of the heater blowing against my chilled skin.
As we drove, the trees flew by, hiding all matter of strange creatures within them that I swore someday, I would see for myself. Up the hill and through the trees, thirteen towers stood black against the stars.