Chapter 11
CHAPTER ELEVEN
JUPITER
I didn’t cry. I wanted that on the record somewhere, carved into the stone of that chamber next to all the other ancient bullshit, because it took every single thing I had left in me and then some.
What actually happened was that my knees gave out, and nine men caught me before I hit the floor, and I made a sound that was somewhere between a laugh and a sob and a swear word.
Then, closing my eyes, I pressed my head against someone’s chest.
Phoenix. It was Phoenix. “I’ve got you,” he rumbled, caressing my hair with his palm.
“I’m fine…”
“Sure you are.”
“I’m extremely fine. I’m the…ugh… finest.” I wasn’t fine. Not at all.
‘She is not fine,’ Noodle echoed for all ten of us to hear. I felt the moment the Stardust shield jumped in surprise at hearing him in their heads for the first time.
Speaking of Nood… where was the little bugger? I was glad he wasn’t coiled around my neck. There was no telling what that surge of power would have done to him.
The sudden onslaught of thoughts and feelings wasn’t like the Nightfall bond.
That bond had come on like a car crash, four presences slamming into me in a single violent instant the moment I woke up in the medical ward.
This was a flood. Nine separate consciousnesses, nine distinct textures of thought, all of them pouring into me at once, and worse—so much worse—they were pouring into each other too.
Somebody’s memory of a childhood kitchen. Somebody’s memory of screams, of black writhing masses of dark matter, of a child’s laughter, a mother’s hug, and of somebody’s absolute, incandescent terror.
“Okay,” I said, out loud. “Okay, everybody shut up.”
Nobody had said anything out loud. I shook my head, as if I could shake the murmuring away.
“You have to shut them down,” said a voice at my elbow, and it was Tala, her dry warm palm sliding into mine. “Do not attempt to close them. You’ll hurt them if you slam the door shut and shove them out.”
“That is genuinely the most vague advice I’ve ever received.”
She patted my hand. “It’s the only advice there is, I’m afraid. Unfortunately your situation has no precedent.”
I shut my eyes tight and focused, trying to pinpoint which stream of thought belonged to whom.
I managed to identify Rowan first, because gravity was the loudest and the heaviest. I pushed it down, trying to rise above the mental noise until my head was above water.
Then Lucas, cold and enormous and weirdly easy, like he’d been waiting for me to do it and stepped back the instant I reached for him.
Then Theo, then Phoenix, then Jamie, who didn’t resist at all, who folded himself down small the second he understood what I needed, but Jamie was used to subduing thoughts. He’d been practicing for years.
Nightfall was harder. Their bond was older, and it had lived in me for months, worn a groove through my psyche and made itself at home.
But to my surprise and knee-buckling relief, all four of them took a mental step backwards, doing most of the leg work for me.
In that moment, as my brain started to become mine again, I could have kissed them all.
By the time I got them all to a low collective murmur—like the sound of a fridge in another room, or a crowd two blocks away, my ears were ringing, and my mouth tasted like pennies. I was also drenched in sweat.
I lifted my head off Phoenix’s chest. The chamber had gone completely silent.
Thirty elders in black robes, all of them staring at me, and not one of them was breathing loudly enough to hear.
The weight of expectation landed like an anvil on my shoulders.
This was real now. Very, very real, and I was going to be expected to follow through on this insane plan to save an entire species.
“Well,” I said a bit breathlessly. “That was horrible. Negative ten out of ten. Would not recommend.”
Eris chuckled, and I met his warm eyes for just a moment, and somehow it was like the last several months fell away. He grinned at me, and to my shock and his disbelief that I could feel through the bond, I smiled back.
Then, Tala started clapping. Malakai joined her, and then a man I didn’t know at the back, and then the whole damn chamber was applauding.
I blinked as I pulled away from the guys, looking around the room at the faces of the Order, the people who’d spent their entire lives hoping and praying for this exact moment.
For some semblance of hope. That maybe in their lifetimes they’d return home.
It went on for so long that I had to look at the floor because if I looked at any of their faces I really was going to lose it. My cheeks were on fire. It was a million times worse than having everyone sing you Happy Birthday at a restaurant.
“Fucking hell, lass,” Eris said, somewhere just behind me. “I can hear the daft Libra thinking about biscuits.”
“I’m hungry,” Theo said, unashamed. “It’s been a long night.”
“You cannae just—” Eris stopped, shaking his head as if to get water out of his ear. “Now you got me thinkin’ about them too.”
“Custard creams,” Theo clarified.
“I will kill you, friend.”
The word friend didn’t sound too friendly to my ears.
“You’ll feel it if you do.” Theo’s grin was slightly smug.
Personally, I was wondering how long it would take the two of them to realize that they were having this conversation entirely in their heads as if they’d been linked for years and not minutes.
“The bond is complete,” Tala said. Everyone shut up. “Which means, now, the practical matters.”
“Never a good phrase,” I muttered. Practical matters could mean anything, but more than likely, it meant pain.
“Nine warriors and an axis.” She looked around at the ten of us with those bright black eyes.
“There is no precedent for this. The largest shield ever recorded was seven including its axis, and it was formed in Bavaria in the fifteen hundreds. It collapsed within a year, and every zodiac in it died.”
“Cool,” I said. “Great. Love that for us.”
“They collapsed because their axis could not hold them without overextending themself. They couldn’t figure out how to balance one another rather than taking for themselves.
According to historical records, they took on two class fives at once, and it destroyed them.
But they did not have an Ophis. Therein lies the difference in strength. ”
Arthur Bennett stepped forward into the ring of scorched stone. “A shield of this size requires its own identity,” he said. “It cannot be Stardust and it cannot be Nightfall. Those names belong to shields that no longer exist as of tonight. The axis names the shield.”
“Me?” I gaped at him, feeling all eyes turn to me.
“You.”
“Right now?”
“Preferably.”
I looked around the chamber. At the burn mark under my boots where the last of my kind had stood and closed a door on his entire species to buy them time.
At thirty faces that had waited their whole lives, and their parents’ whole lives, and their grandparents’ whole lives, for tonight.
At nine men who had just handed me their minds, their bodies and their souls without a single condition attached.
Nightfall. Stardust. Both of them names about the dark. About the space between things, the long cold waiting. Riftward. Dreadwatch. Veilbreak. Every shield name I’d ever heard was a name that assumed the dark was permanent.
I was so goddamn tired of the darkness...
“Horizon,” I said. Nobody spoke. “Horizon Shield. Because that’s the whole point, isn’t it?
A horizon isn’t a wall. It’s just the part you can’t see over yet.
It moves when you move.” I shrugged, suddenly self-conscious, kicking at a nonexistent pebble on the stone floor. “And also it sounds cool, so.”
Malakai’s laugh boomed off the vaulted ceiling. “It does sound cool.”
“Horizon Shield,” Tala repeated, testing it, and then she nodded, and it felt weirdly like being knighted. “Recorded and witnessed.”
“Recorded and witnessed,” the chamber echoed, thirty voices at once, and the sigils under my feet flared silver-white and went dark.
That’s when one of the hooded figures at the back walked toward us, and I watched Lucas’s shoulders drop about two inches, and Rowan actually took half a step backward.
Oh, that’s not good.
The figure stopped at the edge of the scorch mark and pushed back her hood. Red hair, silver streaking through it softly. Slate gray eyes.
“Ms. Black,” said Headmistress Winters.
I stared at her. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”
“I get that a great deal.” Her mouth twitched just slightly.
“You?” I placed my hands on my hips. “You literally just gave me a lecture about attendance policy last week.”
“You were skipping classes.”
“I was in the restricted archives! As you obviously knew since you’re in the freakin Order! Why didn’t you say anything?”
She folded her hands in front of her, entirely unbothered.
“I’ve been a member of the Order for a long time, Ms. Black.
My mother before me, and her father before her.
I prefer to remain sidelined. Someone has to actually run Imperium, and it’s difficult to do that while attending clandestine midnight gatherings in the basement.
The Order has kept its distance from academy administration for a very long time, and that distance is the only reason we’ve survived the Assembly’s attention.
But the merger changes things. So.” She looked around at the nine men, and the amusement drained out of her face and left something much harder underneath.
“Practical matters, as Elder Tala says. As of tonight, all nine of you are moving into Ophiuchus Tower.”
“Is that wise?” Jamie suddenly asked. He stepped closer to my right side, and over Winter’s shoulder, I could see his uncles narrowing their eyes on their nephew.
“It is the axis’s tower, and we prefer bonded shields to remain in close quarters. It’s more comfortable for everyone that way.” Winters said. “It is the only tower on this campus with the capacity to hold nine of you.”
“Both former shield teams will vacate their existing quarters by morning at the latest. Visiting shield accommodation on the east side is being reallocated as of eight a.m. Scorpio has been notified they’ll be expanding their shared access to the common room.
” She turned back to me. “You’ll keep your existing room at the top.
The rest of you may choose from what’s below it.
I’d suggest doing it quickly and without violence, but I confess I’m not optimistic.
” Her eyes narrowed on each of the guys.
Malakai stepped forward then, and I understood immediately where Phoenix got the presence, because the man didn’t have to raise his voice at all to take the whole room. “Training begins tomorrow, here in the Nexus chamber and adjoining chambers.”
I nodded. Good, better to begin now. If we were going to pull this off then we needed to start immediately.
The walk back up the spiral stair took a hundred years.
My legs were shaking so badly by the third turn that Draco put his hand under my elbow without a word, and by the sixth turn Aiden had taken my other side, and by the ninth I gave up entirely and let Phoenix carry me the rest of the way like a sack of flour.
It wasn’t even physical exhaustion. No, it was all mental. All I wanted to do was sleep for a few years just to recover. But we had training tomorrow.
The night air hit us as we came out of the low stone building into the western courtyard. It was well past two, and the fog had come down so thick that the towers were nonexistent in the distance.
“You can put me down,” I murmured, tapping Phoenix’s shoulder.
“You sure?”
“No, but I’ve got to salvage what little pride I have left, right?”
He chuckled and set me on my feet, one hand hovering at the small of my back for a second.
The ten of us stood there in a loose cluster, the academy silent around us.
Now that we were in the open air, some of my walls had dropped.
It was like standing in a room with nine radios all tuned to a different station and turned down low, and I could pick any one of them up and turn it loud if I wanted to, and none of them could stop me.
‘Test,’ I said in my mind.
All nine of them flinched, cursing as they gripped their heads.
“Christ,” Lucas said, wincing. “Warn a man.”
“What, was that loud?” Inside I was cackling.
“Do it again,” said Jamie, which surprised everybody including, I think, Jamie.
So I did.
Hi.
And nine voices came back at once, overlapping, tumbling over each other, and it was chaos.
Hi, love.
Hey.
Aye.
Ridiculous.
Hello, Jupiter.
Hi.
Hi, babe.
—Biscuits—
Theo, I swear to God.