Chapter 14
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
JUPITER
Two weeks later
The ground was bone-white and cracked under my feet, the gravity all wrong, making my body feel too light, like the ground might give me up to the void of space at any moment.
I was standing on a ridge of some cratered rock that shouldn’t have had an atmosphere, but I was breathing, and the sky above me was too dark, too deep, too many stars, with a smear of violet and silver that didn’t belong in any sky I’d ever seen.
And in front of me, enormous, filling half the horizon, was a planet.
It was massive. Jupiter-sized, maybe bigger, and it hung there in the blackness like a colossal titan.
Silver light poured off it in a haze, as if the whole world was made of something that glowed.
Violet oceans rolled across vast continents, the color of crushed amethyst, and where the land rose up, deep emerald forests covered everything, so dark and thick they looked almost blue from this distance.
Three rings of pale debris orbited it slowly, catching the silver light and scattering it in long, lazy arcs.
I knew what it was. I didn’t know how I knew, but I knew. Every cell in my body was screaming it at me, a recognition so deep it was more like memory than sight.
Then the screaming started.
Not aloud, but in my head. Millions of voices, layered over each other, tangled together, terrified, pouring out of that beautiful, impossible planet and straight into the center of my skull.
I dropped to my knees on the cracked lunar rock as my hands went to my temples. It was too much. Too many voices, too much fear, too much agony. Children crying. Adults screaming. Something enormous and ancient wailing from deep beneath the surface, a sound like the planet itself was in pain.
Help us—
—the dark, the dark is coming—
—please, please, someone—
I couldn’t breathe. The screams were filling my lungs, my chest, my throat. I opened my mouth to scream back, to tell them I was here, I could hear them, but no sound came out.
It started at the edges of the continents, creeping in from the violet oceans like oil.
Darkness moved across the surface in tendrils, swallowing the emerald forests whole, turning the silver light to ash.
Where it touched, the screaming doubled.
Tripled. It became something so loud and so terrible that my vision started to white-out.
The darkness was eating the planet. Devouring it. And the screams were the sound of a world being consumed alive. My world.
I reached for it, my hand stretched out toward that impossible horizon, fingers spread, starlight pouring from my skin the way it had in the Nexus chamber.
But the light didn’t reach far or fast enough.
It died in the void between the moon and the planet, snuffed out like a candle in a hurricane.
The darkness kept spreading. Faster now.
The silver light dimmed. The violet oceans turned black.
Jupiter…
A voice. Close. Familiar. Jamie’s voice, but not in my ears—in the dream itself, behind me, somewhere on the surface of this moon.
Jupiter, turn around. Look at me…
I couldn’t turn. My body wouldn’t obey. My eyes were locked on the dying planet, on the darkness swallowing it whole, on the screams that were now so loud they had become a single, continuous shriek that was peeling the layers of my mind apart one by one.
JUPITER! Turn around. Please. You have to turn around.
I tried. God, I tried. My feet were rooted to the lunar rock, my hand still reaching for a world that was being unmade in front of me, and the screaming—
I came back into my body so fast it was nearly the blink of an eye.
My own scream was still ripping out of my throat, and I was sitting bolt upright in bed, sheets tangled around my legs, my hands clawing at my own face.
Tears were pouring down my cheeks in stinging arcs.
My chest was heaving, every breath a sob, and my skin was cold and slick with sweat.
Two figures were at my bedside. My vision was still swimming, the afterimage of that silvery world burned into the backs of my eyelids.
“Jupiter.” Draco’s voice. His violet eyes were wide as he came closer, and I could feel him through the bond.
I felt his terror that mirrored mine, because he’d felt every second of it, every scream, every tendril of darkness, and it had ripped him out of a dead sleep.
“Jupiter, look at me. You’re here. You’re in your room. You’re safe.”
I couldn’t stop shaking. My teeth were chattering. The screams were still echoing in my skull, layered and overlapping, millions of voices crying out from a world that needed help.
“Jamie.” Draco’s voice, directed past me. “Talk to her. She’s not hearing me.”
I flicked my eyes to the side and found him crouched beside the bed, one hand braced on the mattress, the other hovering near my arm like he wasn’t sure he was allowed to touch. His green eyes were bright, too bright, and his jaw was clenched so tight a muscle was jumping in his cheek.
“I was with you, love, and I’m with you now.”
My mouth opened, but nothing came out except a broken, wet sound.
“I called your name,” Jamie said. “I called it over and over. You wouldn’t turn around.
You couldn’t hear me.” Something cracked in his voice then, just for a second, before he wrestled it back under control.
“I’ve never—I’ve never been locked out of a dream like that.
Not even close. It was like the dream didn’t want me there. I wouldn’t come to you…”
Noodle was coiled tight around my wrist, his tongue flicking rapidly against my pulse, and through the bond I could feel him. Not words, just a low, steady hum of alarm and protectiveness that anchored me to the room, to the bed, to the present.
“A whole world,” I managed. My voice was wrecked. Barely a scratchy whisper. “Did you see it?”
“I saw.” Jamie whispered.
Draco’s hand tightened on my shoulder, his thumb rubbing comforting circles into the muscle as I fought to get my breathing under control.
Tears were still streaming down my face. I couldn’t make them stop. My whole body was trembling so hard the bed was shaking, and I could feel the bond wide open and screaming, nine separate threads of alarm and confusion and fear pouring into me from every direction.
Percy was already moving through the tower. I could feel him taking the stairs three at a time. Aiden and Eris were right behind him. Lucas and Rowan and Phoenix and Theo were waking up one by one, the nightmare’s aftershock rolling through the bond like a shockwave.
“I think—” I pressed the heels of my hands against my eyes, trying to push the image out, but it was burned in there, seared into the back of my skull. “I think I saw the apocalypse.”
“I don’t understand how it’s possible, but I think what you saw was more than just a dream. I think it was a memory…or a vision.
“Memory,” Draco finished. His voice had gone quiet, almost reverent. “Or a vision. Or both.”
“The bane consumed everything. There were probably billions of people on that planet. People like me, and I couldn’t do anything but watch.”
Draco pulled me against his chest without a word, and I went, because I didn’t have the strength to do anything else. His arms locked around me, one hand cradling the back of my head, his chin resting on top of my hair. I could feel his heartbeat through his chest.
Jamie didn’t move from his crouch beside the bed. I could feel him watching us, feel the conflict in him, the urge to reach for me warring with whatever restraint was keeping him at arm’s length. Through the bond, his emotions were a mess. Fear, yes, but underneath it something more. Frustration.
The door banged open. Percy came through first, bare-chested, eyes already burning red, hair standing on end like he’d been electrocuted. Aiden was half a step behind him, golden eyes glowing in the dark of the room, and Eris filled the doorway after that, his copper hair wild, his face grim.
“What the fuck happened?” Percy’s voice was rough with sleep. “I felt… Jupiter, I felt you—” He stopped when he saw my face, saw the tears, saw Draco holding me. Something shifted in his eyes. The anger drained out of them. “Jesus Christ.”
“Dream,” Draco said, his voice muffled against my hair. “Bad one.”
“It wasn’t a dream,” Jamie said. He stood slowly, his knees cracking from the crouch. I realized his hands were shaking.
Percy scrubbed both hands through his hair, pushing it out of his face, and sat on the edge of the bed. “What did you see?”
I told them. I told all of them, even as the rest of the shield filtered in—Lucas, Rowan, Phoenix, Theo—each one drawn by the chaos in the bond, each one crowding into my bedroom.
I told them about the way the darkness ate at the planet and the screaming that never stopped, the words coming out in a rush while the memory of it clung to the back of my throat like smoke.
It had felt less like a dream and more like something I had lived through, every detail crisp and clear enough that I could still hear it right now.
“Her dream didn’t want me there,” Jamie said, and the attention in the room swung toward him at once. Aiden’s brow lifted. “I’m a Pisces. Some of us can walk into dreams. I feel them pulling at me when I sleep, thin threads I can follow if I choose. I can bring people with me just as easily.”
Aiden’s expression tightened. “But not hers?”
Jamie shook his head once. “It pushed back somehow and wouldn’t let Jupiter hear me. It’s like it was meant just for her.”
Phoenix stood near the far wall, arms folded. “Or it was a warning.”
I looked across at him. “A warning about what? The bane already consumed the home worlds. What I saw happened thousands of years ago.”
Phoenix crossed to the window and leaned one shoulder against the frame, staring out at the academy grounds below. “Maybe it’s showing you what could happen here. Maybe something wants you to see the pattern before it repeats.”
“Humans have no magic,” Lucas said. “The bane only come to Earth because we draw them. They feed on human energy like appetizers, but it doesn’t sustain them like we do.”
My fingers dragged through my hair, catching at the knots. “Then why go back at all? If we leave, they’ll follow the same trail again. It doesn’t matter where we run if they’re chasing us.”
Draco shook his head, squeezing my fingers until I met his violet eyes.
“Maybe, but we’re not defenseless. When the home worlds fell, we weren’t prepared.
The bane came through the event horizon of a black hole, which technically shouldn’t be physically possible.
It blindsided our people, and our worlds fell in a matter of days.
There were no shield teams to fight them.
The Aelari were a peaceful people, and never saw the end coming. ”
I squeezed his fingers back, and allowed him to cover my hands with his. I tried to ignore the ripples of confusion I could feel coming from Aiden, Eris and Percy, probably wondering why the fuck I was allowing Draco to touch me.
“So you think we stand a chance? If we go back, we might be able to defend ourselves…”
He nodded. “We’re a warrior species now.
We know how to fight them, and we’re very good at it.
Besides, the bane can’t travel as fast as we can.
If you create portals to the home worlds, we would beat them there by thousands of years.
Our bones will be dust before the first bane makes it to Pisces. ”