My mother, the head cheerleader , Jade thought sourly. But at the same time, the logic didn’t totally play. She frowned, trying to think it through in her tired, overloaded brain, knowing that if she stopped thinking, she ran the risk of feeling too much. “The Prophet’s spell requires a soul sacrifice. By enacting it, she would have been offering her own life in exchange for the information.”
Shandi turned her palms to the sky. “Like I said, she was a comet. That was exactly the sort of ‘act first, regret later’ move she specialized in. Though it doesn’t explain how she wound up in the same situation the human is in now. There’s no way she was harboring a makol or any other sort of soul link.”
“The human’s name is Lucius,” Jade snapped, annoyance flashing a quick burn through her system.
“Yes, it is, and he’s bright and shiny now, and you’re hot for him. What do you think is going to happen when all that wears off? Your mother was miserable as a harvester. She hated being on the sidelines. She was a warrior, and she was used to having power—not just magic, but a voice among others her age. When she married your father, whether from love or impulse, or a bit of both, she gave up more than she anticipated. She blamed him for that. And she blamed herself for following her heart, because in doing so, she’d lost the right to fight.”
The words tugged at a connection in Jade’s brain, but she couldn’t make it take shape. She shook her head. “I don’t know what to say anymore. What to think.”
“That’s understandable. You’re tired, and that was a lot to take in.” Rising, Shandi brushed at her tailored pants, which fell in neat creases as though they didn’t dare wrinkle. “Just keep breathing,” the winikin said pragmatically, “and keep yourself steady. Sometimes, that’s all we can do.”
Jade wanted to argue, wanted to scream that she was tired of only breathing, tired of being steady.
She wanted to be unsteady, irrational; she wanted to do something, godsdamn it! But she didn’t want to prolong the conversation further; she wanted some time alone to process, or maybe just pull the covers over her head.
“I’ll be in my room,” Shandi said. “Call if you need me.”
“Of course,” Jade answered numbly. “I will.” But they both knew she wouldn’t.
She saw the winikin to the door and locked it behind her. Then, drawn by the faintest rumble of thunder, barely detectable as a vibration on the air and in the floor beneath her feet, she moved to the sliders and pushed through to the balcony. Lightning flickered on the horizon and a deep-throated, thrumming thunder boom ran through the soles of her feet and up to her body, where it pressed on her heart.
Closing the sliders behind her, she leaned back against the side of the mansion and slid down to sit balled up on the patio floor, with her chin on her knees and her arms wrapped around her shins, feeling the storm approach . . . and waiting for the rain to come and wash away her tears.
PART II
MIDDAY
The sun reaches apogee
CHAPTER TEN
June 14 Two years, six months, and seven days to the zero date University of Texas, Austin
“Hey, Pyro. You lost?”
The hail startled Rabbit, who’d been head-down, lost in his thoughts as he’d hiked across campus.
Pausing just shy of the cement bridge that led to the front entrance of the squat, bunkerlike structure that ironically housed the art history department, he did a mental eye roll and glanced back over his shoulder at the lanky, brown-haired guy who was waving at him. “Not lost, Smitty. Just slumming.”
“Ha! Good one.” Anna’s newest grad student loped a few strides to catch up, made like he was going to punch Rabbit in the arm, then aborted the motion in a fake-out designed to show anyone watching that the two of them were buds, without actually making contact. Everyone who was anyone in the student social structure knew that Rabbit didn’t like to be touched, except by Myrinne. “Ready to come to your senses and give up on that science shit?”
It was a running semijoke among the younger members of the Mayan studies department, who, after seeing Rabbit ace a few grad- level courses, had decided that he was the best naturally intuitive Mayanist the university had seen in forever, and ought to be majoring in their department rather than physics.
What they didn’t get, and what he never intended to tell them, was that the whole Mayan thing wasn’t intuitive at all. It was the way he’d been raised. Rabbit’s old man might not have given much of a crap about his upbringing—Red-Boar had been far more concerned about the memory movies playing inside his own skull—but Jox had taken up the slack, with Strike and Anna helping off and on.
Rabbit had learned the legends and histories from them, and had picked up a better than rudimentary understanding of the glyphs and language even before the barrier—and his own magic—had come alive. So really, the Mayan studies shit had been fluff classes for him. Cheating, really. Not that he was going to fess up on that one, though Anna had threatened to flunk him if he didn’t stop signing up for her classes.
The mental filters he’d installed in his own skull to prevent himself from talking about—or performing—magic on campus wouldn’t let him tell guys like Smitty what was really going on with him. Even if he’d been able to talk about it, though, he wouldn’t have. Unlike in high school, where he hadn’t dared be good at anything lest he get more of the wrong sort of attention from the Reich High Command that had dominated the student scene, at UT he’d found that a guy got points for being good at shit, not just from the teachers, but from the other students.
Granted, his popularity hadn’t really taken off until he’d set Myrinne’s dorm room on fire, thereby gaining his all too apt nickname, but still.
“Nah,” he said, playing along. “I’m still into the science shit.” Which remained a low-grade surprise to him. He’d never seen himself as an egghead, but ever since his first day of the midlevel physics class he’d tested into, when Professor Burns had talked about how fire was nothing more than air molecules breaking the speed limit, he’d been hooked. And the deeper into it he’d gotten, the more he’d felt like he’d found something important, something he’d been looking for without knowing he was looking.
Smitty shook his head. “Wasting your talent, Pyro. Wasting your talent.” Then he grinned, his brain shifting lightning-quick—as it often did—to another, unrelated topic. “You here to see your aunt?”
Rabbit nodded. “Yep. She around?”
As a shortcut to explaining his lifelong relationship with the head of the Mayan studies department, and why he checked in with her on a regular basis, he and Anna had decided he’d just pretend she was his aunt and move on. To his surprise, nobody had called him on the absolute lack of familial resemblance. It didn’t seem to matter that his eyes were pale blue to her cobalt, that his features were hawk- sharp to her classical beauty, or that his hair, which stood up in a pseudo-military brush cut these days, was blah brown to her chestnut-highlighted sable. When he’d asked Myrinne why that was, she’d given him one of her looks—this one conveying, You’re kind of cute when you’re being oblivious—and said that they gave off similar vibes, and that although the conscious minds of most humans were insensitive to magic per se, their subconscious minds registered those vibes and chunked him and Anna together in the category of “powerful bad-ass; don’t piss off.”