Sunblind Serpent: The Zodiac Without A House

"Can it contaminate me?"

Rhovan did not answer immediately.

"It can," he eventually said, "but not because you’re simply carrying it. Ophiuchus can lawfully contain contamination without automatically becoming an Errant. For it to corrupt you, there still has to be a valid route into your Authority, and you would have to begin answering through the False Answer it carries."

"So as long as I keep the Case defined..."

"You reduce the routes available to it. That helps, but it does not make you immune, immortal, invulnerable, blessed, protected by destiny or whatever heroic interpretation you’re about to invent."

"I wasn’t going to invent any of those."

"You looked like you were considering it."

"I was considering whether throwing you into a deep trench would count as a valid release."

Dario covered his mouth with one hand.

Rhovan seemed genuinely interested. "That would depend on whether you consider me a burden. I would love to be thrown, though. Imagine getting thrown by the Ophiarch himself? Isn’t that the most privileged thing that could happen to you?"

A short laugh escaped Nadia from the volunteer desk, but it stopped when she heard the latter part of Rhovan’s statement.

Marek ignored all of them and returned his attention to the occupied scale.

He had deliberately taken the fragment into himself because he knew he could separate it from everything else connected to Ikleni. At the time, defining the Case had felt like the safest answer available. Now, he understood why Rhovan kept insisting that containment and ownership were different.

The thought unexpectedly brought Tomas Vale back into his mind.

His father had disappeared eleven years earlier, when Marek was eight. There had been no body and no real ending—only the increasingly convenient words people used when waiting became difficult: missing, presumed dead, and eventually simply gone.

Marek had spent years refusing to treat any of those words as proof.

For a moment, William Rivera’s shadow reaching toward someone who had never been beneath the collapsed section became uncomfortably easy to compare with his own family searching for a man nobody could prove remained anywhere.

He rejected the comparison before it could settle too deeply.

’No. That’s not the same thing.’

His father’s disappearance still had evidence attached to it. Project Meridian existed, records had been hidden, and questions remained that could still be answered. He would not turn uncertainty into an answer simply because the comparison frightened him.

The older volunteer interrupted his thoughts when she approached them carrying the evacuation ledger.

"There’s something else," she said, glancing toward Ikleni’s body. "I think it might matter. There was another man here before Ikleni started acting strangely."

Rhovan’s posture changed immediately. "What man?"

"I thought he was another evacuee. Tall, dark clothes, and his Astral Mark was near his waist on the right side."

"Could be Scorpius," Rhovan said.

Silas, who had been correcting Nadia’s writing, stopped moving.

Marek noticed but kept his attention on the volunteer. "Did he speak to Ikleni?"

"I don’t know. I saw him watching the damaged section before Ikleni went back there. He looked spaced out while looking at the shadow for a long time."

Rhovan’s eyes narrowed. "He could see the Trace?"

That alone was enough to change the atmosphere around them.

Most people had not understood what the strange movement meant even after witnessing it repeatedly. The volunteers had treated the footsteps, metallic smell, and abnormal shadow as unsettling parts of a place already damaged by the Awakening.

Someone who deliberately watched the Trace was different.

The woman continued. "He also asked us something before he left."

"What did he ask?" Marek asked.

"He wanted to know if a blond Gemini girl had passed through here with a woman wearing silver-white clothes."

Every other thought disappeared from Marek’s mind. "Mara."

Rhovan looked toward him. "It matches her."

Marek’s gaze sharpened. "Don’t start telling me it could be someone else."

"I wasn’t going to. I’m saying the description matches what we’ve been following, which means we treat it seriously without pretending we know more than we do."

Marek hated the answer mostly because it sounded like something he would have said himself.

The volunteer looked between them. "You know the girl?"

"My sister."

Her expression changed, but Marek did not give her time to apologize or ask anything else. "What happened to the Scorpius man?"

"He left before Ikleni started digging through the collapsed section."

"Which direction?"

"West."

Marek looked toward the service road.

Rhovan asked another question before he could move. "You said his Mark was around the waist. Was there anything unusual about it?"

The woman became visibly uncertain. "There was something dark along one side. I thought it was dirt at first."

Silas finally left the volunteer desk and approached them. "Black?"

"I think so."

Rhovan looked toward Ikleni’s corpse. "That thin black defect across his Mark is called a Black Seam. It appears where Black Errancy has taken hold."

Marek glanced at the corpse before looking back at the volunteer.

If the woman had remembered correctly, the Scorpius Astrant might have had one too.

The Scorpius Astrant had apparently noticed the Unclaimed Trace, watched it without warning anyone, asked about Mara and the silver-white-clad woman, then left before Ikleni began acting upon whatever remained around the collapsed section.

Marek closed the notebook he had unconsciously taken out during the conversation.

"He knew something."

Rhovan’s expression had become colder than Marek had seen throughout the entire incident. "Enough that we should assume his presence wasn’t accidental."

Marek looked again toward the place where the shadow had once repeated its unfinished movement. "Then Ikleni might not have been a true first carrier."

"He still could have been," Rhovan replied. "But until we learn whether that Scorpius Astrant interfered with the Trace, we cannot dismiss a carried route."

Marek’s expression hardened.

If the Scorpius had merely observed the Trace, then Ikleni could still have become its first carrier when his Aries Authority acted upon it. But if that man had already contaminated something at the site, altered the Trace through his own Authority, or left behind another contaminated route, then Ikleni might have encountered something that had already crossed the line into Black Errancy.

Neither possibility made the situation better.

"Then either he wanted something to happen here," Marek said, "or he knew enough to understand the risk and deliberately left without warning anyone."

Rhovan did not argue.

Both possibilities were bad.

The remaining volunteers agreed to keep the area around Ikleni’s corpse isolated until someone capable of handling Astral contamination arrived. Marek could only hope such a person actually existed nearby.

Rhovan gave them specific instructions not to move the body unnecessarily, interfere with the black defect across the Mark, or treat the disappearance of the Unclaimed Trace as proof that the contamination was gone.

Marek did not need the warning repeated for himself. His gray scale was still occupied, and the presence inside it was enough of a reminder.

As they prepared to leave, Rhovan watched Marek adjust the strap of his backpack.

"You were Unfixed not long ago."

Marek looked at him. "You already congratulated me for Degree I. Please don’t start again."

"I was going to make an intelligent observation."

"That would be new if it’s indeed intelligent."

Rhovan placed a hand over his chest, pretending to be offended. "You learn very quickly when something important is ahead of you."

Marek’s attention returned to the road west. "Mara is ahead of me."

"Exactly."

"Then walk faster."

Rhovan smiled, but the expression disappeared when he looked back at the evacuation point.

The shadow no longer moved, the footsteps had stopped, and the metallic smell had faded. Ikleni Ferrer’s body remained behind the barricade with the black defect still crossing his Mark, while the gray fragment remained contained inside Marek’s scale.

Nothing about the incident had been erased simply because they finally understood more about how it might have begun.

Rhovan started walking beside him. "One more thing."

"Fire away," Marek replied.

"Black Errancy can only twist the Authority an Astrant already has. It cannot give them powers they never possessed."

Marek considered Ikleni. His Aries Authority had not become something completely different. It had simply lost the rule that allowed the rescue to end.

Somehow, that made the whole thing worse.

"So there are still rules," Marek replied.

"There are always rules."

Marek glanced at him. "That was supposed to comfort me?"

Rhovan looked ahead toward the road that continued along Mara’s trail. "No. It was supposed to remind you that the danger is worse because it still follows rules."

Marek understood the warning, and neither of them spoke again as they planned to continue their journey west to find Mara.