“And a birthing season follows after. I was born at the end of the last birthing season, so there has not been a wedding season in my lifetime yet.”
“Did you . . .” Leo cleared his throat. “Was there someone—well, two someones—who you wanted to marry?”
“Oh, no,” Sera said, and Leo felt a selfish pang of relief. “No, I . . . Leela had been kissed, but not me.” She twined her fingers together and glanced at the door Rahel had gone through. “I did not think that sort of love was meant for me.”
“But you do now?” he asked, tensing in anticipation of her response.
“I know it,” she replied. Leo was certain she could hear his heart pounding through bone and skin and muscle.
“What happened to change your mind?”
She turned to him and her eyes were a burst of refreshing blue in the golden room. “I came to this planet,” she said. “And discovered I am attracted to males.”
She confessed it as if it were the easiest thing in the world, as if she could not hear the bells ringing out inside Leo’s chest. This was not where he’d expected the conversation to go and he wasn’t sure if he’d truly allowed himself to acknowledge his feelings for Sera until this moment.
“Are you all right?” she asked. “Your face looks . . . strange.”
“Does it?” His voice sounded unnaturally high. “No, I’m fine, I’m . . .” He searched for a change of subject, but Sera found one for him.
“Oh,” she said, and her hand flew to her necklace.
“The moonstone?” Leo asked.
She nodded. “It just went cold.”
She took it out from beneath her dress and Leo found his eyes drawn to it. The stone was a white purer than a swan’s wing, shot through with delicate ribbons of color.
“Is it as smooth as it looks?” he asked. He’d never touched it before, never even dared to ask.
Sera smiled and held it out in her palm. “Would you like to feel it?”
Their hands touched as he ran his fingers over it, Sera’s skin igniting a greater thrill in him than any magic stone ever could. The moonstone was like an ice cube that wouldn’t melt—Leo found himself compelled to stroke it over and over again, its smoothness almost compulsive. Sera laughed, a richer, kinder sound than Rahel’s giggles.
“It’s pretty, isn’t it?” she said. “My friend Leela found it on the banks of—”
All of a sudden, the moonstone flared up in their hands, so hot Leo wanted to pull away but found that he couldn’t. Sera’s palm began to glow and Leo had the same sensation he’d had when he and Sera had blood bonded and shared memories—a disorienting weightlessness, a feeling of heat zipping through his veins until it finally reached his heart. Sera gasped, and he knew she felt it too but he couldn’t unstick his jaw to ask her what was going on.
There was a crackling sound, like static through a radio, and Leo’s vision blurred—for a second he saw a different place, almost like an overlay across the opulent room, shadows of another location with columns and paths and clear pools of water.
“Did you see—” Sera began, and then there was a hard jerk behind his navel and he felt like he was being pulled upward very quickly through a narrow tunnel. He found himself rising through one of the pools, except that it wasn’t filled with water and he no longer had any sense of his body at all. Glowing blue columns loomed all around him and a chain of silver-gold-blue was shooting up through the pool he was in, or maybe down from the cone of moonstone that was protruding from a circle of pure white vines covering the ceiling.
At the edge of the pool stood a girl with silver skin and blue hair, a few inches shorter than Sera and with a rounder face.
“Sera?” she whispered, staring at him. And he knew he was seeing through Sera’s eyes, her magic linking them, or maybe it was the moonstone they had been holding—this had to be the City Above the Sky.
“Leela?” Sera said.
Tears were tumbling down the girl’s cheeks, even as her face broke into a wide smile.
“It’s me,” Leela said, and her voice cracked, but there was a clear ring of triumph in it. “It’s me, Sera. I found you.”
Part Two
The City Above the Sky
7
SERA WAS ALIVE.
Leela emerged out into the Moon Gardens, still stunned by the vision she’d had below of Sera on