Sirus looks up and smiles at me.

“How can you love it already?” I ask. “The baby, I mean. You don’t even know what it is, much less who it is. But you love it.”

He pushes his thick-rimmed glasses back up where they slipped down his nose. “I don’t know. It’s funny, isn’t it? But I think Mom was right when she told me I’d have no idea how much she loved me until I had my own.”

“Floods, please don’t ever let me utter the words ‘Mom was right.’”

He laughs, and I walk the rest of the way into the room and curl up on the couch, staring at the floor.

“You all right, kiddo?”

“How are you okay with our parents? How can you be okay with them after what they did to us?”

He lets out a long breath. “You mean the death thing.”

I wipe under my eyes. Ry’s words echo through my head, that maybe they do love me, just not the way I need. “How can they love us if they’d let us go like that? Shouldn’t they want to keep us forever? They could. I know they could. Stupid Whore-us is immortal, and Anubis. Why did they change the rules? Aren’t I—aren’t we good enough for them?”

“Oh, Isadora.” He sits next to me and puts his arm around my shoulders. “Didn’t you ever let Mom talk to you about it?”

“I’ve spent the last three years trying my best not to talk to her about anything.”

“You should have let her explain. She talked with me about it a lot. But I guess I never had the shock you did. You assumed immortality from all the stories. I kind of assumed I’d drop dead at any time, but it wasn’t a big deal to me.”

“How is death not a big deal?”

“Because it’s not the end. We have this life, we make it the best we can, and then we discover the next life.”

“Mother never did. Why should we die when she doesn’t?”

“Did you ever wonder why none of us live nearby or visit often?”

“Because Mother’s a crazy control freak and you couldn’t wait to get away.”

“No. Because when we were old enough, Mom felt like she had given us all the tools she could to have happy lives, and she wanted us to do just that. Live. Make our own mythology, not be swallowed up by hers. Live the kind of happy, drama-free, painful and joyful mortal life she couldn’t, and at the end of it come home to be ushered into our next life by the two people who brought us here in the first place. I know you think mortality is evidence that they don’t care, but giving us the ability to grow and change and progress and then finish? That was the greatest gift two ageless, eternal, very very stuck gods could think to give the children they love more than anything.”

“If mortality is such an awesome gift, why does life hurt so much?”

“Maybe because you’re doing it wrong?”

I look up, glaring through my tear-matted eyelashes, and Sirus laughs.

“Am I scared of the horrible things I know will happen to my kid to hurt him? Absolutely. But would I stop those things at the risk of taking away joy and growth and the absolute embracing of life? Never. Because I love this child for being mine, but I also love him for being who he will be, and I can’t tell you how excited I am to watch him discover that for himself.”

“Or herself.”

“I, uh, may have peeked during the ultrasound. . . .”

“Deena will kill you.”

“Which is why this is our little secret. And also can I say, after spending the last few weeks with you, I’m more than a little relieved my new guy won’t have girl hormones?”

“No, you cannot say that unless you want to get the beating of your life.” I punch him in the shoulder for good measure, then stand to go to bed. I’m as confused as I ever was; things still feel like they’re slipping down a muddy landslide slope in my soul, my desert hopelessly destroyed, and I don’t know how the geography is going to change when everything finally settles. I hope it settles soon. “So you really don’t think they had us just to worship them.”

“There are plenty of other, far easier ways to find worship. They had us because they wanted us. Because they love us.”

I sigh. “You know, life was a lot easier last month when I could hate our parents and be violently opposed to the idea of romance.”

“Heh, yeah, it—wait, romance? What is—”

“Good night!” I run upstairs and collapse into bed, but Sirus’s and Ry’s words spin in my head, swirling and shifting the parts of me I thought were immovable. And the clock counts down to my next meeting with Orion.

Ry.

Orion.

Orion’s stars swirl and dance above me, winking an invitation to join them. I lift my fingers, trailing them through the warm black of the sky, leaving a ripple of sparks like water disturbed. The stars remain just out of my reach, every inch of my skin tingling in their light. There are two new stars, two stars such a perfect and brilliant blue they make an ache flare in my heart. I am hurt and broken, but in these two perfectly blue stars I dare to hope.

My mother has her own constellation, a new one, and it is beautiful though it stirs my rage that here, too, she is eternal and immortalized and I am left on the ground, left to live on it and eventually sleep under it.

Then I notice there’s a section of the sky, not dark but empty, not a glimpse into the eternities, but an endless hole in the sky. It surges forward, swallowing my mother’s stars one by one.