I'm looking outside at this city. I was once blown away by it. I once looked out and saw how beautiful it was. It was modern. It was a whole new world than I was used to. I was wrong. Just behind the well-manicured streets and tall business district buildings are the slums. Not even the slums could be as filthy as the system that controls them.

The entire system was corrupt.

“Hey babe...”

Mark walks into the house. He is in his construction gear. He has on a hard hat and a dirty wife beater on. He walks up behind me when he sees me standing over the balcony. He walks up to me and he holds me. Mark smells like a man. The blue-collar workers never really seemed like something that attracted me but right now it's the only thing that attracted me. He barely made any money from his job but it didn't matter to him. He still went every single day hoping to contribute somehow to this household.

“You're late today,” I state.

“There were all these issues out on site today,” he responds to me, holding me tighter, “I probably smell like crap. I've been working so hard.”

“Is that all you have to tell me?”

He raises an eyebrow. He must be a little confused.

“Um...you look good today,” he says wondering if that's what I'm looking for.

“You called the cops on JB. I told you not to.”

Mark bites his lip. I wonder if he really thought it wouldn't have gotten back to me that he was the one who ran to the police about the . The fact that he is standing there right now shows that he probably assumed I wouldn't. He must not have known the system. The High Liberty lived by his own rules. He did what he chose.

Mark sighs, “Listen. I wasn't about to let him get away with that. It was call the cops on him or do something worse. He violated you. You think I was going to let that pass.”

He's headstrong. He's aggressive. He's just like an Aries. A part of me knows that this is how Mark is. This is how he was raised.

He doesn't get the politics of all this. I cross my arms. I look back out towards the city. He walks up to me. He doesn't touch me. I think he believes I'm mad at him. I'm not mad though. I'm just sad about how everything turned out. I'm emotional.

“His trial is tomorrow.”

“Good! Good. Justice. Right. This is a good thing. You can find him guilty. Right?”

Mark was saying something he didn't believe. I don't even look at him. He knows better. No. This was not a good thing. This was the opposite of a good thing. Mark had opened a box that he couldn't close.

“They took me off the trial.”

There's silence at that moment. Mark looks out to Nyxx. Nyxx is in the living room. She's standing at the door. She's been watching us this entire time. She's watching our expressions. She can probably hear everything we are saying. Mark knows and I know. I can tell he is trying to be a little careful with what he says. Anything and everything we say in our own home will be reported back to the High Liberty.

“He's going to get off...isn't he?” Mark asks.

I nod, “Yeah.”

“No exceptions. Not even 1?”

He's talking about my friends. I know he is. My friends are going to be on the trial. They are going to be handling the trial. He doesn’t come out and say it. It would be wrong to even assume I could try to mislead one of the Liberties on the Jury. I still haven't looked at Mark.

“No. No exceptions.”

“Listen. him. We still have each other. that guy,” Mark says.

He's trying to make me feel better I know he is but as soon as he says it my heart just drops. The feeling of having someone at my side who really cares about me is something that means more to me now than ever. I feel so alone after my friends turned their backs on me. I'm alone in this city. Mark is the only one who I can trust and now I don't even have him.

“Somethings happened...”

Mark glares at me. He studies my face. Does he notice the tears? If he does he seems to upset to acknowledge them immediately. He holds onto my arm. He's firm.

“You're scaring me. What is it Junior?”

I dreaded all day telling Mark what the High Liberty told me.

“Our marriage has been annulled. You are no longer my husband.”

“That's impossible...” Mark says, “I never signed off on an annulment. I know you didn't agree to one. What the hell is happening? That's impossible. Right Junior?”

“Not for the High Liberty it isn't. Today was the pretrial. Tomorrow is the actual trial. JB will be found not guilty and I have been rematched with JB.”

Mark sighs.

“He's on trial for you!”

“The matchmakers don't care about that. I wouldn't be surprised if this is some test that the High Liberty is putting me through.”

I expect Mark to sit with me and stare out in the city. I want us to just spend our last night together crying. Once I'm married I wouldn't be allowed to live with someone else. I had no doubt Mark would soon be matched with someone else if he hadn't been matched already. This was going to be our last night together. He knows it and I know it. There is this heaviness between us. I want to touch him but I don't want to mislead my emotions.

Mark wasn't mine anymore.

That is just how things were.

He just stares out. Then he does something a Libra would probably never do. He punches the glass patio door. His arm smashes the thing to pieces. It's so loud that Nyxx's eyes get a little brighter. Mark notices. He pushes his way through the broken glass and heads to Nyxx. I follow him scared that he is going to do something stupid.

“ the high LIBERTY. this system!” Mark screams out at the top of his lungs.

What he has right now is real emotion. I respect him so much for showing it. I've always been so restrained. I've always been so in control of everything in my life. That is the way of the Libras. We have to perfectly balance everything. Aries doesn't seem to have that problem. They lead with their emotion. They have this fiery soul about them.

I attempt to calm Mark down grabbing onto his arm, “Mark don't...”

Everything he says is going to go back to the High Liberty. Nyxx was a ing spy and he knew it. We had to be super careful around her.

“You think I give a ?” Mark asks.

“Mark...don't be stupid...”

Mark turns to Nyxx. He walks right up to her. The girl is a ghost. The High Liberty wasn't even clever enough to get good spies. Nyxx is so obviously a spy for him. She stands there just watching and waiting. There is no soul in her. Seeing her stand face to face with Mark is crazy. They glare each other down. Sometimes I feel bad for the Virgos. Who would want to live a life without a soul? I wondered if they were always like that even back in the day before the Zodiac system. There isn't much history of what the world was like before the Zodiac system even on the Scale Mountains.

“I got a message for your puppet master,” Mark says, “Tell him I refuse to have him control my life. And oh yeah. Give him this.”

With that Mark punches Nyxx dead in her face. Nyxx doesn't expect it. She falls over, hits her head on the table and passes out. I'm shocked. My mouth just drops open.

“Mark what the . Do you have a death wish?”

“What? it was an accident… My fist just so happened to hit her face. That's the story I'll go with when they come for me. But come on. We don't have much time.”

“Where are we going?”

“To the stars.”

***

Mark takes me across town. It's only a matter of time before Nyxx gets back up and comes looking for me. She always seems to find me. I'm thinking she has some sort of tracker on me but for the life of me I can't figure out what it is.

We arrive at a building. It's an observatory. Mark literally took me to go see the stars. I'm not surprised that the building is closed. It's late at night. I'm also not surprised that this has no effect on Mark what so ever. He breaks in the building helping me through and we make our way to the huge telescope.

“This is the largest reflector in all 12 nations,” he explains, “The dome is almost 50 feet tall. Here. Come closer. Let me show you.”

I wait while Mark adjusts the telescope.

“How'd you find this place?”

“We did some construction on a site not too far from here. I figured I'd wait till our one year anniversary to bring you here. Guess we didn't make it to one year.”

His voice gets solemn when he says that. I hate thinking about it. I grab Mark by the back of his shirt. He turns to me. We make eye contact. It's romantic with us in this dark room with this huge telescope. It would have made a perfect anniversary date.

“Let's not think about tomorrow. We still have tonight,” I explain.

He nods, “You're right. Come here. Look through the telescope. Tell me what you see.”

He helps me look through the telescope. The whole while it's hard to concentrate. He touches me in all the right places. His hands rest on my waist. His body presses up against me. He breathes slowly. Every moment I'm standing next to him I'm falling more and more in love.

“Stars.”

“That's the Libra constellation. Back in the day people used to use the zodiac constellations not only to talk about someone's personalities. They used to talk about the future.”

I laugh. I learned about it back on the Mountain. It was the reason the Zodiac system started in the first place.

“Astrology.”

He nods, “For centuries we look up to the skies looking for answers to the hardest questions in life. Now things aren't much different. Astrology is just the study of how the correlation of all those celestial bodies impact our day to day events. And how they can impact the future.”

“You can't tell the future in the stars. That's a myth.”

He shrugs, “They used to say Zodiacs were a myth. Libra, Aries, Taurus, Gemini, Cancer, Leo, Virgo, Libra, Scorpio, Sagittarius, Capricorn, Aquarius and Pisces were just hobbies.”

“Now they are law,” I respond.”

“Maybe. Maybe they don't have to be,” he responds.

I knew he brought me here for a reason. I look over at Mark. He had something on his mind. He had something bigger on his mind.

“What are you talking about?” I ask him.

“Look at those stars. We can't tell the future in them. You said that yourself. But that's exactly what they are doing. If you are born in January you have a good chance of being an Aquarius and living a lavish lifestyle. If you are born in March you probably are a Pisces and you have a lot of feelings so you'll end up turning to a creative art. That is bull.”

I shrug, “It's the system. It's how things are.”

“I can tell the future and I can see that things need to change,” Mark explains, “I want to be with you. Whose to say we aren't a good match? We are. To me at least. Don't you feel that way?”

“The High Liberty will never let that happen.”

“Then we remove the High Liberty.”

His face is open. He's cl