by Rachel Caine
Brennan had only seen the necessity of saving every possible Warden for the fight now. I was seeing that we needed every one of them for what would come after... when these superpowered Warden children might be left alive, disillusioned, and bitterly angry at the world. We couldn't only think about the immediate. The long-term outlook was just as grave.
I pulled in a breath and said, "Yes."
We focused our attention ahead and down, on the hole. "Opinions?" Luis asked. "We could pack the sides, or push the dirt up. What's best?"
"Up," I said, without really thinking. "Packing the sides will use more force. We need to conserve power."
He nodded, rolled his shoulders to loosen his muscles, and reached out his right hand. I held out my mangled left; part of the metal that served as skin for the artificial muscle-cables was ripped away, and two of the cables had sheared, leaving most of the hand useless and stiff, but it didn't matter, in terms of conveying and directing power.
Earth power rose up through Luis, thundered into me in a flow like a geyser, and out through both of us into the ground... and the ground exploded in a fountain of loose dirt and rock that piled up to the sides, like a volcanic eruption of soil. We dug down twenty feet, and then I nodded to Edie. "Help us down," I told her, and before I could finish saying it, a dizzying combination of winds had lifted us, stabilized us in an upright position, and moved us over the hole. She could have dropped us, and I thought it must have crossed her mind, but instead she lowered the four of us with elaborate care slowly until our feet touched the loose ground.
Even here, twenty feet down, I could see telltale scars of the power that had raged above us; it seemed lifeless, without any trace of living insect activity, although there were plenty of dead, burned carapaces. Had there been any still alive, I'd have used them to help us tunnel, but the lack meant the soil was closer packed, less easy to manipulate. Below that, another ten feet, lay granite, but it had been pulverized into grains almost as fine as sand.
Luis and I continued to dig, moving the dirt up and off to the sides at the top of the shaft. We broke through dense glacial till material, and into an area of the mine that had somehow survived almost intact as it angled down. The beams and bracing had bent, but not broken, and as we stepped out on the silty clay floor, Luis let the tunnel begin to fill in behind us.
Almost immediately, the air began to feel thick; part of it, I realized, was my own natural claustrophobia playing with my senses. I forced myself to breathe slowly and deeply as we kept moving. The children seemed immune to the feeling of burial; Luis produced a reassuringly bright ball of fire to light our way, but it had the disturbing side effect of reducing the quality of the air still more, until Edie began to reduce and recombine molecules to release oxygen from the dirt around us. The fresh air was almost overwhelming at first, but when Luis murmured my name, I forced myself to refocus on the task at hand. The intact mine tunnel ended in a jagged, sharp fall of stones--more dense till, a mix of finer and bulky gravel that had been ground down from mountains aeons ago by the immense power of glaciers. Below the clay lay more till, and then solid stone.
Luis and I pushed the rocks past us, tunneling in and down. It was hot work, and even with the constantly refreshed air I felt the pressure of the deep on me, the tight-pressing walls. The damp, cold feel of clay around me, the stink of it mixed with our sweat... It was just as well that the work before us took such power and concentration, because otherwise the fear that gnawed at my heels would have overtaken me completely. As it was, I did not dare to let go of Luis's hand. It was not entirely to strengthen the flow of power between us, and I thought he knew that; I could feel his concern through the link.
We had tunneled three quarters of the way down when, without warning, I began to feel oddly faint. My lungs were working harder to process the apparently sweet, cool air, and I found myself breathing faster. Thinking why this might be seemed more difficult as well, a slippery concept that flitted like fish through shimmering water. I had a headache, growing worse with every pulsebeat, and I felt sick to my stomach as well.
I was fumbling for water in my pack when Luis stumbled and fell to his knees. It surprised me so much that I dropped the bottle. When I reached for him, I found my hands too clumsy to help.
Everything seemed so hard.
"Stop it," I heard the Void child say. His voice sounded calm, but cold. "Edie, you've had your fun. We need them."
Edie, sitting cross-legged on the damp floor of the tunnel, gave him a disgusted look and shook her head. "You know what, chipmunk? You're really no fun at all. Look at them. Aren't they funny like this?"
I couldn't think what was amusing about seeing us fall, scramble, grab on to each other, and try to rise back to our feet. My head pounded so, and no matter how many breaths I sucked in, it felt as if the walls were crushing me, suffocating me. No air... There was no air....
"Stop it," Alvin said again. "It isn't funny."
She held up her thumb and forefinger, about an inch apart. "Oh, come on, it's a little bit. No? Fine." She waved her hand, and suddenly the air that I was dragging in was full of sweet, cool, intensely real oxygen. I collapsed to my side, hyperventilating to enrich starving tissues, and heard Luis's lungs working at the same desperate speed. Now that my brain was clearing of its fog, I realized that we'd been suffocating.
"You," I gasped, and lifted my head to stare at Edie--who held up her hands in surrender, and shrugged.
"Nope," she said. "I didn't do it. You hit a pocket of methane. It's heavy; it displaces air from the ground up. You couldn't have known. It's odorless and colorless. Kills lots of people."
"She protected the two of us from it," Alvin said. "But she didn't protect you."
"Well, we were closer to the ground," Edie said. "I was getting around to you guys." Her smile was charming, and it had an edge of cruelty to it. "It's just a headache. You'll be fine. I wasn't going to let you die or anything."
No, she wouldn't have; she had a very definite understanding of her risks down here in the tunnels, and despite her mastery over air and water, she had no real chance of reaching the surface again without our help.
I slowed my breathing with deliberate control. My skin was slick with panic sweat, and although the temperature was cave-cool, I felt hot and trapped, and I was still suffering from the headache and a worrying tremble in my muscles. In a few seconds, I felt good enough to rise to my knees and pull Luis with me; he was still breathing too fast, and his dark eyes looked dazed--at least until they focused on Edie and her smile.
I held on to his shoulder as I felt his muscles go tense. "No," I said softly. "Don't waste your strength. We have to keep going." We were committed now, and there was no time for petty anger and vengeance. No room for a fight, either. I was waging enough of a battle to keep my instinctive, atavistic terror of this deep, closed space at bay.
He deliberately relaxed and nodded. His long, dark hair was sopping wet now, and stuck to his face and neck in sweaty points. "You okay?" he asked me, and put his hand on my chin, lifting it so I met his eyes. "No damage?"
"No," I said. There was the lingering headache, but it was subsiding. I wondered how far Edie would really have allowed it to go, without Alvin to control her. Too far, I suspected. It didn't take long for unconsciousness to set in, and brain damage, and death. She'd have been... interested, I thought. Like a scientist with lab animals, or--perhaps more accurately--a serial murderer with a new victim. "No, I'm fine. Let's continue."
Luis rounded on Edie and said, in a deadly quiet voice, "You do that again, and I'll choke the living crap out of you with your own lungs. I mean it."
Her eyes widened, and suddenly she looked like the child she was. "I'm sorry!" she said. "Really, I'm sorry, I won't--I won't do it again. Please, don't hurt me." She shrank back, and Luis loomed over her like a dark, cruel shadow.
He snorted, shook his head, and relaxed. "Don't try to play me, kid. You ain't got the skills. I'm not the Big Bad Wo
lf, here, and you're not Little Red. Save it for someone who doesn't know you're psycho."
He turned back to face the wall of debris in front of us, and began ripping it aside with vicious scoops of power--too much of it, expended too violently, but I understood the impulse. Because he'd looked away from her, he didn't see the change that came over Edie's face in that moment, the black glimmer in her eyes, the flat rage.
I watched her in case she acted on her temptations to hurt him. But in that instant, Alvin reached out and put his hand on Edie's shoulder.
She gasped and sat down, hard.
Alvin nodded at me, once, then folded himself into a calm cross-legged sitting position as Luis and I worked.
I wasn't sure, really, which of them I feared more. Edie, for her petulance and rages, was certainly the more volatile, but Alvin... Alvin had control, and no kind of real moral compass that I could determine. He was polite, and cold, and empty.
I almost preferred Edie's fury. It seemed more... honest.
Chapter 8
AN HOUR LATER, we'd moved so much earth and stone that Luis called a rest, and I sank gratefully down against the cool clay wall, gulping down sweat-warm mouthfuls of water until the plastic bottle was dry. "Eat," Luis told me, and pressed an energy bar into my hand. "Then have more water, but slowly. We're sweating it all out."
I nodded. I didn't feel hungry, but he was right--I needed to keep my energy levels high. The power he was channeling was burning through both of us, and despite the fact that we were literally grounded by--surrounded by--earth, the task was growing rapidly more difficult. As we drove deeper, the pressure on us, and the earth through which we moved, grew more dense. I felt filthy--my clothing clinging and heavy with sweat and caked mud, my skin smeared and as damp as if I'd just emerged from a salty ocean. And yet I was chilled, and grew more so the longer I rested. The damp, cool air made me feel every ache in my much-abused body.
I had time to examine the damage to my left arm, and used a little power to smooth the jagged metal back over the broken cables. It would take time and concentration I didn't have now to fix everything--if I survived, which was far from a given just now. I did not favor our chances. Most of my arm was dead to sensation now, though the first two fingers and thumb could still curl, grip, and hold, and there were ghostly echoes of touch available from them. The Djinn had done damage to me, but it would have likely torn off a flesh limb. I'd been lucky.
"We've only got about another hundred feet," Luis told me. I nodded; I could also see the glow of the Wardens in Oversight, like fireflies trapped in a bottle. They were all alive, though some were prone on the ground--sleeping or unconscious. "Once we break through, we heal whoever needs it, rest, then start the trip back. We've been lucky so far. Maybe it'll hold out."
By lucky, he meant that the Earth herself didn't seem to have objected to our journey under her skin; it was a dangerous place for Earth Wardens, although it was equally powerful... a bit like Weather Wardens traveling by airplane. We were completely at the mercy of our element here, and never more than now, when the Earth herself was at least partially alert to the presence of Wardens pricking her skin. It would be a mere shiver for her to crush us here... or dispatch a wave of Djinn to destroy us.
I hoped she would not do that, because Alvin's abilities horrified me in ways that Edie's did not.
"I wish we knew what was going on out there," Luis said. "Orwell said they still had a few days to make port. Maybe they're making better time than expected." He was trying to be hopeful, but we both knew that what the Wardens could do now to control any Djinn-fueled disaster would be like spraying a fire extinguisher on a lava flow. "Seattle seemed to be holding its own." He didn't mention Portland.
I handed him another bottle of water, which he sipped in carefully controlled doses. I tried to emulate him, though I wanted to guzzle it as quickly as the first. My body seemed deeply starved for moisture. "We need a day off," I said, and that startled a low, bitter laugh from him. "Perhaps a vacation."
"Yeah," he agreed. "On a nice white sand beach, with the sun shining and a cool breeze blowing. Turquoise blue ocean. Maybe a couple of palm trees. Definitely some cold cerveza."
It sounded peaceful, I had to admit, though I had no real experience of the sort of thing he was speaking about; I'd seen photographs, and I could imagine it would seem relaxing. "Perhaps it would be a bit dull for us," I said. That got a less bitter chuckle.
"Girl, I'm definitely hoping for dull. Way too much adrenaline on this ride for me, you know?" He put his arm around me, and for a moment, at least, I felt as if I could breathe easily. Luis had that effect on me, though I don't think it was any sort of magic. Just... love.
Its own kind of magic, most likely.
We finished our water, made sure the children had finished theirs, and then began the sweaty, brutal work again. A hundred feet became fifty, then twenty, then ten.
And then we broke through into a cavernous space, dark and echoing, and heard a glad outcry from the other side. The first opening was small, but not too small for a dirty arm to be thrust through, to grab Luis's hand. The babble of words from the other side made it impossible to pick out anything in particular, so Luis pulled free, bent lower, and yelled, "Get back, all of you! Coming through!" He waited for another fifteen long seconds, then said, "Here goes!" and sent a last shockwave of power through the wall of tightly packed clay and till, and it crumbled in a shower and pulled into a pile behind the four of us. As the dust settled into a dull gray cloud, I was snatched into a desperate hug from a woman I didn't know; she quickly abandoned me to throw her arms around Luis, but I was instantly assaulted by yet another grateful Warden. There were too many of them, and all too grateful.
No one tried to hug Alvin, and those who dared approach Edie received a furious glare that warned them off. After the first rush of overwhelming glee, the Wardens began to sort themselves out into individuals for me.... The one with the most presence seemed to be the smallest, a middle-aged man with a barrel chest, dressed in the grubby remains of a quite nice business suit. The tie was long gone, but he'd kept the jacket, and his pale blue shirt remained relatively clean. "Thank you all," he said, and held up his hands for quiet. The chatter among the other Wardens died down, as if they had become used to following his lead; that surprised me, because there was a strong-faced older woman in the group who I'd have pegged as a natural leader at first glance. There were two other women, one thin and athletic, one much rounder, but taller. The other two men were as different as possible from each other; one was a sullen-looking young man in a battered T-shirt and mud-caked jeans, and the other was a silver-haired, dignified old gentleman in walking shorts and a brightly colored, squarishly cut shirt. "Thank you so much for coming for us. We were starting to think we'd been left for dead."
"Not at all," Luis said. "Believe me, you're needed up top. It's our job to get you back in the fight."
"It's still a fight?" The older man looked surprised. "I thought it'd be over by now."
"If it was over, they wouldn't be here to get us," the horse-faced woman said, and offered her hand to me. "I'm Salvia Owens." Under the coating of grime, her skin was a dark brown, and her eyes seemed to have a green tint to them in the glow of Luis's self-contained, floating light, which had brightened to show the group.
I shook and said, "Cassiel, and this is Luis."
"I'm Mel," the man in the business suit said. "That's Will, Carson, Naomi and Phyllis--Phyl, for short. And the kids...?"
"Edie and Alvin," I said. "It's a long story, and we don't have time for it now."
"Why not?" Edie asked. "What were you going to say about us? That we're freaks? We are," she confided, looking straight at Mel. "I'm stronger than you are. Or you. Or you." She singled out the Weather Wardens in the group. Mel frowned a little, but he must have sensed that she wasn't lying, because he gave Luis and me an uneasy glance. "And don't even ask about Alvin. You don't want to know what he is. Better hope he does
n't show you." She held up her hand, palm out toward Alvin, and he smacked it, though not as if he was in any way exultant. Merely meeting her expectations of behavior.
There was something of me in him, I realized, something of a stranger trapped in a world he didn't understand, or truly fit inside. Sad. By any logic, that should have brought us closer together--we outcasts should stick together.
But not this time. What drove us was so very, very different.
"Is anyone here in need of medical help?" I asked the Wardens. They seemed grateful for the change of subject, but no one had significant injuries or problems. Remarkable, but they'd had access to clean, clear water; there was a large, still, dark pool in the middle of their cave. The Fire Wardens had kept clean-burning warmth available, and the Weather Wardens had scrubbed the air to keep it breathable.
Altogether, a successful isolation, though it couldn't have gone on forever. For one thing, they'd run out of food, and that was something neither Weather nor Fire could manufacture from stone and water. We shared energy bars all around--two per person--and explained what we'd be doing on the way back up--it was similar to how we'd descended, but theoretically, it would be easier, since the earth and rock had already been loosened. Theoretically.
