Unbroken

by Rachel Caine

  The void inside me was growing fast now, shooting out dark tendrils. There were fewer children fanning out past me to attack the Wardens than there might have been, because of Isabel's actions, but still enough to kill what was left of the people--and Djinn--on the other side of that door. It was up to me to stop it.

  I sent a fierce pulse of energy back through the hands of the children touching me, and one by one they slumped, unconscious. One slid over the ragged, broken edge of the floor into the abyss below, but I didn't have time to save him, didn't have any time at all.

  "Isabel!" I shouted. "Stop the children out there!"

  She headed past me for the door, lithe and quick, and as Pearl stretched out a hand toward her, I got in the way. What hit me felt deceptively light at first, like a shower of water, but almost immediately it began to burn through my clothing, and open raw bloody holes in my skin. Acid. I coughed and gagged on the burning smell of it. A Weather Warden might have been able to wash it away, but as an Earth Warden all I could do was slowly change the composition of the acid into an inert form, and that took time.

  The wounds it left me with were impossible to heal, and I had no time left, because lightning sizzled now from Pearl's fingers. I twisted in midair to avoid the strike; it blew apart an antique sofa pushed against the wall, and part of the wall behind it. A burning masterpiece of art slipped off its hook and toppled to the carpet, and I rolled forward and for the first time, touched Pearl's body, in the flesh.

  It was cold. Ice cold. And where my fingers gripped, I saw white creeping into my skin, turning it the pallid consistency of rubber.

  I pulled, but my hand had gone numb, and slid harmlessly off her skin. It felt... dead. Wholly and completely dead.

  My metallic left hand was still functioning. I grabbed the bottle out of my pocket and flipped the cork free with my thumb. "Rashid!" I shouted. "Take the children away from here! All of them you can! Now!"

  "I can't touch the blackened ones," he said, but it was in passing; he was already moving, and he grabbed a boy who was lunging for me with a knife in his hand. The child was only seven or eight years old, and burning hot from the unnatural forces of powers inside him; as Rashid pulled him back, the boy simply made the blade of the knife lengthen. The steel leaped across the open space between us, and the needle-thin tip stabbed an inch into my chest before Rashid could snap it and yank it free. He gave me a wordless look of alarm before he grabbed the fighting boy, then an armload of others, and with a single word of power left them limp and sleeping.

  It would take time for him to get them all.

  I heard Isabel out in the other room yelling at the Wardens. "Don't let them touch you! Kill them if you have to!"

  "But they're just kids!" someone protested, and then the chaos intensified out there. The Void children could kill with a touch, pull away energy in a roaring flood. Where that energy went was a mystery; it seemed to tumble through them and off into the dark. They were no more than child-sized holes punched in the world.

  Isabel was right. They had to be stopped by any means necessary.

  And so did I, now.

  I could feel that heavy pull inside me, like a black hole forming in the pit of my stomach. The drain was small at first, but it was growing, throwing its spiral arms wider and wider with each increasingly fast spin. I had moments left, if that, before I became as empty and as dangerous as these children.

  Or worse. Chrysalis, Pearl had called me. A vessel for something else. Something greater.

  Her dark angel.

  No. That was not my fate. I was not going to watch this world burn, and everything fail, and see Pearl rise as the new Mother. I was not going to stand at her side, her creature, to pollute and torture and destroy what remained in the ashes.

  I would not preside over the death of the human race.

  Rashid had taken away many of Pearl's children, but he couldn't approach the ones armed with Void powers; they were the most dangerous, by far. He misted into view beside me, and dropped a small canvas bag at my feet. It was unzipped, and in it, I could see what looked like a rifle. He grabbed the weapon and tossed it to me; I caught it, surprised, and said, "I can't shoot them!"

  "Darts," he said. "From the zoo. An entire bag." He gave me a scary, wild smile, and winked, and I felt the same surge of hope and exhilaration as I put the stock of the gun to my shoulder, sighted, and pulled the trigger on the nearest Void child.

  The dart took her in the shoulder, and she gasped in surprise and whirled around, face blank with shock... and then just blank, as the drug raced through her system. She stumbled, lost her balance, and fell.

  Isabel ducked back in the door and saw me. "I can't stop them!" she shouted.

  I tossed the rifle, and the bag, to her. "Now you can," I said. "Go! Stay with Luis! I can handle this here!"

  She knew I was lying, she must have, but in this last, desperate moment, she also knew that we had no real choices left. She hesitated one more second, staring into my eyes, and blurted, "I love you, Mom."

  Then she was gone, and I pulled in a deep, trembling breath. There were tears in my eyes. Tears.

  "You really love this human child?" Rashid asked me, as if it were a normal day and we were in casual conversation. As if the world weren't coming apart around us.

  "Yes," I said softly. "Yes, I do. She's my daughter, in every way that matters."

  Rashid shrugged. "And you used to be so... fierce."

  "I still am." I swallowed hard, and tasted darkness. "Rashid, the Void children touched me."

  He looked sharply at me, eyes flaring bright silver. "You're infected?" He took a step back. "Give someone else the bottle. You can't keep me now. You know that. Your sickness will spread to me."

  "Don't worry, I have other plans for you," I said. And I did; a plan had formulated itself somewhere deep inside me, and it was suddenly and brilliantly illuminated like a landing strip in the dark. "I'll set you free at the proper moment."

  "Do it now!"

  "I can't," I said... and then a pale pair of arms locked around me from behind, and pulled me backward with irresistible, bone-breaking force.

  Pearl.

  I tried to summon power and break free, but where she touched me numbness spread--a creeping cold that mirrored the darkness from the Void children that had infected me. My skin, already pale, turned a dead blue-white as infection spread like frost. I couldn't feel the bottle in my fingers, and as much as I tried to hang on to it, I couldn't.

  Rashid cried out, but he couldn't help, couldn't come close to Pearl. And like all trapped Djinn, he couldn't directly touch the bottle.

  It hit the floor, rolled toward the edge of the abyss, and was just tipping over the edge when he summoned a gust of wind that blew it the opposite direction, in a skitter over broken stone to relative safety...

  ... Until there was a flash of green coils untangling and dropping from overhead on an exposed beam, and Esmeralda reached down and scooped up the bottle.

  I had been looking for her. Counting on her, in fact.

  "Isabel," I whispered. I could only just draw the breath to speak, and when I did, my breath misted on the air. "Give it to Isabel. Hurry."

  She laughed, dangling her human half upside down, fangs extended and glistening with venom. "Hell with you," she said. "I am done with all of you people. I used to be good, really good. But you treat me like everybody else does, like a freak. Not anymore, chica." She waggled the bottle in front of me as she righted her body in a sinuous twist of coils. "He's mine now. Mine. Don't think just because I don't have Warden powers anymore that I've forgotten how to order around a Djinn. Rashid's my gorgeous personal insurance policy to get the hell out of this in one piece."

  Pearl laughed, and that laughter crept inside me, too, heavy as fog. I couldn't hold my head up now. I felt like a flesh-doll, limp in her grip. "Poor Cassiel," she said, and I felt her cool lips graze my ear. "Can you feel it? The Mother is listening. She is listening to humans now. U
nguarded, open, vulnerable. It's time for you to choose. Die with the Djinn and the Wardens, or live with me. Esmeralda's already made her choice."

  Esmeralda dropped down out of the rafters with a heavy, meaty thump, and slithered closer, head tilted to one side, watching Pearl curiously.

  "I'm not on anybody's side," she said. "Damn sure not on yours. I've seen what you do to kids. I never had many limits, but whatever mine were, you blew right past them."

  "So you want to be my enemy," Pearl said. "That's an unfortunate choice."

  Esmeralda shrugged. "I don't want to be anybody's enemy. I just want to be on the side that wins, that's all. There never was a place in the old world for me. Maybe there'll be one in yours."

  I couldn't speak. I could just barely find the strength to draw in one raw, aching, freezing breath after another. Outside, the battle between the Wardens and Pearl's children had gone almost quiet; I wondered, with a growing dread, if Isabel was all right. And Luis.

  "Es," I whispered. The dark inside me was starting to hurt as it grew stronger; it was pulling things from me, important things. Memories. Identity. Strength. "Don't. She will not win."

  Esmeralda nodded past me, toward the abyss Rashid had punched into the center of the room--the hole through which had fallen so many children. "Oh, it looks like she will," she said. "Sorry, Cass, but I never was much of a martyr."

  I slowly, painfully turned my head, and saw that the children, alive, intact, aware, were floating in midair. Rising up out of the dark, completely unharmed.

  "Did you really think I'd let the Djinn do something so cruel as to slaughter all these innocent lives?" Pearl asked. "I saved you from yourself, Cassiel. The Wardens are finished, and humanity with them. I'm what comes next. And now, so are you, my sweet, cold sister."

  Cold, so cold. The pain inside was excruciating now, a black fire I couldn't control or fight. The power I pulled from Luis was spinning away from me into that void, eaten by something... something that was reaching through.

  Something that was trying to clamber its sharp-edged way inside me, as her power froze and shattered every bit of strength and power left in me.

  The children were forming into a tightly bound cluster around us, all facing outward... so many young Wardens, so powerful, and all their power was directed inward, channeled together into a pure white shell around them as they floated in the air over the darkness. A milky, glassine skin that sealed them all inside, together.

  And it began to kill them.

  The power being produced was so vivid, so unnatural, that I could sense their small bodies failing under the strain. It didn't matter to Pearl. Nothing mattered now, except her goal, almost in her reach.

  The Void children remaining in the bubble imploded... their darkness exploded out of them, destroying their fragile shells, and flooded together like spilled mercury, spread in a sinuous curve along half of the dome.

  It formed a liquid design, the blaze of power, and the absence of it.

  Black and white.

  Yin and yang.

  The opposing forces of the universe.

  "Stop," I whispered. I grieved for the children who had just... disappeared, but that battle had been lost a long time ago; Pearl had chosen them, hollowed them out, made them avatars and vessels. The other children, the ones on the white side of the dome... those still had souls, minds, personalities. They could still be saved, if only I could stop this, soon.

  But I was losing everything. It was bleeding, slipping, turning dark. Everything, dark.

  Then I heard a whisper, and it rose up out of the remnants of the light inside me, out of the very roots of the earth. Not a word, but a feeling, an intuition. It was the breath and life and voice of the Mother, speaking to humans, brushing over us.

  Life. Pure, untainted life, a power so pure and intense that it brought sharp tears to my eyes. It didn't warm me, but it promised me warmth, life, escape from despair....

  And then I felt Pearl gather to strike. In this moment, when the Mother was finally, gently opening herself to humans, allowing just the merest suggestion of contact with them, she was vulnerable through them.

  I had to act. Had to.

  But all I could manage was one last, dying burst of power--just enough to shock Pearl a little, break me free of her grip, and send me tumbling forward in a heap. I hit the glittering wall of power that had formed around her and the children head on, with stunning force.

  It didn't yield.

  Pearl looked down at me, remote and cold, and her eyes were the lightless empty of the Void. "You reject what I offer, Cassiel. You offend me."

  "Good," I said. It came out raw and bloody, but satisfying. "Kill me, then. If you can."

  She walked down a set of invisible steps, as her children parted for her--some of them had already collapsed, their white light guttering out, and the rest were burning like candles in a furnace. All their power was flowing into Pearl, I realized; it was in the unearthly pale glow of her skin. She had embodied it, and the darkness.

  If she completed this last, cruel act, she would be more powerful than anything else in this world.

  I couldn't break this shell, or the cycle of power that was feeding back on itself inside it. I couldn't save myself, or the children. I couldn't do anything except kneel there, cold and empty, as Pearl glided toward me.

  But I could do one simple thing, after all.

  I could duck.

  The power that lanced out of her erupted in a pure white bolt, heading straight for me; if it touched me, it would burn me to cinders.

  But it didn't touch me. I let myself fall backward, anchored by my knees, and Pearl's strike hissed and burned the air an inch above my chest.

  It bored straight through her own shell of power, lanced out into the room, slammed into the back wall, and kept going.

  And I rolled out through the burned opening of the shell as it began to knit itself closed, sealing Pearl and the children in.

  I barely made it over the closing threshold before it irised shut.

  The black-and-white sphere containing Pearl and her followers began to rotate now, slowly at first, but growing in speed and strength.

  I collapsed gasping on the broken stone floor, and wondered if I had enough strength to battle Esmeralda, who was the only living thing in the room left now outside of the sphere... but as I rolled myself over on my back and looked at her, I realized that I needn't have worried.

  Esmeralda had felt it, too, that whispering touch of the Mother. Her eyes had gone wide and very dark, and they were filled with blind tears. She was still clutching Rashid's bottle in one shaking hand, but I didn't think she even realized she still had it.

  She didn't see me at all.

  "She forgives me for what I did," Es said. "I feel it. I feel it. I can--I can change--"

  And she did, drawing in a deep breath; the thick, muscular coils began to shift, contract, drawing together in a smooth, tapering glide... and Esmeralda was standing. She looked down at her long, smooth legs, slender feet, and cried out--grief, joy, shock all boiling together. The white shirt she was wearing reached almost to her knees now, and it left her looking younger than before, a child playing at dress-up. I wondered how many years it had been since she'd been herself, been truly and completely human.

  Just in time to lose everything again.

  She blinked and looked down at me. "You don't look so good, lady," she said. "I've seen dead things on beaches with better color."

  "Esmeralda," I whispered. "Get out. Go. Find Isabel."

  "She doesn't need to find me," Isabel said from the doorway. "I'm right here, Mom." She was still covered in plaster dust, smeared and dirty, but she was alive. And behind her was Luis, bloody but still upright. He ignored Esmeralda, ignored the spinning sphere hovering in the middle of the room, and limped to me.

  "We're okay out there now," he said. "Lots of sleeping kids. Djinn are holding the power bubble over us." He collapsed down on the floor next to me,
and pulled me into his arms. "God, you're cold, Cass."

  I couldn't tell him I was dying, but it was true; the darkness that I'd been infected with was eating away, steadily and quietly killing me. It was a kind of virus, I decided; as it fed on me, it reproduced. Soon, I'd be a vessel for it, like Pearl's Void children.

  And then I'd be unacceptably dangerous.

  I'd failed on every level. Luis, Isabel, even Esmer-

  alda... they had succeeded. But I hadn't stopped Pearl. I hadn't even slowed her. All my power, all my history, and it had come to this.

  To nothing.

  Ashan was dead now; whatever plan he'd foreseen for me, it had been false, or it had died along with him. My failure would cancel out all of the great victories won by my friends, my family, by humanity, because I had not been strong enough, fast enough, Djinn enough.

  I was doing worse than killing humanity. I was killing the Mother herself, through my failure.

  But I could do one last thing right.