by Rachel Caine
“All right,” I said, and ate another apple slice. It didn’t taste as sweet as it had.
Will ate in silence as well, until the plates were empty and the glasses drained, and then he stood up and stretched. I watched him, aware of how the sun filtered through the clothes and outlined the strong lines of his body. Aware of the gentle intensity of the stare he turned toward me, as he offered me his hand.
I took it, and he pulled me up—against his body. I didn’t move away. There was an odd inevitability to this, a feeling of recognition, as if I’d dreamed this, or lived it in another life. I looked up into his face, into those lovely eyes, and felt myself falling into a great, gaping void from which there would be no return. It should have been frightening, but instead, it felt ... reassuring. Like coming home.
Will let go and stepped away. I stood there for a moment, watching him, and then turned and picked up our plates and glasses. “I’ll take them back,” I said.
He didn’t speak, not even to thank me. I felt his gaze on me, heavy and hot, all the way back to the food hall.
When I came back out, Will was nowhere in sight. I missed him, and hated myself for it; I had no business longing for any man here, including Will, whatever odd attraction had developed between us. I was here for a reason, and that reason had just crystallized for me in a single haunting image—the desperate tears in Zedala’s eyes.
I went back to the barn and picked up the hay rake. As I did so, a pair of arms came out of the shadows behind me, grabbed me from behind, and attempted to yank me backward into the dark.
I suppose that Laura Rose might have screamed, but in that moment I was not Laura Rose. I was Cassiel, and Cassiel didn’t cry for help.
Cassiel made others cry for help.
I drove my elbow backward with as much force as I could, and felt it connect solidly with flesh, muscle, bone. I heard an explosive exhalation of breath against my hair and neck. Before he—I was sure it was a he, from the feel of his musculature against me—could recover, I spun and slammed the heel of my hand in a strike for his nose, to break it or, in the best case, drive bone into his brain.
He caught my hand barely in time, and I belatedly realized that I knew him.
Merle. I had almost forgotten about my fellow implanted agent, since he’d been put into another work cycle altogether ... but here he was, hiding in the dark.
“What do you want?” I hissed. Around us, the horses stamped nervously, catching the rush of adrenaline from our bodies. Merle looked worried. Haunted.
No, he looked hunted.
“I think they suspect,” he said. “Get a message to Rostow. Tell him I need extraction.”
“What did you learn?”
“Not a goddamn thing except how to run a plow,” he said. “I can’t find a way in, and they don’t like questions. I think I asked one too many.”
“Did they threaten you?”
“They don’t threaten anybody,” he said. “But one day, you just wake up in the cornfield, I’m guessing. Contact Rostow. Get us an exit.”
“I’m not going,” I said. Merle let go of my arm, and I stepped back. “I can’t leave. Go if you wish, but I’ll stay.”
“You stay and you’ll end up one of them,” he said. “Or worse. Something’s wrong here. I’ve been in cults before, but this one’s a whole new rainbow of wrong. It’s like it changes you inside out—not like brainwashing. I can resist brainwashing. This is something else.”
What it was, I realized, was the low-level tingle of power in the camp. Pearl’s influence, breathing around us, infiltrating our every thought, breath, heartbeat. Merle could feel it, even if he had no idea what it could be, and it had frightened him. It was eroding his sense of self, corrupting him from within ... and it was doing the same to me, only for me it had created this false link with Will.
“I can’t go,” I said, as gently as I could. “But you should. As soon as possible.” Merle, in struggling to keep his sense of identity and purpose, was making himself a target. They would know he wasn’t one of them soon, if they didn’t know that already. As good an undercover agent as Merle might have been in other circumstances, here in this place he was in grave danger.
“I’ll let you know when it’s ready,” I told him. “Go back to work. Be careful.”
He nodded, wiped his forehead with the sleeve of his gray shirt, and took a deep breath. Even so, he didn’t look himself, I thought.
“Stay cool,” I said. “You’ll be out soon.”
He nodded again and walked out into the sun, head down. Even his body language seemed wrong, when compared to the alert, confident strides of the others in the camp. I could see it. So could others.
Merle was in very real trouble.
I went back to raking the straw as I sank into a light meditative state and reached out for Rostow to deliver my message—a minor enough effort, and a nearly imperceptible use of power, but it still felt more difficult now, as if the walls around the camp were psychic as well as physical blocks. Perhaps it was only that something inside me longed for this life now—the simplicity, the clean and straight lines of it. The honesty and trust.
But the trust itself was a lie, and underneath was a black lake of toxic betrayal. I knew that, I did, but even so, it was difficult to separate knowing from feeling.
I reached out for Rostow, but before I could deliver Merle’s plea, I heard shouts from outside. No one shouted here, not in that particular tone.
I looked out to see that it was the girl, Zedala. She was running across the field, stumbling on the carefully plowed rows. She looked terrified.
Mariah, her teacher, had stopped at the edge of the field, and stood watching her with a stiff, unforgiving expression. Next to her was another teacher in a green scarf, who extended her hand toward Zedala.
The next step the girl took tripped her, and she plunged flat onto the ground.
No.
Into the ground.
I dropped the rake and ran out of the barn. Around the edges of the field, the workers had all stopped what they were doing, but no one was moving to interfere.
Not even Merle, who was standing near the fertilizer cart, clenching his fists.
Zedala didn’t come up from beneath the ground.
I took in a deep breath and ran forward, shoving the two teachers out of my way. I got only a few steps into the field before it opened before me—not my doing—and I plunged down into a thick, heavy darkness of fertile tilled dirt, worms, and the sharp chips of rocks.
I could reach her, I realized. They didn’t expect me to be able to maneuver through the dirt, to use my own Earth powers to guide me to Zedala. But if I did, it would betray me utterly, not only to them but to Pearl.
The frustration made me scream silently into the darkness of my temporary grave.
I couldn’t save her. I could only hope that their goal was to punish, not to kill.
After what seemed an eternity, I felt the ground underneath me pushing upward, expelling me into the air once again. I rolled over on my back, gasping and choking, wiping the black earth from my face with trembling hands.
Zedala was lying crumpled and weeping twenty feet away. She was filthy and terrified, but she was alive.
I coughed up dirt and blinked up at the bright yellow sun, which was blotted out by one of the teachers. Not Mariah. This one was, I was sure, an Earth Warden, and a potentially quite powerful one.
He was also very, very young—no older than Zedala, but with a shimmering cloud of power surrounding him that was unmistakable to the eyes of anyone with a gift. Possibly, I thought, the most powerful Earth Warden I’d ever met, besides Lewis Orwell.
He had dark, empty eyes that held no pity, no reluctance, no doubt. The eyes of a fanatic.
“Go get her,” he said to Mariah, who ducked her head in acknowledgment and hurried over the rows to grab Zedala and pull her to her feet. “Take her to the box.”
“No!” Zedala screamed, but only once. The boy-War
den stared at her, and the next time her mouth opened, nothing came out. The panic and terror on her face spoke loudly enough, though. It was a horrible sight, but when I looked around, I saw that the gray-clothed workers had all turned away, intent on their own duties.
All but Merle, who was still watching, with his fists tightly clenched.
And, standing in the shadow of the corner of the barn ... Will, whose clear gray eyes were fixed not on Zedala, but on me.
The two teachers dragged the girl away. I was left alone to stagger upright, slapping dirt from my clothes. Will strode forward, grabbed my wrist, and pulled me out of the field. Once I was on hard-packed ground, he took my shoulders and shook me, hard enough to make a rain of dirt fall from my body.
“Are you insane?” he demanded. “Don’t you understand that whatever happens, we do not interfere with the training of those children?”
“Training!” I spat, and struck his hands away from me. “I didn’t see training. I thought they were going to kill her!”
“Their methods may seem harsh, but—”
“It’s cruel, Will! And I’m not sure they wouldn’t have let her die, if we hadn’t been watching! I couldn’t—”
“Listen to me! You have to, Laura. You have to learn that they know best!”
“Or?” I lifted my chin and stared into his eyes. His pupils slowly widened in response, as if he was swallowing my image whole.
“Or you won’t have a place here,” he said very gently, and touched my cheek. “And I’d regret that. I’d regret that very much.”
So would I, I realized. Even now. Even with the panic and pain in Zedala’s face, the icy indifference in the boy-Warden’s cruelty. I didn’t want to leave this place.
I didn’t want to leave him.
I took a step away, until my knees were steady enough to hold me, and walked back to the barn, head down.
Then I picked up the rake, and went back to work. As I combed through the straw, I reached out for Rostow, to deliver Merle’s message.
I couldn’t make contact.
There was only emptiness on the other side of the fence, where Rostow and the FBI agents should have been. Nothing. An eerie silence that made me pause in my work and rise up into the aetheric, just enough to see.
Beyond the forest’s cover, the FBI trailer was still in place. So were the cars, the SUVs, the tent where the agents slept.
But there was no sign of them at all.
They had all just ... vanished.
Every single one.
Merle and I were very much vulnerable, and on our own.
Chapter 11
THE REST OF THE DAY passed without incident, and I trudged back with the others to the lodge, where I showered, dressed in fresh clothing, and ate with Will’s usual group of friends. They didn’t mention the unfortunate Zedala, or my dip into the earth in a failed rescue attempt. No one did.
Merle sat alone at one end of another long table, head down. It was as if he’d already been ostracized from the group. I wanted to warn him that there was no rescue, no exit plan, but I didn’t know if I dared now. If Pearl and her followers were powerful enough to abduct, destroy, or otherwise relocate the entire FBI presence, it would be dangerous to display any power that might draw their attention; I knew my aborted attempt to save the girl had already roused some suspicion. There was too much focus on Merle already.
I sipped my water and stared down at my plate as the others talked and laughed, and finally, very carefully, reached out and vibrated the delicate bones of his ear to say, FBI presence is gone. We’re on our own. Watch out.
He looked up, startled, and checked himself before he stared in my direction. Instead, he stared at an entirely innocent Oriana, who was listening to someone else tell a long-winded story about a crow and a field of corn.
And I noted that a man near him was watching, and tracing any potential interactions Merle might have with others.
Merle’s quick thinking had just preserved my cover—but had endangered Oriana, who was entirely innocent. And she didn’t even know it.
My peaceful idyll here had, in a matter of hours, turned into a dangerous pit of vipers. The difference between me and Merle, or me and Zedala, was that I didn’t intend to leave this place—not until I’d accomplished what I came to do.
I needed to lure Pearl here in the flesh, and find a way to destroy her—or cripple her. The Djinn side of me said that it was worth the cost of Merle’s life, or the child’s. Or of Will’s, Oriana’s, and the lives of all the other members of this cult who’d come here seeking escape from their own nests of problems. Collateral damage was inevitable now in this struggle. Surely it was better to sacrifice a few than to be forced to the extreme of slaughtering millions, or destroying the entire broad and lovely spectrum of the human race.
Surely.
Yet looking around the room, seeing the peace these people felt, the gentle love and regard they held for one another ... I felt that this would be less a sacrifice than black, cruel murder.
Not that I wasn’t capable of that, too.
I had only myself to answer to now. Not Luis. Not Isabel. Not even Ashan. Only me, and my human-born conscience.
It should have been easier to silence.
The next few days passed in silence, a kind of tense standoff of waiting. Part of me felt at ease now; the stubbornly Djinn part was aware of how much risk there was, and what a subtle web it had woven around me. No more children visited the barn. In fact, I only saw them at a distance, always close to the school and their teachers. I never caught any sight of Zedala.
Merle continued on as he had, without any incident, until the third morning. It took me a short while to realize that although the other workers in the field beyond the barn were familiar, there was no sign of Merle.
I took it upon myself to visit the food hall and return with a heavy pitcher of cool water and a cup, and made the rounds of the sweating workers to deliver the refreshment with a smile. When I got to Will, he wiped his damp face, gave me a blindly sweet smile, and drank two deep cups before sighing in gratitude.
“Where’s Merle?” I asked, looking around. “He’s usually here, isn’t he?”
Will had been stretching his long arms, but now he lowered them to his sides and looked sidelong at me, brows raised. “Usually,” he said. “Why?”
“No reason. I just wondered if he was all right. He seems quiet lately.”
“I don’t think he worked out,” Will said.
That sounded offhand ... and ominous. I drank some water myself, trying to decide how to approach the subject, and finally abandoned subtlety. “Did he leave?”
“Yes,” Will said. “He left.” After an awkward second of silence, he nodded. “Thanks for the water. I need to get back to work. These rows won’t tend themselves.”
I walked back to the food hall to return the pitcher, thinking hard. Merle might have been able to leave without incident; they might have allowed that.
But I couldn’t believe it, not really. He’d seen the incident with Zedala. He knew the children were at risk, and that made him a dangerous witness indeed. They would never let him simply walk free, even if they hadn’t suspected him of being some sort of spy.
As I put out food for the pigs, greeting them with friendly pats, I ascended into the aetheric to get a glimpse around me. Merle had been solidly visible before, an easily recognizable target to locate ... but now I could see no sign of him. My attention was drawn instead to a spot of darkness on the aetheric, like a wide, violent splash of blood. It was in the field, and it was far beneath the surface.
It was the shape of a corpse. No ... not just one corpse. I counted four, at least, all buried deeply in the earth.
All fresh enough to retain their basic human shape, and the aetheric stain of their death struggles.
One of them had to be Merle.
The emotion of it hit me a moment after the factual information: Merle, as competent and careful as he was, had
been killed. I was alone here. No friends, no allies, no chance of leaving with my life. Like Merle, I’d seen too much, asked too many questions. I was trapped.
But I wanted to be trapped. Didn’t I? Hadn’t that been my purpose in coming here all along?
Still, in that moment, seeing the blunt reality of what had happened to a man who had seemed, in many ways, indestructible, I felt fear, real and visceral. If I died here, I’d leave Luis and Ibby without ever really reconciling with them. They would believe that I hadn’t really loved them, really wanted to stay.
You’re not here to love them. You’re here to save them. And that, too, was true. I had been sent to this world as an avatar of Ashan’s wishes, and I knew that; he’d manipulated me into believing that it was my own will, but I knew the hand of the master at work. Ashan couldn’t lose this game, not with the position in which he’d placed me; if I couldn’t find a way to destroy Pearl, I would be driven to the last extreme, and destroy the human race that anchored and fed her. I was his cat’s paw, and if I was destroyed in the process, then that was a price both he and I knew to be acceptable, given the stakes.
I hadn’t intended to feel so much, or so deeply. Not for myself, and this fragile shell of flesh that sustained me, in any case. It should have been a temporary, uncomfortable prison, but instead—instead I felt as human, as afraid, as any of the people around me.
I spent the rest of the day feeling disconnected and alone, lost with my hideous secret beneath our feet. Will didn’t know, nor did the others. I thought the boy Warden, the one who’d buried me briefly, had been the one to carry out the executions. It was a neat, mess-free way of disposing of those they no longer needed; it would have been a horrible way to die, suffocating on your own grave dirt, but I didn’t suppose the boy cared.
He was a true believer, after all.
I was on my way to the food hall, exhausted and more than a little angry at my own indecision, when I saw a small shadowy figure lurking near the corner of my lodge building.
Zedala. She had managed to create a veil for herself, and done it well; I drifted her way slowly, almost by accident, and put my back against the side of the lodge wall beside her. The night was chilly, and she was shivering in her thin clothes. I was wearing a quilted jacket, which I stripped off and dropped beside her. She quickly picked it up and put it on with a quiet, trembling sigh of gratitude.
