by Rachel Caine
There were conversations, hurried and clipped ones, with people who I assumed were higher up in the organization. Phones were used. Pictures were taken. A medical team arrived with a gurney, evaluated me, not surprisingly came up with a diagnosis of snakebite and some kind of animal attack, and loaded me up with a pile of hospital-approved blankets on top.
The gates parted, and I was wheeled inside the compound, past neatly lettered signs that warned of criminal prosecution to the fullest extent of the law for any violations of security protocols. More guards accompanied the medical team. I supposed I would have been handcuffed to the gurney, except for the snakebite, which made that impossible.
The first building we came to was obviously some kind of administration complex—big, blocky, heavily secure. Lots of locks, key cards, biometric scans just to get me into a hallway. A security officer was there, and he clipped a badge on my shirt, neon red, that proclaimed I was a supervised visitor. I didn’t feel like a visitor. I felt like a prisoner. It probably had tracking devices built in, so I could be found and caught in seconds if I managed to totter up off the bed.
I didn’t think I was going to bump the terror alert level any, given how I felt right now.
A doctor took over, clearly the Head Medical Cheese, and he did some unsympathetic probing of the snakebite wound. “It’s genuine,” he said to a guard standing next to him. “Probably a stage four bite. She’s very sick, and she needs antivenin urgently.” He bent over to look into my pale, sweating face. “What’s your name?”
“Joanne Baldwin.”
“How’d you get here, Joanne?”
“I was walking,” I said. “Snake bit me. Car picked me up but he dropped me here.”
All completely true. The doctor frowned, clearly not thinking much of someone who’d dump me and drive away, but he shook it off. “Looks like a prairie rattler bite,” he said. “Let’s get some CroFab in her, stat.”
In a gratifyingly short time—although every heartbeat felt like it lasted a year, thanks to the unbelievable and escalating pain—a nurse hustled back in with a vial and a hypodermic. He checked the label—thorough, I liked that in a doctor—and filled the hypo with the straw-colored liquid. I hadn’t really noticed, but someone had already put in a central line—and they must have been good at it, because I didn’t like IVs, not at all. The doctor added the antivenin to the flow, then reached for another vial. There were six on the table. I wondered if that was some kind of a record.
“Okay, this is going to take about an hour to get into your system,” the doctor said, after emptying the last vial. “If you start having trouble breathing, let us know immediately. Anaphylaxis is a possibility with this antivenin, but it isn’t common. You’re not allergic to sheep, are you?”
I gave him a blank look. “Sheep? Really?”
“Really.”
“How the hell would I know?”
“Good point,” he said, and grinned. “Lie back and relax. Keep your heart rate down. I know it’s miserable, but the antivenin will help, trust me. I’m going to take a look at the bite on your leg.”
In the great scheme of things, I’d almost forgotten the coyote bite; truthfully, it hardly registered, on the scale of Ow That Hurts right now. But when he started probing the wound, I found myself gasping and guarding, and he shook his head. “Let’s irrigate, get some antibiotics on board, and I’ll need to lay in some stitches. You are some lucky girl.”
I’d have given him the finger if I’d felt up to it.
Someone arrived and handed him a packet of notes, which he speed-read, and as the nurse worked on cleaning the bite, he leaned casually on the gurney and flipped pages. I wasn’t fooled.
“So,” he said. “You’re a Warden.”
“Yes.”
“Not an Earth Warden?”
This was the tricky part, because I was going to have to lie to answer, or explain more than I wanted. “Earth Wardens can’t heal themselves,” I said. “Not easily. It’s a drawback.”
He nodded. “So it is. Is it as bad out there as we’ve heard? Storms, fires, earthquakes? Some people are calling it the end of the world.”
“It’s not,” I said. “But it could be the end of us.”
That sobered him up. He closed the file and tucked it under his arm, looking down at me. Doctors always looked similar to me; there was some kind of posture they had, upright and ever so slightly arrogant, but with good reason. This particular doctor’s name badge read REID, HOWARD. He didn’t look like a Howard to me; he had thick dark hair, a long, thin nose, and smile lines around his mouth. An angular, mobile kind of face. Eyes of indeterminate color, maybe a dark blue. Not kind, though. Assessing and guarded.
“Is that your professional opinion?” he asked. “Since that’s your job, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” I said.
“How serious is it?”
“I wouldn’t go buying any long-term investments.” I coughed, because talking was making me feel sick again. A nurse got me water and a sippy straw.
Dr. Reid stared at me for a few long seconds, and whatever calculations were going on, I couldn’t follow them.
I shut my eyes as he got around to the stitches.
Dr. Reid wasn’t the only person on the base who knew what a Warden was; I could tell from the steady stream of gawkers who found a reason to drop into the infirmary over the next hour. Among them was a tall man wearing casual clothes but with a straight-up military bearing. No rank visible on the badges, but I was willing to bet, from the way people gave him room, that this man was high up.
“Hello,” he said to me immediately, with the assurance of somebody who doesn’t often meet equals, much less superiors. “How are you feeling?”
I wasn’t feeling well at all, and was starting to think that this snakebite ploy was a Very Bad Idea, but I forced a smile. “I’ll live,” I said, and cleared my throat. “Joanne Baldwin.”
He nodded. “I had you checked out. Roland Miles. I’m the director of the plant. I had to give special authorization to get you inside the gates.” By the look he gave me, I’d better humbly appreciate the sacrifice. Oh, and I did. Really. “I’ve given instructions that you’re not to leave this bed for any reason, and that as soon as you’re stable, you’re going in an ambulance to a hospital.”
“I’m a prisoner.”
“If you were a prisoner, you’d be handcuffed to the rail,” he pointed out pleasantly. “We’re just taking all necessary precautions for your health.”
“Including not letting me out of bed. What if I have to go to the bathroom?”
“Bedpan,” he said, and I didn’t think he was kidding. “I take my responsibilities here extremely seriously, Miss Baldwin, and what I see about you in my classified files doesn’t inspire confidence. You seem to have a running feud with the Wardens, and a shooting war going with authority. Now, why are you really here?”
He settled himself in a chair next to my bed, and that put our eyes level. I didn’t like it. I didn’t like the very perceptive aura I was reading off of the guy—he was just plain human, but he was nobody to underestimate, clearly. They wouldn’t have put him in charge of what had to be a major terrorist target if he hadn’t been utterly capable.
“Wait,” I said, and gestured urgently to a nurse. She handed me a kidney-shaped bowl, and I retched up what little I still had in my stomach. It wasn’t theater, it was truly that bad, and after I was done I fell back against the pillows, feeling shaky and still in sharp, cutting pain. “So just to be clear, you think I got myself snakebit as part of a clever plot?”
“Maybe,” he said, unmoved by my clearly unhappy condition. “I’m not taking any chances with you in my facility. You do have security clearances sufficient to gain entry under normal circumstances, so I’ll let you stay until Dr. Reid says you can be moved, but the second that happens, you are out of here. With my best wishes, of course.”
“Of course,” I said, and swallowed hard. “Water?”
&
nbsp; He was kind enough to fetch the cup and sippy straw, and I drained it in a rush.
“I know what’s happening out there,” he said, once I was done. He refilled the glass, which was a considerate thing to do, and set it within easy reach. “I know how bad it is. And I can’t think it’s any accident somebody like you just happens to show up on our doorstep, snakebite or not. You want to level with me, Joanne?”
“Well, I’d like to, but I don’t think your security clearance is high enough,” I said. “And I’m not in a share-y mood right now, what with all the venom and throwing up and you being a giant prick.”
He laughed. It was a real laugh, genuinely amused. Nice to know I was entertaining, even now. “Now that’s the Joanne Baldwin people told me about. You’d be a smart-ass to Death himself, wouldn’t you?”
I had been before. But that probably wasn’t something to share except on a need-to-know basis. “If you want to know what’s going on, stick your head outside,” I said. “Humanity’s sitting on a bomb, and the timer’s clicking down. That’s what’s happening. Forget global climate change; we won’t be around to see the last of the polar bears drown. That’s why I’m here, Roland. I’m on bailing duty on the Titanic.”
He didn’t like that answer, not at all, and it didn’t spark any kind of laughter this time. He was a smart man; he could identify truth when he heard it. “And why come here?” he asked.
“I didn’t! I was dumped out by the idiot who picked me up. I think he could have been running drugs.” In this part of the country, that was an extremely plausible scenario. Carloads of Mexican Brown were caught all the time, zipping their way up through the Southwest. They weren’t fighting a major drug war in Mexico for nothing.
That was my first real lie; only it was actually speculation. I hadn’t stated it as a fact, only a perception. I waited, and watched Roland Miles’s aura up on the aetheric. It was tougher to read regular people than Wardens, but there was no mistaking the troubled colors that surrounded him. The man was under a lot of stress, and he was wary. I didn’t blame him. He certainly had every right.
Wary he remained, but I didn’t get the sense that he detected any hint of a lie in what I’d said. That was good. It wasn’t that I couldn’t tackle the defenses he could probably bring to bear, but it would be very, very messy. Lives would be lost, and there was a decent chance that I’d end up having to do what I’d planned without evacuating the plant first. I didn’t want that on my conscience. Especially as the last act of my life.
Dr. Reid buzzed in the infirmary door, trailed by another nurse, this one carrying a tray full of the antivenin bottles. He nodded pleasantly to Director Miles, who stood up and moved his chair away from the bed to make room as Reid bent over me, taking my pulse, probing the badly swollen arm, and generally being a nuisance before he nodded. “Second round,” he said, and began loading the antivenin into the IV drip. “I didn’t figure that one dose would do you. That was a nasty bite. How’s the pain?”
“Intense,” I said.
“On a scale of—”
“Ten.” And I wasn’t kidding, it really was. As an Earth Warden I was all too aware of the damage the venom was wreaking on my tissues, and it scared me. There was definitely going to be scarring from this, if I survived the day. In a weird way, it was comforting to think that I didn’t have much of a chance of that, anyway.
Six vials of antivenin later, Dr. Reid gave me some kind of additional shot. I didn’t see him do it in time to countermand, but I knew I was in trouble the second the warm, weighty feeling of pain relief began to spread through my body. Oh crap. I couldn’t fall asleep. That would ruin everything.
“No!” I gasped. He’d only emptied about half a syringe into the central line, and now he looked up, frowning. “No narcotics, please.”
“You’re in pain.”
“I don’t want it.”
He shook his head, but it was, after all, a patient’s right to refuse medication. So I got enough to dull the raging, chewing pain, but not enough to get rid of it, or to lull me into dreamland.
Best of both worlds, really.
Miles tried to ask me something else, but Reid cut him off. I closed my eyes and went up into the aetheric—a struggle, considering my physical condition—and watched Miles leave the room. Lucky thing about the plant—the buildings had always been built for pure industrial use, and there weren’t a lot of emotions soaked into the place. Where they existed, they were centered mostly on the area where I was currently resting—injured and scared people had been brought here over the years, and that lingered. But outside, the aetheric shape of the place was orderly, almost sterile. This was an administration building; as I expanded my view I saw activity in several other locations, in some areas going down deep into the ground.
That was where I needed to focus my efforts. Deep in the ground. But not yet, not until I was capable of moving on my own.
It took another forty minutes, but the swelling began to go down, to the pleased murmurs of the medical staff. The venom slowed its progress, and the antivenin began to break it down into harmless chemical strings that were swept away in my body’s efficient housecleaning system. I didn’t feel good, but I felt better. Clearer. I drank a lot of water, and one of the nurses, on Dr. Reid’s approval, provided me with some kind of high-protein bar. I was able to keep it down, which was great.
By the time the second sixty minutes had passed, my arm was only a little swollen and red. Reid bandaged up the wound, after antibiotic shots, and gave me detailed instructions on what to tell the doctor at the hospital when I arrived.
“Dr. Reid,” I said. He stopped his medical lecture and looked at me, frowning. “I need you to listen to me.”
“I’m listening.”
“I can’t leave,” I said. “I need to be here. And you need to help me get everybody out of this compound before it’s too late.”
“Too late for what?”
“I’m going to do something to help us survive what’s happening outside, but it’s going to be very messy. I don’t want your deaths on my hands when I do it. So I need you all to leave the compound, do you understand me?” I held his gaze, and I put all of my Earth Warden powers of persuasion into it. “Isn’t there some medical protocol for evacuation?”
“In the event of a major radiation leak,” he said. “Yes. But—”
“Trust me, there’ll be one by the time you call the alert. How long to get everyone out of here?”
He looked around, blinked, and said, “We’re on skeleton crew, so probably no more than fifteen minutes once the alarm sounds. That’s to load everyone into the vehicles and evacuate to the secondary rally point.”
I loved a place that had their drills down cold. It meant people might actually survive this. Not me, of course. But these people, in specific.
“You know about the Djinn, right?” He nodded. I’d figured that since he knew about Wardens, he’d be up on the current information out there on Djinn as well. “The Djinn aren’t under the control of the Wardens anymore. They’re under the control of the Earth, and the Earth is very, very angry. Understand? The Djinn are going to come here, and they’re going to destroy everything. So you need to be sure you get this done, doc. If you don’t, it’s going to be very, very deadly to your colleagues.”
“I’ve got to talk to Director Miles.”
“If you want my advice, don’t,” I said. “Director Miles will have an apparently sensible solution that will mean a short-term gain for you here, and long-term disaster for the human race. Let me do this. I’m a Warden. I wouldn’t take this risk if there was any alternative, believe me.” I hesitated, then said, “I don’t plan on walking away from it, if that helps.”
“You’re not talking sense,” Reid said. “We can defend this place. That’s the whole point.”
“You can’t defend shit against the Djinn, not when they’re like this,” I said. “Trust me. I’ve been up against them, and it’s not a war you can win. It�
��s not even a war. It’s more like an extermination.”
He knew enough about Djinn to understand I wasn’t overselling it, and he shut up, watching me.
“Look,” I said, more gently. “Doc, I know you wouldn’t be working here if you didn’t have the highest ethical standards. If you weren’t completely trustworthy. But the thing is, I’m not some agent of another government or cause. The organization I’m part of transcends borders, and governments, and causes, and religions. We’re here to save the most lives we can, just like you. You have to help me. I know it seems wrong, but—”
With no warning at all, guards flooded into the room, boots and helmets and hard expressions. Oh, and large weapons, which all ended up aimed at me.
Director Miles walked in. Dr. Reid cast a guilty look around, then stepped away from my bedside as Miles advanced toward me.
“Did you really think I wouldn’t have you monitored?” he asked.
I smiled. “Actually,” I said, “I was pretty sure you would. That was the whole point. Now that I have your undivided attention, let’s talk about how this is going to go.”
“Oh, I already know how it’s going to go,” he said. “With you, handcuffed to your gurney, heading to the nearest FBI holding cell. Probably the medical wing, of course. We’re not lacking in compassion.”
“Only in sense,” I snapped back. “I could bring down this place around you, you know. And I will, if I have to. But I’m offering you the chance, one time only, to save your peoples’ lives. I suggest you take it, Miles.”
“Tell you what. The doctor here is going to trank you up six ways from Sunday, and you can tell the FBI all about it.” He nodded to Reid, who stepped up to my IV with another syringe.
I yanked the line out, clamped down on the immediate bleeding, and used a sudden, localized increase in air pressure around the syringe Dr. Reid was holding to crush it, spilling liquid sleep all over the floor. “Good luck with that,” I said. “You’re going to have to kill me.”
