by Rachel Caine
I felt utterly, filthily sick, and grabbed for Luis. He seemed just as unsteady as I felt, but the two of us balanced each other. “God,” he breathed, staring at the boy. “My God.”
Alvin looked up and at us with a sudden, eerily predatory focus. He said nothing, but the two of us went still, instinctively. The thing that had emerged from him was slowly crawling back into his skin—a thing I could almost see, almost understand, though I didn’t wish that. Not at all. “I won’t hurt you,” he told us blandly. “You’re not enemies.” I heard the unspoken yet hanging at the end of that sentence.
“How many Djinn can you handle like that?” Luis asked. He was struggling to sound offhand about it, as if he were merely interested and not terrified by the child’s potential. Alvin shrugged.
“Three or four,” he said. “It gets harder the more there are, of course. I get full.”
I saw Luis’s Adam’s apple bob as he swallowed. He glanced at me, and I knew what he was thinking. I thought it—felt it—as well. “Full,” I repeated with as little emphasis as I could manage. “You consume them.”
“Of course,” Alvin said. “I wouldn’t let them go to waste. Not unless I can’t help it.”
He kept watching us with that eerily flat interest for another long moment, and then the last of the—shadows?—retreated back into him, and he was just a little boy again. Tired, and small for his age.
He trudged back to the van, opened the door, and climbed in next to Edie, who leaned out the window and said, “Can we go now, please?”
Luis said under his breath, “We can’t. We can’t do this.”
“Do what?” I whispered back. “Use them to rescue trapped Wardens? Yes, we can. And will.”
“We can’t win when they turn on us.”
I smiled grimly. “No,” I agreed. “No, we can’t.”
And then I climbed back on my motorcycle and fired up the engine. When I looked back at him, Luis was still standing there, staring at me, but he shook his head in surrender and got back in the van.
And we drove down that smoky, lifeless, hellish road toward what I could only think of as the inevitable.
In about a quarter of a mile, the road curved and ended in a huge, tumbled mound of steel wreckage. It had once been some kind of structure, likely an administration building located near the mine shaft.
The only sign of the mine itself was an inset depression in the bare ground, curved like a bowl to a depth of almost twenty feet at its center. Featureless and silent.
I parked, and Luis pulled his vehicle in next to mine. As the engines died, the only sounds were the creaking of bent metal in the wind and the crackle of the fires burning sullenly around us. No birds crossed the silent, watching sky. This is what the world will become, I thought. Wreckage and emptiness, with nothing left to feel, or remember, or mourn.
Nothing but Pearl, staring into the dead cinders of her triumph, and smiling.
Luis and the two children got out of the van, and he grabbed the other canvas bag full of supplies. Mine was still secure against my back, but I opened it and checked the stoppered beer bottle that held our emergency option: Rashid. That, I rewrapped carefully and added it back to my bag.
“Right,” Luis said, as I nodded my readiness. “Cassiel and I will open the tunnel. Edie, your job is—”
“I know what I’m supposed to do,” she interrupted, looking annoyed. “I’m not stupid. I’m the one who keeps you breathing. And Alvin’s the one who kills Djinn. Right?”
“Yes,” I said, since Luis didn’t seem to be inclined to answer at all. “We won’t try to keep the tunnel open the entire length; we’d need to reinforce as we go, and there won’t be time. We’ll allow it to collapse behind us. We can open it again in stages as we come up.”
“You hope,” Edie said. “Maybe you won’t be strong enough, and you trap us down there with you. What do we do then?”
“Die,” I said blandly, and met her eyes. “What is your point?”
She raised her eyebrows just a fraction, and—unexpectedly—giggled. “None, I guess,” she said. When she smiled, she looked like a lovely, adorable child, with a dimple denting her right cheek and light shining in her eyes. It was unfair, and I felt a surge of bitter anger at Pearl again. What might this child have been, if left to her own destiny? What might any of them have been? She’d taken the future of the next generation of Wardens and… twisted it. Corrupted it.
She’d left me no choices, and I hated her for that.
I closed my eyes for a second, and turned blindly toward Luis. My hand found his by instinct, and squeezed tightly. When I finally looked, I saw him frowning at me in concern. “You okay?” he asked. I nodded. I wasn’t, because knowledge had come to me in a cold, furious burst, and illuminated everything, every hard, cutting corner of the road ahead. Even if by some miracle we survived all this, what future did these Warden children have ahead of them? The Wardens themselves had been destroyed and didn’t even realize it yet because there was nothing to take up the fight after them.
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 ende
d 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 Wolf, 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 b
ack. 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.
