by Rachel Caine
“What kind of ranch?” Mrs. Jensen asked, frowning. “I’ve got some cousins who own a farm in Indiana—”
I oriented on Mr. Jensen, with his pale green eyes which widened as I captured his gaze. “I think you know what I mean, sir.”
He didn’t answer. I saw flares of panic in his aetheric presence, bright hot stars exploding and crackling in his aura. It was weirdly beautiful. I felt Luis watching the man, too. And Turner. All of us, using Oversight to lay the aetheric template over the real world and see the changes.
“Mr. Jensen,” Turner said. “I need a few words with you, please. In private. Mrs. Jensen, maybe you can get those things together for me? We need to hurry. I don’t want to keep you from your daughter.”
Mrs. Jensen clearly knew something was wrong, but she seized the only thing she could from the confusion—the certainty she would see her daughter. Her husband watched her go, looking lost and more than a little afraid.
Turner pointed the way to a small laundry area off to the side of the living room. It was a close fit for the four of us, and it smelled of cleaning products and soothing fragrances. A strange place to accuse someone of collaborating in his daughter’s kidnapping.
“The Ranch,” Turner said, as soon as he’d closed the door to prying ears. “You recognized the name.”
“Maybe I was thinking of something else,” Jensen said. I took my left hand out of my pocket and let it hang at my side, bronze and gleaming, clearly alien. His eyes were drawn to it, puzzled, and he cocked his head while he focused on it. “I was wrong. I don’t know what you were talking about.”
“Don’t you?” I asked, and slowly flexed my metal fingers. There was a phantom sense of muscles moving; that was very odd. “You have been there, Mr. Jensen. You took Gloria there, did you not? For evaluation?”
He was sweating now, fine beads of moisture that glimmered on his forehead in the light of the overhead fixture. The air felt close and heavy around us. “It was a camp,” he said. “A camp for the gifted and talented. But Gloria didn’t like it, so we came back home. That’s all there was to it.”
“Not all,” I corrected. “You saw things, didn’t you? Things you couldn’t understand or explain.”
Mr. Jensen flinched and looked away, and I understood, finally. “She never told him,” I said to Turner and to the silently observing Luis, leaning against the built-in sink with his arms folded. “His wife never told him she could have been a Warden. Or that their daughter might inherit those talents. He didn’t know what he was seeing. What was happening at the Ranch.”
Jensen’s eyes blurred with tears. “Is that who took her? Those people? But that was last year, it was—it was just a camp, for God’s sake, it was one of those kid things. It wasn’t—Why? Why would they do that?”
Luis and Turner looked at me. All I could find to say was, simply, “Because your daughter has the potential for power. And they want it. You’ll have to be on your guard, from now on. Talk with your wife. Tell her you know your daughter has Warden gifts. She has things to tell you in turn.”
I was bound to harm these people, by saying these things; they had existed in a false world, but a happy one, and now I was poisoning it. With truth, yes, but nevertheless, there would be no stopping the changes.
Life is change, I thought but did not say, and slowly curled the cold metal fingers of my left hand. The hand I had lost not for their child, but for Ibby. For the child I . . . loved.
Life is change.
“We’re going to need you to sit with us,” Turner told Mr. Jensen. “Tell us everything, every detail, about how you received the invitation to take your daughter to this camp, where it was located, who you met, what you did. Everything. You understand?”
He nodded, tears streaming down his face now. “I did this,” he said. “I put her in danger. I put my little girl in danger from these freaks. Oh my God.”
“No,” Luis said, speaking up for the first time. “If you didn’t take her to them, they would’ve come into your house and gotten her anyway. It’s what they do.” A spasm of rage passed through him, registering in harder lines in his face and in red waves on the aetheric. “That’s what they did to my niece. Ibby. And they’ve still got her.”
Mr. Jensen wiped at his face with the sleeve of his shirt. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Is she okay?”
Luis and I stared at each other for a moment, and he answered, very quietly, “I’m going to do anything I have to do to make sure she gets that way.”
Turner let Mr. Jensen rejoin his wife then, leaving the three of us standing in silence in the warm, scented confines of the laundry room. There was a basket of neatly folded clothes sitting on top of the dryer. A young girl’s clothes, bright colors, lovingly maintained.
“So,” Turner said. “You guys got some place you need to be?”
“Yes,” I said. “I believe we will go with you to California.”
Turner smiled thinly, unsurprised. “Grab your gear and meet me at the airport.”
I was surprised to find that Turner had requisitioned a Warden plane, unmarked save in the aetheric, where Wardens would be able to identify the hidden stylized sun symbol on the tail section. It was a small private plane, sleek and gleaming, holding only a dozen or so people in moderately comfortable surroundings. Turner saw the Jensens settled, their bags stored, before seeing to me and Luis. Not that we needed assistance; we had a small bag each, easily tucked away, and although I was hungry, I didn’t feel it was time to eat. Luis asked for a beer. When I raised my eyebrows, he shrugged. “Look, I’m an Earth Warden. I’m not getting drunk. Can’t happen unless I let it.” He sounded a little defensive. I nodded, closed my eyes, and let my head fall comfortably against the leather pillow behind it. The flight was short and uneventful, for a change—smooth air, no turbulence, no attackers emerging to duel us out from the sky.
Refreshingly different.
I slipped into dreams, of blood and wriggling dark things that scuttled through shadows and clutched at my throat. When I woke I realized that my metallic left hand had clenched tight as a cinched knot. I felt nothing from the metal, only from that phantom, nonexistent hand that still eerily insisted it could feel pain. When I relaxed the metal hand, the pain eased. Phantom or not, it felt . . . real. Pain was, after all, in the mind; if my mind still received messages from nerves no longer there, it didn’t matter how the messages arrived. Pain was pain.
Luis was just finishing his beer. He watched me flexing my hand and said, “You still feel it? Your hand?”
His guess was accurate, and startling. I nodded.
“Not all that uncommon,” he said. “People who lose limbs in some kind of traumatic accident often talk about still feeling them. Sometimes for years after. Has something to do with the body’s perception of itself on the aetheric, I think.”
I couldn’t see my own body in the aetheric, not in any kind of detail. “How do I look?” I asked him. “In Oversight?” It was a bit of an impolite question, among Wardens; it simply wasn’t done to ask directly. But I needed to understand.
His eyes unfocused a bit, and he tapped the bottle against his lips a few times before upending it to capture the last few drops and setting it aside. “You mean your hand? It’s still there. Your aetheric self still has it.”
“What form do I take?”
Luis smiled, very slightly. “A beautiful one. You glow like a nuclear reactor. The Djinn don’t show up that well, you know. You do.”
“Because I’m anchored in flesh,” I said. “Because I’m not a Djinn any longer.”
He tilted his head forward, acknowledging the point. “Not technically, no. But you’re more than just a Warden. Or a human. Don’t kid yourself, Cass.”
“Cassiel.”
“Cass.”
“Stop.”
“Make me.” His voice had gone lower, more intimate. I found myself captured by the shape of his lips on the words he spoke, not the words themselves, and shook myself from a
wave of feelings that were difficult to avoid.
“Wrong place, wrong time,” I reminded him. “I doubt Turner would appreciate such a display here, under these circumstances.”
That sobered him immediately. “Or the Jensens,” he agreed, and put the bottle aside to rest his elbows on his knees, leaning toward me. “Cass, for serious now. Is Ibby all right? I need to know. I need you to tell me exactly what happened out there.”
He did, and I hated to tell him, but I sensed the ache in him. He already hurt, infected by his fear and imagination.
“She looked fine,” I told him then, looking down at my hands, one bronze, one flesh. The fingers twined together almost naturally. “I saw no signs of mistreatment or hunger.”
“But.”
I pulled in a deep breath. “But she sounded—not herself. She spoke of her mother, but as if Angela was alive. As if she is doing what she is doing to protect her.” A darker thought occurred to me. “Or . . . as if she believes Pearl is her mother.” That was chillingly likely.
Luis made a sound deep in his throat, and I saw his head tip forward, hiding his face. He said nothing audible.
“I think—” I hesitated, then plunged ahead. “I do think Pearl is using Angela’s image. To make Ibby believe that her mother wishes her to train, to hunt, to kill. To make her do it despite the child’s natural gentleness.”
Luis raised his face then, and his expression was blank, except for the darkness in his eyes. “That bitch is using a dead woman?” His voice was not his own; it was a low growl, angrier than I’d ever heard it. “Using Angie to get at her own kid?”
“I think so,” I said. “I think Isabel wants to please her mother, and she wants her mother back, badly. Pearl would have used that against her. It would have been . . . very easy for her.”
Luis snarled, and his hands clenched into bone- hard fists. Had I been facing him as an enemy, I would have found an immediate and pressing reason to surrender.
I put my right hand on his clenched fist, making the touch as gentle as I could. “No,” I said. “Listen to me. If you fight her directly, Ibby will fight for her. She’ll have to, to defend her mother. Do you understand? We must go at this another way. A better way.”
He shook his head blindly, dark hair whipping, and then buried his face in his hands for a moment. When he finally sat up again and took a deep breath, he had his anger controlled. It was a banked, smoldering fire, but it was under a tight leash. “All right,” he said. “You tell me, how the hell do I let that go on? How do I not knock that bitch’s head off and take Ibby back? Because I’m not really clear on the concept right now.”
“Neither am I,” I confessed. “But if we face her directly, Ibby will suffer, and we won’t accomplish our goal. So please, don’t let Pearl use the child to goad you into fighting the battle on her own terms.”
He stared at me for a second, then said, “You’re talking about tactics now?”
“I’m talking about choices.”
“Like the choice you made to chop your own hand off?” He sounded angry, but it wasn’t really directed at me. He was simply . . . angry. And unable to point it at the person responsible.
“Exactly like that,” I said. “Pearl thought she had given me an either/or choice. Die from the poison coming through the link, or accept Rashid’s offer. I chose instead to change the game.”
Luis blinked. “You think Rashid is in on it with her.”
“I think Rashid is a wild Djinn, not a tamed one. I think if he believes that he can gain an advantage, he will have few human scruples about taking the action. He wanted the list. He’ll continue to try to find a way to take it, because it represents great power, and the Djinn can never resist that.” I felt my lips stretch, unordered, into a smile. “As to cutting off my hand—if I had seen a fourth option, I would have taken it. Believe me.”
“So we can’t trust Rashid?”
I remembered what the Oracle had said to me. “There is no such thing as unlimited trust,” I said. “We can trust him until we can’t. Like anyone else.”
Luis jerked his chin toward Turner, sitting with the Jensens. “Like him?”
“Anyone,” I said. “Even you. Even me. Because if this goes to the endgame, Luis, you won’t be able to trust me, either. Or I, you.”
He shook his head, as if he couldn’t accept that, but I knew he could. He was a pragmatic man, deep down. He knew human nature.
The rest of the trip was spent in pensive silence.
We landed in California in the early- morning hush, although it seemed the human race never stilled itself for long. Lights glimmered; cars moved along roads. Businesses still served, here and there. We grabbed our bags and followed Agent Turner off the airplane, along with the Jensens, to find two black FBI sedans waiting for us. One of the black-suited drivers checked our credentials and loaded the Jensens into the first car, and Agent Turner and the two of us into the second. The FBI car smelled—surprisingly—new, with little olfactory contamination like most other vehicles I’d been inside. I felt less claustrophobic than I usually did. I almost enjoyed the ride.
Almost.
The FBI caravan wound through the sleeping city, and
I caught glimpses of the vast, dark ocean, ceaselessly renewing itself with wave upon wave of change. The drive ended at a large, well-lit building, comfortably aged, and Turner said, “Scripps Memorial. Come on, they’ve got Gloria in a room.”
We exited the car and walked toward the hospital entrance; I heard the wail of a siren approaching—an ambulance, carrying a life in crisis to the emergency services at the rear of the building. It was a source of some amazement to me that humans, for all their capacity for—talent for—wreaking violence, would also build something so thoughtful as a system to care for their ill and injured, and devote such time and energy to it.
I heard tires suddenly squeal as the ambulance changed direction, and looked around to see the massive metal vehicle plunging over the curb, bouncing wildly, aimed now straight for me, Luis, and Turner as we crossed the parking lot.
I shoved Luis and Turner one direction, hard, and didn’t have time to watch where they landed as the ambulance swerved and focused on me. Behind the glass, I saw the driver frantically trying to stop the truck or turn the wheel, but I could tell that it was beyond his control. Like the passenger in the back, and the other paramedic, he was utterly at the mercy of whatever force now had control of his ambulance.
I turned and ran, sprinting across the dark asphalt. Luckily there were no cars in the way, this late at night, and my body was capable—when forced—of speeds that even I found surprising. The ambulance fell behind, but then I heard the engine roar as it picked up speed, eating up ground between us. I heard the dim thunder of the ocean, and the more immediate thudding of my heart, and as I ran I reached back with power and blew out all four rubber-and-metal tires in a tremendous bang. The ambulance immediately thumped hard onto bare metal rims as broken rubber flailed in all directions, spun off by the momentum. It lost speed, but I could sense that the one forcing it on wouldn’t give up so easily.
Neither would I.
I gained the end of the parking lot. There was a chain-link fence there, at the top of a steep slope covered by ice plants; I charged the ten feet up the hill, leaped onto the fence, and climbed toward the top.
I reached the top just as the ambulance jumped that curb, and its momentum carried it up the slope toward me. But without tires, the metal rims chewed ground, finding no purchase, and it never reached the fence before it began to slide backwards, engine screaming in frustration.
I leaped from the fence to the top of the ambulance. I landed with a hollow, booming thump, crouched, and looked from that vantage point out into the night. You’re close, I whispered. I know you are. By making a target of myself, I was hoping to spot the attack before it arrived.
After a split second, I felt power begin to stream through the aetheric, a red-black pulse heading in my direction
, and struggled to identify the type of attack. Not Earth powers, this time.
Fire.
It came as a hot streak of light as large as a man’s head, glowing white hot and trailing flames and smoke. I put my right hand down on the ambulance’s metal roof and pulled up, willing the metal to flow with me, then jumped down to ground level by the rear doors. As I jumped, the roof ripped free, front to back, peeling like a giant tin of sardines, and hit the ground with a thick, heavy boom—arched, still connected to the ambulance at the very top, but extended out like a waterfall of cold steel.
I ducked behind and hardened it just in time for the attacking fireball to strike it squarely in the middle. Ten inches from my face, the metal began to glow a dull, muddy red, and I felt the waves of heat boring through. But I hadn’t intended the metal alone to stop it; I heaved up the ground from the other side of the ambulance in a fountain of damp earth and cascaded it overhead, to thump down on the fireball, burying it beneath an organic weight that would not catch fire easily, if at all.
I heard the hiss as the fire began to fail, and the metal in front of me ceased to glow.
I stepped out of the barricade and stared out in the direction from which the attack had come.
There was a shrill, short cry, and then nothing for a long moment before Luis called, “Cass! Got her!”
Her. My heart stuttered in its rhythm, and I spurred my body back into a run, shattering even the speed at which I’d fled before. Ibby?
Luis emerged from the darkness into the glow of a streetlight. There was a child in his arms.
It was not Isabel. It was another girl, dressed in the same dull paramilitary uniform, long golden braids spilling down over Luis’s arm and swinging like ropes. I felt my stomach clench, and I slowed to a walk.
I saw the same weary pain in his face. “Had to knock her out,” he said. “Same as the other kids. Somebody amped up her powers, big-time. It’s burning her out. Goddammit, we have to stop this. How many of these kids does she have?”
