by Rachel Caine
“Take these off me,” I said, and held my cuffed hands out to Sanders without looking away from Luis.
“Can’t do that.”
I wanted to issue the sort of threat I would have in Djinn form: Refuse me, and I’ll destroy you, your colleagues, every trace you were ever alive. But, in human form, that would not only be extremely difficult to accomplish, it would also get me imprisoned, or shot out of hand.
“I can heal him,” I said, and put a note of pleading in my voice. It was not precisely acting. “Please. Let me help him. Otherwise it will take weeks for him to get back to full strength, and he risks infection.” I left unspoken the obvious: If Luis Rocha died of his wounds, or even complications of them, then he would be held responsible. Not just by me. By his superiors. By the Wardens. Possibly even by one or two Djinn with a random interest.
Sanders obviously recognized the risk.
He fixed me with a long, steady look. I tried my best to convey a lack of threat, although that was hardly my strong suit.
He sighed. “Fine. But you do anything I don’t like, and Agent Klein here will shoot you a whole lot. Okay?”
He wasn’t waiting for my agreement. He unlocked the cuffs, both wrists, and removed them. They looked like regular handcuffs, which was curious; I had expected some small technological addition, but I saw nothing of interest.
Sanders stepped back and nodded toward Luis, lying silent on the table. “Clock’s running,” he said. “You’ve got five minutes.”
He had no experience with Wardens, other than Turner, that much was obvious. I shook my head and put my right hand on Luis’s forehead. It felt cool and slightly clammy. The left—the metal hand—I left at my side. I was no longer sure if I could control the flow of power through it at a fine enough level to perform this kind of task.
The damage within Luis had been surprisingly light, and repaired by skilled surgeons; he was, in fact, not in any danger at all, but merely needed rest and recovery. That, at least, was easy enough to fix, by simply replacing his lost energy with some of mine, although I had precious little to spare. Had he truly been badly injured, I doubted I would have had the reserves to repair him on my own . . . but this, I could do.
And did.
Luis opened his eyes. They were blank for a moment as his brain came aware and began processing information at a pace that was astonishing even to the Djinn—memory, sensory input, aetheric input. Then his eyes focused, fixed on mine, and he did nothing for a long second.
Can you hear me? I performed the Earth Warden trick, murmuring the words directly into his ear by delicate vibrations of the membrane inside. Don’t move. Don’t let them see you’re awake.
He stayed perfectly still, relaxed beneath my hands.
Good to see you, he said. You’re okay?
I was not the one who was lying on a table with stitched wounds. Of course, I said. Are you strong enough to take care of half the guns?
Lady, I can take care of all the guns, Luis responded, and blinked. They’re FBI, right? Oh man.
Was he reconsidering? But you will take care of the guns.
Sure. He sounded resigned. Might as well earn the wanted poster while I’m at it.
I didn’t waste time asking what he meant; instead, I whispered Now into his ear.
He sat up in one fluid movement, and as every FBI agent in the room wondered what to do next, I whirled and advanced on Agent Sanders.
Agent Klein hadn’t been bluffing. He immediately pulled the trigger on his firearm, and his aim was perfectly steady. If his weapon had been working, I would have been down with a hole through my brain.
It didn’t work quite that way. Instead, the gun gave a dry click. Klein blinked and immediately tried again. Another click. The sound was joined by a brittle chatter of clicks, as every FBI agent in the room attempted to fire.
I batted away Sanders’s attempt to punch me and grabbed him by the throat, slamming him backward and down on one of the folding tables, which teetered dangerously and looked ready to collapse. Then it did collapse, in a sudden rush, metal legs splaying out unnaturally, and the table thumped down to the ground, taking Sanders with it. I followed him down, sinking into a crouch, never releasing his throat.
I let the Djinn show on my features, shine in my eyes, and I said, “I will not be controlled by the likes of you, Special Agent Adrian Sanders.” I almost purred. “There is a reason the Wardens have never bent to government control. The Wardens are beyond nations, beyond administrations, beyond the rules and boundaries of your society. They must be, to accomplish their work. They police their own, and they do not need your particular brand of oversight.” Behind me, I heard Luis take on another agent who was rushing to the rescue—possibly Agent Klein. Earth Wardens had the ability to alter gravity. This was probably news to Agent Klein, who let out a startled yelp as the area around him suddenly took on three times the normal gravity at the Earth’s surface, stopping his rush in midstride and sending him crashing heavily—very heavily—face-first to the ground. A position from which he could not, without great and sustained effort, rise.
Luis flicked a look at the other agents, still standing near their computers, weapons in hand. They exchanged a look. “Relax,” he said. “We’re not going to hurt anybody. Chill out.”
I was fairly certain, from the look on Sanders’s face, that he didn’t altogether believe that. I couldn’t really blame him. The way I felt, I couldn’t guarantee him anything on the not-hurting-anyone front. Especially him.
I leaned closer, pale hair drifting around my face like smoke, and whispered, “If you ever try to put those handcuffs on me again, Mr. Sanders, we will have this conversation again, but it won’t end so nicely.” Then I let go, stood up, and offered him a hand. My left. The metal one.
Sanders stared at my face, then the hand, and for a long moment I wasn’t sure he’d accept the implied apology. Then he took my bronze fingers and pulled himself to his feet against my strength.
“We need to work together,” I said. Behind me, Luis stepped up alongside me. “The Wardens are few right now. The Djinn are . . . largely uninvolved. But this fight is yours, too. Human children, Warden or not, are being hurt and killed. You must help us.” I held his dark eyes, and put all my sincerity into the moment. “You must. Think of your own children, and help us.”
He’d been holding on to my hand, and I saw that he held concealed, on his other side, the power- disrupting handcuffs. With one move—no doubt a move he had practiced and performed many times—he could have those on me in seconds, possibly before Luis could interfere.
He didn’t move. After a moment, he let go of me and took a step back. The handcuffs were slipped back into a case at his belt, under his Windbreaker.
“Don’t screw me,” he said. “Because I’m willing to go on a little faith, here. But not much, and not for long. You do anything that makes me doubt you’re all in on this—”
“Oh, we’re all in,” Luis said, and winced a little as he sagged into a chair. He looked tired, and in some pain. “Jesus, how much more ‘all in’ could we be? I’ve lost my brother, my sister- in-law, my niece is somewhere out there in the hands of these assholes. We’ve had half a dozen serious attempts to kill us. You’ve hurt me, done stuff to her—and we didn’t take it out of your ass, man. So shut the hell up, okay?”
Sanders didn’t look particularly offended. “Okay,” he said. “You want to let Klein up now?”
Luis didn’t glance at the other agent, who was still straining to lift himself off of the ground against the increased pull of gravity. “Sure.” Suddenly, the agent’s arms powered him up from the dirt, and he scrambled to his feet, red-faced and chagrined. He retrieved his gun from the ground, checked it, and holstered it, cheeks still burning, eyes still angry. When he saw me watching him, he recovered his composure and tried to look indifferent to the whole turn of events.
Not very successfully.
Sanders took the chair across from Luis. “L
et’s say, for argument’s sake, that I believe you. What the hell do you want out of me? I’ve got an FBI team, sure. I’ve got all the surveillance you could want. I’ve got eyes in the sky and boots on the ground. You think this place is going to fall to some kind of frontal assault?”
I poured Luis a cup of coffee from the pot nearby, and took it to him. He drank part of it gratefully before answering. “Show us what you know.”
“You first.”
“That’s easy,” Luis said. “Damn near nothing. Whatever Cass already told you, that’s it. I wasn’t even there. She’s your only eyewitness. Your turn.”
“Follow me,” Sanders said, and led us out of the tent. I dropped back to stay next to Luis, discreetly monitoring his fitness.
He knew what I was doing, and frowned at me. “What?”
“You’re in pain.”
“I’m fine. It’s a side effect of rapid healing for me. Nothing wrong with me.” He nodded to Agent Sanders. “So you’re what, alpha dog now?”
I smiled. “Humans do tend to run in packs. Dominate the leader, and you dominate the others.”
“Cynical.”
“Useful.”
Sanders didn’t hear, because we were both murmuring very quietly. He led us down the hillside to yet another tent, this one with its entrance pulled shut. He slapped it aside and entered. As we followed, I realized that it was filled with more computers, more people, and rolling bulletin boards filled with images. Some were sharply rendered satellite images, showing the area of Rose Canyon where we were; I recognized the dark slash of the chasm first, and then the manicured park of Pearl’s encampment on the opposite side. The FBI tents were visible only as smudges, but they’d been marked in red to make them more visible.
The white, rounded building that I’d seen was like a moon set into the green, carefully empty expanse. Nothing around it—unlike Colorado, which had had barracks, buildings, even an elaborate playground for the children.
This was more . . . alien.
I scanned the photos one by one, looking at each in detail, surveying the entire expanse of the surface of the billboards. It took time. Luis finished before I did, but I doubt he saw as much.
He was tired.
“So?” Sanders asked. He folded his arms. “Insights from your side of the street?”
“It’s not like Colorado,” I said. “Not at all. That felt as if it had been built by human hands.”
“That’s because it was,” Sanders replied. “Built by the Church of the New World. Their training-slash-inspirational camp, preaching and war games all rolled into one. Thing is, the CNW wasn’t one of those apocalypse cults, originally; it was built by a bunch of hippies who wanted to do the peace and love thing. Gradually got taken over by more and more extreme elements. But even so, we never expected them to ramp up to industrial crazy. They were—” He shrugged. “Normal. As such things go.”
“Until last year,” I said. He nodded. “And when did this structure appear?” I touched the white bubble shown in the pictures.
“About eight months ago,” he said. Same in Colorado. Same in two other places we know of. Same damn structure. This one’s the largest, though. It’s about the size of a football stadium, though it’s not very tall. We figure all their facilities are inside, including whatever training they’re doing.”
“Who comes in and out?”
“In, we get individual cars and trucks. Not too many of those. Most are registered to members of the church, a few suppliers who drop off stuff and drive away.”
Luis asked, “Who comes out to get it?”
“Nobody,” Sanders said. “It sits there until dark. We monitor with night vision, but we never see anybody come out to get it. It just . . . disappears.”
I nodded. I understood, now. “I will need a list of those . . . suppliers.”
“They all check out. And yeah, we’ve tried putting tracking and surveillance into the shipments. No good. Everything gets blocked as soon as it’s inside that dome. Some kind of interference.”
“I’ll need the list,” I repeated. “And a weapon. Perhaps one of those large ones your agents carried in the clearing.”
“Uh-huh,” Sanders said, not in any way as if he was acceding to my request. “And you’d like this because . . . ?”
“Trust me,” Luis said. “I don’t think it’s better to know the answer to that one.”
“Gotta write a report,” Sanders said. “Government runs on reports. So yes. I need an answer before I say yes, no, or anything.”
I shrugged. “I’m going to get into the facility,” I said. “Now that I know how. And I’m going to take a gun because I might need to shoot those who get in my way of retrieving Isabel and as many of the other children as possible.”
Sanders blinked. “You’re going to get inside. Shoot people. Rescue the kids.”
“Yes.”
“That’s your plan.”
“It is.”
He looked at Luis. “Help me out.”
“I think you need a little work on it,” Luis told me. “Particularly in the part where you don’t have any kind of backup or information about what’s inside in the first place. Cass, for all you know, this is one giant fly trap, and you’re the fly. You go in there, you may never make it out. And you’re the one who said she’s all about the Djinn. Maybe she’s just waiting for a Djinn.”
“I’m not a Djinn,” I reminded him. “And I would happily accept backup from you. And any other Wardens you can locate and deliver quickly. But we can’t wait. They know we’re here. They won’t be content to wait quietly much longer.”
“Before they do what?” Sanders asked. His voice had gone quiet. The other agents in the tent—and they were all listening closely, although appearing not to—suddenly looked up, fixed on the answer to his question.
“Show me where the other facilities are located.” He looked nonplussed by the question, then nodded to a nearby female agent, who tapped keys on her computer and pulled up four quadrants on the glowing screen. One was labeled ROSE CANYON, LA JOLLA, CALIFORNIA—where we currently stood. One was labeled DOGTOWN COMMONS, MASSACHUSETTS, and it looked virtually identical to what was shown in La Jolla. Another said ADAMS, TENNESSEE. The last was OHIOVILLE, PENNSYLVANIA. “Show me on a map,” I said. She pulled it up and illuminated the locations for me.
I called on Oversight, bringing the aetheric filter in front of my eyes, and saw the ghostly rivers of power that some humans still called ley lines.
Every one of these spots sat on a nexus, a power center. Oracles were situated on such spots; Sedona, for the Earth Oracle; Seacasket, for the Fire Oracle. Only the Weather Oracle had no fixed location that anyone could identify.
Pearl had established herself—or some aspect of herself—on the supernatural equivalent of a power grid, at the most powerful spots not being watched over by Djinn Oracles.
And all of the locations—all of them—now looked identical. The precisely measured open ground, freed of vegetation. The same glowing dome. Each location was bordered by geography that made it difficult to approach.
She had built herself a network, a support system, and a web of energy.
“Ley lines,” I told Luis. He nodded. “You see what she’s doing?”
“Building herself a power grid? Yeah, I see it. The question is, what’s inside the domes? And which one is she in, physically?”
“I’m not sure she’s in any of them,” I said. “Or, more accurately, I’m not sure she’s not in all of them. I think the dome is Pearl. But she is able to exist simultaneously, in different locations.”
Luis grunted. “Wouldn’t that divide her power?”
“I don’t know,” I said. With the ley lines, it was possible that she could draw from one location to another, move her consciousness seamlessly between the four sites without much, if any, delay. “How many other nexus points are open?”
“In this country? Probably about ten. You think she’ll go after those, to
o?”
The FBI agent running the computer said, “The Ohioville location, there? That only came up on our radar about two months ago. Locals swear it wasn’t there before. Satellite imaging confirms it.”
Pearl was spreading her influence. It was an infection, a kind of disease traveling along the invisible lines of power that crisscrossed the planet’s surface, and also served as conduits directly through its core. These installations could spring up like mushrooms, without warning.
“I think,” I said quietly, “that if she can get enough power, she will spread to every nexus point in the world. Think of these as blisters, holding in infection.” I tapped the screen, and the white dome. “When they break . . .”
Silence. They all looked at me. Luis looked faintly sick. “How much trouble are we in, exactly?”
Enough that I was being forced, again, to consider Ashan’s orders. Destroy them all. She is powering herself through the humans. Cut out the humans, you cut her connection to the Earth, and she can be killed, once and for all.
Her war was against the Djinn, and yes, she would destroy them and absorb their aetheric power; but her heart, her soul, her spirit was channeled through humanity, in the same way that Djinn were connected to the Oracles.
I don’t want to do this, some part of me whispered. Indeed, I did not. I dreaded it with all my soul. To destroy humanity, I would have to feel their pain, their deaths, their lives passing through me, being removed from the world and the living memory of the Mother. I would have to unmake Luis Rocha. Isabel. Even the fragile memorials of the dead, like Manny and Angela.
I couldn’t. I couldn’t bring myself to take that step, not even looking at this appalling thing in front of me, and understanding how little time was left to us.
There’s still time. There must be a way to stop her.
I had to try. For the sake of those I loved, for the sake of those I didn’t, like Agent Sanders and his unseen family, I had to not only try, but succeed.
