4 - Unbroken

by Rachel Caine

  “Don’t,” I said to Luis as he opened his mouth again. “You can’t convince her. The best we can do is get on with things, quickly.”

  He didn’t like it, and he definitely didn’t like Edie’s attitude, but he nodded. I could see the tensed muscles in his neck and shoulders, but all he did was pull open the door of the van. “Inside,” he said. “Let’s move.”

  Edie got in and took her seat next to the very silent boy. He hadn’t done or said a thing the entire time, and that made me feel oddly more afraid of him than of Edie, with all her profligate waste of power.

  Luis started the van, and I mounted my motorcycle. Without a word between us, I eased into the lead.

  Driving through the burning piles of what had once been a vivid, living forest made for a sobering experience. The death of plants and animals left marks on the aetheric, just as those of humans did; the ghostly image of what this place had once been was worrying, and sad. I couldn’t dwell on it for long; the road rapidly became more hazardous, as I dodged the occasional debris that hadn’t been swept completely out of the way. This was made more difficult by the thick, drifting smoke. My eyes burned from the constant irritation, and my lungs seemed thick and congested as well. I began to cough, but I couldn’t spare much attention from the trail ahead. The road had suffered damage from lightning strikes, and I weaved around the potholes, still smoking from their trauma, as well as the other things the tornado had left in its wake.

  I slowed suddenly and stopped. Behind me, Luis hit the brakes fast, leaned out the window, and called, “What is it?”

  There was a man lying in the road. He had on a thick blue jacket, blue jeans, hiking boots—typical covering for a day’s trek out in the forest. There was a corona of thick blood on the road around him.

  I put the bike on its kickstand and walked to him, then crouched to check his pulse.

  He rolled over and smiled at me with shark-sharp teeth, Djinn eyes blazing a milky cold blue, and I knew in that instant that he was going to kill me. I’d fallen for an obvious trap. I hadn’t checked the man in the aetheric, or I’d have seen this was only a shell, not a human with a true aura.

  My own fault. It was a bitter thing to carry with me into the dark.

  He snapped at me with that razor-edged grin, and without thinking, I lifted up my left forearm and slammed it into his jaws, forcing his head back. He gagged on it, chewing, but that arm wasn’t flesh. It was metal, powered by Djinn engineering and my own Earth power.

  It still felt pain, and I couldn’t help the scream that forced its way out—but I didn’t let him pull my arm free of his jaws. Better the metal suffer than my flesh.

  “Cass!” Luis was shouting, and I heard him running to me. I’d get him killed, too, for nothing, for a simple lack of foresight.…

  And then the boy, Alvin, opened the passenger door and stepped out, and the Djinn who was on the verge of ripping my arm away stopped. All his attention was away from me and on the boy. I pulled my mangled forearm free and scrambled back, and the Djinn didn’t bother to follow. He came to his feet in an unnaturally smooth, boneless motion.

  Luis grabbed me and pulled me backward by the collar of my jacket, then yanked me up to my feet. “Get to the van!” he yelled. “I’ve got this!”

  He didn’t. Couldn’t. And he must have been aware of that, but Luis was ever the hero. I would never be able to break him of that habit.

  It didn’t matter. The boy took a few calm, measured steps toward the Djinn, who was staring at him as if he couldn’t quite comprehend what was facing him. “You should both get back in the van,” Alvin said. “I don’t know what this will do to you.”

  Luis seemed undecided, but I was not; I’d seen what Pearl’s Void children could do, and the boy seemed genuinely concerned. Unlike Edie, he wasn’t glorying in his power, or enjoying the confrontation; he seemed very grave, and very focused.

  I pushed Luis back to the van, and climbed in with him. My motorcycle gleamed in the road between us and the confrontation that was slowly unfolding, but I had no desire to get out to move it. I loved the bike, but there was no use in dying for it. “We can’t leave him out there alone,” Luis said. “He’s just a kid.”

  “No,” I said softly. “Look.” I grabbed Luis’s hand, and took him just a little into the aetheric, where the ghost-forest still loomed around us. The Djinn was a blazing white fire there—unusual because Djinn normally weren’t easily visible to humans on this plane, but he was channeling power directly from the Mother.

  Facing him, the boy wasn’t even there. What was there was a kind of howling emptiness, the exact opposite of a human aura; the boy didn’t belong here, in this world. In this plane. There was something inside him that was very far from human.

  I fell back into my body, and felt Luis jerk as he fell into his. He turned toward me, lips parted, eyes wider than I’d ever seen them. “What is that?”

  “Him,” I said, staring at Alvin. “Or what Pearl made out of him. He’s still there, the boy, but there’s something else in him. Something that isn’t from any plane of existence I know.”

  “Demon,” he said. The Wardens were familiar with demons, who could—and did—inhabit Djinn… or Wardens, if the conditions were right. But this wasn’t a demon, either, not in any sense I could explain.

  “More,” I said. That was inadequate, but it didn’t matter. I couldn’t imagine what had happened to this child, but it must have been truly horrific. She’d taken him specifically to hollow out what made him human, and then fill that hole with something alien and totally, coldly uncaring about our world. I’d never understood that before, what she’d done to the Void children; it was even worse than the violation of the other children, like Isabel, who’d had their powers forced into early and violent bloom.

  The boy was a walking bomb.

  The Djinn had, perhaps wisely, decided not to attempt a physical assault; instead, he abandoned his human shell and rushed at the boy in a wave of power. A mundane human would have been killed instantly; a Warden would have lasted a little longer, but in the end, the Djinn was too powerful to fight effectively.

  The power simply passed into the boy, and… vanished. Gone.

  The Djinn shrieked and tried to pull himself back; he managed, at least partially, but as he tried to re-form into a visible body it was plain that what was left was mutilated and badly wounded.

  And the boy hadn’t so much as raised a hand.

  “You should go,” Alvin said to him. “I really don’t want to hurt you. We just want to get by and save those people. Could you go?” He was astonishingly polite, but also completely unmoved by the torture he’d just inflicted. In his own way, he was dead, I realized. Merely better mannered than an average living person.

  The Djinn snarled and attacked—not the boy, but me. I felt the hot, burning premonition of the assault an instant before the power erupted out of the ground below my feet and connected with a snap in the air above.

  I was the conduit for the energy of the lightning bolt. And as I had no Weather Warden abilities, there was no chance I would have survived such an experience… except that Edie simply stopped it in midstrike, leaving only a pop of energy that exploded somewhere above, and a hissing sizzle of steam. In the time it had taken me to realize what was coming, the child had utterly destroyed the Djinn’s attack, without moving from her seat in the van.

  Alvin shook his head and said, “Okay, then.” He sounded sad, but resigned, and in the next instant a complex net of something that I couldn’t quite see, couldn’t quite understand, emerged from the boy’s slender body. It was like a living thing, something boneless and alien, but still anchored in his power and flesh… and it engulfed the wounded Djinn and simply ate him. No sound, no drama, no flashes or explosions. It was… easy.

  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 ended 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 st
one.

  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.