by Rachel Caine
“You’re not serious.”
“Very.”
“Cassiel…”
“Fifteen seconds,” I said. “Please.”
He finished off his bottled water, grabbed a cheese sandwich from a tray, and took a bite as he considered, frowning. Then he swallowed and said, “You’re damn lucky I love you, you know that?”
Oh, I knew. And he knew I knew, so there was nothing to be said to that.
Luis rose and walked toward the far door, eating his sandwich. I took his empty bottle, and mine, and walked in the opposite direction, vaguely in the direction of the large industrial trash can that occupied the corner. The Fire Warden guarding the case watched me with too much interest. Apparently, I did not imitate casual behavior well.
“Move away,” she said to me. I raised my eyebrows.
“Why?”
Fire formed around her fingers. “Let’s just say that I’m asking nicely. This time.”
There was a shout from behind me, and a sudden smell of acrid smoke. A pillow on an unoccupied bed burst into flame, then another. The Fire Warden acted instinctively, focusing her attention on the immediate threat; while she did, I stepped up beside her and pressed my palm to the back of her head. Sleep, I whispered in her mind, and put her out before she could put her power to bear against me; it had to be fast, because Fire Wardens had the best reactions of anyone in responding to threats.
I caught her on the way down and eased her onto an empty bunk. From the outside, it simply looked as if she—like many other Wardens—had collapsed from exhaustion.
And my partner was frantically and obviously extinguishing the fires he’d started. “Sorry, sorry,” he was saying. “Got it under control, no problem. Must be more tired than I’d thought.… Damn, sorry. Fire’s sort of new for me.…”
I backed up against the case.
My discarded backpack was still lying nearby, all its contents dumped out; I grabbed it and dragged it over, and held it in my right hand, still facing away from the glass case. I used my left to reach behind me, and melted the glass in a neat, round hole through which I retrieved two bottles; it was a simple matter of misdirection, to slide them inside, shift slightly over, expand the hole, and grab two more. Then two more. When I had emptied a shelf, I sealed the glass seamlessly behind me and stepped away.
No one was watching me. The Fire Warden I’d put to sleep began to snore lightly.
And from the meeting room into which Joanne and Lewis had disappeared came shouting that penetrated even the world-class soundproofing installed in this wealthy little enclave. I draped my backpack casually over one shoulder by the handle, and picked up one of the piled cheese sandwiches as I watched Luis slowly weave his way around the Wardens, who regarded him with varying degrees of disgust or suspicion, back to me.
He ate another sandwich as I ate mine, and mumbled between bites, “Hope it was worth it.”
“It was,” I said. “She’s getting ready. I can feel it.”
“Pearl, or the Mother?”
“Both,” I said absently. “The Mother has sensed our interference, pinpointed our location; she’ll send everything she can against us to smash us. And that is what Pearl is waiting for.” I nodded toward the half-open door into the room where Pearl was hiding like a hunting spider, lying in wait with her apprentices for the right moment to strike. I could see a portion of Isabel, sitting cross-legged and in a relaxed pose of concentration. There had been too many children awake in there, focused on tasks. It wasn’t merely energy being expended to keep this place safe. It was… readiness. Watchfulness.
I had to get Isabel away from her before it was too late.
I just had no idea how.
The end came fast and without any warning.
First, the conference room door suddenly burst open, and instead of just Joanne and Lewis who’d gone in there, four came out: Lewis, Joanne, David, and Venna. David looked almost as hard and angry as the last time I’d seen him, when Lewis had confined him to the bottle. I was surprised Lewis had survived releasing him… but the real surprise had to be Venna, who should not have looked so like herself. I was still processing that startling information when I felt a brush of air, and suddenly Venna was standing next to me.
In mortal form, she looked like a small, innocent child, with straight golden hair held back from her face by a simple cloth band. She wore a blue and white dress, neat and proper, very like the illustrations I had seen in the children’s book Alice in Wonderland.
It occurred to me a single second later that she shouldn’t—couldn’t—have looked that way; she’d been sealed into the bottle as an Ifrit, twisted and blackened, unable to heal. A skeleton of her former self.
If Venna had been restored, a Djinn of greater power had been killed to provide that miracle… and there was only one Djinn that it could be.
The magnitude of it stunned me.
“Hello, Cassiel,” she said to me, but she was looking off into the distance, in a stare that made it clear she was watching the aetheric. “I’m so glad you are predictable.”
“I—what?” That was baffling, until she tugged the backpack off my arm. “You. But I don’t understand—”
“Conduits sometimes have the gift of foresight,” she said. “It’s a curse, really. You can’t do anything yourself. You can only try to get others to do it for you. I never realized how bothersome that might be until now.” She suddenly turned her bright blue gaze on me, and the power behind it was astonishing. Venna had always been incredibly old, incredibly strong, but this was… different.
“Conduit,” I repeated, and closed my eyes briefly, even in the midst of all the chaos. “Ashan’s gone.”
She inclined her head. “Yes. Ashan is dead. I killed him. I may kill someone else, too. I’m not sure I’m entirely stable quite yet.” She was very calm about it, eerily so. “But I probably won’t kill you, since you’re not really Djinn. I’m going to try to not get hungry unless it’s really necessary.” In a sudden, startling move, she grabbed my backpack from me, with its load of sealed bottles. “I’ll be needing that. I can do this faster than you can.”
She flashed from me to another Warden, then another, then another. She gave out all the bottles I’d collected, dropped the backpack, and turned to face Joanne, Lewis, and David. “It’s done,” she said, and looked up suddenly. “And it’s here.”
She was right.
A burst of energy hit Las Vegas like a bomb, buckling the floor under us, crashing cots and glass and people into one another, onto the floor, while above us chandeliers swayed, flailed, broke loose, and fell like glass bombs. The walls rippled and leaned, and the entire room twisted as the earth’s torment vibrated up in waves.
The Earth Wardens were on it in seconds, controlling the furious shaking, but it was only the beginning of the end of us. Fires broke out in the walls, where the wiring ran, and took hold in unnatural white blazes that ate through drywall, wood, and steel alike. Luis squeezed my hand in silent apology, and ran to help control the flames that threatened to spill out over the injured who lay moaning on the still-moving floor. One of the Weather Wardens shouted a warning—something about wind shears bringing down high-rises, simply bending them until they broke.
Chaos.
And in the midst of it, I felt Pearl finally make her move.
It came in the form of a surgical lightning strike that blackened a ten-foot circle of space at the end of the room and left slag, dripping metal, and burned flesh behind.
The cabinet where the Djinn bottles had been, and all of the bottles I’d left behind, had just been vaporized.
The Warden I’d left sleeping nearby woke up, screaming in a high, thin, agonized voice, but it didn’t last; her entire bottom half had burned to bones, and there was nothing I or anyone else could do to save her. There was an immediate reaction in the room as more Wardens responded, putting out the lingering flames, rushing to more wounded. They were attributing it to the Mother, and indeed, sh
e was attacking us now, fiercely.… There were Djinn materializing in the room, and we had seconds to live, if that.
Pearl had just removed the Wardens’ final, desperate defense, as those Djinn were set free who could have been used to fight on the side of failing humanity. All, it seemed, except the few that I’d managed to rescue, who were in the bottles in my backpack that Venna had distributed.
I thumbed the cap off the one she had left me. “Out of the bottle!” I shouted. “Now!”
In answer, I got a blur of wild, thrashing color, and then Rahel formed out of it with a world-shaking shout of fury that rattled the broken glass around us. She whirled, black braids flying, to focus those alien, cold eyes on me. Her hands were clawed, and ready to pull out my intestines.
“You can take your vengeance later,” I told her. “For now, help us!”
She didn’t have to do it. For a frozen, terrible second, I thought she’d simply choose to go on with her killing plan, take her last satisfaction where it came… but then she bared her sharpened teeth and said, “This will be a later conversation.” She flashed over to a falling wall and held it up, dragging fallen Wardens away from it with the other hand. Her grin was awful and wonderful at once. “It’s happening, Cassiel. Joanne and Lewis and David have gone to the Mother. They’ve left you all to distract her. Did you know you were so disposable?”
I couldn’t believe her, but it was true, I realized; Lewis was gone. So were Joanne and David. I didn’t know when they’d left us, and the aetheric was a horrible vibrating confusion of fury, light, power. The chaos spread through all the levels of the world.
Go, I wished them silently, and let the anger leave me in a rush. We all have our fates. Go to yours, and I will go to mine.
But mine wasn’t quite done with me yet, no matter what Rahel thought.
I felt the surge of energy as the Wardens uncorked their bottles. From one of them I saw emerge a flash of indigo, of silver, and then Rashid—friend, enemy, New Djinn—was standing quite naked and elegant beside me, skin the color of the dark blue sky, eyes like moons. He said, “I’m devastated that you didn’t keep me for yourself, Cassiel,” but then he went just as still and quiet as the others. I recognized most of them, True Djinn and the newer, human-born ones; they were all powerful, and all dangerous in their own rights.
“Scaravelli’s down!” someone shouted. “Orwell’s gone! Who’s next in chain of command?”
“Get Shinju!” someone else yelled, and that made me thrust myself forward, more out of dread than anger.
“No,” I said. “Not her.” I took in a deep breath and nodded to Luis, who raised his eyebrows, but turned to the scared and confused Wardens and began barking out quick, simple orders. Fix this; hold that; do this.… Tasks to keep them moving and focused. We couldn’t afford the chaos. Chaos would feed Pearl even more.
I felt Pearl’s power stirring beyond the wall, and remembered that she had a plan of her own—one that did not include the Djinn. She and her Void children had the power to devastate these last few Djinn who were under our control; she’d hunt those who’d gone wild at her leisure, but these were tethered for the slaughter.
“You!” I barked, and pointed at the woman who’d been handed Rashid’s bottle. “Give him back!”
“Back?” she said, mystified, and shook her head. “I’m not giving—”
I hit her with a neat blow to the chin. It hurt like punching the edge of a knife, but I think it hurt her more; she staggered, and the Djinn bottle slipped out of her hands and bounced harmlessly on an unmade cot.
I got to it first, closed my hands on it, and Rashid said, in a voice full of plummy satisfaction, “If you wanted me so badly, you should have asked, love.”
I couldn’t answer him, or even look at him directly. What I was about to do was full of pain. “I’ve fought for you, Rashid,” I said. “Now I expect you to fight for me.”
“It wasn’t much of a fight,” he said, “but I’ll do what you wish. Mistress.” He leered at me, and bowed a little.
“Put on pants,” I said, “and be ready at my command.”
He seemed disappointed that it was my first order, but he nodded, and in the next blink his naked loins were covered in tight-fitting black leather… so tight they might as well have been a second skin. Well, he had technically obeyed. I let it go.
“Here we go,” Luis breathed, and grabbed my hand to draw me up a level to the aetheric. There was a storm forming there, and in the human world, one huge enough to swallow entire countries. It was coming into existence now, all around us, and on the aetheric the pearl gray skies had turned rotten black, bloody red, with flashes of unclean greens and yellows like suppurating wounds.
The Djinn vanished, heading out to do battle with our destruction… all except Rashid, whom I kept tethered to me with a pulse of will. As I watched on the aetheric, the Djinn formed a circle around the city, and a network of brilliant, complex light wove through them.
The storm hit that barrier, erupted in angry waves, sparks, flares… but stopped. For now. I could sense the intense power flowing from the Wardens to the Djinn, outlays that human bodies weren’t meant to take; even then, the storm on the aetheric was stronger, far stronger, and already it was beginning to rip at the Djinn’s wall, sending pieces flying away into the dark.
“It’s not going to hold,” Rashid said. He sounded muted now, shaken for all his traditional remote mockery. “You have less than a day, probably only hours. There are billions at risk now. Once the Djinn fall, there’s nothing to stop it from devouring everyone.”
“Get Orwell back here!” someone screamed, and Luis let go of me and dropped back into his body, striding across the littered and chaotic room to grab the Warden who was starting to panic. “They ran, they ran and left us. We have to get them back—we’re all going to die here!”
The artificial discipline of the Wardens turned to panic as if a thin sheet of ice had cracked, plunging us all into freezing waters. The Wardens channeling for the Djinn were locked in place; they, at least, were not panicking, but the others—it was leaping from one human to another, this knowledge of their own destruction, and the cries and wailing took on an eerie, crazy edge.
Luis jumped up on an antique table that had been shoved against the wall, took an exquisite crystal vase from the top of it, and shattered it. Loudly. “Shut up!” he roared. It was a shockingly loud voice, and forced silence down on the room, in subsiding whimpers and gasps. “Orwell and Baldwin don’t run. They’re doing something, something that might save everybody. That’s the only damn reason they’d leave, and you know that. You’re Wardens; you’re not in fucking kindergarten. Wherever they went, they’re fighting, and you’re going to fight. The Djinn are buying time for you. Now stop screaming and start thinking!” He pointed at people, three in quick succession. “You, you, and you. Fire, Weather, Earth. Form a team. Start pulling power and strengthening the wall that the Djinn put up. The rest of you, split off in triads and start working. If you’re not working, you’re going to have my boot up your ass. Do you understand me?”
You might have heard a rose petal drop, so quiet were they, and then one of the Wardens at whom he’d pointed took in a breath and clapped another on the shoulder. “Right,” she said. “Back to work. Alan? Join us?” The third Warden moved slowly to join them, joining hands.
The rest of the Wardens glanced at each other. Exhausted they were, and terrified, but he’d shocked them enough to remind them of duty, and there was a good deal of shame in the way they nodded to one another. One young man stuck his hand in the air. “Earth,” he said.
“Earth Wardens, follow his example,” Luis said. “Hold up your hands. Fire, Weather, find your partners. Hurry up.” He jumped down, landing with a heavy thump of boots on carpet, and put up his own hand. Our eyes met, and he shook his head. “No, Cass. Not you. You said Pearl was on the move. It’s time to stop her. I can’t—I can’t do it with you. If they see me take off, it’s all g
oing to come apart. I’m sorry, but… this is where our paths part. When we— When this is done, I’ll see you again.” He smiled, but there was an ending in his eyes, a quiet resignation and grief. “I love you.”
“I love you,” I said to him, and kissed him one last, sweet time. I traced the warm skin of his face, the roughness of his emerging beard, and stepped away. “I don’t want to leave you.”
“You can’t always get what you want,” he said. “The great philosopher Mick Jagger said that. Go, babe. I got this.”
I blinked away a blur of tears, turned, and ran for the half-open doorway that led to Pearl’s children.
The door slammed shut in my face. I hit it, extending Earth power ahead of me, but the door held, bouncing me back. “Rashid!” I yelled, and despite how the Djinn felt about the practice of slavery, despite all of the games and the carefully worded, treacherous game they played, he didn’t wait for my command. He hit the door in a dark blue rush, and it splintered, vaporized for three quarters of its width. Only the hinges remained, clinging to a glossy strip of wood as they flapped wildly.
Inside, Pearl stood at the center of a circle of children, all dressed in white. They were silent, eerily so, not one of them shuffling or fidgeting, and Pearl’s face was turned toward the ceiling, and her smile was broad, peaceful, triumphant.
“Now,” she whispered. “Now go and take your rightful places. She’s vulnerable, never more than now.”
The circle of children turned in their places, facing out now instead of in, and next to me Rashid shifted uneasily. “Cassiel—” The children were advancing now, walking toward the door, toward me, and the foremost in that ring were boys and girls who radiated that special kind of darkness. Whatever inhabited them, it was akin to a demon, and it did not belong here, in this world. There were young ones, no older than five or six; there were older children, as old as twelve or thirteen. Not one of them deserved the fate that had come on them; they’d been abducted, converted, abused, deceived, tortured, and mutilated. Not one of them deserved anything from me but rescue, help, love, kindness.
