4 - Unbroken

by Rachel Caine

  But this was war.

  “Cassiel,” Rashid said, and a warning was plain in his voice. “They’re coming for you. For the Wardens and the Djinn outside. You have to stop them.”

  “I know,” I said.

  “You have to kill them. They’ll destroy me.”

  She’d sent the Void children first, because Rashid still presented a significant threat, and she wanted him gone, destroyed, unmade. The howling darkness contained inside them had grown, and I wasn’t sure there was anything of the original souls left now; I wasn’t sure they were anything but shells for a virus, burned-out avatars as Xarus had been.

  Pearl had used Xarus to strike at us, out there in the desert; the artificial black corner had been her creation, a display of sheer, raw power. She’d created the chimera as well. Mother Earth wouldn’t have been so cruel, so perverse.

  “Cassiel!”

  “Back in the bottle,” I said to Rashid, half absently. The first Void child was only a few feet away. Rashid vanished, and I stoppered the bottle, pushing the cork in tightly and slipping it into the pocket of my pants. I looked past the children, to Pearl.

  She had lowered her gaze to meet mine.

  “This doesn’t have to involve them,” I told her. “It’s between us. It always has been.”

  “Not anymore,” my sister said, in that silky, soft voice I had once loved, and now hated so much. “My grudge isn’t against you, Cassiel. It hasn’t been for some time. You’re a small, insignificant bug, and I don’t care about you, other than to want you removed from my path. It’s the Mother who’s my enemy. And she’s vulnerable. It’s my time now. All you need do is stand aside, and I’ll let you live a while longer. That’s all you want, isn’t it? That’s all any humans want. To delay the inevitable.”

  It dawned on me, late and hard, that I couldn’t see Isabel in the approaching waves of children. She’d matured; she was stronger, faster, taller than any of the rest, but she wasn’t there. “What did you do with her?” I asked. It came out in a cold, clear tone, one that almost shimmered in the air with menace. “Where is Isabel?”

  Pearl pointed, and I followed her motion, turning slightly… and saw a body embedded in the plaster of the wall. Isabel’s face was a mask, mouth frozen open in a scream.

  One hand still remained free in the open air, and it trembled, finger twisting as if trying to claw at the prison.

  I had a nightmare visitation of being sealed in that coffin of earth, of the crystals boring into my bones.

  “She thought she could make me trust her again,” Pearl said. “She failed. I’ll keep her for later; you didn’t want to be my angel of death, Cassiel, but she… she will make a beautiful killer, I think.”

  I screamed, and with no thought for anything else—not even the hands of the children reaching out for me—I drew a pure bolt of Earth power up from the ground below, blasting through concrete, steel, wood.

  I blew out the wall in which Isabel was trapped.

  She collapsed in a broken heap of debris, coated with pulverized drywall, but I saw her moving just a little. I saw her dust-pale hair stir as she breathed.

  The first Void child touched me, and his small, cold hand closed around my wrist.

  Something dark crossed over into me, a small thing, a tiny pinpoint of darkness that moved through my flesh like a burrowing insect, relentlessly seeking out the deepest, hottest flame of my power. Another chubby hand touched me, dark against my pale flesh, and I felt it again, a tiny invasion of something cold, so cold.

  I remembered the needles piercing my flesh, driving inward with smooth, unflinching whispers.

  “You’re going to breed the future, Cassiel,” Pearl said. “A chrysalis for a great power, a new power. You’re the first of the new angels. My dark angels. But first, you have to accept the gift that they’re giving you.”

  More hands on me now. I had to fight. Had to. Rashid was right. I had no choice: I had to kill them or lose myself, horribly. Already, the tiny pinpoints of darkness were starting to draw together inside me, clumping, reproducing. Spreading.

  My light was still burning, my power still strong, but I couldn’t turn it inward, against this; I couldn’t fight an enemy already inside me. Earth Wardens were the worst at self-healing, and she’d struck me at my most vulnerable point… not just in my body, but in my mind.

  I couldn’t fight these children. I couldn’t hurt them.

  The others were flooding around me now. They were heading out into the room with the Wardens, who’d been lulled into thinking that Pearl and her followers were helping, were safe. They’d hardly have time to realize that they’d been betrayed before these children, with their wildly enhanced powers, attacked them. Luis had inadvertently helped that along, by focusing the Wardens on the problem at hand rather than what might be coming for them on their blind side.

  I was the only one watching their back now. Their last line of defense… and I had just lost the war for them, unless I acted now. Now.

  But I couldn’t look into the faces of these children and destroy them, no matter what logic might say.

  Isabel was moving. She pulled herself to her hands and knees, and slowly raised her head. Beneath that caked, tangled mop of hair, her face was a mask of white dust, splattered with drops of shockingly red blood. She did not look human. The fury on her face, in the tight, coiled movements, all these came from some other place, a wound that Pearl had inflicted long ago that had never fully healed.

  “You let Cassie go!” she spat at Pearl. Isabel climbed to her feet, and balls of wickedly twisting fire formed around her hands where they hung at her sides. “You let her go now!”

  “Peace, little one,” Pearl said, and gave her a fond smile. “Don’t presume you can speak to me as if you matter.”

  “You did this to us, to all of us,” she said. Her voice was raw and rough, almost a growl in the back of her throat. “You made us what we are.”

  “I made you great,” Pearl said. “I would have made you a queen in this world, if you hadn’t been so weak and foolish. But I will allow you to take Cassiel’s place at my side, if you wish it. The transformation will hurt, of course, just like all the other changes I made to you to help you become what you are.”

  “Yeah,” Isabel said. “Thanks for the encouragement. It’s going to help a lot when I do this.”

  She flung her arms wide, and I felt a surge of power blast out of the core of the planet, and down from the aetheric, mixing and mingling in a pure white plasmatic burst that glowed eerily from Isabel’s eyes, mouth, even her fingertips. Humans couldn’t pull power directly from the aetheric, not as Djinn could… but Isabel was different. Pearl had made her different, just as she had the Void children, and the other Warden children she’d warped.

  Isabel slammed her palms together in a wide, swinging circle, and the power rang out of her in thick, white, glassy waves across the floor, cracking concrete, shattering steel, dropping the entire center section out of the room and down into a dark, cavernous sinkhole.

  “No!” I screamed at her, but she wasn’t listening. The children who’d been caught in that section had fallen, tipping and sliding as the floor collapsed, and now they tumbled, along with the floor, into the unknown darkness.

  I couldn’t kill these children, but Isabel had been one of them. Children have no sentimentality for their own, not as adults do, and she didn’t hesitate.

  Pearl stayed where she was, hovering with her bare feet exactly where the floor had been. She hadn’t so much as flinched. I’d seen the rings of power part and flow around her like water around a stone. For the first time, she was showing her true power—and that made her vulnerable as well.

  The void inside me was growing fast now, shooting out dark tendrils. There were fewer children fanning out past me to attack the Wardens than there might have been, because of Isabel’s actions, but still enough to kill what was left of the people—and Djinn—on the other side of that door. It was up to me to stop
it.

  I sent a fierce pulse of energy back through the hands of the children touching me, and one by one they slumped, unconscious. One slid over the ragged, broken edge of the floor into the abyss below, but I didn’t have time to save him, didn’t have any time at all.

  “Isabel!” I shouted. “Stop the children out there!”

  She headed past me for the door, lithe and quick, and as Pearl stretched out a hand toward her, I got in the way. What hit me felt deceptively light at first, like a shower of water, but almost immediately it began to burn through my clothing, and open raw bloody holes in my skin. Acid. I coughed and gagged on the burning smell of it. A Weather Warden might have been able to wash it away, but as an Earth Warden all I could do was slowly change the composition of the acid into an inert form, and that took time.

  The wounds it left me with were impossible to heal, and I had no time left, because lightning sizzled now from Pearl’s fingers. I twisted in midair to avoid the strike; it blew apart an antique sofa pushed against the wall, and part of the wall behind it. A burning masterpiece of art slipped off its hook and toppled to the carpet, and I rolled forward and for the first time, touched Pearl’s body, in the flesh.

  It was cold. Ice cold. And where my fingers gripped, I saw white creeping into my skin, turning it the pallid consistency of rubber.

  I pulled, but my hand had gone numb, and slid harmlessly off her skin. It felt… dead. Wholly and completely dead.

  My metallic left hand was still functioning. I grabbed the bottle out of my pocket and flipped the cork free with my thumb. “Rashid!” I shouted. “Take the children away from here! All of them you can! Now!”

  “I can’t touch the blackened ones,” he said, but it was in passing; he was already moving, and he grabbed a boy who was lunging for me with a knife in his hand. The child was only seven or eight years old, and burning hot from the unnatural forces of powers inside him; as Rashid pulled him back, the boy simply made the blade of the knife lengthen. The steel leaped across the open space between us, and the needle-thin tip stabbed an inch into my chest before Rashid could snap it and yank it free. He gave me a wordless look of alarm before he grabbed the fighting boy, then an armload of others, and with a single word of power left them limp and sleeping.

  It would take time for him to get them all.

  I heard Isabel out in the other room yelling at the Wardens. “Don’t let them touch you! Kill them if you have to!”

  “But they’re just kids!” someone protested, and then the chaos intensified out there. The Void children could kill with a touch, pull away energy in a roaring flood. Where that energy went was a mystery; it seemed to tumble through them and off into the dark. They were no more than child-sized holes punched in the world.

  Isabel was right. They had to be stopped by any means necessary.

  And so did I, now.

  I could feel that heavy pull inside me, like a black hole forming in the pit of my stomach. The drain was small at first, but it was growing, throwing its spiral arms wider and wider with each increasingly fast spin. I had moments left, if that, before I became as empty and as dangerous as these children.

  Or worse. Chrysalis, Pearl had called me. A vessel for something else. Something greater.

  Her dark angel.

  No. That was not my fate. I was not going to watch this world burn, and everything fail, and see Pearl rise as the new Mother. I was not going to stand at her side, her creature, to pollute and torture and destroy what remained in the ashes.

  I would not preside over the death of the human race.

  Rashid had taken away many of Pearl’s children, but he couldn’t approach the ones armed with Void powers; they were the most dangerous, by far. He misted into view beside me, and dropped a small canvas bag at my feet. It was unzipped, and in it, I could see what looked like a rifle. He grabbed the weapon and tossed it to me; I caught it, surprised, and said, “I can’t shoot them!”

  “Darts,” he said. “From the zoo. An entire bag.” He gave me a scary, wild smile, and winked, and I felt the same surge of hope and exhilaration as I put the stock of the gun to my shoulder, sighted, and pulled the trigger on the nearest Void child.

  The dart took her in the shoulder, and she gasped in surprise and whirled around, face blank with shock… and then just blank, as the drug raced through her system. She stumbled, lost her balance, and fell.

  Isabel ducked back in the door and saw me. “I can’t stop them!” she shouted.

  I tossed the rifle, and the bag, to her. “Now you can,” I said. “Go! Stay with Luis! I can handle this here!”

  She knew I was lying, she must have, but in this last, desperate moment, she also knew that we had no real choices left. She hesitated one more second, staring into my eyes, and blurted, “I love you, Mom.”

  Then she was gone, and I pulled in a deep, trembling breath. There were tears in my eyes. Tears.

  “You really love this human child?” Rashid asked me, as if it were a normal day and we were in casual conversation. As if the world weren’t coming apart around us.

  “Yes,” I said softly. “Yes, I do. She’s my daughter, in every way that matters.”

  Rashid shrugged. “And you used to be so… fierce.”

  “I still am.” I swallowed hard, and tasted darkness. “Rashid, the Void children touched me.”

  He looked sharply at me, eyes flaring bright silver. “You’re infected?” He took a step back. “Give someone else the bottle. You can’t keep me now. You know that. Your sickness will spread to me.”

  “Don’t worry, I have other plans for you,” I said. And I did; a plan had formulated itself somewhere deep inside me, and it was suddenly and brilliantly illuminated like a landing strip in the dark. “I’ll set you free at the proper moment.”

  “Do it now!”

  “I can’t,” I said… and then a pale pair of arms locked around me from behind, and pulled me backward with irresistible, bone-breaking force.

  Pearl.

  I tried to summon power and break free, but where she touched me numbness spread—a creeping cold that mirrored the darkness from the Void children that had infected me. My skin, already pale, turned a dead blue-white as infection spread like frost. I couldn’t feel the bottle in my fingers, and as much as I tried to hang on to it, I couldn’t.

  Rashid cried out, but he couldn’t help, couldn’t come close to Pearl. And like all trapped Djinn, he couldn’t directly touch the bottle.

  It hit the floor, rolled toward the edge of the abyss, and was just tipping over the edge when he summoned a gust of wind that blew it the opposite direction, in a skitter over broken stone to relative safety…

  … Until there was a flash of green coils untangling and dropping from overhead on an exposed beam, and Esmeralda reached down and scooped up the bottle.

  I had been looking for her. Counting on her, in fact.

  “Isabel,” I whispered. I could only just draw the breath to speak, and when I did, my breath misted on the air. “Give it to Isabel. Hurry.”

  She laughed, dangling her human half upside down, fangs extended and glistening with venom. “Hell with you,” she said. “I am done with all of you people. I used to be good, really good. But you treat me like everybody else does, like a freak. Not anymore, chica.” She waggled the bottle in front of me as she righted her body in a sinuous twist of coils. “He’s mine now. Mine. Don’t think just because I don’t have Warden powers anymore that I’ve forgotten how to order around a Djinn. Rashid’s my gorgeous personal insurance policy to get the hell out of this in one piece.”

  Pearl laughed, and that laughter crept inside me, too, heavy as fog. I couldn’t hold my head up now. I felt like a flesh-doll, limp in her grip. “Poor Cassiel,” she said, and I felt her cool lips graze my ear. “Can you feel it? The Mother is listening. She is listening to humans now. Unguarded, open, vulnerable. It’s time for you to choose. Die with the Djinn and the Wardens, or live with me. Esmeralda’s already made her ch
oice.”

  Esmeralda dropped down out of the rafters with a heavy, meaty thump, and slithered closer, head tilted to one side, watching Pearl curiously.

  “I’m not on anybody’s side,” she said. “Damn sure not on yours. I’ve seen what you do to kids. I never had many limits, but whatever mine were, you blew right past them.”

  “So you want to be my enemy,” Pearl said. “That’s an unfortunate choice.”

  Esmeralda shrugged. “I don’t want to be anybody’s enemy. I just want to be on the side that wins, that’s all. There never was a place in the old world for me. Maybe there’ll be one in yours.”

  I couldn’t speak. I could just barely find the strength to draw in one raw, aching, freezing breath after another. Outside, the battle between the Wardens and Pearl’s children had gone almost quiet; I wondered, with a growing dread, if Isabel was all right. And Luis.

  “Es,” I whispered. The dark inside me was starting to hurt as it grew stronger; it was pulling things from me, important things. Memories. Identity. Strength. “Don’t. She will not win.”

  Esmeralda nodded past me, toward the abyss Rashid had punched into the center of the room—the hole through which had fallen so many children. “Oh, it looks like she will,” she said. “Sorry, Cass, but I never was much of a martyr.”

  I slowly, painfully turned my head, and saw that the children, alive, intact, aware, were floating in midair. Rising up out of the dark, completely unharmed.

  “Did you really think I’d let the Djinn do something so cruel as to slaughter all these innocent lives?” Pearl asked. “I saved you from yourself, Cassiel. The Wardens are finished, and humanity with them. I’m what comes next. And now, so are you, my sweet, cold sister.”

  Cold, so cold. The pain inside was excruciating now, a black fire I couldn’t control or fight. The power I pulled from Luis was spinning away from me into that void, eaten by something… something that was reaching through.

  Something that was trying to clamber its sharp-edged way inside me, as her power froze and shattered every bit of strength and power left in me.