Unbroken

Chapter 7

BRENNAN PROVIDED US with a large silver van, one with enough seating to accommodate the rescued Wardens, plus Luis and the two children; I would ride the motorcycle, both as an outrider and scout, and to provide more space in the main vehicle. He came up with supplies for us as well—sealed boxes of water with straws, energy bars, medical supplies, ropes, carabiners, lightweight tools, and other necessities. “Radios won’t work,” he told us as we inventoried the supplies. “If you need reinforcements, we probably wouldn’t be able to reach you anyway. Get as many as you can out of there and bring them in, but watch yourselves. The Djinn are busy, but they’re never too busy to come looking for trouble.” He was distracted by another Warden, who arrived with a sheaf of papers in a trembling hand and disaster written on his face. “Dammit. Get going while you still can. There’s extra gas in the back of the van, in case the pumps are out. Good luck.”

That was it. Brennan had no time or energy for fond farewells, which left Isabel and Esmeralda. Es, predictably, just shrugged off our good-bye and went back to playing a handheld game that someone had left abandoned. We figured little in her universe.

Isabel was angry.

“You’re taking them,” she said, looking at Alvin and Edie, who were packing up the supplies into sturdy canvas bags. “Not me.”

“Mija, we need a Weather Warden to make sure we can breathe on the way down,” Luis said. “I probably don’t have enough power to keep a tunnel open the whole way. Too easy for us to get trapped without an air supply, otherwise.”

“But I can help you!”

“How?” He stared at her kindly, but steadily, until she looked down. “Isabel, I love you, and I trust you, but you’re still learning fine control of what you do. You’re powerful, no question of that, but Fire’s a tricky thing.”

“I’m better at it than you!”

“Yes, you are,” he agreed. “You definitely are. But that doesn’t mean you’re as good as you need to be, right?” Isabel took a breath, but didn’t try to argue the point. “Fire isn’t as useful where we’re going. Yeah, you’re a strong Earth Warden, I’ll grant you that, but so am I. So is Cassiel. We needed to choose someone who has something we lack, and that’s Weather.”

“That’s stupid.”

“It’s strategy, bug.” He tapped her gently on the nose and kissed her forehead. “I’m sorry, but you’re better off here for now. Brennan will make sure you stay safe, and if you want to help out, you can. Just be careful, okay? And do not leave the building. No matter what Es tells you.”

“Sitting right here,” Esmeralda said without looking up from the beeps and boops of her game. “I’m not looking to leave right now. But if I decide to, you’ve got nothing to say about it, Warden.”

“I know that,” Luis said. “But if you take my niece with you when you do decide to leave, I’ll find you, and we’ll be having a nice, long talk about it.”

“Wow, I can’t wait to see how that turns out.” She raised and lowered her shoulders in a fine, uncaring shrug. “See ya. Or not. Depends on if you die.”

Her callousness wasn’t unexpected, but it did have one side benefit; Isabel threw her arms around her uncle’s neck and hugged him quickly. Then she turned to me and did the same. “Don’t die,” she said. “I’ll hate you forever if you do. Come back safe.”

I kissed her cheek and, like Luis, tapped her gently on the nose. “Promise,” I said. “Get some rest.” She looked tired and pale. She nodded and settled down in a heap on the floor. Someone—not Esmeralda, certainly—had fetched her pillows and blankets.

I didn’t want to leave her, but I didn’t know what else to say. Neither, from the look on her face, did Isabel; we’d left many things unresolved, but that was the nature of human life, I supposed.

As always, I avoided the elevators; there was grumbling from the two children, but I swung one of the two canvas bags on my shoulder, stiff-armed the door, and began the long descent without soliciting their opinions. Luis didn’t bother to offer any; he just picked up the other bag and followed, leaving the children to decide on their own. When I glanced back from two floors below, I found them trudging down in our wake. They didn’t look happy, but I hadn’t expected that.

“Hey!” Alvin called down, as I rounded the corner for the twelfth floor. “What do you have against elevators anyway?”

“Claustrophobia,” Luis said.

“It’s not claustrophobia. I simply don’t like leaving myself at the mercy of machines.”

“Claustrophobia,” Luis said again. “Cass, this might be an issue when it comes to tunnels; you know that.”

“I’ll be fine,” I said. In truth, I hadn’t thought of it, but he might possibly be right about his concerns. I wasn’t comfortable in confined spaces, overall. “We have other things to worry about.” Such as the children clattering after us on the stairs, one of whom had the power to absorb any attack we might throw at him. The only vulnerability a Void wielder might have would be physical, and when he worked with a partner—such as the Weather girl—she could keep us busy enough to make that type of assault problematic.

I was already thinking about how to defeat them in a fight. It probably did not bode well for our cooperative efforts.

At the bottom of the stairs, the door took us out into a large but deserted lobby area. It seemed undisturbed, but there were already signs of neglect; the polished marble floor was scuffed in places, and the large glass doors were smudged with handprints that no one had bothered to clean. It wouldn’t take long for this place to show wear, I thought; if the Wardens or the human race survived the week, someone would need to take charge of sanitation and cleaning, unglamorous as that was.

It wasn’t a concern I’d likely have to worry about. That seemed oddly cheering.

Outside, one of the Wardens had parked the promised silver van, and someone—almost certainly an Earth Warden—had arranged for the move of my Victory down from the roof. It leaned on its kickstand behind the van. I took a moment to take Rashid’s sealed bottle out of my jacket, where I’d been keeping it safe, and rolled it into the blue jeans that were still in the backpack. It would remain better protected there, for now. I made sure the canvas bag fit securely, with both arms through the straps and the bag riding comfortably on my back. The weight was not as bad as I’d expected, balanced so, and I mounted the Victory with a sense of relief. Somehow, having the potential of movement, of escape, always made me feel less helpless, even if it was only an illusion.

Luis slammed the passenger doors and stood there with one foot up in the driver’s side, looking at me. “You ready?” he asked. I nodded and started up the motorcycle. He held the stare for a few seconds longer, then smiled and kissed his fingers at me.

I couldn’t help but smile in return. It was a foolish little gesture, but it warmed me.

Then he was in the truck, and we were rolling down the slight hill, away from the building.

Not surprisingly, it was cloudy; the day was chilly, but not cold. Not yet. It would be bone cold in the wind, but Brennan had helpfully thrown in an extra coat—too large for me, but the warmth would be most welcome. I accelerated as we hit the street, the freeway dead ahead.

We wouldn’t be taking it.

The road out of Portland was clogged solid with cars, vans, trucks—anything with wheels that would roll had fled in the initial panic, and many had run dry of gas on the road. There wasn’t enough equipment, time, or energy now to deal with removing the blockage; instead, the police had simply blocked off the freeway itself. I veered right instead, taking a side road, and checked the aetheric for guidance. The van eased in behind me, a silver ghost moving almost silently through the gray day. There were still vehicles on the road, but most people seemed to be staying inside, glued to whatever news agencies still broadcasted. Few wanted to leave the illusion of safety for whatever might be available elsewhere, until the illusion collapsed.

And then, of course, it would be too late, just as it had been for so many in Portland and in Kansas and Missouri. Not everyone was dead there, it seemed, but those who were trapped were—according to the scattered news reports—rapidly devolving into chaos. It was spreading fast.

The road I located was a small, two-lane blacktop, but it was clear of any traffic, and I opened the throttle and flew. Misty rain began, but the jacket kept me warm and relatively dry. Behind me, the van turned on its lights. We were back in the tall, silent trees, and although the glow of Seattle was behind us, what lay in front seemed dark by contrast.

Wilderness, more dangerous than ever.

The mine where the Wardens had been trapped was geographically not far from the city, but the terrain was difficult; as we rose into the more mountainous areas, I slowed around curves, blind corners, and finally had to pull over as I saw the road that lay ahead. Luis parked behind me, and we stood together in silence, in the misty rain, staring.

“When the Djinn go full crazy, they commit,” he said. The words were flippant, but his tone was not; there was no way to see this any other way than devastation. The forest was simply… gone, though fragments remained—the thick, splintered wrecks of trees, the tangled mess of branches and undergrowth ripped and thrown about like an uneven blanket. The road had disappeared under the mess. Part of it had burned, and smoke still rose in sullen wisps into the air.

It was eerily quiet. No birds called. No human voices, except ours, disturbed the silence. Except for the soft, almost subliminal hiss of the rain, it seemed lifeless.

“We need to clear the road,” I said. There were tons of debris to be shifted. Even though the trees had been splintered and ripped apart, the shredded mass was unbelievably heavy, and it would be the work of giants to clear enough of a path to allow the vehicles to pass—assuming that the road beneath was still intact, which was far from a given. I was beginning to calculate how much power it would take when I felt a sudden warm, dry breeze on the back of my neck.

I turned, and so did Luis.

Edie stood on the roof of the van, hands held out to her sides, and around her, light seemed to physically bend; it was as if she stood in full sunlight, while the rest of us were in shade. When I used Oversight to layer the aetheric into the real world, I saw the tremendous shadowy burst of power that rippled out of her, an aurora of the darkest colors—storm black, corpse gray, vein blue. It snapped together above us, a dizzying and complex arrangement of polarities and elements, heat and cold and brute-force power that almost ripped apart the sky as it reformed the clouds.

The sullen neutrality boiled and turned into ugly darkness, edged with gray-green. The whole sky seemed to turn on our axis, but no, those were the clouds, spinning slowly and disorientingly over the wasteland.

The tornado came down in a white, whipping rope that slammed into the field of debris. As it sucked up the shredded remains of trees, leaves, and limbs, it grew wider and darker, taking on the ominous appearance of a wall.

Edie’s control of that wall was precise, and it stopped its growth at the edges of the road. Luis and I had instinctively fallen back to the shelter of the van, and Alvin hadn’t even left the vehicle, but above us Edie stood firm and exalted, face upturned to the clouds. Her blond hair writhed and rippled in the whipping winds, but the pure force of the tornado was focused away from us. The noise was astonishing, a roar that achieved an almost human pitch, like a scream magnified into millions.

Beneath the tornado, the road cleared.

Edie lowered her gaze to the road, and the screaming, roaring destruction of the tornado obediently began to move at a leisurely pace, flinging off debris in all directions except ours. I saw shattered tree trunks hurled out in chunks that vanished into the far distance. Edie kept her full concentration on the tornado as it continued down the road.

“She can’t keep it up,” Luis said. He was clutching my arm in a painful grip now, and I could understand the impulse; the feeling of vulnerability in the face of what Edie had conjured was overwhelming. As a demonstration of raw power, it matched or exceeded anything I had ever seen—not just the power, but the fine control. “She’s killing herself.”

“No,” I said softly. “She’s not.” And that was, by far, more terrifying. He was right—Edie should have been draining herself at an awful pace, and putting her very life at risk. Instead, she was laughing, like the child she was, with joy. Her eyes had taken on an unnatural sheen that was—however impossibly—like that of a Djinn.

Whatever Pearl had done to these children, these survivors and thrivers in her training program… it had made them not as human as I had thought. They weren’t merely Wardens with more power; they were defying the very laws that governed nature, and power itself. Djinn were built to do what Edie was doing; it was coded in their smallest components. Humans were built to survive here, in this world, and it was a very different thing.

Edie’s tornado continued to sweep the road, back and forth, with precision and regularity, until the way was completely clear. Then she slowly closed her hands, and I felt the pressure above me collapse into overdriven chaos.

“Backlash!” Luis screamed, and tackled me to the ground just as that power erupted all around us in a hundred burning, stabbing lightning bolts, screaming down from the churning clouds. If a single bolt held the power of a nuclear device, this was the equivalent of the detonation of an entire nuclear arsenal.

And it lasted for almost a full minute before the energy spent itself back into the ground and the aetheric.

In the aftermath, my ears ringing from the splitting roar of thunder, I slowly raised my head. I was seeing afterimages of the lightning, even though I’d been facedown for most of it and had kept my eyes tightly closed. It had been like being trapped inside an open circuit, and my skin felt hot and fried.

The landscape looked, if possible, even more like something out of a nightmare. Instead of the debris lying in blankets, it was heaped into hills now, and the hills were on fire. Even the bare ground was blackened and smoking, and the surface of the road only twenty feet away seemed melted and sizzling.

Edie jumped down off the roof of the van and said, “That was cool, right? Did you see it? I’ve never seen lightning so close. It’s whiter the closer you are to it. Did you know that? Only there was some dust in the air; some of it looked orange because of that.” She was manic with excitement, I realized, utterly unconcerned for the damage that she had just done.

“You don’t do things like that!” Luis came up yelling, fists clenched, and Edie took a step back from him. “Didn’t anybody ever teach you how to balance your energy? How to ground it? What if there had been people around, or animals? How many would you have killed with that stunt?”

She looked shocked, then resentful and angry. A dangerous combination. I rose more slowly, and took Luis by the elbow to draw him backward.

He shook me off, still facing the girl. “Don’t do it again, Edie. Tell me you understand what I’m saying.”

“It doesn’t matter,” she said, and lifted her chin in defiance to glare. “Look at it; it’s a wreck! The Djinn trashed it anyway, so what if it burns?”

“And if it spreads?” he shot back. “What then? What are you going to do to control it? Anything?” He was right. With the debris piled as it was now, full of drying, dead vegetation, it was already starting to burn with a vengeance. “Sparks travel, and they travel fast. A mile away and you’re in virgin forest, full of life.”

“Then I dump some water on it,” Edie said. “Big freaking deal.”

“That isn’t enough. If the fire’s hot enough, it just vaporizes your rain. What next?”

“I—” She was frowning now, and lost, so she quickly went on the attack. “It’s not my problem! I was doing what you wanted. I was getting the stuff out of our way! That’s what Fire Wardens are for, to fix these things!”

“That’s not what Fire Wardens are for, to clean up your messes,” Luis said. “It’s not what Djinn are for, either. And if you wanted to get their attention, you’ve done it. That little display lit up the aetheric like the Fourth of July.”

“So?” Edie challenged. “Let them come get me. I can take them.”

“Who? The Djinn? How many, Edie? One, two, yeah, maybe, because you’ve got a hell of a lot of power. But you can’t take five of them. Or ten. Or twenty. And the rest of us, we won’t be so lucky.”

“So?” she said again, and shrugged. “Not my fault you’re lame. Why should I worry about you?”

“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 stone.

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.

“You,” I gasped, and lifted my head to stare at Edie—who held up her hands in surrender, and shrugged.

“Nope,” she said. “I didn’t do it. You hit a pocket of methane. It’s heavy; it displaces air from the ground up. You couldn’t have known. It’s odorless and colorless. Kills lots of people.”

“She protected the two of us from it,” Alvin said. “But she didn’t protect you.”

“Well, we were closer to the ground,” Edie said. “I was getting around to you guys.” Her smile was charming, and it had an edge of cruelty to it. “It’s just a headache. You’ll be fine. I wasn’t going to let you die or anything.”

No, she wouldn’t have; she had a very definite understanding of her risks down here in the tunnels, and despite her mastery over air and water, she had no real chance of reaching the surface again without our help.

I slowed my breathing with deliberate control. My skin was slick with panic sweat, and although the temperature was cave-cool, I felt hot and trapped, and I was still suffering from the headache and a worrying tremble in my muscles. In a few seconds, I felt good enough to rise to my knees and pull Luis with me; he was still breathing too fast, and his dark eyes looked dazed—at least until they focused on Edie and her smile.

I held on to his shoulder as I felt his muscles go tense. “No,” I said softly. “Don’t waste your strength. We have to keep going.” We were committed now, and there was no time for petty anger and vengeance. No room for a fight, either. I was waging enough of a battle to keep my instinctive, atavistic terror of this deep, closed space at bay.

He deliberately relaxed and nodded. His long, dark hair was sopping wet now, and stuck to his face and neck in sweaty points. “You okay?” he asked me, and put his hand on my chin, lifting it so I met his eyes. “No damage?”

“No,” I said. There was the lingering headache, but it was subsiding. I wondered how far Edie would really have allowed it to go, without Alvin to control her. Too far, I suspected. It didn’t take long for unconsciousness to set in, and brain damage, and death. She’d have been… interested, I thought. Like a scientist with lab animals, or—perhaps more accurately—a serial murderer with a new victim. “No, I’m fine. Let’s continue.”

Luis rounded on Edie and said, in a deadly quiet voice, “You do that again, and I’ll choke the living crap out of you with your own lungs. I mean it.”

Her eyes widened, and suddenly she looked like the child she was. “I’m sorry!” she said. “Really, I’m sorry, I won’t—I won’t do it again. Please, don’t hurt me.” She shrank back, and Luis loomed over her like a dark, cruel shadow.

He snorted, shook his head, and relaxed. “Don’t try to play me, kid. You ain’t got the skills. I’m not the Big Bad Wolf, here, and you’re not Little Red. Save it for someone who doesn’t know you’re psycho.”

He turned back to face the wall of debris in front of us, and began ripping it aside with vicious scoops of power—too much of it, expended too violently, but I understood the impulse. Because he’d looked away from her, he didn’t see the change that came over Edie’s face in that moment, the black glimmer in her eyes, the flat rage.

I watched her in case she acted on her temptations to hurt him. But in that instant, Alvin reached out and put his hand on Edie’s shoulder.

She gasped and sat down, hard.

Alvin nodded at me, once, then folded himself into a calm cross-legged sitting position as Luis and I worked.

I wasn’t sure, really, which of them I feared more. Edie, for her petulance and rages, was certainly the more volatile, but Alvin… Alvin had control, and no kind of real moral compass that I could determine. He was polite, and cold, and empty.

I almost preferred Edie’s fury. It seemed more… honest.