Unbroken

Chapter 12

LAS VEGAS SEEMED shockingly normal. Inside the hotel, lights burned; slot machines rang, buzzed, and whirred. Dead-eyed humans sat and gambled away their last wealth, expecting no tomorrow. I supposed that at the end of the world, perhaps people would take their pleasures where they could, though I didn’t see what joy could come of winning a game of chance now.

The very definition of a Pyrrhic victory. You win only to burn.

I thought about that scream that David had uttered; I didn’t seem to be able to unhear that kind of pain and anguish, fury and horror. It echoed unpleasantly inside my head, driving out everything else, and I thought, I have to get him back. Open the bottle and let him find her.

I thought that up to the moment when Lewis opened a door and walked me inside the last refuge of the Wardens.

The smell of sweat, desperation, and despair was thick in the room. There was little noise; it was as hushed and quiet as a church, or a funeral. At one time, this would have been an expensive retreat for the ridiculously wealthy, a playpen for the spoiled, but now all of the elegance had been stripped and shoved away, and the room was a morgue, hospital, surgery, and battleground all at once. There was a space in one corner for Wardens to work, and currently there were six standing together, hands linked. As I watched, one collapsed. A black-coated staff member of the hotel silently picked her up and carried her to a cot, woke another Warden, and led him groggily to take the empty place in the circle.

In Oversight, this room was awash in reds and blacks, bloody with it.

And around us, hemming us in, was a descending white fury.

There was another room, the door left partially open; I glanced at it as we walked past, and saw…

Isabel.

“Ibby!” I cried, and ran toward her. She was sitting cross-legged on the floor, but scrambled up to hug me when I hurtled toward her. Luis was right with me, hugging the child, kissing her.

She’d grown still more—no longer the slender early teen, she’d now matured to an age that had to be ringing the bell of adulthood. Seventeen, eighteen years of growth, perhaps, but the smile was still the unfettered joy of a child, and the relief of one.

“Mama,” she blurted, and then took in a sharp, steadying breath. She shook her long, dark hair back and composed herself with an obvious effort. “I mean, hello, Cassiel. Uncle Luis.”

“Shut up, mija,” he said, and hugged her again. He kissed her on the forehead. “How did you get here?”

“I came with everybody out of Seattle,” she said. “We were evac-ed out by helicopter, except for the Weather Wardens; they had to go in a truck. Es went with them. She said it was exciting.” The color was high in her cheeks, but she was trying very hard to seem composed. “You two look tired. But you’re okay, right?”

“Yeah, we’re okay,” Luis said, and smiled.

“I’m so glad,” said a new voice, and I turned. So did Luis, and his smile vanished. So did his good mood, and mine, because Pearl’s human form stood there, cool and composed, smiling at us. I hadn’t noticed in the stress of the moments before, but she’d affected a Japanese kimono, and put her dark hair up in a complicated style; of all those I’d seen in this place, she was the first to look rested and content. “Please, be welcome here with us.” The us was significant, because she was talking about Isabel. And, I saw, Esmeralda, who was asleep in a piled tangle of coils nearby.

And beyond her was a room full of Pearl’s children. Eerily quiet children, mostly awake and focused on things that weren’t there—working on the aetheric, I assumed. Performing their altruistic duty to help mankind… until Pearl decided that was no longer necessary, of course. As soon it wouldn’t be.

There were almost a hundred of them here, dressed in plain white shirts and pants, like a uniform. Isabel, I realized, was also in white. Even Esmeralda wore a soft white T-shirt on her human half instead of her usual flashy choices.

Pearl’s kimono was a softly patterned white, with embossed flowers and dragons.

“Interesting,” I said, holding her dark gaze. “White’s the color for funerals in Japan.”

“I know,” she said. “I’m in mourning for all those we’ve lost. I’m surprised that you are not… but then, Cassiel, you were never what one would term the sentimental sort. You finally came to join the battle.”

“Oh, I’ve been fighting,” I said. “And I don’t forget who I’m really fighting, either. That was your doing, out there in the desert.”

She cocked her head slightly, but her utterly polite and blank expression never shifted. “It’s good to be aware of one’s purpose,” she said blandly. “Though I thought the Djinn had a different path for you than this. You could have become something so… different. So powerful.”

I had a suffocating flashback to being sealed in that airless tight crystal coffin, pierced by slow, pitiless needles. Changing, as she intended, to something different. Something powerful.

Something that she would control. Her angel of death, stalking the world.

“That’s not going to happen,” I said, and she bowed her head, just a tiny inclination.

“As you say.” It was amusement, not agreement. “You are welcome to stay here with us.”

“No. Isabel,” I said, “get Esmeralda. We’re joining the Wardens.”

“I can’t,” Isabel said. It wasn’t a rebellion, it was a statement. “I’m sorry, Cassie, but I can’t do that. The Wardens aren’t where I need to be. Es, either. They don’t understand us, and they don’t know what we can do. We’re better here, where we can really use our powers to help.”

There was the faintest shadow of a smile on Pearl’s lips. Delicate, like the shadows of flowers and dragons on her robe. “The children know that I’ll care for them,” she said. “As I always have.”

“Care for them,” I repeated. The rage that I kept banked inside, that had driven me to survive despite all the challenges arrayed against me, against Ashan’s edict and the Wardens’ distrust, against the Mother herself—that rage warmed me now. Sustained me. I did not let it drive me, however. I knew that was what she wanted. “Oh, you care for them. I’ve seen the wreckage of the children you no longer wanted, could no longer use. You keep those you can put to work, and once they’re dry, you’ll discard them. And none of them will outlive your rebirth, will they?”

But that, I knew, was a lie. Of all the children that Pearl had abducted, or coerced, or whose parents she’d persuaded to entrust them to her—of all these elite children gathered here with her in this room—she’d keep Isabel to the last breath, purely because I loved her.

Isabel was my punishment. Solely, completely, mine.

“It’s my choice,” Iz insisted. “Cassie, please understand—this is how I want to help. By being here. With her. I want you to respect what I choose to do.”

Luis hadn’t spoken, but he was staring at his niece with an expression that told me how heartbroken he was. “You can’t want this, Iz,” he said softly. “If you do, you’re forgetting everything you learned. She took you, baby. She did things to you that hurt you. She made you—she made you believe that Cass was your enemy, that I was dead. Don’t you see that? She’s not your friend. She’s our enemy.”

“She’s your enemy,” Iz said. She looked just as grave, just as sad. “I’m sorry, Tío. I wish I could make you understand, but she made me what I need to be right now, and I need to be here. Please believe me. Please.”

“They’ll never understand, Isabel,” Pearl said. She sounded so soft, so compassionate, and no one could see what she really was inside: a murderer, bent on extinction, bloody and complete. Someone who could only lust after death on an ever-grander scale. “They’ll always try to stand in your way. But it’s up to you. If you want to go with them, I wish you well.”

She didn’t mean it, of course; she’d never allow Isabel out of her control now, but Iz didn’t know that, couldn’t know it. To her, it sounded like pure generosity of spirit.

There was nothing I could say that wouldn’t reinforce that impression and drive Isabel further into the arms of my enemy.

I felt a presence behind me, and looked back to see that Lewis Orwell was standing there. He nodded politely to Pearl, equal to equal. “Thank you for maintaining the perimeter,” he said. “It’s much-needed relief.”

“I am happy to assist,” she said. “Cassiel seems to think that these children are here against their wishes. Would you please reassure her, Warden?”

He glanced at me, at Luis, and said, “I’ve spoken to as many of them as I can. They all say they’re fine. None of them have parents here with us.” Meaning, I supposed, that this was a room full of orphans, with no one to come for them. No one to battle Pearl for their hearts and minds. And what else would they say? They’d all been twisted into her creatures. They had no voices of their own.

“If that’s so, not all of their parents died out there fighting the good fight,” I said. “Some were killed by—what do you call it?—friendly fire.”

“Maybe,” Orwell said. “But that’s a moot point now. If we survive, we can sort it all out then.” He didn’t seem to hold out any real hope for that, and he was most likely right. “I need the two of you on duty, right now. Come with me.”

“Not without Isabel,” Luis said.

Isabel disagreed. She crossed her arms and sat down on the floor, unmistakably daring us to drag her off against her will. Luis looked down at her, shaken and angry. When he grabbed for her, I intercepted his hand and shook my head. “Leave her,” I said. “You must. This isn’t over.”

“Damn straight it isn’t over,” he said, and glared at Pearl. “I’m coming for you, bitch. You are not getting that girl. Believe it.”

Her gaze brushed mine, and I heard Pearl’s mocking voice in my mind. And you, Cassiel? No empty threats from you, even as I hold your child in my hands? While I hold her very soul?

I smiled slowly, and said aloud, “No empty ones.”

I pushed Luis out ahead of me, following the most powerful Warden on earth to our assigned battle stations.

I should have known that Joanne wasn’t that easy to kill—even for Pearl.

Luis and I were remotely laying thick blocks of power at the base of a newly emerging volcano in Los Angeles. It was brute-force work, no delicacy to it; we were well beyond that kind of control now, after many exhausting hours.

We’d just finished the last layers of protection for the embattled city, and dropped out of the aetheric back into our bodies, when the shout rang out through the hushed, startled room.

“Cassiel! Luis!”

Joanne Baldwin—bloodied, sweaty, dirty, furious—was standing in the doorway. A stillness fell over the room, a sense of dull surprise; there might have been happiness, if anyone had still had the energy for it.

She ignored everyone except us.

Joanne scrambled over cots, prone bodies, and thumped down to land flat-footed facing us, weight distributed for a fight. She looked wild and almost Djinn-bright in her fury. “Where is he?” she demanded, and I saw glimmers of fire around her hands, evidence she was just barely clinging to her controls. “David was with you! Where is he, damn you? What did you do to him? You had his bottle!”

I think she would have burned me out of sheer terror and frustration, but Lewis Orwell—who’d been lying down on a bunk not far away—rose and came toward her. She had no chance to even speak his name before he put his arms around her, not so much to comfort her as hold her back. She pushed him away, but I saw her freeze, taking in what I’d seen hours ago—the state of the man, the sadness, the exhaustion.

“Where is he?” she asked, but in a much shakier, more vulnerable voice. “God, please—”

He took her arm and led her away. Breaking the news to her, I thought, in private—that he’d taken David, that he’d imprisoned him, that he’d made the decision to leave her to die while he’d used David ruthlessly here instead, to shore up defenses, defend the helpless masses dying out there in the greater world.

I’d felt ill even witnessing the trapped fury in Joanne’s lover; he’d done as commanded, mostly because even he couldn’t deny the necessity of it, but he had never stopped hating Lewis for it.

Together they had trapped and imprisoned almost a hundred Djinn, and those bottles sat locked in a case on the far wall of the Wardens’ room. The only bottle that wasn’t there was Venna’s, the one that Lewis himself still kept.

And now Lewis was going to have to explain all of that to Joanne. That ought to be an interesting conversation… and one likely to lead to violence.

The door closed after them. The small meeting space inside didn’t seem like a place to be having the kind of confrontation that was likely between two Wardens of that level of power, but then again, I supposed that having it here in the middle of innocent potential victims might have been worse.

“Hey,” Luis said. He shook his loose black hair away from his face, grabbed a bottle of water from a cooler sitting nearby, and pitched it underhand to me. I cracked the top and drained several gulps, closing my eyes at the simple ecstasy of fulfilling a basic need. “While they’re occupied, we need to talk.”

“About…?”

“You know what.” He jerked his chin at the second, still larger room, where Pearl kept her children segregated from the Wardens. Where Isabel was. “This is coming to a head, and she’s going to strike. We need to be ready when that happens, and I don’t know what your plan is.”

I’d been working on one, but it was depressingly likely that it, too, would fail. Still, he was right; we had to try. “Make your way over toward the door,” I said. “We’ll need a diversion.”

“What kind?”

“Any kind, so long as it pulls the Wardens away from that wall.” I glanced where I meant, and he saw the locked case with its mismatched bottles neatly lined up there. “I need only about fifteen seconds.”

“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, she 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 going 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.

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 choice.”

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.

The children were forming into a tightly bound cluster around us, all facing outward… so many young Wardens, so powerful, and all their power was directed inward, channeled together into a pure white shell around them as they floated in the air over the darkness. A milky, glassine skin that sealed them all inside, together.

And it began to kill them.

The power being produced was so vivid, so unnatural, that I could sense their small bodies failing under the strain. It didn’t matter to Pearl. Nothing mattered now, except her goal, almost in her reach.

The Void children remaining in the bubble imploded… their darkness exploded out of them, destroying their fragile shells, and flooded together like spilled mercury, spread in a sinuous curve along half of the dome.

It formed a liquid design, the blaze of power, and the absence of it.

Black and white.

Yin and yang.

The opposing forces of the universe.

“Stop,” I whispered. I grieved for the children who had just… disappeared, but that battle had been lost a long time ago; Pearl had chosen them, hollowed them out, made them avatars and vessels. The other children, the ones on the white side of the dome… those still had souls, minds, personalities. They could still be saved, if only I could stop this, soon.

But I was losing everything. It was bleeding, slipping, turning dark. Everything, dark.

Then I heard a whisper, and it rose up out of the remnants of the light inside me, out of the very roots of the earth. Not a word, but a feeling, an intuition. It was the breath and life and voice of the Mother, speaking to humans, brushing over us.

Life. Pure, untainted life, a power so pure and intense that it brought sharp tears to my eyes. It didn’t warm me, but it promised me warmth, life, escape from despair.…

And then I felt Pearl gather to strike. In this moment, when the Mother was finally, gently opening herself to humans, allowing just the merest suggestion of contact with them, she was vulnerable through them.

I had to act. Had to.

But all I could manage was one last, dying burst of power—just enough to shock Pearl a little, break me free of her grip, and send me tumbling forward in a heap. I hit the glittering wall of power that had formed around her and the children head on, with stunning force.

It didn’t yield.

Pearl looked down at me, remote and cold, and her eyes were the lightless empty of the Void. “You reject what I offer, Cassiel. You offend me.”

“Good,” I said. It came out raw and bloody, but satisfying. “Kill me, then. If you can.”

She walked down a set of invisible steps, as her children parted for her—some of them had already collapsed, their white light guttering out, and the rest were burning like candles in a furnace. All their power was flowing into Pearl, I realized; it was in the unearthly pale glow of her skin. She had embodied it, and the darkness.

If she completed this last, cruel act, she would be more powerful than anything else in this world.

I couldn’t break this shell, or the cycle of power that was feeding back on itself inside it. I couldn’t save myself, or the children. I couldn’t do anything except kneel there, cold and empty, as Pearl glided toward me.

But I could do one simple thing, after all.

I could duck.

The power that lanced out of her erupted in a pure white bolt, heading straight for me; if it touched me, it would burn me to cinders.

But it didn’t touch me. I let myself fall backward, anchored by my knees, and Pearl’s strike hissed and burned the air an inch above my chest.

It bored straight through her own shell of power, lanced out into the room, slammed into the back wall, and kept going.

And I rolled out through the burned opening of the shell as it began to knit itself closed, sealing Pearl and the children in.

I barely made it over the closing threshold before it irised shut.

The black-and-white sphere containing Pearl and her followers began to rotate now, slowly at first, but growing in speed and strength.

I collapsed gasping on the broken stone floor, and wondered if I had enough strength to battle Esmeralda, who was the only living thing in the room left now outside of the sphere… but as I rolled myself over on my back and looked at her, I realized that I needn’t have worried.

Esmeralda had felt it, too, that whispering touch of the Mother. Her eyes had gone wide and very dark, and they were filled with blind tears. She was still clutching Rashid’s bottle in one shaking hand, but I didn’t think she even realized she still had it.

She didn’t see me at all.

“She forgives me for what I did,” Es said. “I feel it. I feel it. I can—I can change—”

And she did, drawing in a deep breath; the thick, muscular coils began to shift, contract, drawing together in a smooth, tapering glide… and Esmeralda was standing. She looked down at her long, smooth legs, slender feet, and cried out—grief, joy, shock all boiling together. The white shirt she was wearing reached almost to her knees now, and it left her looking younger than before, a child playing at dress-up. I wondered how many years it had been since she’d been herself, been truly and completely human.

Just in time to lose everything again.

She blinked and looked down at me. “You don’t look so good, lady,” she said. “I’ve seen dead things on beaches with better color.”

“Esmeralda,” I whispered. “Get out. Go. Find Isabel.”

“She doesn’t need to find me,” Isabel said from the doorway. “I’m right here, Mom.” She was still covered in plaster dust, smeared and dirty, but she was alive. And behind her was Luis, bloody but still upright. He ignored Esmeralda, ignored the spinning sphere hovering in the middle of the room, and limped to me.

“We’re okay out there now,” he said. “Lots of sleeping kids. Djinn are holding the power bubble over us.” He collapsed down on the floor next to me, and pulled me into his arms. “God, you’re cold, Cass.”

I couldn’t tell him I was dying, but it was true; the darkness that I’d been infected with was eating away, steadily and quietly killing me. It was a kind of virus, I decided; as it fed on me, it reproduced. Soon, I’d be a vessel for it, like Pearl’s Void children.

And then I’d be unacceptably dangerous.

I’d failed on every level. Luis, Isabel, even Esmer-

alda… they had succeeded. But I hadn’t stopped Pearl. I hadn’t even slowed her. All my power, all my history, and it had come to this.

To nothing.

Ashan was dead now; whatever plan he’d foreseen for me, it had been false, or it had died along with him. My failure would cancel out all of the great victories won by my friends, my family, by humanity, because I had not been strong enough, fast enough, Djinn enough.

I was doing worse than killing humanity. I was killing the Mother herself, through my failure.

But I could do one last thing right.

I could stop my transformation into the dark angel that Pearl wanted me to become.

I pulled free of Luis and touched his face very gently. “I love you,” I said. It was a good-bye, and he knew it; I saw the shock ripple through him, and the awful resignation in the rigidity of his muscles. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t do this,” he said. “Whatever you’re thinking, don’t.”

“Mom?” Isabel took a halting step toward us, then stopped. “Mom, what are you doing?”

“What I have to do.” I said it gently but firmly. “We always knew it would come to an ending, didn’t we?”

She shook her head. “No. I don’t believe in endings. I’m not going to let you—”

Her eyes rolled back in her head, and she collapsed back into Luis’s arms. He’d given her just a touch, a gentle push into the darkness, and now he held her gently in his arms and kissed her forehead. He wasn’t looking at me any longer. “She’s going to win, then,” he said. “You can’t stop her.”

The room was lurid with the cream-and-black of the sphere, now spinning fast, whipping between black and white so fast that it blurred into a smear of gray. The power in the room was like needles in my skin, a burning, stinging rush.

“No,” I said. “I can’t.” She was, I sensed, almost there, almost ready to unleash all that power into the heart of the world.

Almost ready to kill the very soul of our Mother.

And here, at the end, filled with a growing darkness, I felt an unexpected sense of… peace. Of quiet inside me, and in that silence, I heard a voice speak.

Make the choice.

Ashan’s voice, an echo of his imperious tone. He might be gone from the world, but he was still demanding things of me.

I opened my eyes and said, “Esmeralda. I need your help.”