Unbroken

Chapter 4

TWO MILES DOWN THE ROAD, I found the Victory motorcycle sitting neatly parked on the edge. The tire marks told me that the truck had stopped, unloaded it, and driven on. Good. I leaned against the bike for a few moments, head down. The rain continued, but it was fitful now, and light; no other traffic had passed in either direction.

I mounted the bike and started it with a spark of power, then patted the sleek side with absent fondness. “Let’s find them,” I said. I opened the saddlebag strapped to the side and found men’s clothing, rolled up tightly; the beer bottle with Rashid’s spirit fit nicely inside the curl of a pair of soft blue jeans, and I cushioned it further with a fleece shirt.

Then I eased the Victory out onto the black ribbon of road, and started the ride.

The punishing vibration of the engine felt magically soothing to me, pounding the kinks from knotted muscles and clearing my mind. The wind and rain in my face woke something primal in me, something that thought clearly and coldly about our chances. They were, of course, poor at best. Lewis Orwell himself had admitted that; until the bulk of the Wardens docked from their mission at sea, those of us stranded here were the thinnest possible line of defense. There was no chance we wouldn’t be shattered.

But we had an unexpected, even shocking advantage, if we could actually trap and bottle the Djinn. I’d always loathed that loophole in the freedom and power of my kind, but now I felt grateful for it; without it, the humans wouldn’t stand a chance, and ultimately neither would the Djinn themselves or the Mother. We had to maintain a fragile balance to fight for reason, for peace, and for the defeat of our real enemy: Pearl.

The Mother was experiencing agony and the temporary madness that came of it. If we could soothe her, it would pass. But Pearl… Pearl was a cancer at the very heart of the world, and she had to be burned away.

The bottle in my saddlebags represented a step toward all of that. Perhaps. At the very least, it symbolized a chance we hadn’t had an hour ago.

I saw the white flash of paint ahead on the road, and accelerated around a curve. The truck was just ahead now, climbing a rise. I could catch it in only a moment.

I was still half a mile back when the vehicle made the top of the hill…

… And exploded in a fireball, raining metal and debris into the trees.

“No!” I screamed. It burst out of me in a fury, ripping a blood path down my nerves and flesh, and I pushed the throttle hard over, heedless of the slick road, the dangers, everything except the burning wreck that was overturned there at the top of the hill.

No one could have survived that.

No one.

I found the first body lying in a burning heap on the side of the road. The pine trees were aflame, and the sound of trees snapping as the sap boiled was like war.

It was very still.

I leaped off the Victory while it was still in motion, letting it slide to a stop as I ran to the body’s side. I turned it over.

Luis.

His eyes were tightly shut, his hands fisted, but as I touched him the flames snuffed out into surly little curls of smoke, and he drew in a deep breath.

His clothes were burned, but as I frantically checked him I realized that the skin beneath was unharmed. Reddened, but not seared. He had a broken ulna and two cracked ribs, but nothing that couldn’t be fixed.

“Did my best,” he whispered. “Christ. That hurt.”

I smoothed his wet hair back. He smelled acridly of burned plastic and metal, but he was alive. Improbably, alive.

“Iz,” he said. “Over there. She jumped, with the girl.” He pointed with his unbroken arm. I kissed him quickly and rose to move in that direction.

The trees there were broken, snapped off at the base and laid out in an eerily neat circular pattern, like wheat stalks bent flat by the wind. And in the center of it was Isabel, curled up like an infant.

No sign of the girl at all.

I turned Isabel over. Her eyes were tightly shut, her skin pale, but she was breathing. Improbably, she wasn’t even scorched—not a single mark on her.

She was whispering under her breath. I pulled her into my arms and bent my head closer to make it out.

“—Couldn’t stop her, couldn’t stop her…”

“Isabel,” I said. “Ibby. Ibby!”

Her dark eyes flew open, but they were shockingly ringed by red now, as if every blood vessel in them had exploded with effort. She didn’t seem to see me at all. “Couldn’t stop her,” she whispered. “Mama, I couldn’t—”

“Shhh, Ibby, hush, it’s all right; you’re all right.” It appalled me that she was, in this extreme, calling on her mother, on a mother she’d seen gunned down. “It’s Cassiel. I’m here.”

“Mama,” she wailed, just as she had on that terrible day, and then her arms went around my neck. “Mama, I couldn’t stop her. I tried but she just—”

Me. She wasn’t calling on Angela, on the ghost of her mother who was gone. She was calling me by that name. Me.

My breath left me in a rush, and I held her tightly against me. Breathed in the smell of her hair, kissed her forehead, and felt a sunburst of feeling so large, so overwhelming that I could not even properly call it love. It was more than that. Much more.

“The girl,” Ibby said, whispering now with her head against my shoulder. “It was the girl. I thought she was sleeping, but she woke up and I couldn’t stop her. She was so strong.… It’s my fault.…”

I carried her over to her uncle. “Luis is all right, my love, you see? He’s all right.” I sat her down next to him as he struggled up, and he hugged her with his good arm. “You couldn’t have done more. You saved him, Ibby.”

“Es,” Ibby whispered, and turned her tear-streaked, eerily red-eyed face toward me. “Where’s Es?”

The truck was a blazing inferno, belching black smoke and radiating an intense, crippling heat. I couldn’t see anything within it except the stark bones of steel pillars. If Esmeralda was inside, there was little left of her.

“I’m right here,” Esmeralda said, and I confess, I jumped; she was wrapped around a pine tree, dangling her human half upside down. Her fangs flashed as she laughed. “I’m no fool, Iz. You wanted to pretend that little bitch was safe, so I bailed out on the road and got in the trees to follow. I’m just surprised it took so long for her to try to blow you up, that’s all. I’d have done it way sooner.” She slithered down the trunk of the tree and righted herself to face me. “Hey, why aren’t you dead, anyway? No way you could take down that Djinn.”

“You—you left me?” Isabel said slowly, sitting up. “You just left?”

Esmeralda shrugged and crossed her arms, leaning her upper body against a tree trunk for support while her coils stacked around her. “Yeah, so? You act like a dumbass, you get left. First rule of survival, Iz. So don’t do it again. This ain’t no rescue mission, and you can’t save anybody. Right, Albino Barbie?”

I supposed that was meant for me, but I was watching the disillusionment on Isabel’s face, and it hurt. She’d trusted Esmeralda, formed a partly imaginary bond with the older girl. She hadn’t realized what I’d always known—that Esmeralda’s capacity for devotion, and for love, was severely blunted.

“Indeed,” I said, raising my eyebrows. “Not everyone can be saved. But the difference between you and Isabel is that Isabel will try. And that is a virtue, not a vice.”

Esmeralda shot me a murderous look, a rude gesture, and sank sullenly into her coils. “Fine, let her Pollyanna along all you want, but the time’s coming, Djinn bitch. Time’s coming she has to make a choice, and if you get in the way, you’ll get hurt. You know I’m right.”

“You left me,” Isabel said. “You knew it was going to go wrong, and you didn’t even try to help!”

“Girl, look at me. I’ve got no freaky powers now; your Warden friends saw to that.” Esmeralda shrugged. “You wouldn’t have listened to me anyway. Right?”

Isabel turned her face away. Her uncle hugged her closer, but she pulled free and walked toward the burning truck. She extended her hand, and I felt the stirring not just of the air as the fire slowly died, but also on the aetheric. The girl was a massive flare of power. A beacon of light in the dark.

She snuffed out the flames and left a smoking, frighteningly charred wreck in its place. “We have to move it off the road,” she said. “Somebody could crash into it.”

Luis looked at me, and I saw the exhaustion in his face. “Esmeralda,” I said. “Help her.”

“I told you, I ain’t got no—”

“You have strength in your body,” I said. “Use it.”

She glowered, but sullenly shifted her coils, wrapped around the wreck, and began dragging it with a metallic screech off to the side. “It’s still hot,” she complained. “Ow.”

“Big baby,” Isabel observed. “It’s not that hot.”

Esmeralda rattled her tail warningly, and Isabel kicked it and walked back to Luis. “Give me your arm,” she said. When he hesitated, she sighed theatrically. “Tío, you can’t run around with it broken, and it’ll take days for you to heal it yourself. Just let me do it.”

Over her shoulder, I nodded at him. He let her take his hand in hers, and even though I looked away, I felt the astonishing power as it swept through him. Ibby’s gifts were not natural, and she did not yet have the fine and delicate control that Luis possessed, but for sheer force, it rivaled the most powerful Wardens in existence… and, I thought, might even rival a Djinn.

The fact that she’d been forced into that power still woke a sickened feeling within me. Her body would never develop along a natural path, or survive as it should. Pearl was to blame for that—Pearl, and the circumstances we now faced. If you love her, stop her, a whisper inside me said. Take her out of the fight. Protect her.

But I couldn’t. There was no safety in this world, and no protection.

If you were her mother, you’d protect her.

Somehow, that whisper hurt more than anything else. I wanted to fill that aching void in Isabel’s life, but I was as crippled as Esmeralda. As untrustworthy.

I could not disappoint her so badly.

Luis’s bone knitted together cleanly, though he’d have to be careful in lifting for a few days. If only all our troubles could be so easily fixed. “We’ve got a transportation issue,” I said. “I can only carry one on the motorcycle. Esmeralda can go on her own, but—”

“Take Ibby,” Luis said. “I can hike it.”

He couldn’t. He was drained, and it took time for an Earth Warden to fully recover from such profligate efforts as he’d shown the past week. Physically, mentally, and psychically.

“It’s twenty more miles,” I said. “I’ll take Isabel, and we’ll find something suitable. We’ll come back for you both. Until then, rest yourself. You know you need it.”

“So do you,” he said, and lowered his voice as he took my hand. “Cass, you’re not a Djinn. You’re flesh and blood, like me. And you’ve done too much already.”

He was right, of course; my reserves of power were faint and shallow, but they had to come from him, through him. Resting would not help me as much as forcing him to rest.

“Isabel will protect me,” I said, and smiled a little. “I’m just the driver. Promise me you’ll rest. Promise.” Because now that I looked at him, in the cold afternoon light, he seemed so pale, and the dark rings around his eyes more pronounced.

But the smile was still as radiant as ever. “Chica, I get it. I promise.” He pulled me closer, and just for a moment, our lips met in a soft, sweet echo of that promise. No passion in it, not now, not here, but something even deeper than that.

Trust.

I drew in my breath slowly as I pulled back, and the wind stirred my pale hair and caressed his cheek with it. I didn’t want to let him go, but I knew that I had to do it. The longer I delayed, the worse our situation might be.

“Look after him,” I told Esmeralda. “If anything happens to him—”

“Yeah, yeah, you’ll make me into a coat, a pair of boots, and an awesome hat, I get it,” she said. “Just go. I’m sick of looking at your pale, bony ass.” She flicked a hand at me dismissively. I gave her a hard five-second stare before walking to my Victory. I’d laid it flat, but on the side not holding the precious bottle; I levered it upright, checked it—save for minor cosmetic damage, intact—and swung my leg over.

“Isabel,” I said. “Let’s go.”

She hopped on without a hesitation and put her arms around my waist. For a second I was reminded of her as a smaller child, in this same position on a different bike, on a different day. A more hopeful one, perhaps.

Then I shook my head, started the engine, and we left Esmeralda and Luis behind, with the dull smoke still staining the air above them.

I was worried about Isabel still; her use of power had lit up the aetheric again, like a lightning strike on an inky night… and it would draw attention. Right now, she might be the most powerful Warden not shrouded by that black corner, far out to sea, and that meant she would be a target.

But all the vigilance seemed to be in vain. We rode fast, but smoothly. The road was empty of traffic or threats. No wrecks littered the highway. The sun had slipped beneath the line of trees now, casting cool velvet shadows across the asphalt. I drove with part of my awareness on the aetheric. If the Djinn—or Pearl’s forces—decided to attack, they wouldn’t give much warning. A split second might mean the difference between life and death.

Less than fifteen minutes later, we topped a steep hill, and below us in a soft, mist-shrouded valley lay a small town. The billboard-large sign proclaimed it HEMMINGTON, A NICE PLACE TO LIVE, and proved it with an utterly artificial photo of a smiling family.

It was very quiet below.

I slowed the bike and stopped, idling. Isabel rose to look over my shoulder. “Why are we waiting?” she asked. “Come on—let’s go!”

“A moment,” I said. There was nothing unusual, either in my field of vision or on the aetheric, yet something gave me pause.

“Look, there’s a parking lot,” she said, and pointed. “Right there. We can get a van or something. We don’t even have to go that far.”

“We need food and water,” I said.

“Toilet paper,” she added. “For sure. Maybe that premoistened kind. There’s a store right there. C’mon, it’s fine. There’s nothing in there. The whole town’s empty.”

She was right—the place was ghostly silent. Lights burned, but I sensed no human habitation at all.

“In and out. Quickly,” I said. “You see to the van. I’ll drop you there and go on to the store. If there’s any trouble at all, take the wheels and go. You can drive, can’t you?”

She laughed. “I was a kid yesterday, but I can learn fast, Cassie. Don’t worry about me.”

There was no point in hesitating; the danger would be there, or not, and waiting wouldn’t improve our chances. I pressed the throttle and sent the Victory gliding down the long hill. I kept the rumbling to a minimum, out of instinct as much as caution.

Too many predators out, and none of them in clear view. Staying quiet and small was as good a defense as any.

The parking lot wasn’t large, but it had several choices of vehicles that would do; the largest was the work truck of some sort of contractor, and stocked with tools, from what I could make out of the interior. Not clean, but useful. I pointed to it as I rolled to a stop, and Isabel nodded as she slid off the bike. “Ibby. Be careful,” I said. She waved impatiently, and I felt a spark of power as she unlocked the door to climb inside. I felt a primitive impulse to stay with her, watch over her, but that would only increase our risks. Better to divide the job.

I drove the bike onto the sidewalk in front of the store. It was called Mike’s EZ Stop, and there were three cars out in front, all silent and deserted. When I killed the engine on the Victory, I could hear sounds—music, applause, talking voices, all of it softened by distance.

Televisions and radios. Not living souls.

The thick glass windows showed nothing—a brightly lit interior of shelves, groceries, coolers at the back fully stocked with cold drinks and packs of beer. I pushed open the door and heard a soft electronic tone, but no one appeared. The registers were open and bare, as if someone had methodically stripped them of cash, but there was no vandalism here.

I took two cloth bags from the environmentally friendly pile—ironic, now—and went shopping.

I checked the aisles methodically for anyone hiding as I grabbed two loaves of bread, peanut butter, jam, dried jerky, energy bars—anything that would keep without refrigeration. I avoided the canned goods, only because the water would be heavy enough; if this proved safe, we could always come back for more.

I was putting the last of the water into the bag when I rounded the corner and faced the last wall of coolers.

They did not contain beer.

The dead stared back at me, frosted and ice-eyed—employees still in aprons, a man in a tan jumpsuit who might have gone with the van Isabel was taking, a small boy crumpled into a fetal ball, a fat old woman in a flowered dress, more; they were stacked in the cooler in a horrifying mess.

Not all were intact.

It couldn’t be all of the town, as overwhelming as it seemed.

I backed up into a row of shelves, and jars of spaghetti sauce clinked together. One popped free and shattered in a mess of red and broken, jagged glass.

Out. Get out. Something screamed inside me, some instinct more human than Djinn, though there was alarm within my Djinn soul as well. I tightened my grip on the bags, whirled, and ran for the doors.

The glass suddenly went opaque with cracks.

I threw myself forward into a facedown slide on the linoleum floor just as all the windows shattered inward, shredding the interior of the store like a bomb. Wind. Not just any wind. No, this was traveling at insane force, blowing over shelves, ripping up counters, and flinging them into the air. I saw a register fly by overhead before it hit a sliding metal shelf and blew apart into sharp fragments of metal and plastic. The electrical power cord hissed wildly in the air like a living thing and slapped the floor only a few inches from my hand.

I had no defense against weather. Not in here.

The initial burst of air had destroyed things, but now it sucked out again, then turned, and turned, warm and cool colliding in an insane battle for supremacy. The debris swirled and sped up into a blur, and the roof of the little store ripped away with a shriek of cracking steel and timber.

Gone.

The walls went next, unraveling into bricks and beams. I curled up tight on the floor and felt the wind sucking at me, ripping me with teeth made of steel and glass, wood and sharp plastic. It would flay me alive, or pull me into the storm of deadly, grinding debris. The linoleum floor, which was being ripped away around me, was at least under my control; made of largely organic materials, it was something within reach of my Earth powers, and I first rolled and wrapped the thick, flexible coating around my body. It protected me to some extent—enough that I began grabbing and dissolving the other organic debris in the air, especially the cutting and stabbing surfaces, into dust. The wind could still throw me at fatal speed, but at least it couldn’t rip me to pieces quite so easily.

But it had other tricks, this tornado formed—I felt it now—of sheer, volcanic hatred… and as it shredded the coolers at the sides of the store, bodies joined the debris. The wind scoured them apart in seconds, into wet flesh and sharp, flaying bone. It was all organic, all under the domain of my Earth power, but it was too much, too fast, especially now that the storm was mixing so many different kinds of weapons together.

The dead attacked me in the second wave, and I’d already spent what power I had to stop the first assault. The bones stabbed at me like flying knives, and skulls pummeled me with the force of thrown bowling balls. The thick flooring couldn’t protect me completely, or forever, and the tornado seemed to be growing in fury now, focused solely on ripping me to pieces.…

And then something entered the fight, on my side. A brilliant rush of power that threw up walls around me, solid earth and concrete, rigid metal, a berm of safety that gave me relief from the pummeling.

And then, quite suddenly, I felt the back of the tornado snap as the power fueling it withdrew. The wind faltered, scattered in all directions, and bones and ripped flesh and debris rained down on the shelter that covered me.

I couldn’t breathe. The linoleum had wrapped tightly to my body, and the air within the shelter had been exhausted in only a few gasps.

I’d suffocate here, in my safe haven.…

But then the top peeled away with the ease of a can opening, and a face looked down on me. Two faces, actually. One, veiled with a fall of dark hair, was Isabel’s, looking pale and frightened.

The other was indigo blue, silver-eyed, and I felt a surge of frantic panic as I realized that it was Rashid. Rashid, whom I’d imprisoned in a bottle…

… That was now held tightly in Isabel’s hand.

“Get her out,” Isabel ordered. Rashid ripped the shelter further open, took hold of the linoleum, and unrolled me from its stifling embrace. I gagged in dusty breaths and stared at his extended hand for a few seconds before grabbing it.

He lifted me effortlessly out and into a wasteland. A very limited and specific one, covering only the building that had once been Mike’s EZ Stop; there was nothing left but scattered bricks, rubble, and the pulped remains of the dead. Not something I wanted Isabel to witness, but not something I could easily shield her from, either.

Isabel grabbed on to me and hugged me, wordless and shaking. I hugged her back and looked over at Rashid, who inclined his head just a tiny bit.

“You’re sane,” I said.

“Well,” he replied, with a sharp-toothed smile, “that is not a common opinion. But I am no longer a puppet of the Mother’s will. Only of hers.” He cast a dark look at Isabel, and my arms tightened around her in reaction. “You are well aware how I feel about such things.”

“Don’t,” I warned him. “She’s a child.”

“Old enough to hold my bottle,” he said. “Though that was your doing, my sweet dear cousin, sticking me in one. For the second time. There will come a reckoning. Soon.”

“Then reckon with me. Not her. She took possession only to save my life.” I hesitated a moment, then said, “What happened here, in this place?”

He didn’t have to answer me; a captive Djinn could easily use the rules of his confinement to throw endless obstacles in the ways of humans with whom he had issues. I counted it a fairly good sign that he said, “Djinn. Of course. There is an anima here. They waked it and moved on, and it did the rest. And will continue to do so.”

An anima was the spirit of a place, a kind of tiny splinter of the Mother’s consciousness, though it was difficult to tell how linked it was to her, or whether it was its own creature, like the Djinn. Anima were generally benign, though some darker ones gave rise to legends of hauntings.

This one, though, was mad and angry, left to stalk through a dead town and rip apart anything that intruded on its fury. There would be many of these, I realized now… pockets of seeming calm that would lure in the unsuspecting, only to trigger a boundless rage. The Djinn had set traps, knowing that humans would seek safety in places that looked safe, comfortable, normal.

I couldn’t help a shudder. The anima wasn’t dead here, only hurt and waiting. It wouldn’t wish to fight a Djinn, so Rashid’s presence alone saved us… but the next to stop here wouldn’t be as lucky.

Rashid stared with those unsettling eyes and an expression I couldn’t read, then said, “If you’re done with using me, child, you can put your toys away.”

“Oh,” Isabel said softly. “Oh, uh, I don’t know how—”

“I’m hardly likely to tell you.” For all his menacing talk, Rashid was, I thought, showing remarkable restraint. Djinn were naturally inclined to take every advantage to trick their masters, but he was deliberately refraining.

Isabel looked frankly panicked. This was well outside the narrow bounds of her experience, and her hand was shaking. Any Djinn with half an impulse toward freedom could have startled her enough to drop the bottle, shattering it on the rubble and setting its captive free.

But Rashid did not move.

“Find something to put in the opening,” I told Isabel softly. “A cork would be best. Something that fits tightly.” She looked around frantically, while Rashid crossed his arms, rocked back and forth on his heels, and shook his head. She finally held up a triangular cosmetic sponge to me, and I nodded. “Now tell him to go back in the bottle.”

“Go back in the bottle,” she said in a rush, and then her cheeks turned red. “Please?”

“For the Mother’s sake, school her if you want to keep her alive,” Rashid told me, but he disappeared, and I gave the girl another nod.

“Push the sponge in tightly,” I said. She did, and let out a sudden gust of breath. She held the bottle out to me, and I took it. “Good job, Iz. Never forget, a captive Djinn is not your friend, only your tool, and tools can turn in your hand. Don’t use him unless you have no choice.” I gave her an odd look then, and voiced the question that had suddenly come to my mind. “How did you know about the bottle?”

The hot red blush in her cheeks grew stronger, and she looked down. “I thought I’d better get your bike,” she said. “I was putting it in the truck when all this started. I was kind of—looking around.”

“And how did you know what it was?”

She frowned and stared at the bottle in my hand—an ordinary empty beer bottle, somewhat ridiculously sealed with a flare of cosmetic sponge. “Can’t you see it?”

I saw nothing beyond the obvious. “What do you see?”

“Him,” she said. “It’s like a sun inside there. It burns.”

That was… impossible. I stared from the bottle to her, thoughtfully, and then became aware of a sharp ache in my right side. The first of many complaints from a body that had sustained much abuse; it was the first voice of a mob’s roar, all clamoring for attention. I had many cuts, some deep, and more than a few cracked bones and torn muscles.

And no time for any of it. “My bike is in the van?” I asked. “And where is the van?”

“In the parking lot,” she said. “I’m sorry, Cassie, I was going to go, but—”

“But then you saw what was happening,” I finished for her. “And you decided to stay and help. Iz, you can’t do that. You must follow orders. Do you understand? I told you to take the van and go. You might have gotten yourself killed along with me.”

“I didn’t,” she said. “And you needed me. You did.”

It was difficult to argue the truth of that, especially when I had to use her stabilizing arm to limp my way out of the wreckage of the store.

The contrasts were eerie. The store was a pile of wreckage and shredded human remains, but just beyond it the street lay quiet and calm, only a few scattered bricks to show any disorder. The parking lot where Iz had left the van still sat unmolested, all the cars shrouded now with a faint coating of dust that still hung in the twilight air.

“What was that?” Iz asked me, as we got into the van. I took the driver’s side.

“I don’t know,” I said, and looked out on the still, picturesque little town. “But I don’t think we’ll find anything else we can use here.”

Or, I added silently, any survivors. A few lights burned in the windows, but there was an emptiness to this place that went deep, all the way to the unsettled core of the earth.

We would, I thought as I jump-started the van and got it rolling toward the exit, go around this place. Well and far around. For all its peaceful appearance, there was a curse hanging on this place, and a powerful one. I wondered what Rashid would tell me if I removed him from the bottle and asked what had happened here to madden the anima so horribly.

I wondered whether he would lie to me.

Probably.

Transportation acquired, we chose a different route at a crossroads rather than visiting the silent town of Hemmington; this one led to an even smaller hamlet, but thankfully there were people on the streets and cars passing through. The people were scared and nervous, and the cars seemed to be loaded with possessions, but it was better than our last stop.

Luis, always cautious, gassed the van up and did the grocery shopping himself (as if it had been my fault!).… He returned with much the same choices I would have made, but had thrown in some candy bars and soft drinks. “Comfort food,” he said. “Ain’t like we’re going to have a whole lot of comfort, overall. Here, I also picked up camping gear. We’re going to need it, one way or another. Not likely to be a lot of four-star accommodations in our future.”

He’d also, without pointing it out, added some interesting survival tools to our supplies, including a rifle, ammunition, some wickedly lovely knives, and other things whose purposes weren’t quite as clear to me. Esmeralda understood their purpose, however. “Water disinfection tabs, portable chemical heating pads… You’re getting serious about this survivalist stuff. Good for you. This shit’s going to get real, fast.”

“You didn’t see that town,” Isabel said from where she sat on the dirty floor of the van, knees pulled up to her chest. She wasn’t looking up as we inventoried the contents of the bags that Luis had brought, and I worried about the stillness of her posture. It seemed more traumatized than I had expected—but then, I had dragged a child, only six years old in real years, if not in body, into a place full of danger and very real horror. What had I expected, that she would easily adapt? Simply accept what she’d seen?

I sank down beside her and put my arm around her. “We won’t go back,” I said.

“We should,” Iz whispered. “All those people. They all needed help, and nobody was there for them. Now they’re just… waiting. All alone.”

It was, I realized, the neglect that bothered her; we’d left that town without burying a single body, recognizing a single lost life.

I took her hand in mine and squeezed, just a little. “I know,” I said. “But, Isabel, you know we cannot go back there. We just can’t. It’s too dangerous, and all that we can offer them is a pyre or a grave. There are people who need our help to stay alive, and that is where we must turn our efforts.”

“We could use him,” she said.

I knew who she was talking about, but it was something I didn’t want to bring up—not here, not in front of Esmeralda, who was tightly coiled in the corner, watching us with her bright, odd eyes. She was, I thought, jealous. Jealous of the two of us, together, sharing this small grace. Perhaps she’d even been jealous of the fact that I’d taken her with me on the trip to Hemmington. I had no way of knowing; she’d never admit it, if so.

But I didn’t trust her, and couldn’t help that fact. Telling her there was a Djinn captive in a bottle was something far too dangerous. The temptation would be irresistible for her—either to torment the Djinn, or to use him for her own benefit. She had a bad history of that kind of behavior, after all.

No, far better I keep Rashid as a secret, for now. I might have need of him—or Isabel might, though I couldn’t trust his forbearance with her for long. He wasn’t a creature of patience.

“Hey,” Luis said, and I glanced up at him. Iz did not. “Let’s talk outside a minute, Cass.” I nodded, hugged Iz once more, and stood to follow him out of the van. He slammed the grimy back door and turned the handle to secure it, then walked away. Not far, but far enough that it was clear he didn’t want to be overheard.

Then he turned on me and said, “You almost got her killed.”

“I know,” I said. “I’m sorry. I never intended—”

“You may not intend it, but you can’t say you couldn’t anticipate it. I’m not letting her out of my sight again. Or you. No more splitting up, no matter what.”

“You needed time to—”

“To heal? Yeah. And you’re covered in cuts and bruises and from the way you’re leaning, you’ve got a cracked rib going on there, too. So you tell me, how are we protecting each other, exactly? How can we?” He swallowed hard and put his heavy, warm hands on my shoulders. “We have to look out for each other, because we need each other more than ever. So don’t try to protect me by putting me in the rear, okay? And I won’t do it for you. We look after the girls, and we watch each other’s backs.” He paused, and smiled a little. “God, you’re beautiful.”

I laughed out loud, because it was blackly comical—I was dirty, covered in bruises. My hair still had the shredded remains of leaves from the night in the woods. I’d been coated in dust in Hemmington, which at least had served to mask the nightmarish remains of blood and other less identifiable substances from the abattoir of that destroyed market. “No,” I said. “Not now, and perhaps not ever. But I think you are just surprised to see me standing.”

“Hell, girl, I’m surprised either of us is breathing. And you are beautiful. Always.” He kissed me so tenderly that it stilled everything for a moment, all the pain and fear and worry and time ticking away. And then he made me smile by saying, “Okay, I’m not saying you couldn’t get an upgrade with a shower and shampoo, maybe a change of clothes. I would personally love to see you in a towel right now.”

“You’re insane,” I said.

“Yeah, well, some people cope with certain death by getting a little bit horny. Why, are you saying you wouldn’t like that right now?”Oddly enough, even after everything—or, perhaps because of it—the idea had a certain bizarre appeal. I was overwhelmingly aware of time passing, of the situation worsening around us, but the fantasy that somehow this could stop just for an hour, perhaps two—that we could find some beautiful, quiet space for the two of us and live that fantasy out, in private—seemed breathtakingly lovely.

And impossible, of course. But I was starting to realize that today, and every day after, would be a study in the impossible. Each minute we both still lived was an improbable gift.

“If you can find a motel,” I said softly, with my lips close to his ear, “and find a way to keep the girls safe and elsewhere, then I will be happy to show you how I feel about your suggestions. Though I fear now is not the time.”

“I know,” Luis said, and pressed his lips to the sensitive skin beneath my ear, waking shivers. “But I figured the thought might keep us both focused for a while.”

It was certainly having a focusing effect upon me, but just then a sharp, shrill tune came from Luis’s pocket, and he pulled back and fumbled for it with evident surprise. “Thought all the grids were down,” he said as he checked the screen of his phone. “Back up, I guess. For now.”

“Who is it?”

He shook his head and pressed the button to accept the call. “Rocha,” he said. “Who is this?” I couldn’t hear the response, but I could see his face—still and frozen halfway to a frown. “What?”

I mouthed the obvious question again, but he looked away from me, frown slowly deepening. When I started to speak aloud, he held up his hand, palm out, to stop me.

“Yeah, I hear you,” he said. “You can’t be serious. It’s me, Cassiel, my niece—we aren’t exactly the infantry. You want an extraction, you’re going to have to send in reinforcements. Lots of them.”

Another pause. He turned completely away from me and lowered his voice. I picked out words that were disturbing, in or out of context—suicide, dangerous, impossible—but then he ended the conversation as suddenly as he’d started it, and shoved the phone back into his pocket. He stayed turned away from me for a few more seconds, hands fisted, and then slowly faced me.

“So,” he said. “I guess you heard something about that.”

“A suicide mission,” I said calmly. “Impossible. You used the word dangerous, but clearly that was superfluous, given the rest of it.”

He grinned, but it was a small, tightly controlled expression, and above it his eyes remained serious. “They’ve got a small group of Wardens trapped, and they need an Earth Warden to go get them. They’re Fire and Weather, can’t do it on their own. So I guess we’re drafted.”

“Where are they?”

He pointed down. “They’re trapped in a collapsed mine shaft,” he said. “And it’s deep. But since there are six of them, and we’re losing manpower all the time, I guess HQ doesn’t feel like writing them off quite yet. They want our—and I’m quoting here—best efforts at rescue.”

I raised my eyebrows. “How far down?”

“Honestly? Nobody’s sure. You know those miners in Chile they rescued a couple of years ago? Not quite that far, but farther than any sane person should have ended up. I’m guessing a Djinn shoved them in there and slammed the door.”

“And could still be guarding it,” I said. “Perhaps.”

“Yeah, maybe so. Which is why I don’t want Iz and Esmeralda along for the ride on this one. We take them all the way to Seattle, get them settled and safe, and then we go on to the rescue.”

“We just agreed we wouldn’t split up.”

“You want to drag two kids down hundreds of feet into gas-filled tunnels where any little spark could blow us all up? I’m pretty sure Esmeralda wouldn’t go anyway, which would split us up to begin with. And I don’t want Iz down there. Call me crazy, but I think we’ve done enough to her for one day.” By we he meant, of course, me. I’d done enough to her for the day. And he was entirely right. “We’re going to need help, especially if there’s a Djinn involved.”

I cocked an eyebrow. “Will you trust me in this?”

“Don’t I always?” he asked. “What am I trusting you about, specifically?”

“I’d rather not say right now.”

His head tilted a little to the side as he regarded me, and although the trust I’d requested was there, so was a healthy dose of doubt. I didn’t blame him. I’d have felt the same, really. “But you’re going to say before we’re half a mile underground and getting hammered by a pissed-off insane Djinn, right? And it’d be real handy if you had, say, a Weather Warden in your back pocket who could manufacture breathable air, because I’m thinking the lack of that will be a little challenging.”

“Trust me,” I said again.

He dragged a gentle finger down the side of my face. “Oh,” he said. “Cassiel, if I trust anybody today, it’s you. I got no choice, do I?”

In truth, I wasn’t sure that made me feel very much better.

“Excuse me,” said a new, and very tentative, voice. I turned, and there was a woman standing a few feet away, with her hand clasping that of a small boy of about six years old. She was pretty, and the uncertain voice seemed to match her hesitant body language. “Did you come from out of town?” That was a polite way, I thought, of saying that we weren’t from around here. The boy ogled Luis with fascination, especially the flame tattoos that licked the skin around the rolled-up sleeves of his shirt.

“Yes, ma’am,” Luis replied. He sounded extremely polite suddenly. “We’re just getting a few supplies, then we’re heading out.”

“Oh, I wasn’t— No, of course you’re welcome here. I’m sorry if it sounded like you weren’t, sir. That wasn’t what I meant, not at all.…” She was flustered now, and solved it by extending her free hand to him. “I’m Lucy. Lucy McKee.”

“Hello, Mrs. McKee.”

“I only asked because the phones are down, and there’s a lot of rumors—the TV reports look just awful. Is it terrorists? Do you know? A lot of people are saying it’s terrorists.” She had large blue eyes that her son had inherited, and they both looked at us with grave, hopeful intensity.

“No, ma’am, I don’t think it’s terrorists,” Luis said. He said it gently, but firmly. “Right now, there are a lot of things going on, but none of them are man-made as far as I’m aware. You should tell your family to stay together. You have a disaster plan, don’t you? How to contact each other? You’ve got food and water supplies?”

“Well, a few, but—”

“Get more,” he said. “Mrs. McKee, I don’t want to scare anybody, but I’m not telling you anything that they won’t be saying on the radio and TV soon. Keep in contact with your people, and get yourself supplied with food and water. Don’t try to go to a bigger city right now. That’s where the trouble will be worse. Understand?”

She nodded silently. I saw a glimmer of tears in her eyes, and fear, but she blinked and forced a smile for her son. “We’ll do that, won’t we, sweetie? We’ll go to the store right now.”

“Can I get Pop Rocks?”

“If you want to, of course you can.” She looked up at us, oddly embarrassed. “I don’t usually let him, but—”

“Let him have what he wants,” Luis said. “Today. Stay safe, ma’am.”

She gave him another smile, fainter this time, and hurried her son along. We watched them go down the block, to the same grocery store Luis had already visited.

“Do you think they’ll live?” I asked him softly. He didn’t look at me.

“Do you think any of us will?”

Without another word, or waiting for my answer, he walked back to the van.