Undone

Chapter 14

THE RANCH—IF that was where I was—seemed endless, and empty. There was little to mark this place as having human residents—no fences, no grazing animals other than deer that bounded away from the road at the sound of the approaching engine. I saw no lights, no structures, no other vehicles.

For all I knew, The Ranch went on for many miles in all directions. Any route I chose, if I left the road, would be utterly random.

But the road had to lead somewhere.

Luis is probably dead, my remorseless Djinn ghost said. What will you do then? You should walk away now, and save yourself the pain and trouble.

I glanced at the machine pistol on the seat beside me, and for the first time, answered her directly. “I will not walk away. I will kill them all,” I said. “And I will take the children home.”

Fine words, fine intentions, but when I topped the last rise and saw the valley, I realized that I could not possibly have enough ammunition to solve the problem that lay before me.

It was a well-lit compound, and by my estimation it covered an area the size of a small town. Tall iron towers ringed the perimeter, and there were two walls, inner and outer, with empty space between them.

It looked like nothing so much as a prison.

Within the walls were square, neatly ordered buildings. Some appeared the size of small houses, and others were as large as schools or city halls. Part of the compound—the town—was a parking lot full of vehicles. Trucks, cars, all-terrain vehicles, large vans.

The lights turned night to day not only within the compound, but on every approach.

A line that Manny had once quoted came back to me. “We’re gonna need a bigger boat,” I murmured. That seemed oddly funny to me at the moment, but that was probably blood loss and the onset of infection.

It hadn’t occurred to me that they would be able to detect me at the top of the hill—I’d turned the headlights off—but clearly, I had underestimated my opposition. I heard a wailing alarm rise, and saw people moving down in the compound.

Perhaps it’s not for me, I thought, and then the radio fixed to the dashboard of the jeep crackled, and a voice said, “We have an intruder on the ridge in Grid 157, repeat, Grid 157. All units, intercept.”

I put the jeep in reverse and backed down the hill, turned it around, and drove as fast as I could the way I had come. The bumps and jounces of the road woke new, special pain from my injuries, but I forced that to the background. Escape was my only viable option. I could worry about my internal bleeding later, if I survived.

I saw a flash of lights behind me. Gaining fast.

Another vehicle crashed out of the trees at right angles to me ahead. I swerved and brushed by it, leaving kisses of paint, and dug the wheels deep in the dirt to pull ahead.

Cassiel?

Luis’s voice in my ear. He sounded distant and slow.

“No time,” I growled. I checked the rearview mirror. I was leading a minor parade of armed vehicles, and bullets spanged off of the metal of the jeep and splintered trees ahead of me.

Wait . . . don’t . . . it’s not what you think—

They were trying to kill me, I thought, and so far, my theory seemed quite sound. I shut him out and kept driving, rocked around a sharp turn on two precarious wheels, and less than fifty feet ahead, I saw a row of children standing in my path. It stretched from one side of the road to the other, into the trees.

For just a fatal instant, my Djinn self said, Keep going.

I took my foot off the gas and slammed on the brake, bringing the jeep to a shaking, shuddering halt a foot away from the children. They hadn’t moved.

I had my hand on the machine pistol, but again, there seemed little use to raising it. I wasn’t going to fire, not at a line of children, and they knew it.

C. T. Styles stepped out of the trees and walked up to the driver’s side of the jeep.

“You’re really strong,” he observed. “Most people never make it this far. Come on. I’ll take you home.”

He’d already led me to die in the woods and be eaten by a bear. I wasn’t quite so stupid as to assume he meant me well this time.

Most people never make it this far.

“How do you know how many people make it this far?” I asked him. “You only came here a few days ago.”

His dark, innocent eyes grew rounder. “Who told you that?”

“Your father.”

C.T. gave me a slow, superior smile. “My dad doesn’t know everything. I’ve been here lots of times. Mom brings me. For training.”

Training.

I was certain to my bones that Officer Styles knew nothing about this. Perhaps this time, his wife had been unwilling, or unable, to bring the boy home from his training.

Isabel. Had Angela also been sending Isabel here? No, impossible. Manny would have known. It was a distance from Albuquerque; her absences would have been noticed.

C.T. was waiting for my response. I gave him none. He finally dropped his chubby hand and stepped back.

An armed man took his place, holding his weapon steady on me. “Ma’am,” he said. “Get out of the truck and leave the gun, or I’ll shoot you in the head. Try any tricks, and I’ll shoot you in the head. Kill me, and my team will shoot you in the head. Do you understand?”

I did. I let go of the weapon and got out of the jeep. My legs barely supported me, which was helpful, as the soldier kicked the bends of my knees and sent me crashing to the dirt. He yanked my hands behind me and fastened my wrists with thin plastic strips, then pressed the muzzle of the gun against the back of my head again.

“If you mess with your restraints, bullet in the head.”

“I am following your theme,” I assured him.

I was loaded into the jeep again, this time in the back, with an escort who kept his gun aimed steadily at me.

I had no strength to escape, and, in fact, this time I did not see the advantage in doing so. Below in the camp, there might be medical treatment, rest, and the possibility of finding Isabel. Drawing power from a Warden, maybe even Luis.

The forest held nothing for me now but death, and while that didn’t frighten me as much as I’d expected, I did not intend to die a failure.

It offended me that after such a long, powerful life, I should end it with a mortal whimper of defeat.

My interior turmoil had manifested itself in tensed muscles and clenched fists, although I had not realized it until the soldier aiming at my head said, “Stop moving or bullet in the head.”

I sighed and relaxed.

The compound was, in fact, larger than I had expected. It had taken time, money, and hard labor to raise the structures and walls. They had learned from their ancestors, I saw—clear open space all around the perimeter fence, where nothing grew, not even grass. I wondered if they used an Earth Warden to tend that barren ground.

The towers evenly spaced around the wall held armed guards—not a surprise, given the convoy that accompanied me. As we traveled into the white glow of the lights, I studied my captor closely. He was nondescript. Medium build, medium coloring that might have owed its origins to any race or country. He wore unmarked camouflage fatigues and sturdy black boots. No jewelry, no markings of any kind, even on the uniform.

“Get your eyes off me,” he said. “Or—”

“Bullet in the head,” I finished. “You can stop repeating yourself.”

He smiled, very slightly, and with no trace of humor. “I don’t think so. I think you need the reminder. I will kill you.”

“I have no doubt.”

I turned my attention outward, to where the massive metal gates were slowly opening to allow us passage. Like any good security system, it controlled the flow of traffic, so the gate behind us closed before the one ahead opened, leaving us vulnerable and exposed in the no-man’s-land between.

I wondered how I might be able to make use of that. Nothing came to mind, but I was weak, sick, in pain, and had a simmering level of anger that seemed to impair my thinking to a remarkable degree.

The next gate creaked open. Hydraulics, I thought. I could work with hydraulics, perhaps.

Just not at the moment.

The guard opened his mouth as I shifted. “Bullet in the head, yes, I know,” I said. “Do try to aim for the center of my skull. I would hate to be left clinging to life and force you to waste a second shot.”

He shut up.

Inside the compound, the streets were clean and logically organized. Not a soul walked on those pristine streets, though I saw curtains and blinds twitch as we drove past houses and barracks-style buildings with a roar of engines. There was relatively little in the way of greenery, except for a park in the center of the community, with a few tall pines and grass.

Ah. And a playground. I saw the swings, slides, and sandboxes. More proof, as if I needed it, that whatever went on in this military-style outpost, it involved children.

Beyond the park, another building glimmered—not like the others. Pearly white, almost organic in its lines. I only saw it in glimpses, but what I saw disquieted me. There was something that raised echoes inside me, from long ago.

Something that did not belong here.

The jeep came to a halt in front of a nondescript concrete building. “Don’t move,” my guard said as he climbed out of the vehicle. He never took his eyes away from me. Wisely, he didn’t come within my reach, only kept his weapon trained steadily on me while two other soldiers pulled me from the seat and—however unsteadily—upright. I did not offer resistance, or much in the way of assistance, either, since I could hardly manage to walk at the moment.

The concrete building was a prison, and inside were individual cells, reinforced to the strength of vaults. That, I thought, was designed to prevent the use of Warden powers, but no matter how massive the door, there were always smaller fault points to be found. It was difficult keeping an Earth Warden chained. . . .

I sensed a familiar power signature, and my head, which had been slowly drooping, rose with a snap. “Luis?”

He was in the first vault we passed. I saw the familiar flash of his brown eyes through the narrow slot in the door as we passed. “Cassiel?” His voice sounded slow and uncertain. “You okay?”

“No,” I said.

Knowing he was here and alive filled me with a water-sweet relief I had not expected. They locked me into a room next to Luis’s cell, and it was grim indeed—plain, seamless floor, plain walls, a stainless steel toilet in the corner, a sink with a water tap. A rolled mattress in the corner.

Nothing else. Nothing at all.

They had not removed the restraints, which begged the baffling question of how they expected me to make use of any of the lavish facilities they’d provided, until I heard the ponderous movement of the locking mechanism rattle, and an Earth Warden stepped into the room.

She was tall, severe, with short brown hair and a pinched mouth, a sharply unpleasant expression that seemed to find me and all I stood for—whatever that might be—in utter contempt. She wore a standard olive green jumpsuit, which fastened with snaps in the front; again, curiously, there was no insignia to be seen. I had always thought humans were compelled to self-identify.

She dropped a neatly packaged bundle to the floor and made a twirling gesture with one finger. “Turn around.” I did, a full shuffling turn, coming back to face her. She rolled her eyes. “No, idiot, put your back to me.”

“Then be precise,” I said.

Once I had my back to her, she advanced with a few quick, light steps, and I felt the plastic straps holding my wrists part with a snap. She stepped away again, holding the remains of my restraints. “All right,” she said. “Strip. Everything comes off.”

If this was a human effort to make me feel awkward or humiliated, it was doomed to failure. The only issue I found with stripping naked was that it was difficult to bend and stretch without waking new waves of agony from my side. Once I’d managed it—she did not offer help—the Warden walked closer again.

“Raise your arm,” she said, and bent to examine the wound in my side. “Nasty. One of our little pets do that to you?”

“Pets,” I echoed.

“Rejects,” she said. “We still find a use for them. Hold still.”

She did not say, This will hurt, because I suspected she didn’t care. I braced myself against the wall with my other palm, trying desperately not to whimper at the acid wash of agony as she poked and prodded.

At length, she seemed satisfied. “You’ve got an infection in there,” she said. “Damage to your liver, nicked a couple of blood vessels. I’ll fix the worst of it. Try not to scream.”

She put her hand over the wound, and I learned that not all Earth Wardens who could heal should. She seemed to have little knowledge of how much pain she caused, and cared even less. In the end, I couldn’t stop the scream. It felt as if she had filled the wound track with boiling lava.

Once she’d exacted the price of the scream—which, I realized, she’d been waiting for—the Warden closed up the cut and stepped back to admire her handiwork. It wasn’t neat: A hand-sized patch of reddened, blistered skin, and a knotted scar. “You should consider training,” I said. She hadn’t given me any power through the contact, hadn’t so much as replenished my lost blood supplies. Her healing had, in fact, left me weaker, not stronger, and I believed that was exactly her intent. She’d left me in a position that I would not sicken and die, but I’d be too weak to present an effective threat.

She bared her teeth at me—I would not call it a smile—and kicked the bundle toward me. “Dress,” she said. “Unless you prefer to stay naked. I don’t really care.”

She left, taking my clothing, and the vaultlike door closed behind her. I crouched and picked up the bundle. Unrolled, it contained a paper-thin jumpsuit of brilliant yellow, the color of reflective paint, and a plain pair of cotton underwear. No brassiere, but my body was lean enough that it wasn’t an important omission. There were socks, and a pair of flimsy shoes with the word PRISONER printed on the bottoms.

I would have manifested my own clothing, if I’d had power, but I didn’t, and I was cold. The vault had a chill to it, like a cave. Or a crypt. I imagined them sealing the room and walking away, leaving me to starve alone. A Djinn would have found that frustrating and boring.

A human would find it fatal.

The clothing didn’t warm me much, but it made me feel less vulnerable—I supposed I had overestimated how much my human body had influenced me along those lines. A human of this time, this culture, needed coverings to feel safe.

As I unrolled the mattress, I found a folded thin blanket and a small pillow. The blanket I wrapped around me as I paced the room. I could sense Luis’s presence, dim and indistinct, on the other side of the wall. If I could touch him . . .

But they had gone to great lengths to be sure I couldn’t.

I pressed my hands to the wall, then my forehead. I could feel him there, possibly even making the same attempt at contact.

My eardrums fluttered, and then I heard his voice, in startlingly clear stereo. Cassiel?

“Here,” I said. I didn’t know if he could hear me, but I supposed he could. He had, even on the road. “Are you all right?”

That bitch Warden keeps filling me full of drugs, he said. He sounded angry and unfocused. Can’t keep myself straight. Withdrawal’s going to be a bitch. You?

“She left me weak,” I said. “I don’t think she found it necessary to drug me.” If I could find a way to touch Luis, she’d regret that, at length. “What do you know about these people?”

Nothing, except they’ve got a pet Earth Warden and some mad building skills. Luis’s voice turned dark. They have Ibby. They told me they’d hurt her if I tried anything.

Yes, the Earth Warden would definitely have time to regret her actions. “I found C. T. Styles,” I said. “Rather, he found me.” I explained about the ambush and the odd way the children acted. “I don’t believe they are themselves. I think someone is controlling them. Using them.”

Why kidnap kids just to run them around like guard dogs? I’m pretty sure there’s not a Doberman shortage.

Something the Earth Warden said returned to me. “Rejects,” I said. “They’re rejects.”

Rejects from what?

I didn’t know. I suspected that was the question on which so much hinged, including our lives.

Although he tried, Luis lost focus, and our contact dissolved in eardrum-splitting shrieks and growls of out-of-control vibrations. I stilled it hastily, but I continued to lean against the wall, and I thought that on the other side of the concrete, so did he.

“I don’t know if you can still hear me,” I said, “but if you can, save your strength. I will do the same.”

Practicality dictated that I curl up on the lumpy, uncomfortable mattress and sleep to conserve as much energy as possible.

I dreamed of Isabel, alone in the woods, and a bear.

When I woke, there was a tray being shoved through a slot at the bottom of my vault door. The food did not look appetizing, but that hardly mattered; it wasn’t food I craved.

I rolled out of bed, crawled to the slot, and seized the wrist of the man who was pushing the tray inside. He gave a startled yelp that turned to a harsh scream as I attempted to pull power from him.

He was merely human. I got only the lightest tingle of power, not even enough to fuel a single continuing breath, and then he broke my grasp and was gone.

I ate the contents of the meal tray slowly, with great concentration. It would help, but without an infusion of power from a Warden, soon, I would be in real trouble. Unlike a natural human body, mine was not self-sustaining. The equations did not balance, and energy leaked away with every beat of my heart.

All the proteins and carbohydrates on the tray couldn’t stop that drain.

Half the day passed in silence. I tried to contact Luis, but he didn’t—or couldn’t—respond. They might have drugged him even more, to silence him. I still sensed his presence, so I did not think they had removed or killed him.

I grew all too familiar with the confining, featureless space of my cell. Six steps across. Nine steps deep. The ceilings were twice my height, the light fixtures inaccessible behind reinforced panels. There were no windows, only a narrow opening in the door and the slot at the bottom through which the trays came.

Both were bolted shut, with massive vault locks, and I could not summon up enough power to matter against that.

I called on Djinn that I knew, from friend to foe; even an enemy might be an inadvertent ally in this situation. But if anyone could hear my weak calls, they ignored them.

I was alone.

My captors allowed me to wait for two more days, in silence, in growing desperation, before the vault door finally opened, and I was put in heavy chains and taken outside, so weak I could hardly walk.

It was daylight, dazzling bright, and I squeezed my eyes closed against the glare as the soldiers prodded me along. I sensed no Warden abilities in any of them. If I had, I wasn’t certain I could have stopped myself from attacking them out of hunger, and that certainly would have ended my fragile human life; the soldiers were deadly serious in their guard duties, and would not have hesitated to shoot.

It was odd even by human standards. There were many people out in the streets—talking, walking to or from some unknown destination. All the rainbow colors of humanity, some dressed in military fatigues, some in simple human dress from a variety of countries. From the park in the central part of the compound came the shrieking laughter of children at play.

No one cast a look toward me, garishly costumed in brilliant yellow, chained, surrounded by armed guards. It was as if I didn’t exist at all. I wondered for a few moments if they had placed some sort of Djinn invisibility shield around us, but no—some of the humans passing by did see us; they simply and utterly ignored us.

“Move,” my guard said, and guided me up the street.

“I want to see Luis Rocha.”

“People in hell want air-conditioning,” he said, which seemed completely off the topic I had proposed. “You’ve got a meeting already.”

As we came nearer to the main building, the one next to the park, I realized how much larger it was than the others. There were organic lines to the flow of the building’s long curves. Where everything else formed squares and angles, this building seemed more grown than constructed, and the material seemed more like mother-of-pearl and bone than wood and stucco.

A Djinn built this, I thought. There were few examples of Djinn artifacts; as a species, we left far less trace than humans on the planet we inhabited. But those that we did make had an unmistakable signature to them, a kind of singing resonance that was visible even to my human-dulled eyes.

I felt a deep surge of unease. The design impressed itself on me, and I realized what it represented: half of the ancient symbol of yin and yang. The park where the children played mirrored the sinuous lines and formed the other half. It had a resonance, as well, a subtle, deep power.

Harmony.

We approached the broad, curving end of the bone house, and a door that gleamed with shifting pearlized color opened without a touch on its surface.

The guards stopped. Their squad leader gestured me on.

I walked up the shallow steps and passed through the portal, into an opulence those outside would hardly imagine possible. The surfaces were breathtaking sweeps of nacre, the colors ranging from ice-cool greens to warm whites. The building had indeed been grown, not built, though there were concessions to human comforts in the form of sleekly rounded furniture, cushions, velvets and furs.

There was a simplicity to it that brought a sense of peace and a terrible kind of stillness. I studied the resonance again, and it was familiar to me. I know this place. Yet I’d never been in it before. I know the one who shaped it. Yes, that was what troubled me. The Djinn who had formed this exquisite, frightening place was someone I not only knew, but feared on levels I could neither identify nor understand.

I was too exhausted, too weak to think.

The door closed. The guards stayed outside. After a moment, the pinch-faced Earth Warden who’d tormented me stepped out of a curtained alcove at the far end of the room.

“This way,” she said. She had a silver gun in her hand. “If you try anything, I’ll kill you.”

Dying seemed almost inevitable, at this point. I hesitated.

“You want to see the girl, don’t you? Isabel?”

Something terrible was waiting for me in the direction she wished me to go. I knew it. I felt it in every screaming nerve. I could not go through that door. If I did, I would not just die. I would die screaming. I would suffer agonies that I could not begin to imagine, but could feel heavy in the air like poisonous smoke.

She.

The thought brushed across me like a ghost, and I knew it came from my Djinn side, the side that was almost dead now, starved into submission. A mere flutter of resistance.

She waits.

I stared at the Warden without moving. She frowned. “Did you hear me? Move it!”

My eyes rolled back in my head and I collapsed. I didn’t try to cushion my fall, didn’t try to turn my body, and when my head struck the ground, it struck hard enough to crack bone and split skin. Blood began to trickle past my nose across the pristine pearl floor.

“Goddammit,” the Warden sighed. “Just what I needed today—another goddamn epileptic fit.”

She came toward me.

I didn’t move.

She knelt next to me and put her hand on my hot pink hair, feeling for the fracture.

I opened my eyes, bared my teeth, and dislocated my arm to wrap fingers over her wrist. It was a tenuous hold, but she was startled, and in those vital seconds I ripped power from her in great, bloody swatches, stripping her clean of all aetheric energy. She wasn’t as powerful as Luis, but she would serve.

I melted away my chains.

She didn’t even have the ability to scream. I held her silent for it, and stared into her wide, agonized eyes, drinking in her pain.

I let her form a word. Just one. “Please . . .”

“I am Djinn,” I told her softly. “Do you understand? Djinn. And I give you the mercy of the Djinn.”

I sealed her mouth with contemptuous ease by stilling her vocal cords; all she was able to produce was a torturous, hoarse buzzing. I put a knee in her back to hold her down and rifled through her pockets. I took the gun, extra clips of bullets, her identification, and a curious medallion holding a silver key.

Then I put the gun to her head, released her vocal cords enough that she could whisper, and said, “Where is the child Isabel Rocha?”

“You Djinn bitch,” the Warden wept. “You hurt me.”

“And I am not finished,” I promised. “Tell me where to find the child.”

“Fuck you!”

“I’m not attracted to you,” I said. “But if by that you mean you won’t help me, then I have no use for you.”

I sealed her mouth forever by exploding a blood vessel in her brain. Relatively painless, and instantly fatal.

It was better than she deserved.

I dragged her body behind a sofa and covered it in silky furs. The bloodstains came up easily, and then I methodically searched the room for a way out.

There was only one.

The way the Warden wanted me to go.

I transformed the neon yellow jumpsuit and prisoner shoes into soft leather trousers and jacket in light pale pink, with war slashes of black. Heavy riding boots.

I moved the curtain aside, expecting another room . . . but it was a hallway, like a long, curving throat. Slick and featureless. There was no sound.

She knows I’m here, I thought. She’s waiting. My Djinn side refused to say anything, or to give me the name of my fear.

I sensed nothing but cold and ice ahead of me.

I moved on, and as I did, doorways appeared—closed, with no markings. Each felt slightly different beneath my fingers. One was hot enough to blister, even at a brush. One felt damp, and I sensed a vast pressure of water behind it. One was a living grave, rich with the smell of rotting things and the work of scavengers.

What are you looking for, Cassiel? Come. Come ahead.

The voice vibrated in my ears the way Luis’s had done, but it was not Luis. It was not any voice I knew. No, it was every voice I knew, Djinn or human, a massive and strange chorus of sound.

I stopped where I was, my hand on a closed door, and felt every nerve shrink with fear.

You killed my servant, killer of Djinn.

“She deserved it,” I said.

The laughter was the laughter of every murderer. Mocking, cold, and free of any trace of a soul. So do you, the voice said. For your crimes, murderer of the eternal.

The nacreous hallway began to close in on me. The pearly layers grew and thickened before my eyes, pushing inward. It would grind me apart. I looked behind and found the way back already closed to me. This structure was the mouth of a hungry predator, and I had no escape but down its throat, the way it wanted me to go. There was something dark and terrible at its heart, waiting to devour.

I took a deep breath and opened the door that stank of earth and rot, and plunged into darkness instead.

If I died here, I would choose my death.

Grave dirt filled my mouth, my nose, my ears. It was heavy and wet on my skin. I knew death intimately, and it tried to push inside me, insistent as a blind worm.

Interesting, the alien voice whispered to me. But you cannot leave me. I know you now. I will have you.

I spat it out and pushed through the dirt, swimming in muck, until I fetched up against a hard surface in the darkness. Nacre. The slick, pearly surface had a living structure to it, like bone. Why? Why have this room of grave dirt?

I had no time for riddles.

I blew the wall apart in an explosion of shards, and the house—if one could call it a house—shrieked. My strike, even as powerful as it was, had only opened a hole the size of a fist. I battered at it, widening it, and the house fought to close its wound even as I struggled to widen it. The instant I paused, it shrank the gash again.

I rained down destruction until the hole was barely wide enough to pass my shoulders, and then wriggled in. This was the most dangerous moment of all; if my concentration faltered, the house would close the gap and chop me in half or amputate a limb. I could sense the Voice screaming, though I had stilled my eardrums and rendered myself effectively deaf. I’d shut off all other senses, too, save sight. I wanted no sensory attacks to distract me at a critical moment.

The nacre had jagged, knife-sharp edges, and it sliced my skin as I crawled and wiggled through the narrow opening. I felt it shift as I hauled myself through, and for a heart-skipping moment I felt the sharp edges press on my thighs enough to draw blood. It wanted to snap shut. I didn’t let it, but it was a very near thing. I hauled my feet free seconds before the nacre mouth snapped closed, gnashing only air.

I was on the white gravel outside of the white house, on the smooth, curving side facing away from the park and the children. I rolled to my feet and began to run, releasing my hold on my senses. I would need every advantage now.

You cannot leave me, Cassiel, killer, destroyer. I have been waiting for you.

This time, the human inhabitants of the compound did not ignore me. I drew shouts, screams, and shots. One bullet grazed my leg, but I dodged the rest, using cover and even the bodies of others. I had little empathy for anyone caught in the cross fire just now. They were only faces, and the terrible thing behind me, the terrible knowledge pressing in on me . . .

What was in that white building, so close to where those children played . . . was nothing less than a monster.

And these adults served it willingly.

A squad of armed soldiers came after me, but I was no longer unarmed, thanks to the gun I had taken from the dead Earth Warden. I dropped two men with shots; the others with a burst of power that crippled them, at least temporarily. I had no interest in killing them, but I didn’t particularly care if that was the outcome.

“Ibby!” I screamed, turning in a circle. “Isabel Rocha!”

I ran on, crying out her name, searching for her individual whisper in all this chaos.

Behind me.

The park.

I reversed course, avoiding the hail of bullets by dodging behind a truck. To get to the park, I would have to go around the bone house, that terrible white place that housed the heart of the monster.

The ones hunting me had grown organized in their attacks, and there was little cover left. Even the confused civilians had withdrawn.

I took in a deep breath and dove for the ground. It parted for me like thick water, and I used my body like a dolphin’s, pushing against the resistance in sinuous curves.

The bone house extended down, into the ground. I sensed its vibration and swam away from it, careful not to touch it.

My breath grew hot in my lungs, rancid and used, and I kicked against the dirt and swam up, tearing my way through the roots of grasses to the surface.

The children were being rounded up in the park. Unlike the rejects I had seen in the forest, dirty and ragged, ill-fed, these were glossy, lovely children in impeccable clothing, all of stainless white.

There were perhaps twenty of them, and they were all under the age of ten.

“Ibby!” I screamed, and one small face came into focus, kindling like a star.

“Cassie!” she shrieked, and threw herself forward, racing toward me.

She was intercepted by one of the adult caregivers, who closed ranks between me and the children. The woman who restrained Isabel was wearing a medallion similar to the one in my pocket, the one that held a silver key.

Ibby stretched out her arms to me, tears streaming down her face, and I aimed the gun at the woman blocking her. “Put her down,” I said. There were more soldiers coming now. The tower guards also realized something was wrong, and of a surety, at least two of them could reach me where I stood. I was an easy target.

But I wasn’t leaving without the child.

“Put her down,” I repeated, “or I’ll kill you all.”

The woman, wide-eyed, shook her head and held on to the struggling child.

“Your choice,” I said, as cold as I had ever been in Djinn form.

I shot her. Isabel shrieked and fell, rolling on the grass. Another adult scooped her up and ran away with her, toward the pearl white building. I saw her chubby arms still reaching out for me, her tear-streaked face desperate, and in that instant I felt the anguish inside me coalesce into true hatred.

No. You will not take the child.

I couldn’t stop the instincts she triggered, the feverish need to protect her at all costs. I’d kill them all to save her, if I had to, and never look back.

She’s my child, the Voice whispered in my ears. She will never be yours. I will make her one of my warriors, and you and your kind will be wiped from existence, thrown into the darkness where not even memories remain. She will destroy you.

Isabel disappeared into the door of the white house, which sealed itself against me.

I had to abandon her. It was the hardest thing I had ever done, to turn away, to run with the sick taste of rage and defeat in my mouth.

I darted around buildings, running with as much speed as I could manage. I had no goal now, nothing but the blind desire to live, escape, find another way to get to Isabel. Bullets spanged and cracked around me, and sometimes found their mark. I couldn’t heal myself from the wounds, but I could close it off and ignore it for a time, and I did.

It burst upon me, with a blinding jolt, that there was still a goal.

I turned toward the prison.

When I reached it, moving so fast I was a blur, there were guards at the door. I barely slowed enough to disable both in screaming agony, then melted the metal outer door.

And then the vault door of the first cell.

Luis Rocha was slumped in a corner, pale and unshaven, barely conscious. His head lolled when I tried to raise him to his feet, and although I could sense the power inside of him, he was blocked from the source by the blanket of drugs circulating in him.

I couldn’t heal myself as easily, but I could clear his bloodstream. It was an investment of power, not a cost; as soon as he was cleared, his power began to flow back to me, through our touch.

His hands wrapped around my wrists, and our gazes locked.

“Cassiel,” he whispered. “Oh, Christ, what have you done?”

I must have looked very different to him.

“Whatever was necessary,” I said. I was leaking blood on the floor from wounds I didn’t feel. “Stand. We have little time.”

He scrambled up. They had also outfitted him in the flimsy yellow jumpsuit and prisoner shoes. I glared at it but decided our power would be better spent toward gaining our escape from this place, before—

The entire building rumbled. Dust sifted from overhead, and the lights flickered.

“Was that you?” Luis asked me. I shook my head. “Me, neither—”

Tree roots exploded up from the floor, cracking concrete. Sharp, jagged roots like daggers, then swords. It happened fast, too fast for us to counter it immediately, and one of the roots erupted under Luis’s feet, stabbing through his foot and into his leg.

He screamed and tried to pull free. As I was helping him, another root ripped through the stone floor, thick and strong as a telephone pole, and almost skewered me from below. I stumbled aside. It continued to rise, slamming into the ceiling above and shattering the impact-resistant plastic cover of the lights.

“Go!” Luis screamed at me. I shook my head and pulled his leg free of the root that impaled it, picked him up in my arms, and began to run.

It was only nine steps, I told myself. Nine steps from the back of the room to the door.

I jumped the last three, praying I had guessed right, as a whole forest of roots erupted from the floor and sliced in all directions.

We hit one of the thick, pale structures and bounced—but we bounced out, not in. I didn’t pause. I hit the ground with both feet and kept running, because the roots followed us, trying to outpace and outflank me. But it was a doomed effort—too much open space, and once we had gained the outside air, too many of their own people in the way to continue an indiscriminate attack.

There was a jeep—possibly the same one that had brought me to this prison in the first place—parked next to the prison building, with the keys dangling in the ignition. I dumped Luis in the seat, climbed behind the wheel, and in seconds we were rocketing for the gate.

I didn’t particularly care if adults got out of my way. I hardly slowed as the bumpers sent them flying from the path.

I knew by this time that they would try to use the children to stop me, so it was not a surprise to see those ragged young bodies lined up in front of the gate, only a grim confirmation.

I couldn’t stop. Not this time.

“Luis!” I yelled. “Can you open a gap somewhere else?”

He nodded. I pointed.

Where I pointed, the inner wall exploded in a shower of bricks. The children were in the wrong place. One of them tried to scramble in front of us—C. T. Styles.

I slowed just enough to grab the boy by the scruff of his neck and sling him into the jeep on the passenger’s side, into Luis’s surprised embrace. “Put him out!” I ordered, and then I was testing the jeep’s ability to scale a shifting mess of broken wall. The tires slipped; the vehicle tilted—then held and climbed.

Beside me, Luis slapped a hand to the child’s forehead and used a burst of power to put him to sleep. “I don’t like doing that!” he shouted, which forced me to laugh a little wildly. There was nothing in this I liked. I didn’t like the fact that we were in an open vehicle, with gunmen drawing their aim on us, while we slithered across broken bricks into a killing field. I didn’t like the fact that I had little chance of surviving this.

I didn’t like the gnawing terror of knowing how much I could lose even if I did survive. Isabel. Luis. My . . . family.

I glanced over at him, through the blowing fury of my pink hair. He had the sleeping little boy in the crook of one arm and the other braced against the dashboard, and Luis’s answering look was full of mad, unbelievable energy.

Just like mine, I suspected.

“Here we go,” I said, and the tires bit the barren ground between the walls. I took one hand off the steering wheel and held it out to him, and Luis stopped bracing himself on the dash and instead gave me his hand, his power, his will. There was no conversation between us. None needed.

I pulled power from him and drove it deep under the wall. I softened the ground beneath a long swath.

The wall sagged, but didn’t fall. Braced with an internal lacing of steel.

Luis battered at the bricks, but the external wall had been hardened against magical attacks, and now we could feel the dampening influences around us—Weather and Fire were at work, as well as opposing Earth forces.

We weren’t going to make it. The jeep was hurtling at the wall at speed. If we hit and it didn’t go down, we would die. C.T.’s small body would be smashed by the impact; if Luis and I survived, we’d be easily picked off by the Wardens and soldiers.

The wall had to come down. I shook the ground, and the entire structure shuddered and bled dust. Some of the concrete shattered and fell away, revealing a sinister skeleton of iron beneath.

I hit it with a final blast of power a millisecond before the jeep’s front grille smashed into the structure with stunning force . . . and in that second, the steel turned translucent, and as we hit it, the crystalline structure exploded into showers of glass.

I ducked instinctively, as did Luis, curving over the unconscious boy on his lap. A shower of shards blew over us, and I felt a hundred hot cuts, but all superficial.

We were lucky. A sharp, daggerlike fragment landed between us and buried itself several inches deep in the plastic and fiber of the edge of Luis’s seat. Another few inches and it might have severed an arm, or landed in his skull.

Bullets rang in a hot chatter along the metal. I pressed the accelerator, and we bounced over the remains of the wall and out into the open ground.

“Faster!” Luis yelled.

I knew that. My foot was all the way down, and we were still accelerating, tearing along the rough dirt road that led into the forest.

The forest tried to close against us, but I didn’t pause; the Earth Warden back in the compound didn’t have time to grow the barricade with any degree of care, and plants forced to cycle into maturity at that rate were naturally fragile. The jeep crushed the saplings trying to block our path, and we sped on.

“Watch for more children!” I snapped, intent on guiding the increasingly loosely steering jeep through the turns. I missed my motorcycle. I wondered if they’d simply abandon it in the woods, leave it to rust. It was a sad end for such a beautiful thing.

If they planned to send the rejected children against us as shock troops, they were unable to get them ahead of us.

We rocketed out of the forest and skidded onto clean, black pavement.

Free.

I looked back as I sped along, going as fast as I dared; there was no sign of pursuit.

No sign at all.

Relief began to creep through my body, slow as poison. I began to feel all the hurts, all the cuts, the bullet wounds that disfigured parts of my body. I was battered, but alive.

Luis was alive.

One of the children I’d promised to retrieve was alive. The other . . .

I drew in a ragged breath, startled by a burn of tears in my eyes. Why am I crying?

Luis was still holding my hand, though I was not drawing any power from him. It was merely comfort. Human touch.

“Cassie,” he said. His touch moved from my palm up my arm, stroked my shoulder, and trailed along my cheeks where tears spilled down. “Big Djinn don’t cry.”

I laughed madly. “Cassiel,” I said. “Cassiel is my name.”

And I heard the Voice in my ears, blocking out the world, whisper, I know your name, Cassiel. I have your heart now, and you will come back to me. You must.