Unknown

Chapter 9

LIGHTS BLAZED ON, brilliant as morning, illuminating us from two sides, and I saw human shapes stepping out of the trees—dressed in dark trousers, with bulky black vests and dark blue all-weather jackets. Most were armed with assault rifles. Those who weren’t were armed with handguns.

All weapons were pointed at the two of us. This didn’t pose much of a challenge for Rashid, but for me . . .

Agent Ben Turner stepped out of the shadows. His gun was in his holster. He looked exhausted, hollow-eyed, and angry. “You,” he said. “Down on the ground, hands behind your heads. Both of you. Do it now!” He speared Rashid with a glare. “I know you probably aren’t worried about us, but if you don’t comply, she gets shot. Understand?”

Rashid nodded, and without a flicker of his oddly amused smile, lowered himself with Djinn grace to his knees and laced his fingers behind his head.

Then he looked up at me, eyebrows raised.

“Unless you’d prefer to try martyrdom,” he said. “Entirely your choice, of course.”

I dropped to my knees, turning my glare instead to Agent Turner.

Who had tried to kill me.

I slowly laced my fingers together behind my head—one set flesh, one set metal—and watched as he nodded to his FBI team of agents, who swarmed forward to shove both Rashid and me forward and snap cold steel around our wrists before hauling us both to our feet again.

There was something odd about the handcuffs, and I tested them with a frown.

As I reached for power, a sharp, painful shock went out from the cuffs. “New thing,” Agent Turner told me, reading the surprise in my face with eerie accuracy. “We’ve been developing a few tricks the last few years. Some of us weren’t convinced the Wardens were a great thing for this country, what with all the egos and the corruption and unpredictability. We developed some countermeasures. That’s one. You try to use your powers, and you get shocked. The bigger the draw, the bigger the shock in reaction. So don’t try it. Trust me.”

“We,” I repeated. “So your loyalty is not with the Wardens.”

He shrugged. “Double agent,” he said. “I’m spying on the FBI for the Wardens. On the Wardens for the FBI. But only one of those is for real, and that’s the FBI side. As far as I’m concerned, if every Warden on Earth disappeared tomorrow, we’d be a hell of a lot better off. Speaking of that—” He reached out, flipped back the leather of my jacket, and found the scroll.

No!

I tried to fight him, but bound as I was, there was nothing I could do. I subsided, panting, as he pulled the case from my pocket. He smiled, and searched for the catch to open it.

There wasn’t one. It had sealed itself into a perfect hard shell, like hardened ivory. After a moment of fruitless poking at the thing, Turner put it in an inside pocket of his own jacket. “Something for the techs,” he said. “They’ll figure out how to crack into it. Once we have the list, we can start to manage this effectively.”

“To stop the abductions?”

“For a start,” he said. “More than that, we can start managing the Wardens, instead of letting them have an unlimited supply of governmental support and cash.”

His problems with the Wardens were, frankly, not my concern. Let Lewis Orwell and Joanne Baldwin deal with the political aspects of their organization; my concerns were much more basic. More personal. “You sent the man after me.”

“Him? Oh, Glenn, the guy with the car? Yeah. He was only supposed to tail you, and grab the scroll if he could. I assume, since you still have it, that it didn’t work out. Did you kill him?”

“Would you care if I had?”

Turner smiled thinly. “Oddly enough? Yes. I’d like to keep the funeral costs down on this operation if I can. And he was acting on my orders. That means I’m ethically responsible for him.”

I shrugged, which wasn’t particularly easy with my hands bound so closely behind me. “He shouldn’t have tried to threaten me with a knife. Or underestimated me. And your ethics are hardly what I would consider to be spotless.” I hardened my gaze and focused in on his face. “Where is Luis?”

“Not here,” Turner said. “So don’t go nuclear on me. It wasn’t my idea to take him anyway.” I didn’t blink. “He’s safe.”

“No,” I said. “He’s not.” I had not heard from him since Rashid and I had been taken prisoner, and although the connection remained, like a hiss of static between us, I thought Luis was unconscious. “He was being hurt.”

Turner frowned and said, “No, that’s impossible. I know—” He stopped himself, but it was too late; he’d already admitted to me that he knew far too much. I felt a primal growl building in the back of my throat, and I knew that my eyes were growing brighter, creating their own light stronger even than the brilliant halogen spotlights being directed on me. “He’s safe. That’s all you need to know. The Wardens aren’t in charge of this anymore. This is a government matter, and we’re taking control.”

I barked out a laugh of pure disbelief. “Really.”

A hand fell on Turner’s shoulder, and another man stepped up, eclipsing him immediately. Not for size; Turner was broader, taller, more physically imposing. This man, however—he was unquestionably in charge. He was small in stature, expensively dressed under his government-issue bulletproof vest and Windbreaker. It was hard to tell his age; anywhere between thirty and fifty, I guessed, but there was no trace of gray in the dark, neatly trimmed hair. Expressive dark eyes that somehow conveyed his regret and command without a word being said. He wore a wedding ring, a pale gold band on his left hand, and a silver ring with a red stone on his right. Like all the agents, he had a communications device curling around his ear.

Unlike most, he had no gun in evidence.

“Ms. Raine,” he said. “Or should I call you Cassiel?”

I stared at him without blinking, and didn’t answer.

“My name is Adrian Sanders. I’m the special agent in charge of this operation, in cooperation with Home-land Security, the ATF, and several other government agencies. So I’ve got a lot on my plate right now, not the least of which is that I have to worry about magic instead of just good old- fashioned people wanting to blow things up.” He sounded faintly disgusted with the idea. “Luis Rocha is in custody at an undisclosed location. He tried to interfere when we took some people in for questioning.”

“Children,” I said. “You took children in for questioning.”

Agent Sanders cocked an eyebrow. “Ms. Raine, the way I understand it, our whole problem here is children. So absolutely, I need to question anyone who can help us get to the bottom of things. Including people below voting age.”

He seemed so reasonable, but there had been nothing at all reasonable about the pain Luis had been feeling. “I will see Luis Rocha,” I said. “Now.”

“No,” Sanders said in reply, flatly. “You won’t. Now sit your ass down on the ground, legs crossed, and don’t get up until we tell you. I’ve got bigger problems than you.”

I really doubted that.

Sanders turned away, pulling Turner with him; the two men conferred, backs to me, and Turner set off at a run through the trees with an escort of three others.

“Are you still standing up?” Sanders asked, without looking over his shoulder at me. “Because one way or another, you’re going to be on the ground in about ten seconds.”

Impossible to manage all the impulses to violence that erupted inside me; he was angering both my human and my Djinn instincts, to deadly effect. I wanted nothing so much as to rip my hands free of these confining restraints and pour power through the man until he was a smoking hole in the ground. The rage was, in fact, frightening in its intensity, all the more so because it was entirely impotent at the moment.

“I’d do as he says,” Rashid murmured, and when I looked over, the Djinn was seated calmly on the ground, legs crossed, looking as if he’d chosen the posture for meditation instead of by intimidation. “They’ll kill you. They have orders to shoot until you’re no longer moving.”

The agents around me were aiming their guns, and Rashid was correct; none of them looked in the least like they would hesitate to fire if they felt it necessary.

I sat down next to Rashid, concentrating on regulating my breathing and the impulse to try to use my powers. The handcuffs were delivering stronger and stronger jolts, sensing the energy rising inside me, and my hands and forearms felt burned and tender from the repeated stabs of pain. I stayed perfectly still, eyes closed. Beside me Rashid was as immobile as the mountains.

Waiting.

Luis.

Nothing came back to me, save that wordless static. He was still alive, but incapable of conscious thought. Drugs, most likely. Or they’d hurt him so badly that his body had, in self-defense, taken away his awareness of the damage. Either way, it was not good news.

Turner had betrayed us, and now there were much greater concerns. Not just Pearl; the government. I had no doubts that Agent Sanders thought he was in control of the situation, and the day; he had no idea just how out of his depth he—and all his merely human colleagues—really were.

“This isn’t useful,” Rashid observed, after at least fifteen minutes of total silence. I pulled myself back from the contemplation of my own, maddening lack of control. “I agreed to help you fight, not help you surrender.”

I bit back my first response, which came with another jolt of pain from the controlling handcuffs. “Can you leave?”

“If I wish.” He let a beat go by. “It wouldn’t negate our agreement. We made a bargain. The fact that it didn’t turn out well for you—”

“Is beside the point, I know. I wasn’t born human.” I tried to moderate the snarl in my voice. “Could you take me with you?”

“Of course,” Rashid said placidly. “The question would be whether or not you’d survive. The odds are not good on that point. I’m not one of those Djinn who can safely convey humans through the aetheric and bring them out alive, and no matter how fast I am, they do have countermeasures.”

“Such as?”

“Ma’at,” he said. “One or two, not powerful enough to be Wardens, but powerful enough to interfere with you, slow you down. That would be enough to allow bullets to reach you. I believe if I try to take you with me, you’ll be dead.”

I considered that. My shoulders ached from the restraints, and I was thirsty. Exhausted. I needed sleep. But more than anything else, I needed to know that Luis was all right.

“I know we can’t alter the agreement,” I said, very carefully. “So I am not attempting to do so. I only say that should you wish to leave this place, no one will be able to stop you. And should you take the scroll from our friend Mr. Turner, I don’t suppose anyone can stop you from doing that, either.”

“Or destroying him like a small bug,” Rashid noted.

“Or that, of course.”

He didn’t move. I had supposed that a mere mention of the fact that he might lay his hands on the scroll would cause him to flicker out of existence and into Mr. Turner’s very nightmares, but instead Rashid sat, patient and silent.

I asked, “Are you waiting for something?”

“No,” he said. “But there’s no great hurry. I can take the scroll from him anytime I please. He is not the rightful owner. Therefore, it’s fair game to take it, so long as I return it to you.”

Was it? I didn’t know that; I supposed it made sense, by Djinn logic. I was specifically given the list—officially granted it by an Oracle. That meant it was my possession, exclusively, until such time as I voluntarily gave it up. Humans didn’t have those types of rules of ownership, which reflected the transfer of power on the aetheric; hence, Turner hadn’t thought twice about taking it from me.

But, I realized, the scroll itself wasn’t just some mere piece of paper locked in a case. It was living.

It was capable of reacting, as it had when it sealed its case shut.

I smiled slowly. “And if you take it into your hands without me granting it to you, it won’t open for you, will it?” I asked him. “That’s why you wanted to bargain for it, not simply take it from me. I have to give it.”

Rashid didn’t bother to deny it. “So in liberating it from your friend Mr. Turner, I am only its temporary custodian. Not a thief.”

“Not a thief at all,” I agreed. “Well then.” I felt my smile fading. “While you have it, you’ll be a target. Whatever you do, you must not let it be taken by Pearl or those she commands.”

“And now you’re putting conditions on me,” Rashid said, and shook his head. “Cassiel. I’ll do as I please, when I please, and you will have to trust that these things will also please you.” He looked up at me, and his eyes were bright and direct, entirely inhuman. “Time to go.”

He’d sensed something, but I didn’t know what. I nodded. That was all the goodbye we said, or needed; Rashid simply melted away, a whisper on the wind, and his empty handcuffs thumped to the ground where he’d been.

That got a reaction from the agents watching us—quick steps in to tighten the cordon, and one small red-haired woman with a pretty, no- nonsense face snapped, “Where is he?”

For all that they’d been briefed on the nature of the Wardens, the nature of the Djinn, the primal terror of a human confronted with the unknown was still there, showing in the tense lines of her body and the flash of disbelief in her blue eyes. She repeated her question, more loudly, pointing her weapon straight at me in unmistakable threat.

I ignored her as I tried to locate what had triggered Rashid’s sudden decision to depart. Nothing obvious; the government agents had control of this side of the chasm, separated from Pearl’s area by a harsh divide that would be difficult to cross without attracting notice. Likewise, Pearl could send her child-soldiers here, but even Pearl had her limits. I didn’t imagine she would stage an all-out assault against an armed camp of the FBI. Her followers weren’t Djinn; they couldn’t travel the aetheric at will. So their approaches would be human in nature—extra-human, possibly, but not Djinn.

I sensed no power stirring in the aetheric toward us. When I directed my attention toward Pearl’s camp across the divide I got a sense of shielded, harnessed, focus energy, like the potential of a bomb, tightly contained. Was Pearl there? I wasn’t sure she was. I wasn’t sure she was anywhere, in a purely physical sense. Her followers, yes, but Pearl could manifest herself in ways I didn’t fully understand, and that meant she couldn’t be tied down to a single focus.

Not yet.

I was still searching for a sign as to what had driven Rashid on his way when Agent Sanders, looking harassed and angry, strode back into the clearing. He looked at the spot where Rashid had been sitting, glared at the agents, then at me. I shrugged.

“Djinn,” I said. “He can leave when he wishes. There’s really not much you—or I—can do about it.”

“Your friend really doesn’t value your life too highly, does he?” Sanders said.

“He isn’t my friend,” I said. “We had an agreement, not a relationship, and my life is my own to worry about.”

“Yeah, you got that right. Come on. Up and at ’em.”

I had been sitting cross-legged for a while, and since my hands were still cuffed behind me, it was difficult to rise. Sanders assisted me with a hand on my arm, and kept the hand there as he directed me away from the clearing, past the watching agents, and down a game trail that cut through the brush.

We emerged into an open area where tents had been erected—camouflage canvas, sturdy government issue that had probably been used for everything from disaster relief to combat. They were large structures. One held cots and a meal area; the other, where Sanders directed me, had long folding tables covered with paper, maps, computers, and equipment whose purpose I couldn’t guess. Communications, perhaps. There were at least ten other people in the tent as we arrived.

Agent Turner was not among them.

There were also folding chairs, and Sanders sat me down in one for a moment to look down into my eyes. “Must be uncomfortable,” he said. “Hands behind you like that. Tell you what, I’ll cuff you in front, but I need your promise not to try anything stupid. I’m not your enemy. Your enemy’s out there, other side of that gully.”

I didn’t like making any kind of deal with Sanders, but he was right; my shoulders were aching, my arms trembling from the strain of trying to relieve the constant pressure. Sitting was awkward, at best.

I nodded.

“I’m going to loosen one cuff,” he said, “and you move both arms in front. No other stunts. You try anything woo-woo and my friend Agent Klein there will put a bullet right in you, are we clear?”

Agent Klein certainly was. He was a young man with curly brown hair and a semiautomatic pistol, which he held unwaveringly pointed at the center of my chest.

“I understand,” I said, and looked straight at Agent Sanders. “I will cooperate.” For now.

He did exactly what he said, stepping behind me to unlock one side of the manacles. I moved both hands forward, sighing a little in relief, and held them out, wrists together. Sanders reattached the cuff with a snap, and I felt a spark go through me—not enough to hurt, just enough to verify that the cuffs were still live. I lowered my hands to my lap.

“Better?” he asked. It was a rhetorical question, and that was very likely the only consideration I would get from him, so I did not respond at all. Sanders likewise didn’t wait for an answer. “So here’s what we know. We know that this camp over there is run by an organization of fringers. On their recruiting materials they like to call themselves the Church of the New World. They’ve got a Web site, bulletin boards, social networks, and a YouTube channel where they post all kinds of crazy, earnest crap about how we need to remake the world. Standard stuff, really; my team’s been tracking these guys for years. But in the last twelve months, something changed with them. They were talking a good game before, but all of a sudden they’ve got money, they’ve got recruitment, they’ve got real physical facilities set up in at least four states that we know about. You following?”

He paused to take a drink of bottled water. When I nodded, he walked over to a laminated map of the United States, with locations circled in red marker. La Jolla, California, where we were now. An X mark was over a circle in Colorado, where the original version of the Ranch we’d found had been located. There were two more places circled. Both, to my eyes, looked remote, far from the nearest large city.

Sanders tapped the crossed-out circle in Colorado with the closed cap of a marker. “We were just setting up the surveillance for this place when you and your friend Luis busted the door and raised hell. Great job, by the way. Lots of dead people, missing kids, one hell of a mess left for us to try to make sense of. Thanks for that.”

“I was not aware I had to clear my plans for rescuing a stolen child with you.”

“Well, you do now.”

“For how long?”

“How does forever work for you?”

“Better than it does for you,” I assured him, and smiled, very briefly and sharply. “I don’t care about your problems, Agent Sanders. I want Luis Rocha. I want to rescue the children. I leave you to deal with the rest, if you can.”

Sanders dragged a chair over across the uneven ground, thumped it down in front of me, and sat with his elbows on his knees, leaning forward. He held my gaze as he said, “That’s not good enough. Far as I can tell, this is a Warden mess of some kind. A Djinn mess. And we’re in it now, because you people can’t take care of your own shit. So read me in, Cassiel. Right now.”

“Read you in?”

“Tell me everything I need to know.”

“Simple enough. Nothing. Withdraw your people. Shut down your operation. Leave.”

Sanders sighed and sat back, folding his arms across his chest. The folding metal chair creaked in complaint. He looked over at Agent Klein, who was still aiming his gun straight at me, and said, “Greg, why don’t you get me and my guest a couple of cups of coffee? You drink coffee, right?” That last was directed at me. I said nothing. “Two. Thanks. This is going to take a while.”

Klein looked startled, and he looked over at his boss for a moment. “Sir? You sure?”

“I’m sure. We have an understanding, right, Cassiel? You try anything with me, and I will bury you and your friend Rocha so deep that the president and the Joint Chiefs wouldn’t have high enough clearance to even know you ever existed. You think Guantánamo was bad? You ain’t seen nothing yet.”

I blinked. “Are you trying to intimidate me?” I was honestly curious, because I had been cowed before—rarely—but it was not very likely to come from this man, with all his rules and limits. “Because for all your posturing, I don’t think you are a bad man. I think you are afraid of me. You shouldn’t be. As long as you don’t interfere with me—”

He gave a short, hard bark of laughter. “Interfere with you? Lady, you’ve done nothing but fuck up our lives around here since you landed on Earth. Now, you tell me what I need to know about how the Wardens and the Djinn are involved in this.”

“Or?”

“Or you’re not going to like me very much,” he said.

I didn’t like him now. I didn’t see how that would be much of a change.

He didn’t push me. Agent Klein returned with two disposable cups filled with thick black coffee. I accepted one and held it in both hands, breathing in the fragrant steam. Agent Sanders guzzled his.

“Where is Turner?” I asked.

“Sent him out,” Sanders said. “Figured that with the bad blood of him selling you out like that, you might want a piece of him. So you can consider him off the case, as far as you’re concerned. All right?”

“Turner worked with you on countermeasures for Wardens,” I said. “For how long?”

“How about I don’t discuss classified government programs?”

“Oh, I assure you, you will discuss it. Whether you discuss it with me, with Lewis Orwell, with Joanne Baldwin, with David or Ashan or some of the others—well, that is your choice. But that will be a much more . . . energetic conversation. One Mr. Turner won’t enjoy, I would think.”

“Turner’s our asset. We’ll protect him.”

I didn’t like the direction this was going. Inevitably, it would end one place—with a civil war between the normal human world and the human Wardens. The Djinn would not have to take sides, but some would. Destruction and wrath would follow.

It was, as Luis would have phrased it, a cluster fuck.

Which brought my mind back to the subject I was most interested in. “I want to see Luis,” I said. “Now.”

Sanders and I engaged in another staring contest. He finally broke it and looked at Agent Klein, who was standing at rest, with his hand not very far at all from his gun. “Get him,” he said.

“Sir—”

“Just get him.”

We waited in silence while Klein was gone. I sipped my coffee. Klein had disappeared around the edge of the tent, and I’d heard a vehicle start and pull away. They weren’t keeping him here, at their forward base; there was a secondary encampment, one where they would probably take me, eventually. There was no virtue in acting too soon. And the coffee wasn’t bad.

Agent Sanders had sense enough to know I wouldn’t speak again until my request had been fulfilled, so he stood up, drank his coffee, and conferred with other agents in the room. When he was done with that, he came and stood over me.

“You made it inside,” he said. “Actually inside the compound.” He sounded impressed.

“In,” I said. “But just getting in is not the problem. There are safeguards. Alarms. Guards.” I thought of the bear-panthers, coursing in packs in the trees, more effective than any human force that could be deployed. “If you think to raid that compound, you’ll be destroyed.”

“Oh, I’m not trying to raid it,” he said. “Not yet. But I’m very interested in exactly what you saw while you were there.”

“Nothing,” I said. “Manicured grounds. A gravel road. A large curved building that glowed from within. That’s all I had time to see.”

He tried asking me more questions, but I had already given him as much as he was going to get from me, and eventually he recognized that fact and fell silent.

Fifteen minutes later, I heard the growl of an engine, the crunch of tires, and then the silence as the driver shut down the vehicle. Slamming doors.

I stood up. That brought a change in posture from all the agents in the room—straightening, bracing, hands moving to weapons. “Sit,” Sanders snapped. I ignored him, and he pulled his sidearm, although he didn’t aim it. “Sit down, Cassiel. I’m not playing.”

Shadows at the opening of the tent. Agent Klein . . . and Luis Rocha.

My breath went out of me, because he was being carried on a stretcher by two other men. Unconscious. The men settled the stretcher on top of one of the folding tables and, at a nod from Sanders, withdrew to wait. Klein took up his post again only a few feet away, gun drawn.

I looked from Luis’s slack, blank face to Sanders. Everything seemed to have a red tinge to it, and I was having difficulty breathing.

“He’s alive,” Sanders said, as if that was even a question. “Whoa, Cassiel. Take it down a notch. He’s going to be okay. He put up a hell of a fight. They had to go hard on him, and then they had to put him out to treat him. He’ll wake up in a couple of hours.”

I saw blood on Luis’s shirt. I lifted the hem of it and saw a bandage as large as my hand beneath it, on his right side. Beneath it I sensed a cut, a long and deep one, that had perforated organs and nicked a bowel. The human physicians had repaired the damage with stitches, cleaned out wounds, and left him to heal.

“Take these off me,” I said, and held my cuffed hands out to Sanders without looking away from Luis.

“Can’t do that.”

I wanted to issue the sort of threat I would have in Djinn form: Refuse me, and I’ll destroy you, your colleagues, every trace you were ever alive. But, in human form, that would not only be extremely difficult to accomplish, it would also get me imprisoned, or shot out of hand.

“I can heal him,” I said, and put a note of pleading in my voice. It was not precisely acting. “Please. Let me help him. Otherwise it will take weeks for him to get back to full strength, and he risks infection.” I left unspoken the obvious: If Luis Rocha died of his wounds, or even complications of them, then he would be held responsible. Not just by me. By his superiors. By the Wardens. Possibly even by one or two Djinn with a random interest.

Sanders obviously recognized the risk.

He fixed me with a long, steady look. I tried my best to convey a lack of threat, although that was hardly my strong suit.

He sighed. “Fine. But you do anything I don’t like, and Agent Klein here will shoot you a whole lot. Okay?”

He wasn’t waiting for my agreement. He unlocked the cuffs, both wrists, and removed them. They looked like regular handcuffs, which was curious; I had expected some small technological addition, but I saw nothing of interest.

Sanders stepped back and nodded toward Luis, lying silent on the table. “Clock’s running,” he said. “You’ve got five minutes.”

He had no experience with Wardens, other than Turner, that much was obvious. I shook my head and put my right hand on Luis’s forehead. It felt cool and slightly clammy. The left—the metal hand—I left at my side. I was no longer sure if I could control the flow of power through it at a fine enough level to perform this kind of task.

The damage within Luis had been surprisingly light, and repaired by skilled surgeons; he was, in fact, not in any danger at all, but merely needed rest and recovery. That, at least, was easy enough to fix, by simply replacing his lost energy with some of mine, although I had precious little to spare. Had he truly been badly injured, I doubted I would have had the reserves to repair him on my own . . . but this, I could do.

And did.

Luis opened his eyes. They were blank for a moment as his brain came aware and began processing information at a pace that was astonishing even to the Djinn—memory, sensory input, aetheric input. Then his eyes focused, fixed on mine, and he did nothing for a long second.

Can you hear me? I performed the Earth Warden trick, murmuring the words directly into his ear by delicate vibrations of the membrane inside. Don’t move. Don’t let them see you’re awake.

He stayed perfectly still, relaxed beneath my hands.

Good to see you, he said. You’re okay?

I was not the one who was lying on a table with stitched wounds. Of course, I said. Are you strong enough to take care of half the guns?

Lady, I can take care of all the guns, Luis responded, and blinked. They’re FBI, right? Oh man.

Was he reconsidering? But you will take care of the guns.

Sure. He sounded resigned. Might as well earn the wanted poster while I’m at it.

I didn’t waste time asking what he meant; instead, I whispered Now into his ear.

He sat up in one fluid movement, and as every FBI agent in the room wondered what to do next, I whirled and advanced on Agent Sanders.

Agent Klein hadn’t been bluffing. He immediately pulled the trigger on his firearm, and his aim was perfectly steady. If his weapon had been working, I would have been down with a hole through my brain.

It didn’t work quite that way. Instead, the gun gave a dry click. Klein blinked and immediately tried again. Another click. The sound was joined by a brittle chatter of clicks, as every FBI agent in the room attempted to fire.

I batted away Sanders’s attempt to punch me and grabbed him by the throat, slamming him backward and down on one of the folding tables, which teetered dangerously and looked ready to collapse. Then it did collapse, in a sudden rush, metal legs splaying out unnaturally, and the table thumped down to the ground, taking Sanders with it. I followed him down, sinking into a crouch, never releasing his throat.

I let the Djinn show on my features, shine in my eyes, and I said, “I will not be controlled by the likes of you, Special Agent Adrian Sanders.” I almost purred. “There is a reason the Wardens have never bent to government control. The Wardens are beyond nations, beyond administrations, beyond the rules and boundaries of your society. They must be, to accomplish their work. They police their own, and they do not need your particular brand of oversight.” Behind me, I heard Luis take on another agent who was rushing to the rescue—possibly Agent Klein. Earth Wardens had the ability to alter gravity. This was probably news to Agent Klein, who let out a startled yelp as the area around him suddenly took on three times the normal gravity at the Earth’s surface, stopping his rush in midstride and sending him crashing heavily—very heavily—face-first to the ground. A position from which he could not, without great and sustained effort, rise.

Luis flicked a look at the other agents, still standing near their computers, weapons in hand. They exchanged a look. “Relax,” he said. “We’re not going to hurt anybody. Chill out.”

I was fairly certain, from the look on Sanders’s face, that he didn’t altogether believe that. I couldn’t really blame him. The way I felt, I couldn’t guarantee him anything on the not-hurting-anyone front. Especially him.

I leaned closer, pale hair drifting around my face like smoke, and whispered, “If you ever try to put those handcuffs on me again, Mr. Sanders, we will have this conversation again, but it won’t end so nicely.” Then I let go, stood up, and offered him a hand. My left. The metal one.

Sanders stared at my face, then the hand, and for a long moment I wasn’t sure he’d accept the implied apology. Then he took my bronze fingers and pulled himself to his feet against my strength.

“We need to work together,” I said. Behind me, Luis stepped up alongside me. “The Wardens are few right now. The Djinn are . . . largely uninvolved. But this fight is yours, too. Human children, Warden or not, are being hurt and killed. You must help us.” I held his dark eyes, and put all my sincerity into the moment. “You must. Think of your own children, and help us.”

He’d been holding on to my hand, and I saw that he held concealed, on his other side, the power- disrupting handcuffs. With one move—no doubt a move he had practiced and performed many times—he could have those on me in seconds, possibly before Luis could interfere.

He didn’t move. After a moment, he let go of me and took a step back. The handcuffs were slipped back into a case at his belt, under his Windbreaker.

“Don’t screw me,” he said. “Because I’m willing to go on a little faith, here. But not much, and not for long. You do anything that makes me doubt you’re all in on this—”

“Oh, we’re all in,” Luis said, and winced a little as he sagged into a chair. He looked tired, and in some pain. “Jesus, how much more ‘all in’ could we be? I’ve lost my brother, my sister- in-law, my niece is somewhere out there in the hands of these assholes. We’ve had half a dozen serious attempts to kill us. You’ve hurt me, done stuff to her—and we didn’t take it out of your ass, man. So shut the hell up, okay?”

Sanders didn’t look particularly offended. “Okay,” he said. “You want to let Klein up now?”

Luis didn’t glance at the other agent, who was still straining to lift himself off of the ground against the increased pull of gravity. “Sure.” Suddenly, the agent’s arms powered him up from the dirt, and he scrambled to his feet, red-faced and chagrined. He retrieved his gun from the ground, checked it, and holstered it, cheeks still burning, eyes still angry. When he saw me watching him, he recovered his composure and tried to look indifferent to the whole turn of events.

Not very successfully.

Sanders took the chair across from Luis. “Let’s say, for argument’s sake, that I believe you. What the hell do you want out of me? I’ve got an FBI team, sure. I’ve got all the surveillance you could want. I’ve got eyes in the sky and boots on the ground. You think this place is going to fall to some kind of frontal assault?”

I poured Luis a cup of coffee from the pot nearby, and took it to him. He drank part of it gratefully before answering. “Show us what you know.”

“You first.”

“That’s easy,” Luis said. “Damn near nothing. Whatever Cass already told you, that’s it. I wasn’t even there. She’s your only eyewitness. Your turn.”

“Follow me,” Sanders said, and led us out of the tent. I dropped back to stay next to Luis, discreetly monitoring his fitness.

He knew what I was doing, and frowned at me. “What?”

“You’re in pain.”

“I’m fine. It’s a side effect of rapid healing for me. Nothing wrong with me.” He nodded to Agent Sanders. “So you’re what, alpha dog now?”

I smiled. “Humans do tend to run in packs. Dominate the leader, and you dominate the others.”

“Cynical.”

“Useful.”

Sanders didn’t hear, because we were both murmuring very quietly. He led us down the hillside to yet another tent, this one with its entrance pulled shut. He slapped it aside and entered. As we followed, I realized that it was filled with more computers, more people, and rolling bulletin boards filled with images. Some were sharply rendered satellite images, showing the area of Rose Canyon where we were; I recognized the dark slash of the chasm first, and then the manicured park of Pearl’s encampment on the opposite side. The FBI tents were visible only as smudges, but they’d been marked in red to make them more visible.

The white, rounded building that I’d seen was like a moon set into the green, carefully empty expanse. Nothing around it—unlike Colorado, which had had barracks, buildings, even an elaborate playground for the children.

This was more . . . alien.

I scanned the photos one by one, looking at each in detail, surveying the entire expanse of the surface of the billboards. It took time. Luis finished before I did, but I doubt he saw as much.

He was tired.

“So?” Sanders asked. He folded his arms. “Insights from your side of the street?”

“It’s not like Colorado,” I said. “Not at all. That felt as if it had been built by human hands.”

“That’s because it was,” Sanders replied. “Built by the Church of the New World. Their training-slash-inspirational camp, preaching and war games all rolled into one. Thing is, the CNW wasn’t one of those apocalypse cults, originally; it was built by a bunch of hippies who wanted to do the peace and love thing. Gradually got taken over by more and more extreme elements. But even so, we never expected them to ramp up to industrial crazy. They were—” He shrugged. “Normal. As such things go.”

“Until last year,” I said. He nodded. “And when did this structure appear?” I touched the white bubble shown in the pictures.

“About eight months ago,” he said. Same in Colorado. Same in two other places we know of. Same damn structure. This one’s the largest, though. It’s about the size of a football stadium, though it’s not very tall. We figure all their facilities are inside, including whatever training they’re doing.”

“Who comes in and out?”

“In, we get individual cars and trucks. Not too many of those. Most are registered to members of the church, a few suppliers who drop off stuff and drive away.”

Luis asked, “Who comes out to get it?”

“Nobody,” Sanders said. “It sits there until dark. We monitor with night vision, but we never see anybody come out to get it. It just . . . disappears.”

I nodded. I understood, now. “I will need a list of those . . . suppliers.”

“They all check out. And yeah, we’ve tried putting tracking and surveillance into the shipments. No good. Everything gets blocked as soon as it’s inside that dome. Some kind of interference.”

“I’ll need the list,” I repeated. “And a weapon. Perhaps one of those large ones your agents carried in the clearing.”

“Uh-huh,” Sanders said, not in any way as if he was acceding to my request. “And you’d like this because . . . ?”

“Trust me,” Luis said. “I don’t think it’s better to know the answer to that one.”

“Gotta write a report,” Sanders said. “Government runs on reports. So yes. I need an answer before I say yes, no, or anything.”

I shrugged. “I’m going to get into the facility,” I said. “Now that I know how. And I’m going to take a gun because I might need to shoot those who get in my way of retrieving Isabel and as many of the other children as possible.”

Sanders blinked. “You’re going to get inside. Shoot people. Rescue the kids.”

“Yes.”

“That’s your plan.”

“It is.”

He looked at Luis. “Help me out.”

“I think you need a little work on it,” Luis told me. “Particularly in the part where you don’t have any kind of backup or information about what’s inside in the first place. Cass, for all you know, this is one giant fly trap, and you’re the fly. You go in there, you may never make it out. And you’re the one who said she’s all about the Djinn. Maybe she’s just waiting for a Djinn.”

“I’m not a Djinn,” I reminded him. “And I would happily accept backup from you. And any other Wardens you can locate and deliver quickly. But we can’t wait. They know we’re here. They won’t be content to wait quietly much longer.”

“Before they do what?” Sanders asked. His voice had gone quiet. The other agents in the tent—and they were all listening closely, although appearing not to—suddenly looked up, fixed on the answer to his question.

“Show me where the other facilities are located.” He looked nonplussed by the question, then nodded to a nearby female agent, who tapped keys on her computer and pulled up four quadrants on the glowing screen. One was labeled ROSE CANYON, LA JOLLA, CALIFORNIA—where we currently stood. One was labeled DOGTOWN COMMONS, MASSACHUSETTS, and it looked virtually identical to what was shown in La Jolla. Another said ADAMS, TENNESSEE. The last was OHIOVILLE, PENNSYLVANIA. “Show me on a map,” I said. She pulled it up and illuminated the locations for me.

I called on Oversight, bringing the aetheric filter in front of my eyes, and saw the ghostly rivers of power that some humans still called ley lines.

Every one of these spots sat on a nexus, a power center. Oracles were situated on such spots; Sedona, for the Earth Oracle; Seacasket, for the Fire Oracle. Only the Weather Oracle had no fixed location that anyone could identify.

Pearl had established herself—or some aspect of herself—on the supernatural equivalent of a power grid, at the most powerful spots not being watched over by Djinn Oracles.

And all of the locations—all of them—now looked identical. The precisely measured open ground, freed of vegetation. The same glowing dome. Each location was bordered by geography that made it difficult to approach.

She had built herself a network, a support system, and a web of energy.

“Ley lines,” I told Luis. He nodded. “You see what she’s doing?”

“Building herself a power grid? Yeah, I see it. The question is, what’s inside the domes? And which one is she in, physically?”

“I’m not sure she’s in any of them,” I said. “Or, more accurately, I’m not sure she’s not in all of them. I think the dome is Pearl. But she is able to exist simultaneously, in different locations.”

Luis grunted. “Wouldn’t that divide her power?”

“I don’t know,” I said. With the ley lines, it was possible that she could draw from one location to another, move her consciousness seamlessly between the four sites without much, if any, delay. “How many other nexus points are open?”

“In this country? Probably about ten. You think she’ll go after those, too?”

The FBI agent running the computer said, “The Ohioville location, there? That only came up on our radar about two months ago. Locals swear it wasn’t there before. Satellite imaging confirms it.”

Pearl was spreading her influence. It was an infection, a kind of disease traveling along the invisible lines of power that crisscrossed the planet’s surface, and also served as conduits directly through its core. These installations could spring up like mushrooms, without warning.

“I think,” I said quietly, “that if she can get enough power, she will spread to every nexus point in the world. Think of these as blisters, holding in infection.” I tapped the screen, and the white dome. “When they break . . .”

Silence. They all looked at me. Luis looked faintly sick. “How much trouble are we in, exactly?”

Enough that I was being forced, again, to consider Ashan’s orders. Destroy them all. She is powering herself through the humans. Cut out the humans, you cut her connection to the Earth, and she can be killed, once and for all.

Her war was against the Djinn, and yes, she would destroy them and absorb their aetheric power; but her heart, her soul, her spirit was channeled through humanity, in the same way that Djinn were connected to the Oracles.

I don’t want to do this, some part of me whispered. Indeed, I did not. I dreaded it with all my soul. To destroy humanity, I would have to feel their pain, their deaths, their lives passing through me, being removed from the world and the living memory of the Mother. I would have to unmake Luis Rocha. Isabel. Even the fragile memorials of the dead, like Manny and Angela.

I couldn’t. I couldn’t bring myself to take that step, not even looking at this appalling thing in front of me, and understanding how little time was left to us.

There’s still time. There must be a way to stop her.

I had to try. For the sake of those I loved, for the sake of those I didn’t, like Agent Sanders and his unseen family, I had to not only try, but succeed.

“We need all the Wardens you can find,” I said. “All of them. We need to attack all of these at the same time, force her to fight multiple fronts. You understand?” I turned to Agent Sanders. “There will be humans to fight, or to rescue. Can we count on you to do what is needed?”

“You want teams at each of these locations.”

“Are you saying they’re not already there, feeding you information?”

He was silent, watching me, and finally gave a single nod. “All right,” he said. “When?”

“Let me check on Wardens,” Luis said, and slapped his pockets, looking harassed. “Cell phone?”

Agent Klein stepped up and handed it over to him. Luis flipped it open and began making calls. I left him to it, staring at the shimmering, featureless domes on the screen.

Sister, I thought. We were sisters once. So much alike. But she had learned to love killing, and I had learned to embrace the opposite. That was a harshly learned lesson, courtesy of Ashan, probably one he had never intended. But one I valued, nevertheless.

It occurred to me that she expected me to act against her as Ashan wished, destroying humanity to cut her off from her power. Reducing me to the same state that she had once been in.

Driving me mad, because assuredly, with so much death and agony coursing through me, I would destroy myself. I’d become like her.

Obsessed with the end of all things.

I wondered if Ashan had thought of that, too. Of what would happen if I turned toxic, like Pearl. Two of us, rending the world apart.

I could only imagine, old and clever as Ashan was, that he’d already seen that possibility.

That meant that should I execute his orders . . . execute humanity . . . there would be someone standing in the background, waiting to destroy me, as well.

It would be the only safe thing to do.

And suddenly, Rashid’s inexplicable attachment made sense. He was not Ashan’s creature, but he was Ashan’s hireling. Close to me not because he was interested, or concerned, but because he was waiting.

Waiting for what he, and Ashan, knew was inevitable.

My hands—flesh, and metal—clenched into fists. “No,” I murmured. “Not inevitable.”

The FBI agent next to me looked up, frowning. “Excuse me?”

“Nothing is inevitable,” I said. “Not even death.”

I left her wondering, and turned to walk outside of the tent, breathing in the fresh, crisp air. It was mostly untainted by the massive cities around us, although I could still catch the occasional stench of exhaust and oil. I leaned against the rough bark of a tree, breathing deeply, and then crouched down to place both hands flat against the ground. I could sense something here, something like I had felt back on the ridge where I’d buried the child. A presence, though distant and elusive. Her presence.

“Help me,” I whispered. “Help me understand what I should do.” Then I directed it upward, outward, to the greater power beyond the vast one of this world. “Help me save them.”

A cool breeze drifted across my face like a caress, and I turned into it and closed my eyes. This moment felt peaceful, almost worshipful in its intensity. As if I was alone, connected once more to the life I had once led. Connected to eternity.

Then I heard a snapping of twigs, and opened my eyes to see Agent Ben Turner shove aside underbrush and step out to face me.

The Warden was not his usual, nondescript self. He’d been in a fight, a hard one; there were bruises forming on his face, and one of his hands looked swollen into uselessness. Broken, perhaps. He was breathing hard. His FBI-issue Windbreaker was ripped—no, shredded—and I saw blood spotting his shirt. Minor wounds, it seemed, but the look in his eyes told me that he did not consider them so.

“You did that,” he said. “You set that bastard on me.”

Rashid. “No one commands Rashid,” I said, which was quite true, albeit misleading in this case. “You drew his attention yourself, by taking the scroll. You knew he wanted it for himself.” I raised my eyebrows. “Do you still have it?”

“What do you think?” he snapped, and held up his swollen hand. “He broke my fingers to get it!”

That did sound like Rashid. “He didn’t like you turning against us. Neither did I. Neither, I suspect, will the other Wardens.”

“You think I give a crap about what the Wardens think?” Turner snapped. “I did what I had to do. You people are out of control. Look at what they just did in Florida—Jesus Christ, they stole a fucking cruise ship. With innocent people on board. They kidnapped people, and you know some of those people are bound to get caught in the middle. That’s what I’m left with—loyalty to a bunch of assholes who think nothing of collateral damage? No. No more. The Wardens need somebody telling them where their limits are, if they can’t see it themselves.”

It was a long speech, and he was winded by the end of it. And emotionally exhausted from the passion he’d poured into it. I wondered what collateral damage he had seen, or experienced himself. I wondered if his own hands were entirely clean of the blood.

“I have never loved the Wardens,” I said, which was entirely true. As a Djinn, they’d been the enemy to me: enslavers of my own kind. Not only no better than human . . . worse than human. When the pact had shattered between the Djinn and the Wardens, freeing the captives from their forced servitude, no one had taken more satisfaction from that than I.

But I also knew that the Wardens were what they were for a reason. They were ruthless, self-centered and ferociously competitive, yes; they were also self-sacrificing and magnificent, when necessary. These things did not make for comfortable, easily categorizable analysis. The Wardens, like nature itself, were neither good nor bad. They simply were. And were required to be, for the sake of the fragile lives in their trust.

“You think the government can control them?” I asked. “You think you have enough will and power of your own to force the Wardens into it?”

“I’m not alone,” he said. “There are other Wardens who think things have gone too far.”

“Then take it back from within. But if you think that subjugating them to the will of political appointees is a good idea, then I suggest you are allowing your hatred to blind you to reality,” I said. “It doesn’t matter now. We will need your help.”

“My help?” He laughed, but it had a wild, dark sound. “Why the hell would I help any of you?”

“Because you’re not a bad man. Because you are sworn to help, to protect, and not to run from battle, yes, but mostly because you, Ben Turner, the man beneath all that, wants justice. And wishes to save children. I saw that in you when we first met, Ben. You want to save them. You need to save them.”

He blinked, but he didn’t disagree with that, at least. “There are children in that compound,” I said. “Isabel Rocha is one of them. You saw Brianna. You saw Gloria. You saw the others. You know we can’t let them be destroyed, not without losing our own honor.”

He leaned against another tree across the clearing, cradling his wounded arm in his good hand. He looked tired, and achy, and a little lost. “So what are you going to do?”

“Go get them,” I said. “And you will come with me.” He held up his hand. “Yeah, about that. I don’t really think I’ll be a whole lot of help.”

Luis stepped out of the tent, looked from me to Agent Turner, and said, “Hey. Are we going to beat the crap out of this guy?”

“I think Rashid’s already performed that service,” I said. “What’s left is healing him so that we can use him.”

“Dammit. I always miss out on the beat-down and end up doing the cleanup. Sucks being an Earth Warden sometimes.”

“Sometimes,” I agreed, straight-faced. “Will you do it?”

“Of course I will,” Luis said grumpily. “I’m not going to waste my energy on pain maintenance.”

I did not blame him. Turner, for his part, looked apprehensively relieved, if such a thing were possible. Luis glared at him, then went to him and took his wounded hand. He was true to his word; I heard the tiny snaps and pops of bones straightening, being forced back into their shapes and sockets, and Turner’s face went dirty-pale, and he leaned his head back against the tree, rigid and fighting to control his impulse to scream, faint, or vomit. Or some combination of those three. But I suspected Luis did, after all, put in some nerve blocks. He wasn’t unnecessarily cruel. Merely . . . proportional.

It took a few long moments of concentration, and then Luis let go and stepped back. Turner lowered his hand and stared at it in bemused wonder. Tried to move his fingers, and winced a little.

“Yeah, the muscles will complain for a while,” Luis said. “They got beaten up too. But the bones will hold, as long as you don’t do something crazy with them, like hit somebody. Best I could do on short notice.”

“It’s better,” Turner said, with a little sense of wonder to it. “I think it’ll do.”

“It will have to,” I said. “We’re going into the compound.”

Turner’s head came up, and his eyes widened. “What? When?”

“As soon as the other teams are in place,” I said. “Luis will be able to hide our presence from any regular humans; if they have Wardens on their side, it might be a bit more difficult, but we can manage.”

Fooling Pearl would be the much greater challenge. That was why I had asked for the coordinated raids on each location; if her attention was split, if she realized she was under threat on all fronts, she might miss me until it was too late.

Perhaps. Or perhaps she’d simply recognize my presence, withdraw from every other front, and focus on killing me.

If killing me was her intent, of course. I wasn’t altogether certain of that. If she’d wanted me dead, surely she could have sent overwhelming force to manage it by now. No, I thought she wanted this. She wanted me to come here.

I didn’t think it was merely for the satisfaction of watching me die, although that might easily be a consideration. No, there was something else.

Something I was missing.

Luis was watching me. “You all right?”

“Fine,” I said. “And the Wardens?”

“Got them to coordinate something out of New York, but we’re screwed having any Wardens on the ground for this—it’ll be remote attacks at the other locations, but they’ll make it as good as they can. I’ve got them on standby. All you have to do is give me the go.”

“We go now,” I said. “I will give the signal for the attack when we are in position there. Get ready.”

Agent Turner raised his eyebrows, but didn’t respond otherwise; he walked into the tent. A moment later, his superior burst out, looking thunderous. “Are you out of your mind?” he demanded. “I’m not letting you take people in there now. You don’t even have cover of darkness!”

“It wouldn’t matter if I did,” I said. “Either we’ll be able to hide, or we won’t. Light or darkness is irrelevant to her. But if you want to be useful, make a distraction that will draw the attention of her soldiers.”

“What kind of distraction?”

“Mass our people at the chasm. Make it look like you’re going to come across,” Turner supplied, unexpectedly. “Start using the bullhorn. Tell them you want to talk.”

I nodded. I had been frankly thinking of something more violent, but that would work and expose the men and women here to less risk overall. “One hour,” I said. “It will take that long for us to get across the chasm, deal with her countermeasures, and reach the dome.”

“Without being detected,” Sanders said. “Right. Sure.”

It was not a perfect plan. And I knew, knew that I was missing something vital. But my conviction was that I had no time to waste, or this would be intensely worse, very soon.