by Rachel Caine
Beneath the tornado, the road cleared.
Edie lowered her gaze to the road, and the screaming, roaring destruction of the tornado obediently began to move at a leisurely pace, flinging off debris in all directions except ours. I saw shattered tree trunks hurled out in chunks that vanished into the far distance. Edie kept her full concentration on the tornado as it continued down the road.
"She can't keep it up," Luis said. He was clutching my arm in a painful grip now, and I could understand the impulse; the feeling of vulnerability in the face of what Edie had conjured was overwhelming. As a demonstration of raw power, it matched or exceeded anything I had ever seen--not just the power, but the fine control. "She's killing herself."
"No," I said softly. "She's not." And that was, by far, more terrifying. He was right--Edie should have been draining herself at an awful pace, and putting her very life at risk. Instead, she was laughing, like the child she was, with joy. Her eyes had taken on an unnatural sheen that was--however impossibly--like that of a Djinn.
Whatever Pearl had done to these children, these survivors and thrivers in her training program... it had made them not as human as I had thought. They weren't merely Wardens with more power; they were defying the very laws that governed nature, and power itself. Djinn were built to do what Edie was doing; it was coded in their smallest components. Humans were built to survive here, in this world, and it was a very different thing.
Edie's tornado continued to sweep the road, back and forth, with precision and regularity, until the way was completely clear. Then she slowly closed her hands, and I felt the pressure above me collapse into overdriven chaos.
"Backlash!" Luis screamed, and tackled me to the ground just as that power erupted all around us in a hundred burning, stabbing lightning bolts, screaming down from the churning clouds. If a single bolt held the power of a nuclear device, this was the equivalent of the detonation of an entire nuclear arsenal.
And it lasted for almost a full minute before the energy spent itself back into the ground and the aetheric.
In the aftermath, my ears ringing from the splitting roar of thunder, I slowly raised my head. I was seeing afterimages of the lightning, even though I'd been facedown for most of it and had kept my eyes tightly closed. It had been like being trapped inside an open circuit, and my skin felt hot and fried.
The landscape looked, if possible, even more like something out of a nightmare. Instead of the debris lying in blankets, it was heaped into hills now, and the hills were on fire. Even the bare ground was blackened and smoking, and the surface of the road only twenty feet away seemed melted and sizzling.
Edie jumped down off the roof of the van and said, "That was cool, right? Did you see it? I've never seen lightning so close. It's whiter the closer you are to it. Did you know that? Only there was some dust in the air; some of it looked orange because of that." She was manic with excitement, I realized, utterly unconcerned for the damage that she had just done.
"You don't do things like that!" Luis came up yelling, fists clenched, and Edie took a step back from him. "Didn't anybody ever teach you how to balance your energy? How to ground it? What if there had been people around, or animals? How many would you have killed with that stunt?"
She looked shocked, then resentful and angry. A dangerous combination. I rose more slowly, and took Luis by the elbow to draw him backward.
He shook me off, still facing the girl. "Don't do it again, Edie. Tell me you understand what I'm saying."
"It doesn't matter," she said, and lifted her chin in defiance to glare. "Look at it; it's a wreck! The Djinn trashed it anyway, so what if it burns?"
"And if it spreads?" he shot back. "What then? What are you going to do to control it? Anything?" He was right. With the debris piled as it was now, full of drying, dead vegetation, it was already starting to burn with a vengeance. "Sparks travel, and they travel fast. A mile away and you're in virgin forest, full of life."
"Then I dump some water on it," Edie said. "Big freaking deal."
"That isn't enough. If the fire's hot enough, it just vaporizes your rain. What next?"
"I--" She was frowning now, and lost, so she quickly went on the attack. "It's not my problem! I was doing what you wanted. I was getting the stuff out of our way! That's what Fire Wardens are for, to fix these things!"
"That's not what Fire Wardens are for, to clean up your messes," Luis said. "It's not what Djinn are for, either. And if you wanted to get their attention, you've done it. That little display lit up the aetheric like the Fourth of July."
"So?" Edie challenged. "Let them come get me. I can take them."
"Who? The Djinn? How many, Edie? One, two, yeah, maybe, because you've got a hell of a lot of power. But you can't take five of them. Or ten. Or twenty. And the rest of us, we won't be so lucky."
"So?" she said again, and shrugged. "Not my fault you're lame. Why should I worry about you?"
"Don't," I said to Luis as he opened his mouth again. "You can't convince her. The best we can do is get on with things, quickly."
He didn't like it, and he definitely didn't like Edie's attitude, but he nodded. I could see the tensed muscles in his neck and shoulders, but all he did was pull open the door of the van. "Inside," he said. "Let's move."
Edie got in and took her seat next to the very silent boy. He hadn't done or said a thing the entire time, and that made me feel oddly more afraid of him than of Edie, with all her profligate waste of power.
Luis started the van, and I mounted my motorcycle. Without a word between us, I eased into the lead.
Driving through the burning piles of what had once been a vivid, living forest made for a sobering experience. The death of plants and animals left marks on the aetheric, just as those of humans did; the ghostly image of what this place had once been was worrying, and sad. I couldn't dwell on it for long; the road rapidly became more hazardous, as I dodged the occasional debris that hadn't been swept completely out of the way. This was made more difficult by the thick, drifting smoke. My eyes burned from the constant irritation, and my lungs seemed thick and congested as well. I began to cough, but I couldn't spare much attention from the trail ahead. The road had suffered damage from lightning strikes, and I weaved around the potholes, still smoking from their trauma, as well as the other things the tornado had left in its wake.
I slowed suddenly and stopped. Behind me, Luis hit the brakes fast, leaned out the window, and called, "What is it?"
There was a man lying in the road. He had on a thick blue jacket, blue jeans, hiking boots--typical covering for a day's trek out in the forest. There was a corona of thick blood on the road around him.
I put the bike on its kickstand and walked to him, then crouched to check his pulse.
He rolled over and smiled at me with shark-sharp teeth, Djinn eyes blazing a milky cold blue, and I knew in that instant that he was going to kill me. I'd fallen for an obvious trap. I hadn't checked the man in the aetheric, or I'd have seen this was only a shell, not a human with a true aura.
My own fault. It was a bitter thing to carry with me into the dark.
He snapped at me with that razor-edged grin, and without thinking, I lifted up my left forearm and slammed it into his jaws, forcing his head back. He gagged on it, chewing, but that arm wasn't flesh. It was metal, powered by Djinn engineering and my own Earth power.
It still felt pain, and I couldn't help the scream that forced its way out--but I didn't let him pull my arm free of his jaws. Better the metal suffer than my flesh.
"Cass!" Luis was shouting, and I heard him running to me. I'd get him killed, too, for nothing, for a simple lack of foresight....
And then the boy, Alvin, opened the passenger door and stepped out, and the Djinn who was on the verge of ripping my arm away stopped. All his attention was away from me and on the boy. I pulled my mangled forearm free and scrambled back, and the Djinn didn't bother to follow. He came to his feet in an unnaturally smooth, boneless motion.
&n
bsp; Luis grabbed me and pulled me backward by the collar of my jacket, then yanked me up to my feet. "Get to the van!" he yelled. "I've got this!"
He didn't. Couldn't. And he must have been aware of that, but Luis was ever the hero. I would never be able to break him of that habit.
It didn't matter. The boy took a few calm, measured steps toward the Djinn, who was staring at him as if he couldn't quite comprehend what was facing him. "You should both get back in the van," Alvin said. "I don't know what this will do to you."
Luis seemed undecided, but I was not; I'd seen what Pearl's Void children could do, and the boy seemed genuinely concerned. Unlike Edie, he wasn't glorying in his power, or enjoying the confrontation; he seemed very grave, and very focused.
I pushed Luis back to the van, and climbed in with him. My motorcycle gleamed in the road between us and the confrontation that was slowly unfolding, but I had no desire to get out to move it. I loved the bike, but there was no use in dying for it. "We can't leave him out there alone," Luis said. "He's just a kid."
"No," I said softly. "Look." I grabbed Luis's hand, and took him just a little into the aetheric, where the ghost-forest still loomed around us. The Djinn was a blazing white fire there--unusual because Djinn normally weren't easily visible to humans on this plane, but he was channeling power directly from the Mother.
Facing him, the boy wasn't even there. What was there was a kind of howling emptiness, the exact opposite of a human aura; the boy didn't belong here, in this world. In this plane. There was something inside him that was very far from human.
I fell back into my body, and felt Luis jerk as he fell into his. He turned toward me, lips parted, eyes wider than I'd ever seen them. "What is that?"
"Him," I said, staring at Alvin. "Or what Pearl made out of him. He's still there, the boy, but there's something else in him. Something that isn't from any plane of existence I know."
"Demon," he said. The Wardens were familiar with demons, who could--and did--inhabit Djinn... or Wardens, if the conditions were right. But this wasn't a demon, either, not in any sense I could explain.
"More," I said. That was inadequate, but it didn't matter. I couldn't imagine what had happened to this child, but it must have been truly horrific. She'd taken him specifically to hollow out what made him human, and then fill that hole with something alien and totally, coldly uncaring about our world. I'd never understood that before, what she'd done to the Void children; it was even worse than the violation of the other children, like Isabel, who'd had their powers forced into early and violent bloom.
The boy was a walking bomb.
The Djinn had, perhaps wisely, decided not to attempt a physical assault; instead, he abandoned his human shell and rushed at the boy in a wave of power. A mundane human would have been killed instantly; a Warden would have lasted a little longer, but in the end, the Djinn was too powerful to fight effectively.
The power simply passed into the boy, and... vanished. Gone.
The Djinn shrieked and tried to pull himself back; he managed, at least partially, but as he tried to re-form into a visible body it was plain that what was left was mutilated and badly wounded.
And the boy hadn't so much as raised a hand.
"You should go," Alvin said to him. "I really don't want to hurt you. We just want to get by and save those people. Could you go?" He was astonishingly polite, but also completely unmoved by the torture he'd just inflicted. In his own way, he was dead, I realized. Merely better mannered than an average living person.
The Djinn snarled and attacked--not the boy, but me. I felt the hot, burning premonition of the assault an instant before the power erupted out of the ground below my feet and connected with a snap in the air above.
I was the conduit for the energy of the lightning bolt. And as I had no Weather Warden abilities, there was no chance I would have survived such an experience... except that Edie simply stopped it in midstrike, leaving only a pop of energy that exploded somewhere above, and a hissing sizzle of steam. In the time it had taken me to realize what was coming, the child had utterly destroyed the Djinn's attack, without moving from her seat in the van.
Alvin shook his head and said, "Okay, then." He sounded sad, but resigned, and in the next instant a complex net of something that I couldn't quite see, couldn't quite understand, emerged from the boy's slender body. It was like a living thing, something boneless and alien, but still anchored in his power and flesh... and it engulfed the wounded Djinn and simply ate him. No sound, no drama, no flashes or explosions. It was... easy.
I felt utterly, filthily sick, and grabbed for Luis. He seemed just as unsteady as I felt, but the two of us balanced each other. "God," he breathed, staring at the boy. "My God."
Alvin looked up and at us with a sudden, eerily predatory focus. He said nothing, but the two of us went still, instinctively. The thing that had emerged from him was slowly crawling back into his skin--a thing I could almost see, almost understand, though I didn't wish that. Not at all. "I won't hurt you," he told us blandly. "You're not enemies." I heard the unspoken yet hanging at the end of that sentence.
"How many Djinn can you handle like that?" Luis asked. He was struggling to sound offhand about it, as if he were merely interested and not terrified by the child's potential. Alvin shrugged.
"Three or four," he said. "It gets harder the more there are, of course. I get full."
I saw Luis's Adam's apple bob as he swallowed. He glanced at me, and I knew what he was thinking. I thought it--felt it--as well. "Full," I repeated with as little emphasis as I could manage. "You consume them."
"Of course," Alvin said. "I wouldn't let them go to waste. Not unless I can't help it."
He kept watching us with that eerily flat interest for another long moment, and then the last of the--shadows?--retreated back into him, and he was just a little boy again. Tired, and small for his age.
He trudged back to the van, opened the door, and climbed in next to Edie, who leaned out the window and said, "Can we go now, please?"
Luis said under his breath, "We can't. We can't do this."
"Do what?" I whispered back. "Use them to rescue trapped Wardens? Yes, we can. And will."
"We can't win when they turn on us."
I smiled grimly. "No," I agreed. "No, we can't."
And then I climbed back on my motorcycle and fired up the engine. When I looked back at him, Luis was still standing there, staring at me, but he shook his head in surrender and got back in the van.
And we drove down that smoky, lifeless, hellish road toward what I could only think of as the inevitable.
In about a quarter of a mile, the road curved and ended in a huge, tumbled mound of steel wreckage. It had once been some kind of structure, likely an administration building located near the mine shaft.
The only sign of the mine itself was an inset depression in the bare ground, curved like a bowl to a depth of almost twenty feet at its center. Featureless and silent.
I parked, and Luis pulled his vehicle in next to mine. As the engines died, the only sounds were the creaking of bent metal in the wind and the crackle of the fires burning sullenly around us. No birds crossed the silent, watching sky. This is what the world will become, I thought. Wreckage and emptiness, with nothing left to feel, or remember, or mourn.
Nothing but Pearl, staring into the dead cinders of her triumph, and smiling.
Luis and the two children got out of the van, and he grabbed the other canvas bag full of supplies. Mine was still secure against my back, but I opened it and checked the stoppered beer bottle that held our emergency option: Rashid. That, I rewrapped carefully and added it back to my bag.
"Right," Luis said, as I nodded my readiness. "Cassiel and I will open the tunnel. Edie, your job is--"
"I know what I'm supposed to do," she interrupted, looking annoyed. "I'm not stupid. I'm the one who keeps you breathing. And Alvin's the one who kills Djinn. Right?"
"Yes," I said, since Luis didn't seem to
be inclined to answer at all. "We won't try to keep the tunnel open the entire length; we'd need to reinforce as we go, and there won't be time. We'll allow it to collapse behind us. We can open it again in stages as we come up."
"You hope," Edie said. "Maybe you won't be strong enough, and you trap us down there with you. What do we do then?"
"Die," I said blandly, and met her eyes. "What is your point?"
She raised her eyebrows just a fraction, and--unexpectedly--giggled. "None, I guess," she said. When she smiled, she looked like a lovely, adorable child, with a dimple denting her right cheek and light shining in her eyes. It was unfair, and I felt a surge of bitter anger at Pearl again. What might this child have been, if left to her own destiny? What might any of them have been? She'd taken the future of the next generation of Wardens and... twisted it. Corrupted it.
She'd left me no choices, and I hated her for that.
I closed my eyes for a second, and turned blindly toward Luis. My hand found his by instinct, and squeezed tightly. When I finally looked, I saw him frowning at me in concern. "You okay?" he asked. I nodded. I wasn't, because knowledge had come to me in a cold, furious burst, and illuminated everything, every hard, cutting corner of the road ahead. Even if by some miracle we survived all this, what future did these Warden children have ahead of them? The Wardens themselves had been destroyed and didn't even realize it yet because there was nothing to take up the fight after them.