by Rachel Caine
Thinking of the Oracles made me think about my daughter, Imara, and I felt a leap of terrible fear. Had she screamed, like the others? Had she lost herself, too?
“No,” David said, and his fingers tightened on mine. “She’s all right, Imara is all right. We’d know—” His voice trailed off, and I saw a flash of panic in his eyes. We wouldn’t know. We were only human now, and our daughter, our child who’d been born half Djinn and raised to become an Oracle . . . she was beyond our grasp now. David normally would have been able to reach out to her, over any distance, but now he was just as trapped in flesh and as clueless as I felt.
We both turned immediately to Lewis.
“I don’t know about the Oracles. I haven’t heard anything,” he said. He knew immediately what we were thinking about, and the frown on his face said that he was worried about it, too. “I’ll get somebody on it. David, do you know why she summoned the Djinn?”
“Pain,” David said softly. “You heard the scream. That was her pain.”
It rolled over me in a fresh, overwhelming wave of memory, and I had to concentrate hard to keep myself from shaking with the intensity of the experience. “The black corner,” I said. “She’s been hurt. That’s why she’s waking up. We did this.”
David visibly swallowed, then nodded. Our hands tightened together, the only real comfort we could offer each other. It had been bad enough when we’d been responsible for the pain and death of Djinn. Now we might be responsible for a whole lot more.
“We’ll find a way to get back to ourselves,” he said. “We have to find a way.”
I wished I could believe him. Lewis wasn’t looking at me, and I could tell that he was trying not to reveal his own doubts. He pushed away from the bulkhead wall and said, “You asked what we were going to do. I don’t see that there’s any reason to change the plan. We hit land, the Wardens scatter to handle crisis events. I’d like you two at Warden HQ for the time being. It’ll be easier to work with you there, and you can help us with coordination.”
Coordination.
If the Earth was really waking up, really angry, really hurt—we’d be coordinating firefighting during a nuclear war. And it was a waste. He was sidelining us, and I didn’t like it.
“We have something more important to do, Lewis. I know you’re trying to keep us out of the way, but we have to try to find a way to get our powers back,” I said. “David can’t live like this. You know that. We have to see the Oracles. If anybody knows, they do.”
“I can’t give you help.”
“We don’t need any,” David said. “This will work, or it won’t. But isn’t it worth a shot?”
Lewis thought about it for a moment, then nodded. “Yes,” he said. “It’s worth a shot. But if it doesn’t work, I need you at Warden HQ. Understand?”
“Understood,” I said.
No way in hell.
I got used to feeling sealed inside myself over the next two days; if David didn’t, he hid it well. We didn’t need confinement in hospital beds, so we checked ourselves out while Lewis wasn’t looking. It wasn’t really our fault, though. Cherise instigated it.
“No way am I sleeping in this horrible bed the rest of the trip,” she declared within a couple of hours of waking up. For Cherise, she looked ragged. For anyone else, she looked magazine-cover ready, but I could spot the subtleties—a smudge under her eyes, a slight pallor under her tan, hair that wasn’t quite as bouncy as usual. “And the shower in here sucks. What is this shampoo stuff, anyway? Medical soap? Ugh. No. I am not doing without product. There’s a limit.”
With that, and without anybody giving her permission to vacate the bed, she was up and moving, wrapped in a sheet and searching for her clothes. David helped—more afraid that she’d end up dropping the sheet and he’d see more of Cherise than he intended, I think—and once she’d laid her hands on her shorts, shirt, and shoes, there was no stopping her.
Which was all fine with me, actually. I was heartily sick of this room. I dressed quickly. David was hilariously slow; I wondered how often he’d actually had to pull on his own pants in the last few thousand years. Probably zero times.
“Sunshine,” Cherise declared as we followed her out of the medical area and into the more spacious public area of the ship. The utilitarian carpet and walls were replaced by lusher stuff the higher we went, and by the time we could see daylight streaming through windows, we were in posh territory, with fancy sitting rooms and dark wood paneling. And bars. A lot of bars. A few were even serving.
Cherise stopped at one and ordered us all margaritas.
“I don’t think this is the time—,” I said, but she pressed the glass into my hands firmly.
“Sweetie, this is exactly the time to drink,” she said. “We survived, right? We’re heading home? Definitely happy hour, from now until, oh, ever after.” She clinked glasses with me, then David, and led us out a side door onto the deck of the ship. We didn’t much feel like celebrating, but it was tough to resist Cher when she was in a mood like this.
And she was right about taking us outside. It was beautiful.
Hard to believe that we’d spent the last few weeks—no, months? years?—under such strain, facing such dire circumstances. When we’d sailed out of Miami, we’d done it in the teeth of a monstrous storm.
Today the sun was warm and kind, the sky a rich, clean-scrubbed blue. The breeze that blew in off the waves was gentle as it glided over my bare arms. The sea was calm; it glittered in diamond-bright swells, a sparkling fabric unrolled as far as the eye could see.
So beautiful.
David put his arm around me, and we stood there for a moment in silence, staring out at the vista. Cherise leaned on her forearms on the rail, smiling, turning her face up to the sun with an expression of pure delight.
“Cher?”
She turned at the sound of her name, and I glanced back to see Kevin coming at a run from a lower deck, taking the stairs two at a time. My relationship with Kevin—the youngest Warden we had, I believed—was complicated. He was complicated, more than most people I knew: damaged, and dangerous, and unpredictable, but still struggling to find and hold on to that core of goodness that against all odds survived within him. He’d been through a lot, in his—what was it now, nineteen years? He was three years younger than Cherise, which seemed like a lot at their ages. But that didn’t stop him from being head over heels in love with her.
“Hey, Kev,” she said, turning from the rail as he jumped to the top of the steps and lunged to grab her in a hug. She was a very small girl, and he was tall and lanky, putting on more muscle all the time. An odd couple, but also oddly appropriate for each other. Cherise’s unending optimism was something Kevin needed in his life, which had seen way too much darkness. She was laughing in bright, silvery peals as he spun her around in his arms. “Whoa, whoa, easy, don’t make me yak!”
He stopped and let her go, but she didn’t go far—just far enough to kiss him, with authority. David raised his eyebrows a little but said nothing. I wondered what he thought about it. I suspected he was just as wary as I was of Kevin, generally.
“You’re okay?” Kevin asked. “Lewis said—”
“Yeah, look, the Djinn kind of freaked out and there was a thing, but I’m all good now. See?” Cherise did a runway twirl for him. “I’m fine.”
“Yes, you are.”
She made a purring sound low in her throat and arched against him like a cat. “Don’t tease unless you mean it.”
“Oh, I—” Kevin suddenly stopped in midflirt, blinked, and looked at her with a baffled expression. David and I both turned to look at him. Cherise was just as baffled as Kevin, it seemed.
“What?” I asked, because it didn’t seem like Cherise could even remember the word.
Kevin closed his eyes for a second, rubbed them, and opened them again. Relief spread across his face, and he shook his head. “Nothing,” he said. “Jesus, I’m tired. I thought—it’s nothing. I’m okay.”
> Cherise stepped forward and put her hand against his cheek, one of those loving gestures that I find myself doing to David so often. Kevin relaxed and bent toward her, covering her hand with his. “Well,” I said to David, “they’ve gotten cozy. Not really sure how I feel about that.”
He acknowledged it with a nod, but I could tell his mind was elsewhere. Shadows in his eyes, weariness in his face. For the first time, it struck me that every minute he spent in a human body—a real human body, cut off from the Djinn—he was growing older, just as I was. I tried to imagine how it felt for him to have lost so much, to be so alone. I knew how I felt. Surely for him it was millions times worse.
“David.” I put a hand on his arm, and got his full focus. “Are you okay? Do you need Lewis to—”
No mistaking the weary twist of his mouth. He hated being dependent on anyone, but he’d have to face facts—he couldn’t draw enough power from me to fuel his life well, and Lewis was the best bet. But David didn’t like being beholden to the first man I’d ever loved. At all. “I’m fine,” he said, voice unnervingly soft and even. “If I have to see him for help, I will.”
I didn’t believe him, but he wasn’t asking me to, in so many words. It was the big lie, and he was asking me not to push it. David wasn’t the kind to be reasonable about his limits; after spending millennia without many at all, he was going to crash into human borders pretty hard, and it was going to hurt.
It wasn’t the kind of thing he’d thank me for pointing out, either.
“Coordinating,” I said, bringing us back to the dark center of things around which our lives revolved now. “He really wanted to stick us with coordinating at headquarters.”
That got a smile from him, if a brief one. “It’s not going to suit you if we have to do it.”
“Speak for yourself, Master of”—I was about to say Djinn but caught myself in time . . . ouch—“the obvious. I’m not giving up yet. We’ll find a way to get our mojo back. See if we don’t.”
David drained the rest of his glass and dangled it from his fingers, staring down now into the sparkling waves. “You sure you want it back?”
“Are you kidding me?”
“No,” he said, and his voice had that odd, flat, soft inflection again, as if he were pressing all the emotion out of it with great care. “Jo, think about it. We both want to be together, but we’ve always been of two worlds. I tried to make you part of mine, but that didn’t work. This—this is a chance to make me part of yours.”
I forgot all about the drink in my hand, the beautiful day, the laughter of Cherise and Kevin standing a few feet away, and fixed him with a disbelieving stare. “David, you’re dying.”
“Everyone’s dying,” he said. “Mortal life is short to someone like me even in the best case. If I don’t—resume my life as a Djinn, I can be a true husband to you. Living a human life.” His eyes finally moved to meet mine. “Giving you human children.”
We didn’t talk about Imara very often; our Djinn child was a beautiful, complicated gift, but she had never been a baby, never rested in my arms, never taken her first steps. The mothering instinct in me craved more, and he knew that. I’d never said it, but of course he knew.
“David—”
“It’s not a good time,” he finished for me, and he was right on, even though we no longer shared that deep supernatural bond that had made it so easy for him to read me. “I know. But there’s so little good about all this, Jo. We should take what we can, when we can, for as long as we can.”
“I’m not having children just to watch them die, if this turns bad,” I said, and somehow managed not to add, again. Imara’s death, before she’d been made an Oracle, was something that would haunt me forever. “We’re in trouble. Don’t think I haven’t noticed.”
“You know what I’ve learned from thousands of years of watching humanity? It’s always a bad time.” He put his arms around me and held me, and the simple warmth of it made me want to weep. I didn’t. It wouldn’t do for me to get all girly and soft on him now. “But all the bad times end, too.”
“Thus sayeth the dude with a long view.”
“Dude?”
“Sorry, it was my bad eighties teen years coming back to haunt me.”
He kissed me, as if he couldn’t think of any more words. That was okay. It got the point across just fine.
It was very strange to be on the outskirts of the whirl-wind of activity inside the Wardens—a bystander, like Cherise. Someone included me in some of the meetings, out of courtesy, but being outside of the direct flow of crisis information made me feel like I was just holding down a chair at the table. It was, in fact, a literal table, the biggest one on the ship, and it seated about twenty; I supposed they used it for swank corporate meetings on the high seas. Or really large families, with equally large checkbooks. Lewis sat at one end, looking down the long expanse of wood; around it, every chair was filled with some powerful Warden or other.
Except mine and David’s, of course. We were just keeping the cushions warm.
We were an hour into the meeting, and what had started out as a grim list of problems had only gotten worse.
“Reports coming in from South America,” said Kyril Valotte, an exotic- looking young man who missed being handsome by the narrow set of his eyes. “Earthquakes and lava flows in Venezuela. We’ve got teams heading there now, but we’ve also got reports of odd animal attacks in Panama, some kind of disease outbreak in Guatemala. . . . It’s a lot for the Earth team to handle at once.”
“I can send four Wardens out of Texas,” said the head of the Southwest U.S. region, and made some notes on his map. “Earth Wardens I got. Weather Wardens I need.”
“I’ll send as many as I can,” Kyril said with a nod. “We’ll need ground transportation.”
I held up my hand. “I’ll take it. I can still make phone calls.”
They looked up, and I saw the frank confusion in their faces for a second before memory caught up. Then they both just looked uncomfortable. Kyril nodded and murmured something meaninglessly kind. The U.S. Warden—Jerry something?—didn’t bother. He just went back to his maps.
There was a lot of that going on. Lower- ranked Wardens came in and out, delivering notes and whispered messages to their bosses, and with each note, the deployments ended up revised. Thankfully, Cherise had come to my rescue with a genuine computer and network uplink, so I was dispatching travel authorizations and setting up rental cars at the speed of—well, not light, but at the speed of whatever satellite I was bouncing my signal from. It was something useful to do, at least.
I was glad, because listening to the trouble was somehow worse than not knowing about it at all.
Lewis looked at his watch and said, “Hour update,” which was the trigger for us to go around the table, one by one, and list off the emerging issues, the ones being handled, and estimated numbers of casualties. I tallied it up in a spreadsheet. Nice and clean and neat.
By the time silence fell again, and my fingers stopped typing, I was shaking. The pause was deep and profound. I stared at the list of things I’d recorded.
“Jo?” Lewis’s voice was gentle. He already knew.
I cleared my throat. “We’re up to more than a thousand reported anomalies and severe issues,” I said. “Estimated casualties worldwide are climbing steadily. Right now, from what we have reported, the worst case scenario puts human lives lost at about half a million people.”
People who were bad at math took in sharp breaths around the table.
“It’s going to get worse,” David said, in the silence. “The Djinn aren’t intervening. I believe they could be causing some of these events.”
“Why? Why would they do that?” It was an emotional question, not a rational one, and it came from Kelley, down near the end of the table. She was upset, clearly.
“Because they don’t have a choice,” David said. “The Djinn aren’t operating under their own control anymore. At least, I don’t believe they
are. Otherwise, at least one of them would be here now. You can’t count on any assistance from the Djinn, and where you meet them, you have to consider them as hostile.”
We all knew what that meant; hostile Djinn were pretty much worst-case scenario all by themselves, and they were now only a part of our problems. I felt sick and light-headed, and I was pretty sure from the faces around the table that I wasn’t the only one.
“Focus on what we can control,” Lewis said. “We’re dispatching Wardens to cover the hot spots, but that’s reacting. We need to get ahead of this.”
Someone let out a hollow laugh. “How?”
“We need to get to the source of the problem,” Lewis said. “We need to get to the Mother herself.”
This time, I felt David take a breath. A sharp one, which he let out slowly before saying, “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”
“I realize that we’re just humans,” Lewis said, “but sooner or later, she needs to understand what she’s killing.”
“You think she doesn’t?” David asked, very mildly. That brought another few seconds of silence around the table. “Humanity has done stupid things in the name of its own blind survival, worse in the name of its own comfort. She’s not concerned with individuals, Lewis. She’s concerned with balance. If you put all of humanity on one side of the scales, and all of the other life on Earth on the other side . . .”
“You know what? I’m not here to debate humanity’s crappy conservation record,” Lewis snapped, and then he rubbed his face and sat back in his chair. “Sorry. I get your point, but this has been brewing for a long time. If we can’t establish direct contact with the Mother, we have to rely on the Djinn to influence her. Frankly, I’m not feeling good about that plan, since the Djinn are already on her side. Are you?”