Unbroken os-4

by Rachel Caine

  She shook her head. “No. I don’t believe in endings. I’m not going to let you—”

  Her eyes rolled back in her head, and she collapsed back into Luis’s arms. He’d given her just a touch, a gentle push into the darkness, and now he held her gently in his arms and kissed her forehead. He wasn’t looking at me any longer. “She’s going to win, then,” he said. “You can’t stop her.”

  The room was lurid with the cream-and-black of the sphere, now spinning fast, whipping between black and white so fast that it blurred into a smear of gray. The power in the room was like needles in my skin, a burning, stinging rush.

  “No,” I said. “I can’t.” She was, I sensed, almost there, almost ready to unleash all that power into the heart of the world.

  Almost ready to kill the very soul of our Mother.

  And here, at the end, filled with a growing darkness, I felt an unexpected sense of… peace. Of quiet inside me, and in that silence, I heard a voice speak.

  Make the choice.

  Ashan’s voice, an echo of his imperious tone. He might be gone from the world, but he was still demanding things of me.

  I opened my eyes and said, “Esmeralda. I need your help.”

  Chapter 13

  “I CAN’T DO THIS,” Es said. She was scared—very scared, in fact, uncertain in her newfound humanity. “I don’t know how anymore.”

  “You can,” I told her. The darkness inside me was reaching critical stages. Only a moment had passed—a moment that had been taken up by the difficult task of getting Luis to withdraw, with Isabel, to a safe distance, because I couldn’t guarantee what would happen next. “Your venom killed a Djinn. It’ll certainly kill me. And I need to destroy this body, Esmeralda. I can’t leave it, otherwise.”

  “But I just got out of being a snake,” she said. “What if I can’t shift back again?”

  “You will,” I promised her, and took her hands in mine. “Or it won’t matter.”

  “Wow, you are such a cheerleader.”

  I smiled. “It’s been interesting knowing you, Esmeralda.”

  “Likewise.” She sighed, shook her head, and reached for the Warden powers she’d been so long denied.

  And she shifted back into Snake Girl.

  When she opened her eyes, they were reptilian, vertically slitted, veined with red and gold… and then she opened her mouth, unhinged her jaw, and the sharp, gleaming daggers of fangs descended and locked in place as she struck in a blur.

  Esmeralda’s fangs sank into my neck and shoulder, piercing skin, muscle, bone. Her venom burned like acid as she injected it.

  I heard Luis shout—a wordless denial, a rejection of what I was doing, but he didn’t try to stop it. He understood that it wasn’t possible now.

  I’m so sorry, I thought. The venom was fast, and fatal, and I felt my blood thicken in my veins. Two beats of my heart. Three. I have loved you all, in my own way. And you are worthy of more than I can give.

  My heart tripped, faltered, and gave one last spasmodic pulse before going utterly, finally, completely still.

  It hurt. Death hurt.

  Ah, I heard a warm, gentle voice say. You’ve chosen. That is good. You have been missed.

  It might have been the Mother, or my imagination, or the ghost of Ashan in my dying, fragile human mind.

  Equally, it might have been the still, quiet voice of God echoing within me.

  I exploded like a star out of my body, shed it like a burst chrysalis, and I wasn’t blackened by the Void. I wasn’t Pearl’s creature.

  I was Cassiel, immortal, born of lava and stars, and the Void choked and fell in on itself inside the shell I’d cast off. I was on the aetheric plane now, looking down with the remote interest of a scientist observing laboratory mice. It was hard to believe that the flesh cooling on the floor had encased me, only a few seconds before; shedding humanity had been astonishingly easy, for all that I’d agonized over it.

  The freedom, the power, the life was all around me now, coursing like blood, pulsing, intoxicating. Humanity struggled and sweated on the ground, but Djinn rode the currents of the world like eagles. So easy to forget them. To allow it all to slide away in the clean, healing stream.

  You have only a moment now. The whisper came in cold, perfect clarity to me, a disturbance of light and shadow, pulse and ebb. It was not a voice, but on the aetheric, it could make itself understood.

  The body slithered free of Esmeralda’s coils to fall lifelessly on the cracked concrete. Dead, my mortal flesh looked pallid, blue-white, my green eyes shallow as glass. My lips were parted, as if I had something to tell the world, but that secret would never be uttered.

  Esmeralda shrank back into her human form, shivering and fragile, and wiped my blood from her mouth with trembling hands. “I didn’t want to,” she murmured, and sank down on her knees next to me. “I didn’t want to do that. Why did you make me do that?”

  Luis carried Isabel back over. She was stirring now, murmuring drowsily in his arms; he put her gently on the ground and took up my failed human body instead, rocking it gently back and forth in the pulsing, inhuman light of Pearl’s sphere…

  …Which flared into a sudden, glaring, blinding burst, and exploded into starlight and suns, a universe being born and instantly dying, and out of it walked…

  …A goddess.

  In the human world, she was a glowing, brilliant creature, gilded in darkness; Luis shielded his eyes and tried to squint between his fingers to see her as she walked toward them, my misfit human family.

  He let my body slip back to the ground, and stood up to face her.

  Pearl was a vortex of energy here on the aetheric, drawing in currents and creating a lazily spinning wheel on which I drifted. She was opening a portal here, one that stretched through every level of the world, all the way down to the dark, hidden heart of the Mother herself.

  As she was walking toward Luis, terrifying and majestic as the storm she had created, he didn’t flinch. Didn’t hesitate.

  He attacked.

  I felt the violence from where I stood, such a distant and remote observer; he called fire from the liquid center of the earth, focused its power through the lens of his own soul, and threw it on her like a burning blanket.

  It simply slid away and left her untouched. She didn’t so much as falter in her steady progress toward him.

  Well? said a calm, quiet voice, echoing through the aetheric. Are you just going to let him die for nothing? Or are you going to do what Ashan asked of you in the beginning?

  Venna? I whispered. I felt the echo through the world, here and not here. Her presence spread everywhere… but it was tainted, twisted, not entirely as it should have been. It was turning fragile and thin with every pulse of power.

  I can’t stay with you long, she responded. I’m too damaged, but until there is a new conduit I will have to serve; Ashan chose me, even though I didn’t want the responsibility. He knew what must be done, long ago. You must finish it, now, before it’s too late. The Mother’s heart is opened. She is listening. She is vulnerable. It’s up to you to protect her now.

  I felt the aetheric… stop. The entire world, all of its levels and planes and complicated, clockwork parts, stopped. All the Djinn, all the Wardens, all the humans. Animals. Plants. Insects.

  Everything living stopped, caught in a moment of utter, shining awareness as the Mother opened her eyes and looked on it with full, conscious intent. It was beautiful, and terrifying. Angels would hide their faces under that merciless, merciful gaze; humans went silent and still. I was aware that even Pearl, with her merciless progress toward my family, had halted, just for a moment.

  I could see the Mother’s consciousness flowing into the brilliant vessel of her Earth Oracle, not so far away from where my old physical body lay broken. She was distilling herself into one form, so that she could hear and speak to the representative of the human race. To Lewis Orwell.

  While in that form, she was as vulnerable as she would eve
r be.

  Pearl’s shining, slick form appeared now on the aetheric, and was echoed on all the levels above and below. She was ripping through reality, heading for the Mother, and when she reached her…

  … She would kill her.

  Now, Venna whispered. It must be now. I can’t… She, too, was losing power. The Djinn were failing, as the aetheric ripped apart in a disrupted chaos around Pearl; she was damaging the link between the Mother and her children, obscuring the flow of power.

  They would die soon. So would I—I was now Djinn, one of them, and I could feel my own connection to the lifeblood of the planet beginning to choke off, dry up. A Djinn couldn’t last for long without it. Humans could last longer, but they’d go mad, and they wouldn’t even understand why they were ripping each other to pieces. Storms would rage, before an unnatural silence fell. Everything, everything, would fail.

  Ashan had known it would come to this, and he’d known that I could make the choice. By teaching me about them, about humans, by making me become one, he’d connected me in ways that I’d never have been able to know in my original, uncorrupted form.

  The seeds of humanity remained within me, even now. I’d never be rid of them… and I didn’t want to be rid of them. Luis was within me, and Isabel. Manny and Angela. The brave Wardens dying; the courage of humans who had no reason to risk themselves for others.

  Infinite beauty and tragedy. Humanity was flawed, and angry, and cruel; it was beautiful, and creative, and kind. It had spread over every corner of the world, and where it tread, things were never the same. The aetheric was scarred by them, and yet it was also made richer and deeper by what they felt, loved, made.

  No other species had ever done these things, created these things.

  And they were worth saving. All of it, worth saving.

  You have to do it. Venna’s last, faint whisper, a prayer from the soul of the dying Djinn as Pearl used the cutting, burning power of the human race, all their fear and hatred, lensed through the children she’d made so diamond-hard, to strike at the beating, living heart of the world.

  And she was right. Ashan was right. I had been wrong, always.

  I was Djinn. I was ancient, and ruthless, and powerful, and even now, with the world darkening around me, with the aetheric beginning to shatter and crumble into dust, I had one great and singular talent. I could kill better than any other being who had ever existed, throughout creation.

  And now, I had to use that skill. Pearl’s power came from humanity, from the souls of all of those packed into this busy world—six billion and more, each holding a spark, a connection, that when connected was a source of astonishing power. Only Pearl had ever tapped into it.

  And now that source had to be cut off.

  I gathered them up. Every human life, every boy or girl drawing their first, fragile breath, every old man and woman drawing their last. Every heart, every soul, no matter how good, no matter how evil.

  Every Warden, as well.

  I could hold them all in my hands, all the billions of precious, fragile lives. All the stories and histories and potentials.

  And I could end them.

  I felt Pearl turn her startled attention toward me as I rose on bright, burning wings, with all of humanity held in my hands.

  You can’t, she said, her words written in crystal on the aetheric as it began to burn. You love them too much now.

  I did love them; I honestly did. Ashan had given me that gift, though whether he’d meant it as a gift or a curse was a mystery. He’d wanted me to learn something; I had, but I wasn’t sure if it was the same lesson he’d meant.

  But what I learned gave me the strength, the compassion, to do what had to be done.

  I killed them.

  Every heart, stopped.

  Every breath, taken.

  Every scrap of life, drawn into my own aetheric form, saved and protected.

  No Djinn was made for this, not even me; I was a killer, not a protector, but I couldn’t let the tiny sparks of their souls go out. Their bodies fell.… Luis, collapsing on the floor, entirely gone. Isabel. Esmeralda. Beyond, a roomful of Wardens snuffed out on a single breath. Cities full of bodies falling. Countries. Continents.

  Not one single human breathed on earth, for the space of a full minute.

  And Pearl’s power supply failed.

  She didn’t realize what had happened for a wild second; she cast about for energy, failed to find it, and was immediately forced to break off her attack; the energy she’d siphoned from those doomed children had been meant to fuel a war, not her own life, but she no longer had a choice. Every second that passed ripped more away from her, because without that connection through humanity, she had nothing.

  She was nothing.

  The Mother was safe now, and the aetheric began to stabilize, though vast pieces of it had been burnt black; it would take years, maybe centuries, to heal the damage that had been done in only moments.

  Pearl hung on, grimly, pouring power into her own existence, but it was like pouring water into a hurricane. She couldn’t hold.

  I watched as pieces of her ripped away, flying into the Void she’d created; she was no longer a glossy, freshly born goddess, but a crippled and blackened thing that fought to back away from the blackest, most starless void.

  She ripped at the aetheric, trying to find something, anything to hold herself in life, but there was nothing for her now, no human to clutch and drain.

  Death came for her in a silent rush, but she was not quite finished yet; Pearl sensed my presence hovering near her on the aetheric, and she turned on me, howling her defiance.

  Grappling with me, on the edge of the Void.

  We fell together toward the end of all things, and I felt her last, hot burst of triumph. I made you kill them, she said, and it was like all the evil in the world shrieking its last, hot breath into me. I made you fall.

  I’m not falling, I told her, and came free with a sudden, flashing beat of silver wings that broke her into tiny flakes of ash and smoke, screams and despair.

  She was a nightmare that humanity had dreamed, and now she disappeared into the Void.

  I beat my wings and fought my way back up, away from the black pull of death, to the last whispers of light at the very top of the world.

  The Void closed.

  Pearl was gone with it.

  The Djinn were silent now, amid the countless human dead, staring up at me. I had just murdered an entire race. The Mother was safe, but the agony of what I’d done would echo forever. Nothing would be the same. Nothing would be saved, not of the race that I’d come to love and cherish. Their cities and histories would fall into ruin, into silence, into dust. Not even their whispers would remain.

  Unless I righted the balance.

  I couldn’t do it alone, and wordlessly, I sent out a call.

  I felt them coming to me, on the aetheric—all my brothers and sisters, True Djinn and New, powerless and powerful. Some were bound in nets of glowing thread—those enslaved to bottles. Some were free, and wild with power.

  One drifted close to me, and I recognized the tense, restless boil of blue-black energy within the netted cage that bound him. Save yourself, Rashid said. Don’t do this.

  But it had been Ashan’s plan all along, and I was, finally, at peace with it. Ashan was gone, but the conduit remained.… Venna, though frail and broken, stood ready, and I reached out to her on one side, and to the caged, brilliant coppery flare that was David on the other. Together, they were halves of a whole, a key to the heart of the Mother.

  Down in the human world, only a moment had passed. Long enough.

  I let go of all that I had drawn in, all that I’d taken from those lifeless human forms. All the energy. All the breaths. All the heartbeats. But there is no perfect transfer of energy; there is always loss, both going and coming.

  I’d known from the beginning that not all those I’d taken could, or would, come back. I had no control of that, or choice. Some
hearts restarted. Some breaths were taken. For many, the seconds that had just passed went unnoticed, except as a nightmare.

  I gave everything I had to make them live. Everything. Every last drop of power and energy that made me what I was, flowing out through Venna and David. When I had no more, I let go.

  I had done what I’d been fated to do, and I was content with that. My light was going out of the world.

  And then… something touched me. Something huge, gentle, kind… and wise. Not the Mother. Something beyond, as great in proportion to her as humans were to the tiniest insects.

  I had been touched by something divine, and as the last of the Djinn Cassiel passed away…

  … My consciousness flowed back into flesh that I’d left behind.

  Outcast, again, but this time, by my own choice.

  Unfortunately for me, that meant that I had fallen back into a body that wasn’t just drained of life, but dying. I had one breath left, maybe two, and a single heartbeat left before Esmeralda’s very effective venom destroyed it beyond all repair.

  “No!”

  That was Isabel’s raw scream in my ears.

  My eyes were still open, but now I blinked away a film and focused on the girl’s sweaty, white-streaked face. She was shaking and gasping, but she put her hands on my chest and drove healing power into me, warm and rich and golden, a flood of peace that quickly turned toxic as it battled the intense venom Esmeralda had injected. The damage was grave, and Isabel fought for me, fought so hard that the pain that came with it was something I could only accept, and embrace. My blood burned. My nerves fried under the stress. Organs pulsed and wept poison. Muscles ripped and re-formed. Bone knitted.

  But even so, she couldn’t save me. Not alone. But she wasn’t alone, because she had a bottle in her hand, and the cork was lying discarded six feet away, and Rashid was kneeling beside us now, indigo face sharp and intense, eyes like burning glass as he cleaned the toxins from my blood and flesh, wiping it away as it burned its way out of my skin and through clothing.

  It hurt, living. It hurt so much. And again, it wasn’t enough. Rashid couldn’t save me. Isabel couldn’t save me.