by Rachel Caine
"She left me weak," I said. "I don't think she found it necessary to drug me." If I could find a way to touch Luis, she'd regret that, at length. "What do you know about these people?"
Nothing, except they've got a pet Earth Warden and some mad building skills. Luis's voice turned dark. They have Ibby. They told me they'd hurt her if I tried anything.
Yes, the Earth Warden would definitely have time to regret her actions. "I found C. T. Styles," I said. "Rather, he found me." I explained about the ambush and the odd way the children acted. "I don't believe they are themselves. I think someone is controlling them. Using them."
Why kidnap kids just to run them around like guard dogs? I'm pretty sure there's not a Doberman shortage.
Something the Earth Warden said returned to me. "Rejects," I said. "They're rejects."
Rejects from what?
I didn't know. I suspected that was the question on which so much hinged, including our lives.
Although he tried, Luis lost focus, and our contact dissolved in eardrum-splitting shrieks and growls of out-of-control vibrations. I stilled it hastily, but I continued to lean against the wall, and I thought that on the other side of the concrete, so did he.
"I don't know if you can still hear me," I said, "but if you can, save your strength. I will do the same."
Practicality dictated that I curl up on the lumpy, uncomfortable mattress and sleep to conserve as much energy as possible.
I dreamed of Isabel, alone in the woods, and a bear.
When I woke, there was a tray being shoved through a slot at the bottom of my vault door. The food did not look appetizing, but that hardly mattered; it wasn't food I craved.
I rolled out of bed, crawled to the slot, and seized the wrist of the man who was pushing the tray inside. He gave a startled yelp that turned to a harsh scream as I attempted to pull power from him.
He was merely human. I got only the lightest tingle of power, not even enough to fuel a single continuing breath, and then he broke my grasp and was gone.
I ate the contents of the meal tray slowly, with great concentration. It would help, but without an infusion of power from a Warden, soon, I would be in real trouble. Unlike a natural human body, mine was not self-sustaining. The equations did not balance, and energy leaked away with every beat of my heart.
All the proteins and carbohydrates on the tray couldn't stop that drain.
Half the day passed in silence. I tried to contact Luis, but he didn't--or couldn't--respond. They might have drugged him even more, to silence him. I still sensed his presence, so I did not think they had removed or killed him.
I grew all too familiar with the confining, featureless space of my cell. Six steps across. Nine steps deep. The ceilings were twice my height, the light fixtures inaccessible behind reinforced panels. There were no windows, only a narrow opening in the door and the slot at the bottom through which the trays came.
Both were bolted shut, with massive vault locks, and I could not summon up enough power to matter against that.
I called on Djinn that I knew, from friend to foe; even an enemy might be an inadvertent ally in this situation. But if anyone could hear my weak calls, they ignored them.
I was alone.
My captors allowed me to wait for two more days, in silence, in growing desperation, before the vault door finally opened, and I was put in heavy chains and taken outside, so weak I could hardly walk.
It was daylight, dazzling bright, and I squeezed my eyes closed against the glare as the soldiers prodded me along. I sensed no Warden abilities in any of them. If I had, I wasn't certain I could have stopped myself from attacking them out of hunger, and that certainly would have ended my fragile human life; the soldiers were deadly serious in their guard duties, and would not have hesitated to shoot.
It was odd even by human standards. There were many people out in the streets--talking, walking to or from some unknown destination. All the rainbow colors of humanity, some dressed in military fatigues, some in simple human dress from a variety of countries. From the park in the central part of the compound came the shrieking laughter of children at play.
No one cast a look toward me, garishly costumed in brilliant yellow, chained, surrounded by armed guards. It was as if I didn't exist at all. I wondered for a few moments if they had placed some sort of Djinn invisibility shield around us, but no--some of the humans passing by did see us; they simply and utterly ignored us.
"Move," my guard said, and guided me up the street.
"I want to see Luis Rocha."
"People in hell want air-conditioning," he said, which seemed completely off the topic I had proposed. "You've got a meeting already."
As we came nearer to the main building, the one next to the park, I realized how much larger it was than the others. There were organic lines to the flow of the building's long curves. Where everything else formed squares and angles, this building seemed more grown than constructed, and the material seemed more like mother-of-pearl and bone than wood and stucco.
A Djinn built this, I thought. There were few examples of Djinn artifacts; as a species, we left far less trace than humans on the planet we inhabited. But those that we did make had an unmistakable signature to them, a kind of singing resonance that was visible even to my human-dulled eyes.
I felt a deep surge of unease. The design impressed itself on me, and I realized what it represented: half of the ancient symbol of yin and yang. The park where the children played mirrored the sinuous lines and formed the other half. It had a resonance, as well, a subtle, deep power.
Harmony.
We approached the broad, curving end of the bone house, and a door that gleamed with shifting pearlized color opened without a touch on its surface.
The guards stopped. Their squad leader gestured me on.
I walked up the shallow steps and passed through the portal, into an opulence those outside would hardly imagine possible. The surfaces were breathtaking sweeps of nacre, the colors ranging from ice-cool greens to warm whites. The building had indeed been grown, not built, though there were concessions to human comforts in the form of sleekly rounded furniture, cushions, velvets and furs.
There was a simplicity to it that brought a sense of peace and a terrible kind of stillness. I studied the resonance again, and it was familiar to me. I know this place. Yet I'd never been in it before. I know the one who shaped it. Yes, that was what troubled me. The Djinn who had formed this exquisite, frightening place was someone I not only knew, but feared on levels I could neither identify nor understand.
I was too exhausted, too weak to think.
The door closed. The guards stayed outside. After a moment, the pinch-faced Earth Warden who'd tormented me stepped out of a curtained alcove at the far end of the room.
"This way," she said. She had a silver gun in her hand. "If you try anything, I'll kill you."
Dying seemed almost inevitable, at this point. I hesitated.
"You want to see the girl, don't you? Isabel?"
Something terrible was waiting for me in the direction she wished me to go. I knew it. I felt it in every screaming nerve. I could not go through that door. If I did, I would not just die. I would die screaming. I would suffer agonies that I could not begin to imagine, but could feel heavy in the air like poisonous smoke.
She.
The thought brushed across me like a ghost, and I knew it came from my Djinn side, the side that was almost dead now, starved into submission. A mere flutter of resistance.
She waits.
I stared at the Warden without moving. She frowned. "Did you hear me? Move it!"
My eyes rolled back in my head and I collapsed. I didn't try to cushion my fall, didn't try to turn my body, and when my head struck the ground, it struck hard enough to crack bone and split skin. Blood began to trickle past my nose across the pristine pearl floor.
"Goddammit," the Warden sighed. "Just what I needed today--another goddamn epileptic fit."
; She came toward me.
I didn't move.
She knelt next to me and put her hand on my hot pink hair, feeling for the fracture.
I opened my eyes, bared my teeth, and dislocated my arm to wrap fingers over her wrist. It was a tenuous hold, but she was startled, and in those vital seconds I ripped power from her in great, bloody swatches, stripping her clean of all aetheric energy. She wasn't as powerful as Luis, but she would serve.
I melted away my chains.
She didn't even have the ability to scream. I held her silent for it, and stared into her wide, agonized eyes, drinking in her pain.
I let her form a word. Just one. "Please . . ."
"I am Djinn," I told her softly. "Do you understand? Djinn. And I give you the mercy of the Djinn."
I sealed her mouth with contemptuous ease by stilling her vocal cords; all she was able to produce was a torturous, hoarse buzzing. I put a knee in her back to hold her down and rifled through her pockets. I took the gun, extra clips of bullets, her identification, and a curious medallion holding a silver key.
Then I put the gun to her head, released her vocal cords enough that she could whisper, and said, "Where is the child Isabel Rocha?"
"You Djinn bitch," the Warden wept. "You hurt me."
"And I am not finished," I promised. "Tell me where to find the child."
"Fuck you!"
"I'm not attracted to you," I said. "But if by that you mean you won't help me, then I have no use for you."
I sealed her mouth forever by exploding a blood vessel in her brain. Relatively painless, and instantly fatal.
It was better than she deserved.
I dragged her body behind a sofa and covered it in silky furs. The bloodstains came up easily, and then I methodically searched the room for a way out.
There was only one.
The way the Warden wanted me to go.
I transformed the neon yellow jumpsuit and prisoner shoes into soft leather trousers and jacket in light pale pink, with war slashes of black. Heavy riding boots.
I moved the curtain aside, expecting another room . . . but it was a hallway, like a long, curving throat. Slick and featureless. There was no sound.
She knows I'm here, I thought. She's waiting. My Djinn side refused to say anything, or to give me the name of my fear.
I sensed nothing but cold and ice ahead of me.
I moved on, and as I did, doorways appeared--closed, with no markings. Each felt slightly different beneath my fingers. One was hot enough to blister, even at a brush. One felt damp, and I sensed a vast pressure of water behind it. One was a living grave, rich with the smell of rotting things and the work of scavengers.
What are you looking for, Cassiel? Come. Come ahead.
The voice vibrated in my ears the way Luis's had done, but it was not Luis. It was not any voice I knew. No, it was every voice I knew, Djinn or human, a massive and strange chorus of sound.
I stopped where I was, my hand on a closed door, and felt every nerve shrink with fear.
You killed my servant, killer of Djinn.
"She deserved it," I said.
The laughter was the laughter of every murderer. Mocking, cold, and free of any trace of a soul. So do you, the voice said. For your crimes, murderer of the eternal.
The nacreous hallway began to close in on me. The pearly layers grew and thickened before my eyes, pushing inward. It would grind me apart. I looked behind and found the way back already closed to me. This structure was the mouth of a hungry predator, and I had no escape but down its throat, the way it wanted me to go. There was something dark and terrible at its heart, waiting to devour.
I took a deep breath and opened the door that stank of earth and rot, and plunged into darkness instead.
If I died here, I would choose my death.
Grave dirt filled my mouth, my nose, my ears. It was heavy and wet on my skin. I knew death intimately, and it tried to push inside me, insistent as a blind worm.
Interesting, the alien voice whispered to me. But you cannot leave me. I know you now. I will have you.
I spat it out and pushed through the dirt, swimming in muck, until I fetched up against a hard surface in the darkness. Nacre. The slick, pearly surface had a living structure to it, like bone. Why? Why have this room of grave dirt?
I had no time for riddles.
I blew the wall apart in an explosion of shards, and the house--if one could call it a house--shrieked. My strike, even as powerful as it was, had only opened a hole the size of a fist. I battered at it, widening it, and the house fought to close its wound even as I struggled to widen it. The instant I paused, it shrank the gash again.
I rained down destruction until the hole was barely wide enough to pass my shoulders, and then wriggled in. This was the most dangerous moment of all; if my concentration faltered, the house would close the gap and chop me in half or amputate a limb. I could sense the Voice screaming, though I had stilled my eardrums and rendered myself effectively deaf. I'd shut off all other senses, too, save sight. I wanted no sensory attacks to distract me at a critical moment.
The nacre had jagged, knife-sharp edges, and it sliced my skin as I crawled and wiggled through the narrow opening. I felt it shift as I hauled myself through, and for a heart-skipping moment I felt the sharp edges press on my thighs enough to draw blood. It wanted to snap shut. I didn't let it, but it was a very near thing. I hauled my feet free seconds before the nacre mouth snapped closed, gnashing only air.
I was on the white gravel outside of the white house, on the smooth, curving side facing away from the park and the children. I rolled to my feet and began to run, releasing my hold on my senses. I would need every advantage now.
You cannot leave me, Cassiel, killer, destroyer. I have been waiting for you.
This time, the human inhabitants of the compound did not ignore me. I drew shouts, screams, and shots. One bullet grazed my leg, but I dodged the rest, using cover and even the bodies of others. I had little empathy for anyone caught in the cross fire just now. They were only faces, and the terrible thing behind me, the terrible knowledge pressing in on me . . .
What was in that white building, so close to where those children played . . . was nothing less than a monster.
And these adults served it willingly.
A squad of armed soldiers came after me, but I was no longer unarmed, thanks to the gun I had taken from the dead Earth Warden. I dropped two men with shots; the others with a burst of power that crippled them, at least temporarily. I had no interest in killing them, but I didn't particularly care if that was the outcome.
"Ibby!" I screamed, turning in a circle. "Isabel Rocha!"
I ran on, crying out her name, searching for her individual whisper in all this chaos.
Behind me.
The park.
I reversed course, avoiding the hail of bullets by dodging behind a truck. To get to the park, I would have to go around the bone house, that terrible white place that housed the heart of the monster.
Those hunting me had grown organized in their attacks, and there was little cover left. Even the confused civilians had withdrawn.
I took in a deep breath and dove for the ground. It parted for me like thick water, and I used my body like a dolphin's, pushing against the resistance in sinuous curves.
The bone house extended down, into the ground. I sensed its vibration and swam away from it, careful not to touch it.
My breath grew hot in my lungs, rancid and used, and I kicked against the dirt and swam up, tearing my way through the roots of grasses to the surface.
The children were being rounded up in the park. Unlike the rejects I had seen in the forest, dirty and ragged, ill-fed, these were glossy, lovely children in impeccable clothing, all of stainless white.
There were perhaps twenty of them, and they were all under the age of ten.
"Ibby!" I screamed, and one small face came into focus, kindling like a star.
"Cassie!" she shrieked, a
nd threw herself forward, racing toward me.
She was intercepted by one of the adult caregivers, who closed ranks between me and the children. The woman who restrained Isabel was wearing a medallion similar to the one in my pocket, the one that held a silver key.
Ibby stretched out her arms to me, tears streaming down her face, and I aimed the gun at the woman blocking her. "Put her down," I said. There were more soldiers coming now. The tower guards also realized something was wrong, and of a surety, at least two of them could reach me where I stood. I was an easy target.
But I wasn't leaving without the child.
"Put her down," I repeated, "or I'll kill you all."
The woman, wide-eyed, shook her head and held on to the struggling child.
"Your choice," I said, as cold as I had ever been in Djinn form.
I shot her. Isabel shrieked and fell, rolling on the grass. Another adult scooped her up and ran away with her, toward the pearl white building. I saw her chubby arms still reaching out for me, her tear-streaked face desperate, and in that instant I felt the anguish inside me coalesce into true hatred.
No. You will not take the child.
I couldn't stop the instincts she triggered, the feverish need to protect her at all costs. I'd kill them all to save her, if I had to, and never look back.
She's my child, the Voice whispered in my ears. She will never be yours. I will make her one of my warriors, and you and your kind will be wiped from existence, thrown into the darkness where not even memories remain. She will destroy you.
Isabel disappeared into the door of the white house, which sealed itself against me.
I had to abandon her. It was the hardest thing I had ever done, to turn away, to run with the sick taste of rage and defeat in my mouth.
I darted around buildings, running with as much speed as I could manage. I had no goal now, nothing but the blind desire to live, escape, find another way to get to Isabel. Bullets spanged and cracked around me, and sometimes found their mark. I couldn't heal myself from the wounds, but I could close it off and ignore it for a time, and I did.
It burst upon me, with a blinding jolt, that there was still a goal.
I turned toward the prison.
When I reached it, moving so fast I was a blur, there were guards at the door. I barely slowed enough to disable both in screaming agony, then melted the metal outer door.