Undone

Chapter 11

WHAT LUIS HAD just done was a grave breach of the rules of the Wardens, and I understood why; Earth Wardens—the truly powerful ones—could manipulate memory. If it was done subtly enough, the victim might never suspect anything had happened at all.

It was a power that was fearfully easy to abuse, and difficult to detect. Under normal circumstances, I thought that Luis would never have done such a thing, but now, with the Wardens either withdrawn to their own affairs or potential threats . . . he couldn’t afford to rely on them for help.

Or me.

“Why didn’t you kill them?” I asked Luis. We were out of earshot of Sylvia and the funeral director, who were near the door. Luis shook his head. He was moving slowly, concentrating on the steady motion of his feet, as if it was the most difficult thing in the world at the moment.

“It’s a pride thing. You kill a Norteño, you get killed, or everybody near you does. There’s no end once you start that. It can roll on for years. Wipe out whole families.”

Blood feuds. One of the common threads of human culture, this inability to forget or forgive. It was something they had in common with the Djinn. When I had heard the boy speak of hurting Isabel, I had almost killed him. I wouldn’t have hesitated if Luis hadn’t been there. I’d have simply ended the threat, with no regard for the consequences. I would have walked away from the resulting war with no thought of guilt.

I had to admit to myself that Luis’s way was likely better.

The funeral director stepped into our path and said, in his low, gentle voice, “Is everything all right, Mr. Rocha?”

“Everything’s fine,” Luis said hoarsely. “My friends got a little carried away by their grief. I’ll pay for the damages.”

The funeral director’s eyes widened, and he moved off down the hall with what might have been unseemly haste. Luis watched him go.

“Another reason not to kill anybody,” he said. “Considering the room’s booked in my name.”

Sylvia stood by the exit, looking sad and angry. She was restlessly crumpling a tissue in her hands, over and over, and she sent Luis a filthy look as we approached.

I tried to remember that she had lost a child, but in that moment, it was difficult.

“You and your friends,” she said in a low, vicious tone, “had better not show your faces at my daughter’s funeral. God help you if you do.”

“Sylvia—”

Her eyes glittered, but the tears in them seemed more like armor than grief. “You brought the Norteños here? And then you let them walk away? What kind of a man are you, you don’t defend your own?”

She slammed open the door and stalked away. Luis hurried after her—as much as he was capable at the moment—and opened the passenger’s door of the pickup truck. He had to lift her up on the step.

She did not appear grateful.

It was a stiff, silent drive home, with Sylvia sitting rigid between us. In the passing flare of headlights, her expression remained remote and furious. She put away the handkerchief and took out a set of black, polished beads. She kissed the silver crucifix that dangled from it, and then began to work the beds through her fingers, lips moving silently. Rosary beads. I was surprised the custom had not changed from so long ago.

Luis seemed to have no trouble navigating, but I could sense his weariness. He yawned hugely as he parked the big, black truck in front of Sylvia’s house, which blazed with warm light, and opened his driver’s-side door to descend.

I hopped out and extended my hands to Sylvia. She frowned at me, and then evidently decided that I was less objectionable to her at the moment than Luis.

I lifted her effortlessly and set her feet on the concrete sidewalk. She stepped back, momentarily too amazed to frown, and Luis rounded the hood of the truck. He looked from Sylvia to me and sighed.

“Thanks,” he told me. Not as if he meant it. “Sylvia, I’d like to say good night to Isabel. If you don’t mind.” He hated asking, but seemed to recognize that insisting would only cause the woman to stand more firmly in his way.

Sylvia sent us another distrustful look, and grudgingly nodded. “Don’t wake her up if she’s asleep,” she said. “It’s hard enough for her, with the bad dreams.”

Sylvia’s sister Veronica was in the living room, knitting in the glow of the softly playing television set. She stood up to give Sylvia a hug, and then a slightly more restrained one to Luis. None for me, but Veronica—a large, grandmotherly woman with a kinder face than her sister—nodded and smiled instead.

“She’s been very quiet,” Veronica said. “I don’t think she woke up at all.”

Luis moved down the hall, leaving Sylvia to whisper with her sister, and as he reached Isabel’s door, I hesitated.

“Stop,” I whispered. Luis paused, hand in the air an inch from the knob.

“What?”

I didn’t know. There was a feeling—a wrongness. Nothing I could identify, either in the human world or on the aetheric. It was almost as if something had been here and gone, leaving only its acrid, bitter aetheric scent.

“You had a Warden watching the house?”

“Ma’at, like I told you. Yeah, of course.”

I shoved Luis out of the way and opened the door myself.

There was no immediate terror leaping to confront me; the room was as we’d left it, only darker. A sparkling night-light glimmered softly against the far wall, casting pink radiance into the corner and across the bed.

The aura was stronger here. Don’t scare the child, I told myself, and forced myself to move slowly and softly to the bed.

She was a featureless lump beneath the covers. The pink light played out its endless soothing loop, catching the shadows and creases of the blankets.

I slowly pulled them down, and heard Luis’s gasp.

The bed held only a stuffed pillow and a rag doll, whose black yarn hair spilled out over the pillow. I put my hand in the hollow where Isabel had been. “Cold,” I said. “She’s been gone a long time.” Perhaps since the first time Veronica had checked on her. I sat back on my heels, studying the bed carefully. There was no sign of a struggle, nothing overturned. No hint on the aetheric of trauma.

Isabel had not been harmed.

Not here.

That maddening ghost of a trace eluded me. I had sensed it before, but I couldn’t force the memory to appear. It hovered like a fog at the edges of my awareness, but never came close enough to drag into the light.

My hand remained in the hollow of Isabel’s bed, where her body had slept. I could feel each individual fiber of the cool cotton sheet. I could smell the sweet perfume of her hair on the pillow.

Gone.

Luis had moved to the closet and now was conducting a methodical search of the room, calling Isabel’s name in a calm, loud tone that grew gradually louder, gradually less calm as each hiding place was eliminated.

His hands were shaking. Not just trembling, but shaking, like a man gripped by extreme cold.

After he’d looked beneath the bed, he looked across it at me, and I said, “She’s not here, Luis.”

His face flushed red, then pale. “She’s here. She’s hiding, that’s all. ISABEL!” He bellowed it this time, got to his feet, and charged out of the room. I heard the sound of his footsteps, his calls, the sounds of doors being opened and shut. Sylvia’s strident demands to know what he was doing. Veronica’s softer protests.

The screams when Luis finally told them the child was gone.

I stayed there motionless and silent, staring at the dirty rag doll. It was the one the child had been holding the first time I’d seen her in her front yard. One black button eye was missing, and a seam beneath the right arm had given way. Discolored, soft stuffing poked through.

She’s gone.

Someone had taken her. It hadn’t been the Norteños; I had their scent now, I knew they wouldn’t have bothered to abduct a child unless they expected money or blood in response. Lolly had not acted like a man who’d given such orders, though he might have, if pushed. He’d not gone so far, not yet.

Someone else had. Someone with roots in power. A Warden. A Djinn. Someone I had likely touched, possibly even trusted.

They had just made a terrible, terrible mistake in their choice of victims. I had killed for Manny and Angela in a fit of rage and shock. I would do it with cold, measured violence this time, to regain the child.

Outside the room, Sylvia was calling the police. I heard Luis slide down the wall, beaten down this time by his grief, but his grief was different from mine. Mine was a cold, alien thing.

I stood up and retreated to the hallway, where he sat like a broken doll. I crouched down to look into his eyes.

“She’s gone,” I said, “but I think I know what path we have to follow.”

“The Norteños—”

“No. They might have shot into the house, but they’re not so stupid as to invite a child-abduction investigation. They would be destroyed by it.”

His hands were still violently trembling. “Some predator, then. Some bastard predator.”

“No,” I said slowly. “I don’t think so. I think it had to do with us.”

“Us.” The flat panic in Luis’s eyes receded. “What do you mean, to do with us?”

“Someone wants us stopped; we have ample evidence of that. Together and separately, we’ve been marked. How better to stop us than to take the child, knowing we both care for her safety?” I willed him to understand me. When I was not certain he did, I reached out and gripped his cold hands in both of mine. “Luis. There is a trace of power in that room. Warden or Djinn, I can’t tell, but we must find out. Question the one who was supposed to watch over her. Either they were bought off or disabled. We need to know what happened.”

His fingers twisted and gripped my wrists, hard.

He pushed me away. I rocked backward, but it’s not so easy to overbalance a Djinn, even so little as I now was. My grace seemed to anger him even more.

“This is your fault.” He almost spat it in my face. “It started with you, you coming here and making trouble. If anything happens to Isabel—”

“If anything happens to Isabel,” I said, “I will take my payment in blood and screams. And then you may take yours, from me. I won’t fight you. I’ve done enough harm here already.”

Because he was right, of course. This had all started with my arrival. Whatever I had done to trigger these events, trigger them I had; I owed Luis Rocha a debt I could never pay, even before the abduction of his niece.

Someone, somewhere had struck at me, and shattered the lives of everyone standing near me.

That, I could not forgive.

As a Djinn, I could never forgive.

Luis was unable to raise the Ma’at who was supposed to be watching Isabel. I couldn’t find him on the aetheric.

It was a very bad sign. “He wasn’t bought off,” Luis said. “Not Jim. No way in hell. He was a friend, and a good one.”

He was likely dead, then. Our enemies had assassinated him quietly, without attracting anyone’s attention, and then come for the girl. It had been well planned and executed.

It made me wonder why they had not done the same for us.

The police arrived. They were not the same as the ones who’d been involved in Manny and Angela’s shooting, but they made the natural connections—Luis’s former gang affiliation, the deaths of Isabel’s two parents. Luis was taken away for questioning, although both Sylvia and I insisted he had never been out of our sight long enough to accomplish the abduction of the child.

With the arrival of detectives—a higher order of policemen, I realized, like the difference between Djinn and Oracles—the questions took a personal turn. Luis had arranged to have me cleared of blame in Scott Sands’s disappearance, but this was three times in only a few days that I had been standing at the center of a criminal investigation.

I supposed it was natural for them to find this odd, but the feeling grew within me that we were wasting precious time while the police collected their painstaking samples, took photographs, questioned suspects, and conducted a spiral search of the house, the yard, the neighborhood.

“Look, it’s still possible the girl could have run away,” one of the detectives said to me as I stood on the porch outside, under the glare of portable lights. Yellow tape flapped all around the house. There were news vans now parked at both ends of the street, held back only by the barricades, and Sylvia’s neighbors had turned out in force to murmur and gawk. “Did she seem upset?”

“Of course,” I replied. “Her parents were killed. But I don’t think she’s run away.”

The detective quirked one perfectly shaped eyebrow. She was a small blonde with a tendency to smirk that irritated me beyond bearing. “Why not?”

“Because she left her suitcase,” I said. I had seen it sitting in the corner of the room, covered with pink flowers and Barbie doll stickers. “And she left her doll.”

I had succeeded in wiping away her smile. “I see.”

“It’s possible, if she decided to run away, that she would go home,” I said. “But for such a small child, it’s too long a walk, even if she knew the way.” There {he aw were many dangers in the world, predators ready to snatch up the unprotected. I felt sickened by the prospects, but I knew in my heart—what a human feeling—that Ibby had not gone. She had been taken away.

I had a strong and growing conviction that the police, well-intentioned as they were, could not help us in this, and the longer we stayed here, trying to fit in, the worse things would become. Like the investigators, I knew that trails rapidly went cold, especially such slender trails as I had to follow.

It would be very inconvenient to be jailed as a suspect.

“You don’t seem too upset,” the detective said to me.

I cocked my head slightly as I thought it over, as I’d often seen humans do. “I don’t? I suppose I’m in shock.”

“No. Your friend Luis, he’s in shock. Grandma Sylvia’s in shock. You’re not in shock.”

“That makes me seem suspicious, I suppose.”

“You think?” She smiled again, and it raised alarms all along my spine. “We’ll continue this discussion downtown.”

She took my arm. Across the yard, I saw Luis, cornered by another detective, notice what was going on. I didn’t know what to do—cooperation seemed a waste of time, and violence counterproductive—but Luis reached out, put his hand on the detective’s shoulder, and gave him a wide, warm smile. Then he shook hands with the man and came toward me.

“You can’t talk to her now, sir,” my detective said. Her tone wasn’t inviting any arguments, and her grip on my arm was just as firm. “Please go be with your family.”

“She is family,” Luis said. The detective gave him a look that was so full of incredulity that even I smiled. “Distant relative.”

“Yeah? What galaxy?” The detective tugged on my arm again. “Come on, ma’am. Let’s go.”

“Detective. One moment.” Luis was still smiling, warm and wide, and he captured her flat stare with his. “Thank you for all that you’re doing to help us.” He extended his hand. I knew what he was doing—it was an Earth Warden trick, one of making themselves seem likable and trustworthy—but I could see that it wouldn’t work on this woman. She had a streak of distrust as dark as rust through her brittle, bitter aura.

“My job,” she said shortly, and added her other hand to push my shoulder. “Move it.”

I glanced down at her feet, and whispered into the ground. I was learning, from the carefully controlled way that Luis applied his skills, that for an Earth Warden subtlety was as effective as brute force.

Green grass looped up in ropy strands, lashing her ankles, burying her sensible shoes. When she tried to take a step, she overbalanced, and for a moment she clung closely to me before she let go to crouch down to see what was holding her. “What the hell—?”

Luis leaned over, too, placed his hand on her shoulder as if in concern, and I felt the strong pulse of power that slid through her. The grass fell away, but the woman didn’t immediately move.

“You’ve cleared us,” he told her in a very quiet tone. “We didn’t have anything to do with Ibby’s disappearance. You know this to be true. We have somewhere important to go, and you’re giving us permission to leave.”

I sensed her struggle against him. It was a very close thing, and Luis’s strength was very low just now, both in power and in human terms.

I had little enough to add, but I stepped in and added my hand on top of his. He glanced up, acknowledging the infusion of power, and guided it to surgical precision, shaping the woman’s response.

Again, it was illegal. The Wardens would have dismissed him for such a use, or taken his powers and left him a crippled shell. But the Wardens had taken their eyes from us, and this was now a fight for more than just survival.

Isabel’s life was at stake.

Whatever he did was on too fine a level for me to sense the exact methods, but when he removed his hand, the detective blinked at him, nodded, said, “Fine, thanks for your cooperation. You two can go. I know you’re in a hurry.”

We walked away together. As we approached the line, one of the officers turned from his post, frowned, and held out his hand to stop us. Luis looked over his shoulder at the detective, who was standing where he’d left her, arms folded. She made an impatient gesture to the perimeter policeman, and we ducked under the fluttering barrier and headed for the street.

We were lucky, I thought, that the news organizations were held back at the end of the street. I saw cameras focusing on us, felt the pressure of their excited attention. It was not pleasant.

I positioned Luis with his back to the cameras, so that he covered me, as well, and said, “You didn’t make her trust us?”

“Couldn’t,” he said. “It’s like hypnotism; you can make people follow a path they would have normally gone down, but that detective doesn’t trust anybody, and even if she did, she damn sure wouldn’t trust me. It was easier to just skip her farther along a track she’d have taken. Anyway, let’s get out of here. We don’t have too long before she starts looking through her notes and realizes she didn’t finish questioning us.”

“I could destroy the notes,” I offered.

“Cassiel, we want the police to help. Just not to put their sights on us. Destroying their notes doesn’t get us anywhere.” We had arrived at the parked truck, but it was surrounded by forensic technicians who were taking samples. In case, I supposed, we were all lying, the witnesses were all lying, and Luis had abducted Isabel himself. “Crap,” Luis muttered. “Well, they’re just doing their jobs. Too many to influence.”

“It’s a foolish waste of time.”

“No, it’s not,” he said soberly. “Statistically, kids get abducted by family members more than strangers. Makes sense. I got no problem with them following every possible lead.”

My motorcycle, I noted, was sitting neglected at the curb not far away. Luis noticed it at the same time, and we exchanged a silent look of inquiry, then moved toward it.

“No helmets,” I told him, as I straddled the bike.

“Least of my worries right now.”

I felt the shift of mass as he climbed on behind me, and then his hands closed on me, low, near my hips. I started the motorcycle. Something about the low growl of it soothed the gnawing fear and anger within me.

Luis shifted his weight to find the balance point, and I eased the bike out into the empty street.

One problem, I realized: we would have to pass through the gauntlet of press clogging both ends of the neighborhood. In the truck we would have had the advantage of height and sealed windows. On the Victory, we didn’t even have the relative anonymity of helmets.

“Alley,” Luis said in my ear. “That way.”

I leaned the bike the way he directed, over a spray of gravel and behind a neighbor’s house, and into a narrow paved street filled with overflowing trash cans and refuse.

“Go!” he shouted. “They’ll follow us if they can!” I applied the throttle, and the bike shot forward. Luis’s arms tightened around me to hold on, and I accelerated down the alley and into the next at right angles, which spilled into a street. I took the turn fast and accelerated yet again, narrowly beating the light and weaving around a slow-moving van.

“Left here!” Luis shouted, and I crossed three lanes of traffic with the throttle wide open, almost skidding through the turn. “Okay, good, ease off. I think we’re okay”

The Victory seemed disappointed to return to its role as mere transportation, but at traffic speeds it glided smoothly, sleek as a shark. We attracted curious glances. I was almost growing used to it.

“Back to your motel,” he said. “You get your stuff. I can’t guarantee the police won’t want to ask us more questions, so it’s better we move.”

“We need to go,” I said. I heard an echo of the Oracle’s voice, back in Sedona. You need to go.

“Yeah, but where?” he asked. I heard the frustration in him, sensed it in the harshness of his grip on my hips. “How are we going to find her?”

“I think I know a way,” I said, and guided the bike back to the motel.

I changed my clothing back from funeral black to pale white riding leathers over a pink long-sleeved shirt. I left the pants dark, though I roughened the fabric weave to denim. My shoes took on the solidity and toughness of riding boots.

I did it almost effortlessly this time, upon walking into the darkened, silent room. By the time I closed the door behind Luis, I’d changed completely. If it surprised him—if he even noticed—he said nothing. He sat down on the side of the neatly made bed and said, “What now?”

I opened a drawer near the bed and took out the maps that I had purchased along with the motorcycle. They were tough, encased in plastic, and I had New Mexico and one of several other states, including Colorado.

I unfolded both and flattened them out on the carpet, then took a cross-legged seat on one side. I indicated the other, and Luis folded himself down. “How does this help?” He was impatient and losing his temper. “We don’t need maps, we need—”

I grabbed his hand, took a small silver knife from my jacket pocket, and cut his finger with one swift jerk.

“Hey!” he yelped, and tried to pull away. I squeezed the cut. Ruby drops formed and dripped, hitting one map. I moved his finger until the drops were poised over the second drawing. Two drops were sufficient. I released him.

“We need blood,” I said. “You and Isabel share a tie of consanguinity. It’s not as strong as it would be if we had Manny or Angela’s blood, but I think it will do.”

He sucked on his cut finger, thinking it over, then slowly nodded. “You’re talking about finding similars on the aetheric.”

“The Wardens do this?”

“Not with the actual mutilation and bleeding,” he said. “Next time, ask before you cut me.”

I folded the knife and put it away. “Next time,” I said, “I doubt I’ll have to ask.”

The blood drops were formless blotches on the maps, signifying nothing without the application of will and energy. I held out my hand, and Luis sighed and offered his unwounded one for me to hold.

We focused together on the maps.

What we were doing was, in fact, harder than it might seem; the maps were only a representation of the earth, not the aetheric spirit. If the maps themselves had actually been carried through the distance that was shown, they would appear more fully in the aetheric. In fact, the route I had taken from Albuquerque to Sedona was clearly glowing in Oversight, when I went up to survey our work. The rest of the maps, except for certain parts of the town of Albuquerque, was pale and ghostly—and then Luis touched the map, in the real world, and added all of his experience into its reality, as well.

The map took on depth, dimension, life. A miniature of this section of the world. Luis, like his brother, had traveled widely in this part of the country.

The drops of his blood glowed like fireballs in the aetheric, but their glow would quickly fade as natural decomposition set in. It was an odd thing that the very fuel that drove blood cells—oxygen—was also what corroded them. Already, the iron content was showing a chemical change.

Isabel’s connection to Luis was, in mathematical terms, a small percentage. She had half of her father’s DNA, half of her mother’s; of Manny’s DNA, half would be identical to Luis’s. The best we could hope for would be a 25 percent connection between the two.

It was still a strong bond. Like calls to like. One of the founding principles of the world.

Luis’s blood drops glowed brighter, as I bathed them with the essence of the Earth. They rolled very slowly across the plastic, tracing a path in wet trails, from Albuquerque. . . . . . . Heading north, straight north, winding along the highway that led up to Colorado.

The blood drops on the New Mexico map trembled and stopped moving just before the town of Counselor.

On the other map, the drops showed the same.

“Jicarilla Apache reservation,” Luis said. “That’s where she is.”

The drops—only faintly glowing now on the aetheric—nudged forward another fraction of an inch.

“That’s where she is now,” I agreed. “But she’s moving.”

We dropped out of the aetheric, and I wiped the blood from the plastic-coated maps before folding them and placing them in the interior pocket of my jacket.

We studied each other for a long, silent moment, and then Luis said, “You going to be up for this?”

“To finding Isabel? Yes.” I was no longer holding his hand, and so had only the smallest access to the aetheric, but the darkness in his aura was very clear. “You aren’t.”

He blinked. “What?”

“You need rest, Luis. You can’t sleep on the motorcycle. I need for you to be awake and alert.”

He shook his head. “No time. Every minute counts, Cassiel. What if—what if they hurt her—” He did not want to think about all the terrible things that could happen to a child, and neither did I.

“If they hurt her,” I said, “we will know.” I felt that to be true. The bond we had formed was strong enough, and Luis’s Earth Warden powers only amplified it. “Luis, you must rest. If you don’t, you won’t have any power to give me, and this trip will be wasted. We accomplish nothing.”

He didn’t want to sleep. When I stretched him out on the bed and placed my hand on his forehead, he still fought against the descending darkness. Something in him was too weary to go on—I could sense it—but some other part refused to let go. He’d spent a massive amount of energy in the past twenty-four hours, and I didn’t understand his resistance.

His fingers wrapped around my wrist, but he didn’t pull my hand away from his forehead. Even at close range, in the dimness, his dark eyes looked like pools of shadow.

“Promise me,” he said. “You promise me that you’ll get her back even if something happens to me. Promise. ”

“I will,” I said.

“Again.”

“I will.”

His fingers tightened. “Again.”

“I will,” I said. I bent forward to brush my fingers on his parted lips. “Sleep.”

His eyes drifted closed, and his grip loosened on my wrist, falling away.

I had meant to give him only the slightest contact, but his lips felt warm and soft beneath my fingers, and I lingered.

I stayed where I was until I was certain he was asleep, and then I moved to the small, stained armchair near the window. I watched the parking lot. There was little activity, and no one seemed to take an interest in our room.

A thief approached my motorcycle once, looking around to see if anyone was watching; when he tried to roll it away, I softened the asphalt beneath his feet, trapping him, and opened the door. He stared at me, struggling to free himself from what must have seemed to him a nightmare.

“Leave,” I told him, and restored the ground beneath his feet. “Don’t come back.” It seemed I should say something more constructive, perhaps. “And don’t steal.”

He looked down at his oil-stained athletic shoes and ran.

I went back to the chair, and before dawn came, I slid into a light, dreaming sleep.

I woke up to the smell of brewing coffee and running water. The shower. Luis was bathing. I felt stiff and uncomfortable, but warm enough; I looked down and saw that he had given me a blanket sometime during my rest. I rose, folded the cover, and walked to the coffeepot. I poured two cups and carried them into the bathroom.

Luis was a shadowy form behind the plastic curtain. I set the cup on the countertop.

“Cassiel?” The curtain moved aside, revealing only his face. “What the hell are you doing?”

“Bringing you coffee,” I said.

“Yeah, okay, thanks, but—” He sighed. “Privacy’s not really a concept for you, is it?”

I gave him a slow, thin smile. “Do you imagine I long to see you naked?”

Put that way, he had no answer. He let the curtain drop back in place.

I leaned against the counter and sipped my coffee, watching the shadowy form move, and when the water shut off, I went back into the bedroom.

Luis dressed quickly. While he was doing so, I washed myself in the overheated bathroom. The cooler air of the bedroom felt good on my damp skin when I walked out, my clothing over my arm.

Naked.

Luis looked, a kind of involuntary inspection, but then he turned his back. I made no comment as I dragged on my underwear and clothing, layer by layer, with the leather on the topmost. “I am not shy,” I assured him. “It’s not a Djinn trait.”

“Yeah,” he agreed. “I get that, actually.” He sounded very odd. He glanced over his shoulder, saw that I had clothed myself, and faced me again. “We’ve lost a lot of time.”

“No more than we would have if we’d gone as we were, faced our enemies, and lost,” I said. “I have her trace now, on the aetheric. I won’t lose them again.”

Not unless they realized the trick I had used to form the link, and found a way to break it.

I had to hope that they had taken the child for a reason, because the easiest possible way to sever the link was by killing her.

Luis drained the last of his coffee. “Let’s roll.”

A quick stop to outfit us both with helmets, and we were on the trail. It was a short enough drive into the Jicarilla reservation. Outside of Albuquerque, the New Mexico landscape edged away into dusty sages, ochers, and reds. There was vegetation, but it was the hardy kind, living on little and surviving much.

I felt an odd kind of kinship with it.

As we traveled, I assessed Luis’s condition. He was stronger today, and his reservoir of power had replenished itself. That reservoir, in human Wardens, seeped in from the world around them, a kind of osmosis that I seemed incapable of copying. It would be easier to absorb some of that power through the contact of skin, but I found that if I concentrated and was cautious, I could siphon small amounts even through the shielded contact where his hands held my waist.

I trembled with relief as his warm energy sank through my starved tissues, but I did not think he could feel it. The sensation was likely lost in the road vibration of the Victory as we sped through long, empty miles.

The map had shown us the route that Isabel had followed, but our analysis of alternatives showed us better-paved highways where I could open the throttle on the motorcycle and rocket us along at much higher speeds. Illegal, and therefore a risk, but like Luis, I felt desperate to make better time.

Ibby’s captors might be the same who’d launched such vicious attacks against Manny, against me, against Luis. If so, they’d shown little mercy or regard for innocents, and I could not be sure that Isabel’s tender age would make any difference to them.

In two hours, we crossed the border into the Jicarilla reservation. There was little to mark it—faded signs and the same harsh country. State Highway 537 led through the heart of it.

I pulled over to the side of the dusty road, into soft sand, to go up into the aetheric. Isabel’s position had moved on, but it was not far ahead . . . another two hours at most.

I wondered why our enemies were moving so slowly. Surely a five-year-old child couldn’t hold back their progress so drastically.

Unless . . . they meant us to follow. Why attack us, wasting their own energy, when they could force us to waste ours in pursuit, and trap us in the end?

I didn’t speak of it to Luis, but I knew his thoughts would have led him to the same conclusions. The technique we had used to track the girl was rare, but not unknown among Earth Wardens; we had perhaps used a less common tactic, but if our opponents were as determined as I expected, they could have planned against it.

And the Jicarilla reservation stretched across the border, from New Mexico into Colorado.

“What are you doing? We need to get moving!” Luis said. He’d taken care of his call of nature, and mine could wait. “Something wrong?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “How many Wardens between here and the Colorado border?”

“Zero. We’re stretched a little thin, you know, and besides, far as I know, there’s only one or two left in the entire state. Most of the top rank went to answer Lewis’s call on the coast. They’re gone now, out of the country.”

I turned my head slightly. “Were you asked to go?”

“Yeah.” His tone didn’t invite further conversation on the subject. “Why are you worried about Wardens all of a sudden?”

I fixed my eyes on the far, shimmering horizon, where the black ribbon of the road rose up to meet the sky in a vanishing point, and I held out my hand to him. After a hesitation, he took it, and this time, I was the leader rising into the aetheric. We did not go far. We didn’t have to.

When we dropped down again, Luis shuddered as he entered his flesh again, and said, “Damn. I was hoping they wouldn’t know we were coming.”

“So was I,” I said. “Helmets.”

“Helmets won’t help visibility,” he pointed out. “You’ll be driving blind.”

“Put your hand on my back,” I said. “On my skin. I can use Oversight if you don’t let go.”

“You think you can drive like that?”

Blind? Using only the confusing information available on the aetheric to see? Possibly. What choice did I have?

I watched the vanishing point on the horizon grow hazy, then disappear as dirty red smudged the clear blue sky in an uneven, growing line.

What I was showing him in the aetheric was a sandstorm coming. A bad one.

I donned my helmet. It wouldn’t keep out everything, but it would do enough to allow me to breathe—unless the plastic broke. I didn’t want to consider that possibility. Behind me, I felt Luis adjusting his own helmet, and then his hands slid up under my jacket, tugged my shirt from my trousers, and settled in a warm span on either side of my waist, skin on skin.

The connection snapped tight between us, stronger for the touch, and I took in a deep breath.

“Keep your head down,” I told him. “I don’t know what else might come out of the dark.”

I pressed the throttle and threw sand on the still air, achieved the solid surface of the road, and the Victory dug into the asphalt, growling its challenge. I edged the speed faster and faster. It reminded me of old days, of horses thundering toward the enemy lines, of knights jousting, of a pure, clean purpose. Kill or die.

The red line on the horizon boiled up and out, like ink dropped in water. I felt the forces driving it—not Earth but Weather, the interaction of cold and warm air creating this deadly and explosive windstorm. In wetter climates, it would have brought thunder and rain, but here it only lashed the land, picked up abrasive grit and rubbed it together, building its own energy within the sandstorm.

The first gust of wind danced across the prairie, heading for us at a right angle. Tornado, my mind named it at first, but I knew that was not right. Gustnado. It didn’t matter what it was called, only that it hit us broadside in a stinging, powerful rush, and I felt the back tire of the Victory skid a bit, then grab traction again. The oncoming wall of sand grew darker as it came on—still red, but shading now toward brown as more and more light was blocked. It would blot out the sun altogether.

“We can’t do it!” Luis yelled behind me. I didn’t have the time to answer. It was true: we couldn’t possibly affect the entire sandstorm, but I wasn’t trying to. All I wanted was a tunnel through it, a lessening of the intensity. We could do that. I was certain we could.

I was certain until the moment I realized how huge the storm truly was. It had looked large from a distance, but it was monstrous now, and still growing larger. It covered the horizon in red-brown waves, rippling like silk, stretching to the heavens.

A dusty, rattling pickup truck roared up from a side road, took the turn, and sped past us going the other direction. I heard the driver shout a warning to us. He was running.

That was sensible. But on the other side of that wall lay the child we’d come to find, and I wasn’t willing to admit defeat. Not yet.

“Stop!” Luis yelled. I barely heard him through the contact of our two helmets, as if we were in the vacuum of outer space instead of safe on the ground. “We can’t do it!”

“Hold!” I ordered him. I bent my head, firmed my grip on the Victory, and kept rocketing forward.

We hit the sand, or the sand hit us, with the force of a net stretched across the road. If I had not clung viciously to the motorcycle, we’d have been thrown headlong, likely killed. The Victory skidded, and I tried to right her, but the darkness and screaming sand had no direction, no dimensions. Which way was forward? Even my instincts flailed helplessly. The storm had reached an intensity that crackled with its own energy and power, a half-sentient monster whose only mission was to expand, consume, grow. Life, at its most basic.

Oversight helped a little. I drew power through the grip of Luis’s hands on my waist and poured it in a laser-straight line through the darkness in the direction I thought was north. Even with his power and my ability to amplify and control, I achieved no more than a narrow window in which the sand was merely thick instead of smothering.

I accelerated again, following the line. Around us, the walls of darkness swirled and lashed. The faceplate on my helmet was scratched first, then scoured into fog by the unrelenting blast. I felt a sharp pain in my leg, then another in my shoulder. Rocks. There would be more debris mixed in as the sandstorm’s power grew. It could pick up metal, barbwire, wooden posts.

A strand of barbwire could decapitate me as easily as a sword, and for a moment, my courage wavered. I am going to kill us both. What would happen to Isabel then?

Ahead, something flickered in the gloom. Oversight was a confusing boil of color, half-recognized patterns, nothing I could identify. . . .

And then, with shocking suddenness, the patterns resolved into gray lines, snapping into angles.

It was a car, and it was heading straight for us.