Gale Force

Chapter Two

According to the checklist I’d downloaded from the Internet, I was already running about six months behind on planning any decent kind of wedding that didn’t involve shotguns and pissed-off dads. As I waited in the Fort Lauderdale airport for Warden Silverton’s plane, I read over the printed bridal list and anxiously jotted notes in the margins. Some things I just marked out. I wasn’t fooling with wedding advisors, wedding consultants, or wedding planners; none of them would be equipped to deal with the complexities of the wedding of a Warden and a Djinn, anyway. And if they were, they’d be way, way too expensive.

Clergy. Now that was something I did have to think about. Unless we went for a civil ceremony . . . Hmmm. Maybe one of the pagan faiths would be willing to do it. And then there were the caterers. Photographers. Musicians for the reception. Florists.

The whole thing was obscenely complicated. I suspected the wedding ritual was designed to make absolutely sure you really wanted to get married. God knew that if you were on the fence about it, the organizing would put you over the edge into permanent bachelorette-hood.

I was settled in an uncomfortable hard plastic seat in the baggage claim area, watching the arriving passengers.I had a sign propped next to me with the stylized sun symbol of the Wardens on it in gold and glitter—unmistakable, to anyone who knew what it meant, although I’d put SILVERTON below it in block letters, just in case.

I spotted a likely candidate—a tall African American man with erect military bearing who snagged an olive-drab duffel bag from the baggage belt. Sure enough, as his eyes scanned the waiting crowd, he fixed right on me and headed in my direction.

I stood up, claimed the sign, and waited for him to stride over. He got taller and taller the closer he came, very imposing. His handshake was firm and businesslike, and I realized he was older than I’d thought— probably in his early fifties, with a light dusting of gray in his close-cropped black hair, lines around his eyes. “Mr. Silverton,” I said. “Joanne Baldwin.”

“Heard of you, ma’am,” he said. No hint of whether the advance notice had been good or bad. “Call me Jerome, please. No point in formality if we’re going to be working together.”

“Right. Jerome, my car’s outside. How was your flight?”

“Food-free,” he said. “Could I impose on you to discuss this assignment over dinner?”

“Sure,” I said. “Anything in particular?”

“Fish,” he said. “Hate to miss the fish when I come to the coast.”

He liked my car. In fact, Jerome liked my car more than most people, walking all the way around it, asking questions about the engine, the performance, the mileage. I was betting that he’d ask to drive it, but he didn’t; he stowed his gear in the trunk and took the passenger side. I made sure to drive extra fast, just to give him a demonstration, which he seemed to appreciate.

“So,” I said, as we whipped down North Ocean Boulevard, enjoying the sea breeze and late afternoon sun, “I noticed you were NFA in the system. Travel a lot?”

“Prefer it that way,” he said. “Not really interested in being tied down.”

“And that sound you hear is the hearts of women breaking from coast to coast.”

I got a low chuckle out of him. “Not likely, ma’am.”

“Joanne.”

“Joanne.” He flashed me a million-dollar smile. “Pretty women make me nervous.”

I doubted that. “No Mrs. Silverton, then?”

The smile disappeared. “No. There was, but she’s gone now.” The way he said it didn’t invite mining that particular subject. “Tell me about the earthquake. ”

I did, sparing no details; no telling what was relevant. When I got to a description of the black glass thorn stuck into the aetheric, he frowned and turned toward me, intense and focused.

“That’s why you called me,” he said. “Because of the radiation problem.”

“That’s one reason, but you’re supposed to be a very good Earth Warden as well. One of the most sensitive to things not being right before things go to hell. That might really be an asset around here right now.”

I took a right turn into the parking lot of a seafood restaurant I particularly liked, parked, and turned off the engine. Silverton made no move to get out, so neither did I.

“I’m going to need some things,” he said. “A handheld GPS device. A Geiger counter. Couple of other things.”

“Anything you need, I’ll get,” I said. “Make me a list.”

He was still studying me, in a way that made me feel like I should have something more to say. I followed a burst of inspiration and asked, “Have you seen something like this before?”

With that, Silverton opened his door and put one long leg outside. Before he levered himself up, he met my eyes and said, “I sure as hell hope not.”

It took the rest of the day to get Silverton’s shopping list together, which included a detailed map and geological survey of the area, and a whole bunch of equipment whose names and purposes I didn’t even recognize. “What are you expecting to find, Jimmy Hoffa?” I muttered, loading the last of it into the backseat of the Mustang. I didn’t like using the car as a packhorse. It was a thoroughbred. Besides, I didn’t want dings in the upholstery.

Silverton didn’t answer me. It was getting dark, and I’d proposed waiting until the next morning, but Silverton seemed anxious to get started, so we started driving, cruising slowly—just two people in a fast car, slumming it on a leisurely sightseeing trip.

Silverton kept his eyes glued alternately on the Geiger counter and the maps, and I could tell that he was also maintaining part of his awareness, searching the aetheric. It took a lot of control to do that. He steered me with terse commands to go right or left—once, he had me back up and turn around. I heard the Geiger counter begin to click, and Silverton nodded once.

The sun was going down in the west, layers of stacked colors trailing behind like vast silk scarves. A few cirrus clouds skidded toward the horizon, but it was a calm sea with fair winds.

And inside the car, the Geiger counter stopped clicking and started chattering. I instinctively slowed down. “Here?”

“Not yet. Keep going.”

Not good. The clicking was already frantic. What did that mean for all those people driving by? Were they sick? Dying?

“Pull in up ahead,” Silverton said, and pointed off to the right. I bumped up a ramp into a deserted parking area—some kind of office building, marked as condemned. I barely paid attention. My gaze was fixed on Silverton as he compared maps, looked at the GPS, and used colored pens to mark our position. He shut off the Geiger counter, which was a storm of constant, nervous clicking, and got out of the car. I unbuckled my safety belt and hurried after him, grabbing the heavy duffel bag from the back. He paced the parking lot, prowling like a cat, and finally headed off across the asphalt toward the building.

It didn’t look like much: three stories, mostly built of concrete slabs, with a few cheerless windows. The style looked vaguely 1970s, one of those designs of the future that had never really caught on. I’d always wondered why, in the future, people never seemed to appreciate things like plants, carpet, and comfortably padded furniture. I just knew that the offices inside this building would have hard plastic chairs and concrete floors and earth-toned macramé wall hangings.

Well, it would have, except that this building was long abandoned. Some of the higher windows were broken out; the lower ones were boarded up with warping plywood. A sign on the door announced NO TRESPASSING, in uneven Day-Glo letters.

Silverton, however, wasn’t about to be warned off. He walked up to the double glass doors and, without hesitation, yanked. Nothing happened. They were locked.

I cleared my throat. “Maybe we should—”

Apparently, the end of that sentence was break in, because Silverton exerted a pulse of Earth power, and the lock made a little metallic snapping sound, and the glass doors shivered and sagged open. He shot me a look. “You were saying?”

“Just wondering if we ought to alert the bail bonds-man now, or wait until they let us have our one phone call,” I said. “Don’t mind me. I’m fine.” Well, I wasn’t, really. “Are we radioactive?”

Silverton raised his eyebrows. “Well, yes. Did the clicking not tip you off?” He didn’t wait for my answer, which would not have been helpful anyway; he swung the door open, and a wave of eau-de-abandoned-building swarmed over me. Old paper, turning to dust. Mold. Stale, still air. A faintly unpleasant undertone of sewer problems, too.

Oh man. This was looking less like a good plan all the time. I had not worn the right shoes for tramping through sewer water. In fact, I didn’t own the right shoes for that, and hoped I never would. Still, not cool to abandon the contractor you’ve hired to solve the problem.

So when Silverton strode on, into a dim entry hall, I followed.

Silverton was much better prepped than I’d thought; that even extended to flashlights, big heavy ones that would double as clubs in an emergency. I was glad, because I could hear scuttling somewhere upstairs. I know—big, bad Earth Warden afraid of things that scuttle. But it’s all context. I’m fine with Nature’s way, as long as Nature keeps it out of my way.

I cautiously split my attention between the real world—which was full of hazardous broken furniture, moldering carpet, and dangling wires—and the aetheric. The spirit world was tinted bloodred here, and it felt hot . . . oven-hot. I didn’t like it. Things had happened in this place, bad things. Their ghosts still hung around, joyless and draining. Workplace shooting, maybe. Or something equally horrible. Emotion stained this place, even over and above whatever our radioactive target might prove to be.

Silverton reached the end of the hallway and turned a slow circle, then pointed at a dented metal door that said MAINTENANCE ONLY. It was locked. He did the trick again, and beyond was a pitch darkness that made my skin crawl. The flashlights weren’t making a dent, really.

“Allow me,” I said, and twisted a small thread of Fire into a wick, then set it alight inside a bubble of air. I levitated it into the room ahead of us and turned up the brightness until the flickering magic lantern revealed rusted metal steps, going down, and mold-streaked concrete walls. “You’re sure about this?”

“You want to get to it; we go down there,” Silverton said. “Tell you what—makes you feel any better, I’ll let you go first.”

It didn’t, but I was probably the best equipped to deal with any hostile force that popped up out of the darkness. Damn, I hated being competent sometimes. “How radioactive are we, exactly?”

“On a scale from one to ten?” Silverton asked cheerily. “Dead, ma’am. Or we would be, if we weren’t Earth Wardens. Got some natural immunity against that kind of thing.”

“Some?”

“The longer we stay, the worse off we are,” he pointed out. Right. I was taking the lead. Fantastic.

I stepped onto the rusting metal, heard something creak, and hastily pushed my awareness down through the stairs, checking for structural integrity. They’d hold, thankfully, but just to be sure I added a little stiffener at the welded joints.

Twenty-two steps later, I arrived at the basement level, where the building’s power plant was contained. At least that was what I assumed it was: a huge block of metal, dented and rusted, with inert panels of darkenedindicators. I summoned the floating light closer as I walked around it.

“Should be close,” Silverton said. In the dark, his voice sounded like the whisper of a ghost. And there were ghosts down here; I could feel their presence on the aetheric. People had definitely died hard in this place. Enough of them could have spawned a New Djinn. Nobody knew where the Old Djinn, the ones from the dawn of time, had come from, but the newer ones were born out of enough energy being set free at the same time. Disasters and mass killings were particularly prone to it.

I kept looking into Oversight and templated it across the real world as I eased around the generator. Whatever this thing was, it ought to be right there . . . and it was.

It was a severed head.

I screamed and recoiled—reflex—and slammed into Silverton’s hard chest. He steadied me, moved me out of the way, and crouched down to stare at the dead, still face.

“That’s a Djinn,” he said softly.

“Can’t be.” I was getting control of myself again, willing myself back to some kind of mental balance. My heart was still thumping like a speed-metal drummer, but my hands were only shaking a little. “Djinn don’t die. Not like that. And they don’t leave corpses when they do.”

“This one did,” Silverton said. “Recognize him?”

I didn’t. I didn’t want to, either. “How can you cut the head off a Djinn?”

“You can’t.” Silverton reached out and touched the head. It wobbled backward a little, but didn’t roll. “He’s buried in the concrete up to the neck.”

Okay, that was—if possible—even creepier. “What about the black thing? Is it him?”

“No,” Silverton said. “It’s inside him. We have to get him out.”

He put both hands flat on the floor, on either side of the Djinn’s head, and the concrete began to liquefy. Silverton reached into the wet concrete and gave me a glance. “Grab his other arm.”

Last thing I wanted to do, but I did it. I reached down into the cool, wet cement and found something that felt more like flesh than liquid, and pulled. Silverton matched me, and we stood and walked backward, still pulling.

The Djinn’s body slipped free, covered from the neck down in a gray, dripping mass. He was naked, and he looked very, very . . . human. The only way I could tell that he wasn’t entirely human was the gauzy signature on the aetheric, barely perceptible now that we had him free of the ground.

Silverton was right. The black knife was inside him, driven in like a spike. This close on the aetheric it looked even deadlier than before. Glittering, sharp, lethal.

Silverton took a deep breath. “We’re going to have to open him up.”

I ran through all the reflexive denials and arguments in my head, and finally said, “You tell me what to do.”

Silverton reached in his backpack and pulled out two pairs of thick, black rubberized gloves. He handed me one and donned the other pair, then took out a long, wicked-looking knife.

“You going to be okay?” he asked me. I must have looked pale. I nodded, poured on the power to the light drifting overhead, and swooped it closer to give Silverton as much visibility as possible. “Quick and dirty. We’re not doing an appendectomy here. This is an autopsy.”

I had no idea what a Djinn looked like beneath the skin. Human, I supposed—full of organs and blood and nerves and all the things that sustained us.

I was wrong about that. Maybe this Djinn had only assumed a human shape, or maybe the black thing inside him had corrupted him from within.

In any case, as soon as Silverton’s knife pierced the graying skin, what poured out wasn’t blood. . . . It was a toxic black liquid, like oil. It didn’t leak; it pumped— as if some part of him was still alive. God, I hoped that wasn’t true.

Silverton didn’t pause, but his face went tense and still. He ripped the knife from neck to groin in one fast motion, put it aside, and yanked the cavity open. “Hold it,” he snapped at me. Before I could come up with the very good reasons why I didn’t want to do that, my gloved hands moved, grabbed the slick edges, and braced it open for him.

Silverton reached inside the Djinn, got both hands around the thing inside him, and pulled. It resisted, but then he rocked backward, as if something had broken free, and the top of the black shard swam up out of the black liquid and caught the light.

It flared into a galaxy of stars, glittering, and I gasped and looked away from it. There was something deeply wrong about it. Deeply alien.

“Oh God,” I whispered. Silverton’s face had gone an unhealthy shade of gray, and his hands shook as he pulled the thing out. “Drop it. Jerome, drop it!”

He got it free of the Djinn’s corpse and let go. It fell to the concrete floor—not like the glass it resembled, not at all. It fell with a thick, metallic clunk. Drops of oily black dripped from its sharp edges, and both Silverton and I stared at it without saying a word for a few moments.

Then Silverton said, “This shouldn’t be here. This can’t be here.”

I licked my lips and tasted sweat. “What is it?”

He met my eyes, and I saw real fear in him, the big tough military guy. “I don’t know. If I had to apply some kind of scientific principle to it, I’d say it was antimatter. Antimatter in suspension, made stable in the real world.”

I knew the theory of antimatter, of course. Back in the 1970s, a scientist named Dirac had been trying to figure out an explanation for the way matter behaved in certain circumstances, and he came up with a theory about something called the Dirac Sea—a kind of negative energy that exists underneath the positively charged matter in a vacuum. That led to scientists talking about contraterrene matter, and antiparticles.

Human scientists had actually managed to artificially create antimatter—in fact, they regularly did it, in places like CERN and Fermilab. Of course, their antimatter was unstable—it had to be, considering that it was manifesting and interacting with the matter-based world. The longest antimatter had ever lasted, even with all their technology sustaining it, was about fifteen seconds before it annihilated itself.

But if this was some kind of bottled, stable antimatter, that was bad. Very, very bad. When matter and antimatter collided, gamma rays were one side effect, which would explain the radiation. Even this container, whatever it was, wasn’t able to completely contain the antimatter, so there was a continuous stream of radioactive energy pouring off it.

“Antimatter collisions are about ten times more powerful than chemically based energy,” Silverton said, and wiped his sweating forehead with his sleeve. “One kilogram of antimatter annihilating itself is supposed to produce about 180 petajoules of energy.”

“Which is . . .”

“Catastrophic would be charitable.”

“And how much do you think is in there?”

We both looked at the thing lying on the concrete floor, alien and deadly enough to destroy a Djinn even without being released.

“I think,” Silverton said slowly, “that we’re looking at about two kilograms.”

In other words, double the worst-case scenario he’d just described.

“We need the Djinn,” I said. “At the very least, they need to know about what happened to him.” I nodded toward the dead Djinn.

Silverton nodded. “I think we’re going to need more than the Djinn,” he said.

“Like who?”

“God.”