Unknown

Chapter 10

KITTING OUT LUIS, TURNER, and me in FBI- issue bulletproof vests—worn beneath my leather jacket, for my part, and with the FBI identification blacked out with tape for Luis—was the work of moments. Turner was freely given one of the compact assault weapons. Luis and I were flatly denied, although Sanders did, in private, slip us sidearms.

I looked at the other two Wardens in silence for a moment, standing on the edge of the chasm, as a light breeze blew across the open space and rustled the trees above us. “This will be dangerous,” I said bluntly. “Very dangerous. If you wish to stop here . . .”

Luis made a rude noise. “Shut up and dance, Cass. Ibby’s over there, right? I want her back. Now.”

I nodded and turned my focus to Turner, who was staring into the distance as if reviewing all the choices that had led him to this somewhat distressing moment. Turner finally shrugged. “I’m in,” he said. “You were right. I may hate what the Wardens stand for these days, but these are kids. Innocent kids. And they need our help.”

That settled, we began to climb down.

Luis and I had agreed to preserve power whenever possible, so the climb was managed the normal human way—hands and feet, carefully placed. Straining muscles. An ever-present, patient threat from gravity, and a fluttering fear that never quite could be brushed aside. Pebbles and dirt rattled constantly, and although I went slowly and carefully, this use of human skills was new to me. I was confident enough on trails, however steep, but this . . . this verticality was different. It looked easier, in theory. In practice, I was out of breath and trembling well before the bottom was close enough to promise a survivable fall.

A small but robust creek ran through the muck at the bottom, and we paused to wash the sweat from our faces and necks. “Don’t drink that,” Luis told me, and tossed me a bottle of water he’d put in a net holster on his belt. I gulped down several mouthfuls and passed it on to Turner. Luis drank last and returned the now half-empty bottle to its carrier. “She could have poisoned the creek,” he told me. “I don’t see any fish or insects down here.”

He was right. The bottom of the chasm seemed eerily devoid of the usual creatures. Just the water, hissing on its way.

“Later,” he said. He knew I was thinking of repairing the damage she’d done, if he was right about the environmental poison. “We’re saving our strength, remember?” I did, but I didn’t like it much. “How are we on time?”

Ben Turner checked his watch. “Twenty minutes,” he said. “That gives us another twenty for the ascent, and twenty to deal with whatever’s at the top and get in position. And you’re sure that’s reasonable, right?”

I wasn’t, but there were no reasonable expectations to be had in any of this. I just faced the upthrusting wall and began to pull myself up, one painful foot at a time.

We were halfway up when I felt a surge of power coming through the aetheric. “Luis!” I called sharply, and he looked up. “Hide us!”

He took a deep breath, and lowered his head. We all froze in place on the rock face, and when I glanced down again, I saw nothing. No men below me, only vaguely man-shaped juts of rock.

Pebbles fell from above as someone leaned over the edge. There was a soft, inaudible report made in a child’s high voice, and then another, adult voice clearly said, “Raise it anyway. It’s good practice for you.”

I rested my forehead against the stone and tried not to interfere with Luis’s concentration. It was, at the moment, all that stood between us and death. We were too high to fall without serious injury, and too far from the top to launch any kind of effective attack. With one of the child-Wardens above us, we couldn’t strike in any case.

Below, I heard something odd. The hissing of the water took on volume, depth, built to a roar. I felt harsh gusts of wind whip up, battering me against the rock, and the cold spray as the stream built in volume, being forced from its underground source at an ever-greater volume. In the distance I heard a sudden boom of thunder, and felt the snap of lightning. Clouds were moving overhead now, driven by the unbelievable fury of Warden magic, clumping and thickening into a storm.

Raise it anyway.

The Warden had been instructed to use wind and water to scrub the entire chasm clean of any potential threats. I assessed our options. There weren’t many.

Luis’s voice suddenly whispered in my ear, in that eerie nonvocal communication. I’m going to lock us all down, he said. It’s the wind that’s a danger. The water won’t come high enough to drown us.

Agreed, I sent back.

Beneath my hands, the rock suddenly softened, flowing around my hands, and I felt the same happening where my boots were jammed into precarious footholds. The rock solidified, trapping hands and feet into secure pockets. I couldn’t fall now.

I also couldn’t move on my own will, without undoing the power Luis had put in place.

The winds rose, whipping through the narrow chasm. At first it felt like shoves, then battering blows. Debris slammed through—lighter things first, then larger pieces of wood, flat rocks, discarded metal. I kept my face down, pressed to the stone, partially protected by my arms. It was all I could do.

Lightning flared in lurid, graceful fans overhead, and just when I felt that the wind would rip my arms out of my sockets with its relentless push, it began to slacken. Rain pounded down, instead, hard and silver, ice cold. I gasped and waited for it to stop.

I rose into the aetheric, anchored by Luis only a few feet away, and watched the glow of the two Wardens standing at the edge of the chasm, above. One—the child—glowed in colors that shouldn’t have been possible, and the damage was awful and obvious in the persona he projected out into the world; a twisted gnome of a boy, scarred and melted. He’d been taught this. Forced into it.

The woman with him was little better, though her particular darkness glowed like poison through her veins. Her own choice, not imposed on her. She had power of her own, though not enough to have been a Warden in her own right. Possibly, once, one of the Ma’at.

The adult and the child stopped their interference with the energy of the storms, the river, the wind, and almost immediately it all slackened and fell into a confused, roiling mess. Neither of them bothered to balance the power out. That was dangerous; aetheric energy, summoned and left undirected, could trigger all manner of disasters, especially here, near the brilliant flood of energy that was the ley line, the invisible network of energy that linked together nexus points.

They’re gone, I told Luis. He released his hold on the rock, and it flowed away from our hands and feet, back to its original configuration. My muscles had taken advantage of the support to rest themselves, and my pace upward increased dramatically.

Close. So close.

There.

My hands touched the grass at the top, and I pulled myself up, rolled, and immediately fell flat, facedown so that I could institute my own protective cover, which made me a slightly uneven rise and fall in the velvety green lawn. I hardly saw Luis at all, or Turner, but I knew my partner had placed the same chameleon measures over them.

Very slowly, we began to make our way, on our bellies, across the lawn. Not in the way you see in films . . . not crawling, with our bodies in the air, braced on forearms. We slid along the grass, bellies flat, pulling ourselves slowly forward with flattened hands. It was slow, tedious work, but effectively silent and almost impossible to spot, even on the open ground, with the kind of camouflage we employed.

But with the time we had lost, I was worried we wouldn’t make it to the dome before Sanders triggered his distraction, drawing people directly toward us.

And then I saw one of the bear- panther chimeras emerge from the trees at the perimeter, sniff the air suspiciously, and begin to pad across the grass, nostrils flaring for scent.

Cass, Luis whispered.

I see it.

It’s going to smell us.

No question of that. It already had, though it was baffled by the lack of visible evidence of our presence. It padded around us in a slow circle, orange eyes fixed on the open space where one of its senses reported we were, and the others reported we were not.

Can you put it out? I asked Luis.

Maybe, he responded. If it gets close enough. But that leaves us with a huge unconscious problem for anybody to notice. Which is not the point of stealth.

I closed my eyes, pushed my face into the clean, springy grass, and sent my aetheric senses out to find something, anything we could use.

I found a deer. A magnificent young buck, sharpening his antlers against a tree just beyond the tree line.

I panicked him with a pulse of Earth power and sent him bounding into the clearing, where he froze in shock at the sight of the huge, feline form of the chimera snuffling at apparently empty grass.

The chimera’s head snapped up, the elusive smell of humans suddenly overridden by obvious prey.

Run, I told the deer, and released it. It turned and crashed back into the trees, bounding for its life.

The bear/panther roared after it, powering on massively muscled legs. Other howls answered it from all sides—the pack, taking up the hunt. I felt sickened, but the deer had already made the fatal error; I had only exploited it to our advantage.

We crawled as fast as such things could be accomplished.

We were not quite at the glowing curve of the dome when I heard the revving of engines on the other side of the chasm. Agent Sanders was making noise, a lot of it. Voices shouted. Metal banged. They were relocating all their tents to here, right within sight of the compound. No more hiding and playing coy.

I heard Agent Sanders’s voice, magnified into a giant’s deep shout, roll in a wave across the distance. “You in the dome,” he said. “I want to talk to the leader of the Church of the New World in this location.”

No response. I lifted my head and took reckonings. The access road was less than ten feet ahead of us, and to the left was a cleared open area, dirt only, neat as if it had been cordoned off by nature herself. The supply drop. That meant that at least one access was located right there, as close as possible to that spot; human nature and efficiency dictated that to be the case. One didn’t build a road and a drop point if the access was on the other side of the building.

And Pearl, I knew, would have built access in whatever ways she liked.

Follow, I whispered to both Luis and Turner, and crawled around the edge of the supply area, almost to the dome itself.

Then we waited.

It took some time. Agent Sanders repeated his request, over and over, in a bland and annoyingly exact manner. When his voice got tired, Sanders put on blaring recorded music by a singer who offended even my limited sensibilities for his lack of imagination.

And after almost half an hour, an access point opened on the dome, and a single person stepped outside.

Not Pearl, of course. I didn’t recognize this man. He was tall, sun-browned, lean, and with a hardened face that looked strong, but not kind. He had a bullhorn as well.

He came out of another access point, one further along the curve of the dome.

“Who are you?” he demanded, his own voice just as strong and deep as Sanders’s had been. “What do you want from us?”

As if that wasn’t obvious. The man couldn’t be oblivious to the abduction of children going on within his own house.

See if you can open it, I whispered to Luis, and felt him crawl past me and touch his hand to the dome near the supply drop point.

While Pearl’s spokesman and Sanders carried on their make-believe negotiations—and there was really no doubt how that would end—the area of the dome where Luis’s hand had rested suddenly belled inward, and parted with a cool whisper of air to form a circle.

Like a mouth.

I hesitated, staring at it. The last time I had entered one of Pearl’s lairs, it had almost destroyed me, and I’d been alone at the time. I hadn’t had to worry about two other lives trailing along behind me.

Luis started to enter the opening. I reached out and grabbed his arm, hard.

No, I said.

What the hell? Why? We’re exposed out here! Because this was what she wanted, or she would not have driven me to this point. Picadors, and bulls. She had opened only the doors she wanted me to go through. Pearl understood me. On some level, we were the same—outcast, angry, vengeful. I had taken one road, and she another, but in parallel, not opposition.

I closed my eyes for a moment, shivering, and then whispered, Stay here, both of you. Stay down. I will open it to bring the children out.

Luis stared at me from shocked, wide eyes. You can’t go in alone.

I won’t be alone, I said. You’re always with me. He involuntarily reached out to me, cupping my cheek in his warm, dirty palm, and the look in his face was horrified, heartbroken, and angry.

Start the attack at the other domes, I told him.

You can’t do this, he said. Beside him, Turner was making urgent go motions; without the Earth Warden talent for silent communication, he was left frustratingly out of the loop.

She’ll have the children waiting, I told Luis. If we go in as a group, there will be deaths. I can’t let that happen. It was what Pearl wanted. For us to be trapped in close quarters, fighting these children for our lives. The more of us there were, the worse the toll would be.

You can’t do this alone, he said again. He wasn’t wrong, but I also understood now that there was a price for victory here, as everywhere.

And the price was too high. She meant it to be too high.

Follow, I said. Wait five minutes, and follow. If I’m dead, do what you can.

I didn’t bother to argue with either one of them. I just lifted my body and lunged inside, slamming the opening shut behind me and locking it with a twist of my will. He could force it, but it would take time.

I didn’t think there was much left.

When I turned back, I faced an organic sweep of cool, iridescent walls—not quite stone, not quite bone, not quite nacreous. It curved as it followed the outer shape of the dome, and I ran lightly along the path, looking for what I knew I would find.

I rounded the curve and found Isabel.

“Ibby?”

I slowed my steps, my metal left hand touching the outer wall, and stared at her with the intensity I reserved for those I loved, and for enemies. I wasn’t sure which she was now. Or whether she was still both.

Isabel was still, in body, a chubby little girl, but she had put aside the behavior of a child. She stood very still, very alert, watching my approach. Behind her were three other children, each older than she was. They were dressed the same, all in that durable camouflage material, which I now realized had the same properties that Luis had used in his efforts to conceal us; the material mimicked its surroundings, and now it was a shimmering ivory, like silk.

“Ibby,” I said. I stopped and faced her, just as still as she was. “I’ve come to take you home, Ibby.”

She didn’t answer. None of them did. They just watched me with alert, angry eyes.

“Isabel, I don’t want to fight you. I want to take you home.”

Isabel slowly shook her head. “This is my home.”

“No. Your home is with your uncle Luis.” And me, I wanted to say, but didn’t dare. “He’s waiting for you. He’s missed you so badly. You remember your uncle, don’t you?”

Her dark eyes flickered for a moment, and I knew she was remembering. What she might remember was another question; if Pearl had succeeded in altering the girl’s perceptions, her memories, she might be reliving imaginary trauma—or real ones. Pearl had manipulated these children, tried to use their familial feelings to raise barriers and drive hatreds—but she could only manipulate, not program. That left them vulnerable to the same appeals.

“Uncle Luis is dead,” Ibby said. “You killed him. It was horrible.”

“She’s lying to you,” I said. Not that I hadn’t almost gotten him killed on many occasions, but it was probably not the best time to parse the dynamics of that relationship. “Ibby, the lady who tells you these things, she isn’t your friend. And she lies. She wants to use you, all of you. She doesn’t care what happens to you.”

Isabel was no fool, and I saw her consider that. The children behind her, however, didn’t have our history together. Or, perhaps, the same flexibility of mind.

“You’re the liar! You’re the evil one!” one of them shouted, and clapped his hands together.

A hammer of air forced itself down the narrow hallway, hit me, and slammed me backward to the floor with such violence I saw black swarms of stars, and felt myself begin to disconnect from this world. I fought back, panting, and rolled to my side to get up.

The Weather Warden child hit me again, harder, sending me face- first into the wall. I slid down it, almost senseless, and sensed Isabel stepping forward. The assault stopped, mainly because the Weather Warden—the same boy who’d almost killed us in the chasm, perhaps?—couldn’t strike with Isabel in the way.

Isabel called fire into her hand. It came in a blue-white burst of energy, flickering red at the edges, and echoed eerily in her eyes as she advanced toward me.

“You wanted them dead,” she said. “My parents. All our parents. You killed Uncle Luis. You want to kill me and my friends. You want to kill the lady.”

Only one of those things was true, but it was the critical one; I did want to kill the lady. And however it had happened, Manny and Angela Rocha had died; Pearl could twist the facts to suit her cause, and it would be useless for me to try to deny them.

But Luis . . . I could prove she was lying about Luis.

“Stop,” I said, or tried to say; there was blood in my mouth, and I wasn’t sure that I had actually spoken at all. The second blow had been so hard that I couldn’t get my limbs to move, other than uncoordinated scrabbles. “He’s alive.” That sounded almost clear. “Your uncle is alive.”

“Liar,” Ibby said. “I saw you kill him. The lady showed me—you hurt him, you hurt him so bad he died. And now you’re going to burn, just like you burned him.”

She pulled her hand back.

I flung out a hand in useless denial . . . and felt a surge of horror at what had been done to Ibby. To all these children. She’d watched someone—even if it had not been Luis in truth—burn. Whether that had been illusion or reality, it was traumatic enough to leave unendurable scars.

In the instant before she launched the fire at me, I shouted, “Ibby, think! I’m like your uncle! I can’t use fire!”

Ibby blinked. She stayed there, poised on the edge of violence, fire flickering and hissing in her small, chubby hand.

“Your uncle is an Earth Warden,” I panted. “I share his power. I am an Earth Warden. I couldn’t burn him, even if I wanted to, do you understand? And I never would, Ibby. I love him, just as I love you.”

It was much for a child her age to understand, but she’d been forced to things far beyond her normal understanding already. She understood the nature of power because of what Pearl had already taught her.

Ibby quenched the fireball with a clench of her fist, leaving behind a smear of acrid smoke on the air. She looked at me with wide, lost eyes, frowning.

“But I saw,” she said. “I saw you do it. I know you did it.”

Children are literal. And Pearl had counted on that. “No, my dear,” I said softly, and heard the grief and tenderness in my voice. “I didn’t. And I won’t hurt him, or you. You have my promise.”

I felt the air move behind me, a cool breeze stirring my hair, and heard running, booted feet.

And then Luis said, “Ibby?”

In the first instant there was shock, then fear. She’d seen him die. This required a wrenching adjustment of her worldview, something difficult and painful.

Then I saw delight dawn. Her eyes rounded, and so did her perfect little rosebud of a mouth, and in that single moment, she seemed the child she had been. “Tío Luis?” Her voice was shaking and uncertain.

He lowered himself to one knee. “I’m here, mija. I’m right here.”

She took a step forward, then shook her head, violently, and backed away, into the safety of the other children. “No,” she said. “No, it’s a trick. You’re playing a trick.”

Luis didn’t move, not even a muscle. He didn’t even glance at me. “Mija, it’s no trick. I’m here to take you home. You want to go home, don’t you? I know you didn’t want to leave us. I know they made you go. It’s not your fault. None of this is your fault.”

She pulled in a trembling breath, and I saw tears glitter in her dark eyes. So young. So fragile.

“Isabel,” Luis whispered. “I love you. Please come home.”

“No,” said the Weather Warden boy, the one who’d slammed me into the walls. He was cold and utterly controlled, and he grabbed Ibby’s shoulder as she started to move toward us. “She’s not going anywhere. You’re not going to hurt her anymore.”

“I’m not going to hurt her.” Luis kept his voice low, and as gentle as possible. “I’m not going to hurt any of you. You can all come with us.”

“Why, so you can cut into our heads? Make us zombies?” The boy’s grip on Ibby’s shoulder must have hurt; I saw her wince. “That’s what you do, we know all about it. You take us away to your hospital and you cut us up and you lock us up. We’re not going to let you do that to us. Or to anyone else, ever again. We’re going to stop you.”

They thought they were the heroes.

Worse, there was a grain of truth in what the boy was saying, like all successful lies. The Wardens did operate on those whose powers were too dangerous, too uncontrollable. Some didn’t survive. Some survived grievously damaged. Pearl knew that.

She had twisted it in their minds, made it their inevitable fate. Made us all evil, predatory villains.

They’d fight, all right. Fight to the death, because they were the brightest, the strongest, the most courageous.

She was turning our future heroes against us.

“Ibby,” I coughed, and rolled up to my hands and knees. “Ibby, please don’t. Let us help you.”

“No,” the boy said, when Isabel tried to pull free. He shoved her behind him, and slapped his palms together again, driving a wall of force toward us. I collapsed to the floor this time before it hit me, presenting as little target as possible; even so, the impact almost drove me into unconsciousness.

It blew Luis backwards, sliding him ten feet down the hall with a yelp of pain.

“No!” Isabel shouted, and turned on the boy, shoving him back. “No, don’t hurt him!”

“That’s your enemy, dummy!” he yelled back, and shoved in turn. “How weak are you? Didn’t you learn anything? It’s probably not even him!”

“It is,” Isabel said, and turned toward Luis. “It is him.”

As she started toward us, the boy tried to grab her, but this time, Ibby was ready, and she slipped out of his hands and ran past me, toward her uncle. Luis rose, staggering a little, and she leaped into his arms.

He was driven back a step, but held on to her; there was a flash of pain on his face, quickly buried by waves of relief. He kissed her shining dark hair, hugged her, and murmured rapid calming phrases in Spanish, only half of which I could hear. Promising he loved her. Promising he would protect her.

I hoped that was true.

“The lady lied,” I managed to say to Isabel, and to the other children still facing us. “She lied to you. Do you understand? She’s trying to make you hurt innocent people. I know you don’t want to do that. You’re better than that.”

One looked horror-stricken, and backed up. He was clearly questioning everything he’d been shown, everything he’d been told; there was real doubt in his face, real pain. He was just a bit younger than the Weather Warden boy.

I saw no such doubts on that one’s face. He was a fanatic. A true believer, as was the girl next to him.

“You’re the ones who lie!” the girl shouted, and I felt a fearfully strong Earth power ripping at me, trying to clutch its fingers around my heart and crush. I batted the attack away and lurched to my feet, wiping blood from my mouth. Earth powers, I could defend against. The boy who was backing away was Fire.

The Weather Warden boy was still the real danger. He was willing to kill. Eager to. He was just trying to find the right moment, and to avoid hurting Ibby in the process—though I wasn’t at all sure he would flinch from it, if he thought it necessary.

“Get her out,” I said to Luis. “Go. Go now.”

He hesitated. Isabel turned her luminous, too-adult eyes to me, and I saw the shadow in them, the adult understanding. The power.

Pearl had made the child old far beyond her years. Forced her to see and do things that would have damaged someone far more experienced in this world.

I wasn’t sure, suddenly, that we hadn’t been manipulated, once more, but really, what choice was there? Leave Ibby here, to suffer more? No. Not possible. We had to try, or there was no point to any of it.

“Take her,” I said. “You have to save her or none of this will mean anything. Just go, Luis. Go.”

He nodded and began to back away, up the tunnel. Agent Ben Turner stepped in to fill his place, standing with feet spread wide apart, blocking any possible pursuit that might have gone after Luis and Ibby. He looked tired and bruised, but also focused and very capable. Between the two of us, we could cover two avenues of attack.

But neither of us could defend against a Weather attack.

Lightning arced from all sides of the tunnel, like a net of energy, striking at both of us. It mostly missed me as I dove forward, but it struck Turner squarely, and he froze, galvanized by the force, but absorbing it into fire energy. Transforming it. Lightning and fire were close cousins, and although it hurt him, it didn’t kill him. He staggered, fell against the curving wall of the tunnel, and stripped off his FBI Windbreaker, which had burns and melted fabric dripping in syrupy streams down the sleeves.

I hit the smooth wall of the tunnel, planted my feet, and adjusted my trajectory, adding Earth Warden speed to my movements, burning energy at a rapid rate now. Lightning continued to fill the tunnel, but I sped up my reflexes and reaction time, and although it brushed close, it never stabbed home.

The children retreated. The boy changed his attack again, pushing me back with a wave of hot wind, and the Earth child darted forward to slam a fist into my chest.

It hit with the overwhelming force of a freight train. It took years for an Earth Warden to build up that kind of force, yet this child pulled it in an instant, and I felt it blow through me, damaging everything in its path—ribs, lungs, barely missing my heart. I choked, gasped, and felt a burst of pain bloom like a flower made of knives in my chest.

“Cassiel!” Turner yelled, and sent a burst of fire rolling past me, forcing the Earth Warden child back just as she tried to summon up a second, killing blow. “Jesus, get back!”

I couldn’t. I was already wounded, and if I didn’t finish this quickly, they would.

I ignored the agony. I rolled forward over my right shoulder, came up in a crouch, hands outstretched, slammed both palms against the foreheads of the two children, and sent a jolt of power into them that overloaded their brains, instantly sending them unconscious.

In theory.

One went down.

The one I’d held my metallic left hand to, the Weather Warden, staggered, but as I’d feared, the metal had failed to conduct aetheric power in the same way that flesh did.

It was a fatal moment to learn that for a fact.

The boy had no more hesitation or mercy than the girl at his side, who was already falling to the ground in sleep. He struck me point blank with an invisible blade of hardened air, punching it deep inside me. It was an old form of attack, one that the Wardens had long since abandoned; Weather Wardens didn’t engage in close-quarters fighting, and when they did, they tried to avoid fatal wounds.

This was . . . very close to fatal. Very, very close.

I fell forward, reaching out with my right hand as I did, and slapped it against his forehead. He was a sweet-faced child, Asian in ancestry, with silky black hair cut in a careless shag around his face.

I had just enough focus left to send the pulse of power into him, and he collapsed before I fell on top of him.

I was bleeding. Unable to breathe.

“Cassiel!” A distant voice, shouting. I felt something tugging at me, but it was very remote.

It felt peaceful suddenly.

Someone rolled me over, grabbed the two unconscious children, and hustled them away. I lay there watching the red pool of my blood spread outward across the clean pale floor.

I felt the hunger of the place stir. It liked blood. It loved mine.

Sister. Pearl’s voice, echoing in my head, unwelcome in this peaceful state I’d reached. No, this won’t do. I can’t have you giving your life. That’s to no purpose at all.

Sorry to disappoint you, I replied. I felt . . . remote now. Like an Oracle myself, removed from the concerns of the world. I remembered how I’d longed for peace, for solitude, for silence.

I was finding it, breath by breath. Soon, it would surround me entirely.

You’d leave the man, Pearl said. I find that hard to believe. You’ve become so human. So bound to skin. And he does so love you, already. Like the child. It was hard to turn her against you. I had to hurt her many times to do that.

I felt a stir of hate, an echo of emotion that troubled me. It had no place here, where I was leaving things behind.

The pool of red crawled outward, spreading into a lake.

There was one more Warden child left in the hallway, the one who’d backed away from the fight once Isabel had been taken. He was an older boy, about ten years, and I saw in him the shadow of the man he might one day become, if he survived all this—if he survived all of us—to be a genuine Warden.

He would be the next Lewis Orwell. There was a light in him . . . a light . . . .

He reached out and touched me, spreading his hand over the open wet wound that the knife of air had left. “No,” I whispered. “No, don’t.” Because as close as I had come to the edge, I might pull him with me. I would not pull him into the dark. “Let me go. It’s all right.”

Shhhhh, Pearl said soothingly in my mind. Oh my sister, he’s mine to give. And I give you this gift. I’m not ready to let you go quite yet. It’s not time.

“No!” I screamed it, but it was too late.

The boy wasn’t acting of his own accord. This child, this marvelous and beautiful child who would grow to be a marvelous, beautiful man, was completely under her control. Against his own will, he poured power into me, emptied every reserve. It roared into me in a fierce, white-hot cascade, burning through my nerves, spilling in a flood through the wounded tissues. Healing. Mending sliced arteries. Forcing the wound closed.

Saving me. Destroying himself.

“No!” I whispered, but I couldn’t stop it. Couldn’t sever the connection. I was too weak, and perhaps, at some primal level, I was too afraid. Too afraid of dying myself.

She emptied him of everything. Every tiny scrap of power, even the tiny bursts of energy that kept the cells of his body alive.

She killed him to save me.

“No!” My scream was raw, and it filled the narrow space of the hallway, raced through the space, echoed from the roots of my soul.

I caught the boy as he fell, but it was too late. He was emptied by Pearl and discarded like garbage.

I was weak, pale, and horribly damaged, but I was no longer on the edge of death. He had gone on without me, into the dark.

Not by his choice.

I heard voices in the distance, a confusion of shouting, running feet. You should go now, sister, Pearl said. I wouldn’t have you waste my gift. But I won’t allow you to take more of my children. I need them for our next meeting.

“I will,” I said out loud. My voice was bloody, ragged with rage. “I will stop you from doing this. I will stop you.”

You know how, Pearl said. All you have to do is act. But if you do, this one child dead before you is the first of billions. Then again, if you don’t act, I will do the same to the Djinn, the Oracles, to the faithless Mother who turned her back on me. Which would you prefer?

Let the Djinn save themselves. I couldn’t face another death now, much less the deaths of billions.

But there had to be another way.

“I will stop you,” I repeated. “However it has to happen.”

I gathered up the fallen child in my arms. My blood soaked into the boy’s clothing from my own, and I staggered and fell against the wall, dizzy from the effort and a sudden, overwhelming feeling of anguish. I am guilty of this, I thought. Guilty of destroying something astonishing. I might have stopped him, if I’d been strong enough. His life, for mine. It wasn’t a fair bargain.

I had to find some way to make it worthwhile. And I had to face his parents, look them in the eyes, and explain why I had failed their son.

I owed him that.

A dark shape rounded the far end of the sloping hallway, at the opposite curve from my exit—not a child, an adult. Tall and broad, and armed with a rifle, which he aimed in my direction. I had no time for subtleties; I melted the barrel of his gun just as he pulled the trigger. It exploded in his hands, sending him reeling back into the man behind him, who shoved his bleeding, screaming colleague aside to raise his own rifle and squeeze off two fast shots. His aim was poor, thanks to quick reactions and adrenaline, but the hallway was narrow, and one of the bullets caught me low in the side, in the bulletproof vest.

I turned my back as he vaulted forward, screaming his defiance, followed by a whole rank of his friends.

I ran for the exit. The weight of the dead boy was like lead in my arms, and my body felt as if it might collapse with every dull step, but I rounded the corner still ten feet ahead of the pursuers . . .

... and the door was closed.

I slammed my hand down on the nacreous surface, willing it to open, but it refused.

I didn’t say I would make it easy, sister, Pearl laughed in my head. I want you suffering. For a very long time, the way you made me suffer. I want to bury that tiny part of you in the ground, trapped and bleeding and aware, aware for all time. I want to feel your screams echoing in eternity. You deserve that.

I put my back to the blank wall where the door should have been, breathing hard, and watched all the soldiers plug the hallway, blocking any possible alternate routes. Metallic clicks as they aimed their weapons, but the man in the front rank held up a clenched fist, and no one fired.

“Put him down,” the man said. “And get on your knees, hands behind your head.”

I couldn’t disable so many weapons. Even if I could, they had other weapons, and I sensed that some of them, if not many, had other powers they could bring to bear against me.

I was trapped, completely and utterly trapped.

But I was not giving up the boy.

Or kneeling.

Not now. Not to them. Not ever.

The leader of the security force must have recognized that, because he nodded sharply and put his weapon to his shoulder, sighted, and fired. One shot.

It hit me in the leg, shattering my femur, and I screamed and almost went down.

He adjusted his aim to target the other leg. When I reached out with power to try to disable his gun, something blocked me—him, or one of his men.

The wall softened behind my back, sagged outward under my weight, and I fell as it popped and pulled aside in that eerie round mouth.

Spitting me out, this time.

“Cassiel!” Luis screamed. He grabbed my hand and dragged me around the curve of the dome, slapped a hand on its surface, and dialed the opening close in the face of the security leader. “Oh God, what the hell . . . ?”

There was chaos at the perimeter. FBI agents had driven an armored truck down the slope of the hill, and were engaged in a full firefight against a squad of Pearl’s human guards, while still others were fighting off an assault by the chimera bear/panther predators. It was all lit by a hellish, fiery glow as the treetops burned around us.

Turner, panting, raced toward us, stopping along the way to trade shots with a human guard. He grabbed me by one arm, Luis took the other, and they started to drag me off.

The boy tumbled from my grip. “No!” I shrieked. “No, bring him! Bring him!” I fought them in a frenzy, grabbing at the boy’s body. Luis recognized that we would all die if he didn’t try to help me, and slung the boy over one shoulder as he pulled me along, limping on one bloody leg, toward the armored carrier.

He and Turner thrust me inside, along with a medic who climbed in with a pack of supplies. Also in the truck

I found the two sleeping Warden children, and Isabel, who was curled up in a ball in one corner, watching the fight with bright, terrified eyes. She looked at me—bloody, pale, wild as I was—and threw herself into my arms as I collapsed on the seat beside her.

I tried to hold her as the world slipped greasily around me, but the pain came in waves, blacking out everything, and I heard the medic say, “Hold still,” and then it was all dark.

Not even the rattle of gunfire followed me.