Gale Force

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