Unbroken

in Luis’s eyes were tragic now.

I pushed past him and slogged through the clinging mud toward the truck.

Esmeralda was coiled up in a loose tangle of scales and limbs near the back door, looking as drowned and annoyed as I felt. Her tail rattled as I passed her. “Saw you out there,” she said. “Have fun with your hermana?”

“Shut up,” I snapped.

“You can’t let Isabel keep doing that, you know,” she said. “Picking up strays.”

“Like you?”

Esmeralda smiled, but there was a hint of the snake in that smile. “Some strays bite. This one will. You can’t save them all. Got to make sure Iz understands that.”

Esmeralda wasn’t saying anything that I didn’t feel myself, gut-deep, but it offended me that she was echoing my own thoughts. I didn’t want this Djinn-killing sociopath on my side, or in my head.

“Saving children may not be your priority,” I said coolly, “but perhaps it should be ours. Keep away from the girl. She may yet be salvageable.”

“Keep telling yourself that!” she yelled back, as I climbed into the truck’s cab. “She’s going to melt your faces off, and don’t say I didn’t warn you!”

Isabel was already inside, sitting stiffly in the center of the bench seat with the little girl in her arms. She’d wrapped her in the blanket I’d used before, and asleep, the child seemed innocent and heartbreakingly vulnerable. I slammed the door. Isabel edged away from me, putting clear space between us, as Luis got in the driver’s side. I heard the back door slam as Esmeralda took her place.

Nobody spoke at all as we drove away, into the storm.

Luis still had a working cell phone, and charged it using the plug-in port in the truck. His first call, once we were safely out of the heart of the storm and into something more like normal rain, was to the Wardens.

“Crisis Center,” said a sharp male voice on the other end of the line. “Name?”

“Luis Rocha, Earth. Checking in,” he said.

“You mobile and able to take work?”

“Yes,” he said, and gave me a quelling look when I started to speak. “Are they back?”

“They who?”

“The ones who went off on the cruise,” he said. The cruise in question had not actually been a vacation; a large number of the most powerful Wardens had boarded an ocean liner and sailed away from the coast of Florida, trying to prevent a major disaster. So far, there had been no word of their return… but then, we’d been preoccupied.

“Not yet,” the voice said. “They should be docking in a few days, though. We’ve made contact and told them how dire the situation is here. They’re making best possible speed, but it’s up to us to hold until they get here.”

From the stress in the man’s voice, he didn’t think that was very likely. I didn’t hold out much hope, either. Mother Earth, conscious and angry, could destroy much of human civilization in a day, never mind a week. The Wardens remaining wouldn’t be able to stop it, especially with the Djinn co-opted against them.

“I need to speak with Lewis Orwell,” I said. “Now.”

“Who’s this?”

“Cassiel, who was once a Djinn. Put me through.” I had, I thought, learned my humility lessons well; I had at least thought to give some context to my name, instead of presuming that it still held a resonance of power on its own.

“Can’t do that, lady.”

My voice went lower and colder. “Put me through.”

“Warden Rocha, please tell her that—”

“He tells me nothing,” I interrupted. “Put me through to Lewis Orwell now.”

A heavy sigh rattled through the phone, and the unfortunate in the Crisis Center said, “I’ll try. Hold.”

Luis said, “You really think you’re going to get the fucking Lord High Master of the Wardens to chat with you right now? Jesus, Cass, get a grip.”

“If Pearl wants to form an alliance with the Wardens, it will have to be stopped, and he’s the one to stop it,” I said. “He needs to know. Now.”

“Sometimes I think you just don’t get the concept of boss. He’s not going to —”

These was a click, and a different voice, scratchy with distance and a fragile connection, came on. “Orwell,” he said. “And it had better be breaking news, Cassiel.”

“It is,” I said. “You remember why I was cast down.”

“Well, I don’t know if down is very flattering to the rest of us. Cast out might be a better term. But yes, I remember. Ashan wanted you to kill the human race, and you said you wouldn’t. I hope you’re not calling to ask for a thank-you, because we’re just a little busy.” He sounded very grim, far more so than I’d expected. Orwell was one of those perpetually confident men, and yet now… “The Djinn who came with us are dying. Cut off. We’re in a black corner.”

A black corner was a Warden term for one of the burned-out areas of the world, where such an explosion of power had taken place that it destroyed the aetheric, and prevented Djinn from accessing their power. Djinn stranded in one of those areas would starve to death, slowly or quickly. Most black corners were small, isolated areas; even an injured Djinn could crawl out before permanent damage was done. But out on the ocean, when the aetheric was so ripped and bloodied… they might not survive. Any of them. They were New Djinn, most of them, but there was one.… “Venna,” I said aloud, and felt a surge of dread. “Is Venna—?”

“She’s sick,” he said. “Very sick.”

“No.” I said it softly, and almost involuntarily. Venna was a True Djinn, like me; she was ancient and incredibly powerful. I’d been puzzled by her recent affiliation with humans, but then, she’d always been intrigued by the strangest things. “Not Venna.” The loss of someone such as she would bring down the heavens, I thought.

What hurt more was the realization that I hadn’t felt her distress. Venna and I had links that went back farther than the human race, and yet… yet I felt nothing of her danger, or pain.

Lewis sighed. “Get to the point, Cassiel.”

I gulped back my pain, my shock, and focused hard to say, “Pearl. The enemy I’ve been fighting. She’s become very powerful, and now she will approach the Wardens, offer to fight by their side. You must not take her offer, Lewis.”

“Is it a trap? Is she going to not fight on our side?”

“No—she will. She must. She needs humanity to live, for now, until she achieves her ultimate goal… but then she’ll turn on the Wardens, destroy you all. When she no longer needs them, she’ll kill the rest of humanity as well.”

He was silent a long time, long enough that I feared the connection lost, but then Lewis said, “Good to know. Thanks, Cass. We should make landfall in a few days, but meanwhile, I need every Warden out there to fight, understand? Don’t give up. Shield all that you can.”

“You must promise me that you won’t accept any help from her!”

“How can I?” Lewis sounded—not himself. That was a cry of bleak despair, and the words that followed were just as dark. “I had twenty-five thousand Wardens when I started, to protect almost seven billion people. Know how many I have now? It’s tough to get a real count, but I was down to about ten thousand, and now—now it’s maybe half that. The Djinn are either dying or puppets for Mother Earth. We’ve got nothing. You expect me to throw back the only possible ally we have?”

“She’ll kill you,” I said softly. “She’ll kill you all.”

“Listen to yourself,” he replied. “Even after all this time, you can’t think of yourself as one of us.”

He hung up the call, and I sank back in the seat, feeling weary and utterly defeated. Luis silently put the phone away and concentrated on driving for a while.

“Well,” he finally said, “at least you warned him. But I’ve got to be honest: He’s right. He’s got to pick the lesser of two evils right now.”

“Pearl isn’t the lesser. She only appears to be, from the Wardens’ perspective right now.”

“Yeah, well, you can argue it when we see him.” He yawned, shook himself out of it, and said, “We can’t