Unbroken

thing I’d glimpsed, a single flare of brightness in the dark.

A glass bottle.

It was a beer bottle, still smelling of hops and malt.

Seconds left.

Rashid was in front of the truck now.

Summoning his power.

“Be thou bound to my service,” I said, and concentrated every ounce of the power inside me on his distant spark. “Be thou bound to my service. Be thou bound to my service, Rashid!”

There was a scream on the aetheric, a ripping of the fabric, and power flowed like blood toward me, through me, into the bottle.

I slapped my hand down on the top, trapping him within, and collapsed to my knees on the fallen leaves. A chilly blast of wind made me shake, but it wasn’t only that—the fear came back, and the emptiness, and the fragility of flesh. The Djinn Cassiel had visited me and gone, and left me a human shell full of weakness.

But I had Rashid. I had him.

There was mud caked at the bottom of the leaves, and I slammed the bottle down into it, sealing it tightly. It looked empty, but on the aetheric the glass container swirled and glowed with trapped energy.

I didn’t know if the binding would keep him controlled by my will, or if it had only bound him into a prison; the only way to test it would be to release him, and that was a dangerous risk. Too dangerous, for now. Later, perhaps, it would be worth taking the chance.

The truck was still moving, already out of sight. Safe, for now.

And I was once again on foot.

Chapter 4

TWO MILES DOWN THE ROAD, I found the Victory motorcycle sitting neatly parked on the edge. The tire marks told me that the truck had stopped, unloaded it, and driven on. Good. I leaned against the bike for a few moments, head down. The rain continued, but it was fitful now, and light; no other traffic had passed in either direction.

I mounted the bike and started it with a spark of power, then patted the sleek side with absent fondness. “Let’s find them,” I said. I opened the saddlebag strapped to the side and found men’s clothing, rolled up tightly; the beer bottle with Rashid’s spirit fit nicely inside the curl of a pair of soft blue jeans, and I cushioned it further with a fleece shirt.

Then I eased the Victory out onto the black ribbon of road, and started the ride.

The punishing vibration of the engine felt magically soothing to me, pounding the kinks from knotted muscles and clearing my mind. The wind and rain in my face woke something primal in me, something that thought clearly and coldly about our chances. They were, of course, poor at best. Lewis Orwell himself had admitted that; until the bulk of the Wardens docked from their mission at sea, those of us stranded here were the thinnest possible line of defense. There was no chance we wouldn’t be shattered.

But we had an unexpected, even shocking advantage, if we could actually trap and bottle the Djinn. I’d always loathed that loophole in the freedom and power of my kind, but now I felt grateful for it; without it, the humans wouldn’t stand a chance, and ultimately neither would the Djinn themselves or the Mother. We had to maintain a fragile balance to fight for reason, for peace, and for the defeat of our real enemy: Pearl.

The Mother was experiencing agony and the temporary madness that came of it. If we could soothe her, it would pass. But Pearl… Pearl was a cancer at the very heart of the world, and she had to be burned away.

The bottle in my saddlebags represented a step toward all of that. Perhaps. At the very least, it symbolized a chance we hadn’t had an hour ago.

I saw the white flash of paint ahead on the road, and accelerated around a curve. The truck was just ahead now, climbing a rise. I could catch it in only a moment.

I was still half a mile back when the vehicle made the top of the hill…

… And exploded in a fireball, raining metal and debris into the trees.

“No!” I screamed. It burst out of me in a fury, ripping a blood path down my nerves and flesh, and I pushed the throttle hard over, heedless of the slick road, the dangers, everything except the burning wreck that was overturned there at the top of the hill.

No one could have survived that.

No one.

* * *

I found the first body lying in a burning heap on the side of the road. The pine trees were aflame, and the sound of trees snapping as the sap boiled was like war.

It was very still.

I leaped off the Victory while it was still in motion, letting it slide to a stop as I ran to the body’s side. I turned it over.

Luis.

His eyes were tightly shut, his hands fisted, but as I touched him the flames snuffed out into surly little curls of smoke, and he drew in a deep breath.

His clothes were burned, but as I frantically checked him I realized that the skin beneath was unharmed. Reddened, but not seared. He had a broken ulna and two cracked ribs, but nothing that couldn’t be fixed.

“Did my best,” he whispered. “Christ. That hurt.”

I smoothed his wet hair back. He smelled acridly of burned plastic and metal, but he was alive. Improbably, alive.

“Iz,” he said. “Over there. She jumped, with the girl.” He pointed with his unbroken arm. I kissed him quickly and rose to move in that direction.

The trees there were broken, snapped off at the base and laid out in an eerily neat circular pattern, like wheat stalks bent flat by the wind. And in the center of it was Isabel, curled up like an infant.

No sign of the girl at all.

I turned Isabel over. Her eyes were tightly shut, her skin pale, but she was breathing. Improbably, she wasn’t even scorched—not a single mark on her.

She was whispering under her breath. I pulled her into my arms and bent my head closer to make it out.

“—Couldn’t stop her, couldn’t stop her…”

“Isabel,” I said. “Ibby. Ibby!”

Her dark eyes flew open, but they were shockingly ringed by red now, as if every blood vessel in them had exploded with effort. She didn’t seem to see me at all. “Couldn’t stop her,” she whispered. “Mama, I couldn’t —”

“Shhh, Ibby, hush, it’s all right; you’re all right.” It appalled me that she was, in this extreme, calling on her mother, on a mother she’d seen gunned down. “It’s Cassiel. I’m here.”

“Mama,” she wailed, just as she had on that terrible day, and then her arms went around my neck. “Mama, I couldn’t stop her. I tried but she just—”

Me. She wasn’t calling on Angela, on the ghost of her mother who was gone. She was calling me by that name. Me.

My breath left me in a rush, and I held her tightly against me. Breathed in the smell of her hair, kissed her forehead, and felt a sunburst of feeling so large, so overwhelming that I could not even properly call it love. It was more than that. Much more.

“The girl,” Ibby said, whispering now with her head against my shoulder. “It was the girl. I thought she was sleeping, but she woke up and I couldn’t stop her. She was so strong.… It’s my fault. …”

I carried her over to her uncle. “Luis is all right, my love, you see? He’s all right.” I sat her down next to him