Unbroken

“Come on—let’s go!”

“A moment,” I said. There was nothing unusual, either in my field of vision or on the aetheric, yet something gave me pause.

“Look, there’s a parking lot,” she said, and pointed. “Right there. We can get a van or something. We don’t even have to go that far.”

“We need food and water,” I said.

“Toilet paper,” she added. “For sure. Maybe that premoistened kind. There’s a store right there. C’mon, it’s fine. There’s nothing in there. The whole town’s empty.”

She was right—the place was ghostly silent. Lights burned, but I sensed no human habitation at all.

“In and out. Quickly,” I said. “You see to the van. I’ll drop you there and go on to the store. If there’s any trouble at all, take the wheels and go. You can drive, can’t you?”

She laughed. “I was a kid yesterday, but I can learn fast, Cassie. Don’t worry about me.”

There was no point in hesitating; the danger would be there, or not, and waiting wouldn’t improve our chances. I pressed the throttle and sent the Victory gliding down the long hill. I kept the rumbling to a minimum, out of instinct as much as caution.

Too many predators out, and none of them in clear view. Staying quiet and small was as good a defense as any.

The parking lot wasn’t large, but it had several choices of vehicles that would do; the largest was the work truck of some sort of contractor, and stocked with tools, from what I could make out of the interior. Not clean, but useful. I pointed to it as I rolled to a stop, and Isabel nodded as she slid off the bike. “Ibby. Be careful,” I said. She waved impatiently, and I felt a spark of power as she unlocked the door to climb inside. I felt a primitive impulse to stay with her, watch over her, but that would only increase our risks. Better to divide the job.

I drove the bike onto the sidewalk in front of the store. It was called Mike’s EZ Stop, and there were three cars out in front, all silent and deserted. When I killed the engine on the Victory, I could hear sounds—music, applause, talking voices, all of it softened by distance.

Televisions and radios. Not living souls.

The thick glass windows showed nothing—a brightly lit interior of shelves, groceries, coolers at the back fully stocked with cold drinks and packs of beer. I pushed open the door and heard a soft electronic tone, but no one appeared. The registers were open and bare, as if someone had methodically stripped them of cash, but there was no vandalism here.

I took two cloth bags from the environmentally friendly pile—ironic, now—and went shopping.

I checked the aisles methodically for anyone hiding as I grabbed two loaves of bread, peanut butter, jam, dried jerky, energy bars—anything that would keep without refrigeration. I avoided the canned goods, only because the water would be heavy enough; if this proved safe, we could always come back for more.

I was putting the last of the water into the bag when I rounded the corner and faced the last wall of coolers.

They did not contain beer.

The dead stared back at me, frosted and ice-eyed—employees still in aprons, a man in a tan jumpsuit who might have gone with the van Isabel was taking, a small boy crumpled into a fetal ball, a fat old woman in a flowered dress, more; they were stacked in the cooler in a horrifying mess.

Not all were intact.

It couldn’t be all of the town, as overwhelming as it seemed.

I backed up into a row of shelves, and jars of spaghetti sauce clinked together. One popped free and shattered in a mess of red and broken, jagged glass.

Out. Get out. Something screamed inside me, some instinct more human than Djinn, though there was alarm within my Djinn soul as well. I tightened my grip on the bags, whirled, and ran for the doors.

The glass suddenly went opaque with cracks.

I threw myself forward into a facedown slide on the linoleum floor just as all the windows shattered inward, shredding the interior of the store like a bomb. Wind. Not just any wind. No, this was traveling at insane force, blowing over shelves, ripping up counters, and flinging them into the air. I saw a register fly by overhead before it hit a sliding metal shelf and blew apart into sharp fragments of metal and plastic. The electrical power cord hissed wildly in the air like a living thing and slapped the floor only a few inches from my hand.

I had no defense against weather. Not in here.

The initial burst of air had destroyed things, but now it sucked out again, then turned, and turned, warm and cool colliding in an insane battle for supremacy. The debris swirled and sped up into a blur, and the roof of the little store ripped away with a shriek of cracking steel and timber.

Gone.

The walls went next, unraveling into bricks and beams. I curled up tight on the floor and felt the wind sucking at me, ripping me with teeth made of steel and glass, wood and sharp plastic. It would flay me alive, or pull me into the storm of deadly, grinding debris. The linoleum floor, which was being ripped away around me, was at least under my control; made of largely organic materials, it was something within reach of my Earth powers, and I first rolled and wrapped the thick, flexible coating around my body. It protected me to some extent—enough that I began grabbing and dissolving the other organic debris in the air, especially the cutting and stabbing surfaces, into dust. The wind could still throw me at fatal speed, but at least it couldn’t rip me to pieces quite so easily.

But it had other tricks, this tornado formed—I felt it now—of sheer, volcanic hatred… and as it shredded the coolers at the sides of the store, bodies joined the debris. The wind scoured them apart in seconds, into wet flesh and sharp, flaying bone. It was all organic, all under the domain of my Earth power, but it was too much, too fast, especially now that the storm was mixing so many different kinds of weapons together.

The dead attacked me in the second wave, and I’d already spent what power I had to stop the first assault. The bones stabbed at me like flying knives, and skulls pummeled me with the force of thrown bowling balls. The thick flooring couldn’t protect me completely, or forever, and the tornado seemed to be growing in fury now, focused solely on ripping me to pieces.…

And then something entered the fight, on my side. A brilliant rush of power that threw up walls around me, solid earth and concrete, rigid metal, a berm of safety that gave me relief from the pummeling.

And then, quite suddenly, I felt the back of the tornado snap as the power fueling it withdrew. The wind faltered, scattered in all directions, and bones and ripped flesh and debris rained down on the shelter that covered me.

I couldn’t breathe. The linoleum had wrapped tightly to my body, and the air within the shelter had been exhausted in only a few gasps.

I’d suffocate here, in my safe haven.…

But then the top peeled away with the ease of a can opening, and a face looked down on me. Two faces, actually. One, veiled with a fall of dark hair, was Isabel’s, looking pale and frightened.

The other was indigo blue, silver-eyed, and I felt a surge of frantic panic as I realized that it was Rashid. Rashid, whom I’d imprisoned in a bottle…

… That was now held tightly in Isabel’s hand.

“Get her out,” Isabel ordered. Rashid ripped the shelter further open, took hold of the linoleum, and unrolled me from its stifling embrace. I gagged in dusty breaths and stared at his extended hand for a few seconds before grabbing it.

He lifted me effortlessly out and into a wasteland. A very limited and specific one, covering only the building that had once been Mike’s EZ Stop; there was nothing left but scattered bricks, rubble, and the pulped remains of the dead. Not something I wanted Isabel to witness, but not something I could easily shield her from, either.

Isabel grabbed on to me and hugged me, wordless and shaking. I hugged her back and looked over at Rashid, who inclined his head just a tiny bit.

“You’re sane,” I said.

“Well,” he replied, with a sharp-toothed smile, “that is not a common opinion. But I am no longer a puppet of the Mother’s will. Only of hers.” He cast a dark look at Isabel,