Unbroken

and my arms tightened around her in reaction. “You are well aware how I feel about such things.”

“Don’t,” I warned him. “She’s a child.”

“Old enough to hold my bottle,” he said. “Though that was your doing, my sweet dear cousin, sticking me in one. For the second time. There will come a reckoning. Soon.”

“Then reckon with me. Not her. She took possession only to save my life.” I hesitated a moment, then said, “What happened here, in this place?”

He didn’t have to answer me; a captive Djinn could easily use the rules of his confinement to throw endless obstacles in the ways of humans with whom he had issues. I counted it a fairly good sign that he said, “Djinn. Of course. There is an anima here. They waked it and moved on, and it did the rest. And will continue to do so.”

An anima was the spirit of a place, a kind of tiny splinter of the Mother’s consciousness, though it was difficult to tell how linked it was to her, or whether it was its own creature, like the Djinn. Anima were generally benign, though some darker ones gave rise to legends of hauntings.

This one, though, was mad and angry, left to stalk through a dead town and rip apart anything that intruded on its fury. There would be many of these, I realized now… pockets of seeming calm that would lure in the unsuspecting, only to trigger a boundless rage. The Djinn had set traps, knowing that humans would seek safety in places that looked safe, comfortable, normal.

I couldn’t help a shudder. The anima wasn’t dead here, only hurt and waiting. It wouldn’t wish to fight a Djinn, so Rashid’s presence alone saved us… but the next to stop here wouldn’t be as lucky.

Rashid stared with those unsettling eyes and an expression I couldn’t read, then said, “If you’re done with using me, child, you can put your toys away.”

“Oh,” Isabel said softly. “Oh, uh, I don’t know how—”

“I’m hardly likely to tell you.” For all his menacing talk, Rashid was, I thought, showing remarkable restraint. Djinn were naturally inclined to take every advantage to trick their masters, but he was deliberately refraining.

Isabel looked frankly panicked. This was well outside the narrow bounds of her experience, and her hand was shaking. Any Djinn with half an impulse toward freedom could have startled her enough to drop the bottle, shattering it on the rubble and setting its captive free.

But Rashid did not move.

“Find something to put in the opening,” I told Isabel softly. “A cork would be best. Something that fits tightly.” She looked around frantically, while Rashid crossed his arms, rocked back and forth on his heels, and shook his head. She finally held up a triangular cosmetic sponge to me, and I nodded. “Now tell him to go back in the bottle.”

“Go back in the bottle,” she said in a rush, and then her cheeks turned red. “Please?”

“For the Mother’s sake, school her if you want to keep her alive,” Rashid told me, but he disappeared, and I gave the girl another nod.

“Push the sponge in tightly,” I said. She did, and let out a sudden gust of breath. She held the bottle out to me, and I took it. “Good job, Iz. Never forget, a captive Djinn is not your friend, only your tool, and tools can turn in your hand. Don’t use him unless you have no choice.” I gave her an odd look then, and voiced the question that had suddenly come to my mind. “How did you know about the bottle?”

The hot red blush in her cheeks grew stronger, and she looked down. “I thought I’d better get your bike,” she said. “I was putting it in the truck when all this started. I was kind of—looking around.”

“And how did you know what it was?”

She frowned and stared at the bottle in my hand—an ordinary empty beer bottle, somewhat ridiculously sealed with a flare of cosmetic sponge. “Can’t you see it?”

I saw nothing beyond the obvious. “What do you see?”

“Him,” she said. “It’s like a sun inside there. It burns.”

That was… impossible. I stared from the bottle to her, thoughtfully, and then became aware of a sharp ache in my right side. The first of many complaints from a body that had sustained much abuse; it was the first voice of a mob’s roar, all clamoring for attention. I had many cuts, some deep, and more than a few cracked bones and torn muscles.

And no time for any of it. “My bike is in the van?” I asked. “And where is the van?”

“In the parking lot,” she said. “I’m sorry, Cassie, I was going to go, but—”

“But then you saw what was happening,” I finished for her. “And you decided to stay and help. Iz, you can’t do that. You must follow orders. Do you understand? I told you to take the van and go. You might have gotten yourself killed along with me.”

“I didn’t,” she said. “And you needed me. You did.”

It was difficult to argue the truth of that, especially when I had to use her stabilizing arm to limp my way out of the wreckage of the store.

The contrasts were eerie. The store was a pile of wreckage and shredded human remains, but just beyond it the street lay quiet and calm, only a few scattered bricks to show any disorder. The parking lot where Iz had left the van still sat unmolested, all the cars shrouded now with a faint coating of dust that still hung in the twilight air.

“What was that?” Iz asked me, as we got into the van. I took the driver’s side.

“I don’t know,” I said, and looked out on the still, picturesque little town. “But I don’t think we’ll find anything else we can use here.”

Or, I added silently, any survivors. A few lights burned in the windows, but there was an emptiness to this place that went deep, all the way to the unsettled core of the earth.

We would, I thought as I jump-started the van and got it rolling toward the exit, go around this place. Well and far around. For all its peaceful appearance, there was a curse hanging on this place, and a powerful one. I wondered what Rashid would tell me if I removed him from the bottle and asked what had happened here to madden the anima so horribly.

I wondered whether he would lie to me.

Probably.

Transportation acquired, we chose a different route at a crossroads rather than visiting the silent town of Hemmington; this one led to an even smaller hamlet, but thankfully there were people on the streets and cars passing through. The people were scared and nervous, and the cars seemed to be loaded with possessions, but it was better than our last stop.

Luis, always cautious, gassed the van up and did the grocery shopping himself (as if it had been my fault!).… He returned with much the same choices I would have made, but had thrown in some candy bars and soft drinks. “Comfort food,” he said. “Ain’t like we’re going to have a whole lot of comfort, overall. Here, I also picked up camping gear. We’re going to need it, one way or another. Not likely to be a lot of four-star accommodations in our future.”

He’d also, without pointing it out, added some interesting survival tools to our supplies, including a rifle, ammunition, some wickedly lovely knives, and other things whose purposes weren’t quite as clear to me. Esmeralda understood their purpose, however. “Water disinfection tabs, portable chemical heating pads… You’re getting serious about this survivalist stuff. Good for you. This shit’s going to get real, fast.”

“You didn’t see that town,” Isabel said from where she sat on the dirty floor of the van, knees pulled up to her chest. She wasn’t looking up as we inventoried the contents of the bags that Luis had brought, and I worried about the stillness of her posture. It seemed more traumatized than I had expected—but then, I had dragged a child, only six years old in real years, if not in body, into a place full of danger and very real horror. What had I expected, that she would easily adapt? Simply accept what she’d seen?

I sank down beside her and put my arm around her. “We won’t go back,” I said.

“We should,” Iz whispered. “All those people. They all needed help, and nobody was there for them. Now they’re just… waiting. All alone.”

It was, I realized, the neglect that bothered her; we’d left that town without burying a single body, recognizing a single lost life.