Unbroken

were working harder to process the apparently sweet, cool air, and I found myself breathing faster. Thinking why this might be seemed more difficult as well, a slippery concept that flitted like fish through shimmering water. I had a headache, growing worse with every pulsebeat, and I felt sick to my stomach as well.

I was fumbling for water in my pack when Luis stumbled and fell to his knees. It surprised me so much that I dropped the bottle. When I reached for him, I found my hands too clumsy to help.

Everything seemed so hard.

“Stop it,” I heard the Void child say. His voice sounded calm, but cold. “Edie, you’ve had your fun. We need them.”

Edie, sitting cross-legged on the damp floor of the tunnel, gave him a disgusted look and shook her head. “You know what, chipmunk? You’re really no fun at all. Look at them. Aren’t they funny like this?”

I couldn’t think what was amusing about seeing us fall, scramble, grab on to each other, and try to rise back to our feet. My head pounded so, and no matter how many breaths I sucked in, it felt as if the walls were crushing me, suffocating me. No air… There was no air.…

“Stop it,” Alvin said again. “It isn’t funny.”

She held up her thumb and forefinger, about an inch apart. “Oh, come on, it’s a little bit. No? Fine.” She waved her hand, and suddenly the air that I was dragging in was full of sweet, cool, intensely real oxygen. I collapsed to my side, hyperventilating to enrich starving tissues, and heard Luis’s lungs working at the same desperate speed. Now that my brain was clearing of its fog, I realized that we’d been suffocating.

“You,” I gasped, and lifted my head to stare at Edie—who held up her hands in surrender, and shrugged.

“Nope,” she said. “I didn’t do it. You hit a pocket of methane. It’s heavy; it displaces air from the ground up. You couldn’t have known. It’s odorless and colorless. Kills lots of people.”

“She protected the two of us from it,” Alvin said. “But she didn’t protect you.”

“Well, we were closer to the ground,” Edie said. “I was getting around to you guys.” Her smile was charming, and it had an edge of cruelty to it. “It’s just a headache. You’ll be fine. I wasn’t going to let you die or anything.”

No, she wouldn’t have; she had a very definite understanding of her risks down here in the tunnels, and despite her mastery over air and water, she had no real chance of reaching the surface again without our help.

I slowed my breathing with deliberate control. My skin was slick with panic sweat, and although the temperature was cave-cool, I felt hot and trapped, and I was still suffering from the headache and a worrying tremble in my muscles. In a few seconds, I felt good enough to rise to my knees and pull Luis with me; he was still breathing too fast, and his dark eyes looked dazed—at least until they focused on Edie and her smile.

I held on to his shoulder as I felt his muscles go tense. “No,” I said softly. “Don’t waste your strength. We have to keep going.” We were committed now, and there was no time for petty anger and vengeance. No room for a fight, either. I was waging enough of a battle to keep my instinctive, atavistic terror of this deep, closed space at bay.

He deliberately relaxed and nodded. His long, dark hair was sopping wet now, and stuck to his face and neck in sweaty points. “You okay?” he asked me, and put his hand on my chin, lifting it so I met his eyes. “No damage?”

“No,” I said. There was the lingering headache, but it was subsiding. I wondered how far Edie would really have allowed it to go, without Alvin to control her. Too far, I suspected. It didn’t take long for unconsciousness to set in, and brain damage, and death. She’d have been… interested, I thought. Like a scientist with lab animals, or —perhaps more accurately—a serial murderer with a new victim. “No, I’m fine. Let’s continue.”

Luis rounded on Edie and said, in a deadly quiet voice, “You do that again, and I’ll choke the living crap out of you with your own lungs. I mean it.”

Her eyes widened, and suddenly she looked like the child she was. “I’m sorry!” she said. “Really, I’m sorry, I won’t—I won’t do it again. Please, don’t hurt me.” She shrank back, and Luis loomed over her like a dark, cruel shadow.

He snorted, shook his head, and relaxed. “Don’t try to play me, kid. You ain’t got the skills. I’m not the Big Bad Wolf, here, and you’re not Little Red. Save it for someone who doesn’t know you’re psycho.”

He turned back to face the wall of debris in front of us, and began ripping it aside with vicious scoops of power—too much of it, expended too violently, but I understood the impulse. Because he’d looked away from her, he didn’t see the change that came over Edie’s face in that moment, the black glimmer in her eyes, the flat rage.

I watched her in case she acted on her temptations to hurt him. But in that instant, Alvin reached out and put his hand on Edie’s shoulder.

She gasped and sat down, hard.

Alvin nodded at me, once, then folded himself into a calm cross-legged sitting position as Luis and I worked.

I wasn’t sure, really, which of them I feared more. Edie, for her petulance and rages, was certainly the more volatile, but Alvin… Alvin had control, and no kind of real moral compass that I could determine. He was polite, and cold, and empty.

I almost preferred Edie’s fury. It seemed more… honest.

Chapter 8

AN HOUR LATER, we’d moved so much earth and stone that Luis called a rest, and I sank gratefully down against the cool clay wall, gulping down sweat-warm mouthfuls of water until the plastic bottle was dry. “Eat,” Luis told me, and pressed an energy bar into my hand. “Then have more water, but slowly. We’re sweating it all out.”

I nodded. I didn’t feel hungry, but he was right—I needed to keep my energy levels high. The power he was channeling was burning through both of us, and despite the fact that we were literally grounded by—surrounded by—earth, the task was growing rapidly more difficult. As we drove deeper, the pressure on us, and the earth through which we moved, grew more dense. I felt filthy—my clothing clinging and heavy with sweat and caked mud, my skin smeared and as damp as if I’d just emerged from a salty ocean. And yet I was chilled, and grew more so the longer I rested. The damp, cool air made me feel every ache in my much-abused body.

I had time to examine the damage to my left arm, and used a little power to smooth the jagged metal back over the broken cables. It would take time and concentration I didn’t have now to fix everything—if I survived, which was far from a given just now. I did not favor our chances. Most of my arm was dead to sensation now, though the first two fingers and thumb could still curl, grip, and hold, and there were ghostly echoes of touch available from them. The Djinn had done damage to me, but it would have likely torn off a flesh limb. I’d been lucky.

“We’ve only got about another hundred feet,” Luis told me. I nodded; I could also see the glow of the Wardens in Oversight, like fireflies trapped in a bottle. They were all alive, though some were prone on the ground —sleeping or unconscious. “Once we break through, we heal whoever needs it, rest, then start the trip back. We’ve been lucky so far. Maybe it’ll hold out.”

By lucky, he meant that the Earth herself didn’t seem to have objected to our journey under her skin; it was a dangerous place for Earth Wardens, although it was equally powerful… a bit like Weather Wardens traveling by airplane. We were completely at the mercy of our element here, and never more than now, when the Earth herself was at least partially alert to the presence of Wardens pricking her skin. It would be a mere shiver for her to crush us here… or dispatch a wave of Djinn to destroy us.

I hoped she would not do that, because Alvin’s abilities horrified me in ways that Edie’s did not.

“I wish we knew what was going on out there,” Luis said. “Orwell said they still had a few days to make port. Maybe they’re making better time than expected.” He was trying to be hopeful, but we both knew that what the Wardens could do now to control any Djinn-fueled disaster would be like spraying a fire extinguisher on a lava flow.