Unbroken

was open my eyes and stare in confusion at the blur of brightness in front of me.

There was a sudden, horrifyingly loud babble of sound. Voices. I couldn’t sort them out. It was all too real, too harsh, and no matter how bad the dark had been, at least it had been constant.…

I picked one voice from the noise. “Cass? Cassiel?… Damn you, let me go. I have to—”

“No!” said another voice. “Keep him back. He doesn’t need to see this.”

The first voice—I knew it, and I felt something resonating inside me, a kind of warmth, a glow that I hadn’t even known was gone until it returned. Power, flowing into me. Making me live again.

I blinked. The haze before me resolved into the shape of a tall man, dressed in a stained flannel shirt, blue jeans, boots. His hair was long and untidy around his lean, angular face, and he was looking at me with an odd hesitancy.

“Cassiel,” he said. It was half a whisper, and in a sudden move, he crouched down. I was lying on the ground, I realized. Above me was stone, and the light that had blinded me shone from a single flashlight he’d averted at an angle. “I’m going to get you out of there. You just stay still. Struggling will only hurt more.”

I blinked and tried to speak, but the raw edges in my throat could only make an indistinct rough whisper. I tried to move my head, tilt it forward so I could look down at myself, but he was right; the effort woke sharp and screaming pain in my skull, neck, and shoulders.

“Where is Luis?” I managed to say. The man who crouched over me smiled a little, but his eyes looked tired and heartbroken.

“He’s over there,” he said. “First we have to deal with this, okay? He got us here. Now let me get you out. Stay strong.”

I couldn’t nod, but I blinked to let him know I understood.

Lewis Orwell, the most powerful Warden in the world, took a deep breath, lowered his head for a moment, and when he raised it, there was an aura of golden power that glimmered around him even here, on the human plane.

He bent forward and slid his large hands over my face, through my hair, around my head in a slow, sweeping motion.

It hurt. I stiffened with the snaps of agony, one after another, like tiny bones breaking.

His hands met at the back of my head, then moved down, cupping my neck, spreading out over my shoulders. Every gentle touch sent waves of agony through me, snaps of white-hot pain. He paused there for a moment. He was as close as I’d ever let any human get, his body all but pressed to mine, and Orwell’s lips hovered very close to mine. His eyes were dark, very dark, and full of a power I didn’t fully comprehend.

“Look down,” he whispered.

I did.

I was encased in a coffin that had been fitted exactly to my body, one made of glittering pink crystal that shimmered in the artificial light.

And the coffin was alive, and it had grown into me. Needles of crystal, a whole forest of them, pierced and punctured my skin, some thin and just in the skin, some thicker and driving to muscle. Still others had drilled into bone.

They were flushed red with my blood.

“I have to break them,” Lewis said, still very softly. “This thing is alive. It’s fighting to keep you. It’s feeding off you. I won’t lie, this is going to hurt.”

I could nod now. After a second’s horror, edged with fear, I did.

“Hold on,” he said, and jerked me violently forward. At the same time, I sensed a hammer blow of power coursing through him, through me, and all the crystals shattered at once in a mind- destroying white-hot wave of agony and fury and hunger and disappointment…

… And then I was lying limp on Lewis’s chest, cradled in his arms. Screaming voicelessly, because the pain was worse, somehow, as if the crystals were still inside me, still drilling…

And they were.

The broken ends of the crystals were moving. Driving in.

Lewis wrapped his arms around me, and I felt another surge of power blast through me in a cresting wave that hit and shattered every one of the deadly fragments, until I was lying limp against him, covered in a coating of shining dust.

“Get Rocha, somebody,” Orwell said. He let his arms fall free to hit the ground at his sides, and didn’t move. I couldn’t. My muscles felt loose and slack, unnaturally dead within my body. My bones felt as if they had been broken into dust as well… and then a strong pair of hands was pulling me up and into another embrace.

Luis.

The smell of him washed over me, familiar and strong—male sweat, damp earth, the spicy sweetness of peppers and chocolate. I saw the tattoos on his arms first, winding sinuously up his bronze skin, and finally I focused on his face.

“Luis,” I whispered. It was all I could manage. He looked shaken and anguished, but he smiled and kissed me.

When he pulled back, there was blood on his face. Fresh red blood in a pattern of dots.

I raised my fingers to touch my face, and felt the holes left by the crystals, the wetness that seeped from them. My whole body wept red.

“Stay still,” he told me. “Don’t try to move. Just stay still.”

It seemed like sound advice, and just this one time, I obeyed.

Two days in a Warden hospital in Seattle, while they pumped blood into my almost-drained body and carefully closed up every wound. The final count had been in the hundreds of punctures. Damage to my bones had been extensive, they told me, and I had several painful rehabilitation sessions with an Earth Warden to repair them.

No one explained to me what had happened until the afternoon of the second day, when Lewis Orwell dropped in and shut the door on a fluttering entourage of anxious Wardens with questions, alerts, and requests. He nodded to Luis, who was sitting at my side holding my right hand in both of his; Luis nodded back cautiously. “How’s she doing?” Orwell asked. He had a pleasant, resonant voice, and like many Earth Wardens (except me) he seemed to exude a soothing, reassuring presence that everyone liked.

“I am fine,” I answered before Luis could speak. “There’s no need to keep me confined to this bed. The bones are healing.”

“Note the present tense,” Luis said. “You’re not out of the woods, Cassiel.”

“Of course not. We are in the Pacific Northwest.”

“And… that was too literal. I meant—”

“I know what you meant,” I said, “but I am fine. The healing will continue whether I am in the bed or out of it.”

“She’s right,” Orwell said, and dragged a steel-backed chair over to the other side of my bed, which he straddled. He rested his chin on crossed arms and studied me with clinical interest. “You’re a fast healer. Comes from the Djinn part of you, most likely.” He fell silent, and I wondered what he was thinking, or wanted me to say.

I stared back, unwilling to give the first ground.

“I expected you to be full of questions,” he said.

“Did you?”

“Most people couldn’t have come out of that sane,” he told me. There was an interestingly tentative edge to his voice now, as if he couldn’t quite understand something he’d previously thought an open book. “But those who did would want to know what happened to them. They’d be demanding it. Unlike you.”

I shrugged. It hurt; healing meant that the functions were intact, but the residual pain would continue for a while, like the fading ache of deep bruises. “You’ll tell me when you think you know,” I said. “I could tell from the discussion in the halls that no one understood very much.”

He tilted his head a little to the side, as if trying to consider me from a slightly different angle. “Hasn’t he told you?” Orwell glanced at Luis, who was sitting silently at my side. There was an odd dynamic between these two men, something like a power struggle, but I didn’t understand why.