Unbroken

“He hasn’t been forthcoming,” I said. “He says he doesn’t remember what happened after we broke through in the mine and found the Djinn standing at the top.”

“And you?”

“Something came, something even the Djinn feared. Ashan retreated, but they took the others with them. I didn’t see what it was that threatened them, but it took me for its own. Then I remember waking up in the— confinement.” It hadn’t been a prison. It had been a coffin—no, worse. It had been a chrysalis, something that would have transformed me into something else altogether. What, I didn’t know, but I had come perilously close to finding out. “The other Wardens? Alive?”

“We found Rocha and the other five unconscious five miles from the mine entrance,” Orwell said. “Rocha tells me they were going to be killed by the Djinn, so they went at it hard; one died of her injuries, but they were all pretty bad off when we found them. The first thing he wanted to do when he was on his feet was saddle up and go off looking for you.”

“And you let him.”

“No, I went with him. Good thing I did; you were buried in there deep, and there weren’t a lot of traces to track. Between the two of us, we managed.” He gave a modest shrug. “Then it was just a matter of digging you out.”

Somehow, I doubted it was quite that simple. I thought back to the nightmare of coming into the light, of the crystals drilled into my flesh and bone. “What was it doing to me?”

“You don’t know?” Orwell stared at me steadily for a long moment, then shrugged. “I’ll be honest, I’ve never seen anything like it. Your flesh was turning crystalline, hard as diamonds. Your eyes—it had only just started, I can tell you that much. What you would have been at the end of it is anybody’s guess, but it would have been…”

“Irresistible,” Luis put in softly, and drew both our gazes. “Like the irresistible force. And beautiful, too. Scary beautiful.”

It reminded me far too much of what Pearl had promised. I ached still in every cell; I was, I sensed, lucky that the process hadn’t gone much further or I’d have never survived the reversal.

I forced myself to think beyond my own fears. “How long have you been here, Orwell? Where are the Wardens who went out to sea with you? The Djinn?”

“We docked in Miami four days ago,” he said. “The Wardens are where they’re needed. The Djinn…” He hesitated, and looked away. “They were taken as soon as we got out of the black corner. We lost them, one way or another.”

“But they held,” I said, and felt a burst of amazement that was almost pride. “The Wardens held. Against the Djinn.”

“We’re maintaining,” Orwell agreed. He looked exhausted, I thought; leadership sat well on him, but it was a crushing load. “We’re not winning. Look, I know from Brennan that you think dealing with Shinju is dealing with the devil, but trust me: Right now, I’ll take the devil and all his pointy-headed minions as long as they do what I tell them. I have to, because our only other choice is obliteration.” He let that sink in before he continued. “As best we can tell, the reason Rocha and the other Wardens who survived that mine are still alive is that Shinju brought her kids and fought on their side. They’d have been ground into hamburger, otherwise. As it was, the odds were way too close.”

“Pearl—Shinju—is the one who sealed me in that prison,” I told him. “I know it. I heard her voice.”

“Maybe so, but I’ve got no energy right now for personal grudges,” he said. “Revenge can wait until we’ve got bandwidth. For now, I need every soldier fighting our enemies, not each other.”

I raised my eyebrows, and did not answer. Luis, on the other hand, did. “If she makes another move at Cassie, I’ll find a way to kill that bitch. I mean it. I don’t care what it costs.” His grip on my hand was tight, too tight, but I understood, for the first time, his emotion. The hate and fear was a tight little ball inside him, bound with razor-edged guilt. “You saw her. You saw what it was doing to her.”

Lewis Orwell inclined his head just a little, a silent acknowledgment, but he said, “Revenge can wait. And it will. Get me?”

“I get you,” Luis said, though his tone and his expression were set hard. “What next?”

“I need her up and on her feet, and you both back in the field,” Orwell said. “Things are moving fast now. Joanne’s on her own, and she needs backup. I can’t go. I’m sending you two.”

“I can’t leave Isabel—”

“Isabel’s with me,” Orwell interrupted. “Snake Girl, too. I need them, and I’m using them. All assets get deployed. Sorry, but that’s just how it is. The kid’s a soldier now, too.”

He stood up and pushed the chair out of the way; Luis came to his feet, too, and released my hand. The stare between them looked far too confrontational for comfort, so I took a deep breath, bracing for the pain, and swung my legs over the edge of the bed on Luis’s side. He grabbed for me instinctively as I pulled myself into a wavering, teeth-gritted-against-the-pain standing position, and I held on tight to his arm. It was sufficiently distracting to break the moment, and Lewis Orwell took advantage of it. He gave me a last, assessing look, nodded, and left the room, pursued by at least a dozen Wardens all pelting him with questions.

“Bastard,” Luis said. “Son of a bitch has no feelings. I’m telling you—he’s like a walking fucking iceberg, and he causes just about as much damage.”

I allowed him to guide me back to a sitting position on the edge of the bed. It shocked me how fragile I still felt. I knew intellectually how damaged I’d been, but what still haunted me was the look on my partner’s face when he’d seen me taken from that crystal prison. “Perhaps,” I said. “But perhaps he can’t afford feelings now. He’s right. If anything is to survive, we have to risk everything. Everyone. There are no safe places left.”

He knew it, and he loathed that knowledge just as much as I did. “I need to protect her, Cass. I failed my brother. I failed his wife. I even failed you. I can’t let her down, too.” He put his arms around me. The care he took told me more about him than me; I might feel fragile, but he touched me like I was made of butterfly wings. As if I might shatter, like the crystal from which I’d emerged. “She’s ours, and we can’t let her down.”

Ours. The child was, in many ways—not of our bodies, perhaps, but of Luis’s blood, and through him, and his dead brother, mine as well. We owed her love, and safety. We’d always owed her that.

I put my hands on either side of Luis’s face and held him still as I said, “We’ve already let her down. We let her down the instant that Pearl abducted her, and every day since we’ve been struggling to find meaning for her in that. But she’s not ours. She’s her own, always. And she wants to fight. She seeks it out, as I do. Step back, and let her be herself. It’s the only way we cannot disappoint her now.”

He tried to shake his head. I didn’t allow it. We stared deep into each other’s eyes. His were haunted, and I’m sure that mine held the shadows of the torture I’d endured.

My darkness won.

He pulled me into his arms, and this time, he used his strength; I lost my breath from the force of his embrace, but it was a good pain, a just and correct ache that came as much from my soul as my flesh. We stayed that way for a very long time, minutes long, before Luis pulled back and said, “You got a few things to make up to me, you know.”

I blinked, thrown by his conversational swerve. “Why?”

“Not every guy has to take seeing his lover stripped naked and lying on top of the head of the Wardens,” he said. “Even if you were covered in glitter and blood.”

He was talking about my rebirth from the crystal coffin, when Orwell had pulled me out. Had I been naked? It surprised me, but thinking back, modesty hadn’t been the largest concern I’d had. “You seem more worried by the nakedness than the blood,” I pointed out. He lifted one shoulder in a half shrug.

“Yeah, well, we all bleed a lot around here,” he said. “But the naked part, that’s supposed to be sort of private.”

“You are very odd.”

“You like that about me,” he said, and kissed me. Sweet and hot, spicy and smooth, he spiked my pulse hard, and reminded me of the delights of physical bodies. I remembered the image of him that had come to me there in the dark, in my deepest panic and pain… of his bare skin, shimmering in the peaceful light. Of his fingers trailing over mine, waking fire.

In the end, it had been him who’d kept me alive at the bottom of that dark, dark pit.