Unbroken

panhandle near Amarillo, and it was close, very close—though the smoke rising up into the clear blue sky didn’t bode well for the installation’s fate. Luis’s truck stopped next to me, and he rolled down the window.

“Madre,” Luis murmured, as we looked down at the true scale of the destruction in front of us. The buildings that had—presumably—once existed had been leveled into rubble. The secure fencing at the perimeter of the facility lay in twists and tatters, and near the center of the large debris field lay an enormous pit from which black smoke and dust still drifted. “What the hell was this place?”

There was a sign—damaged and ripped partway down the center, but still readable. “Some kind of research and construction facility,” I said. “Nuclear weapons.”

“Perfect,” Luis said grimly. “My day wasn’t sucking hard enough; I get to fry my balls off, too. Feel that? Radiation’s off the scale.”

“It can be dealt with,” I said. “She’s down there. In the pit. Buried, I think.”

“Sure, because that’ll be easy, given our great history with that kind of thing. Plus radiation.”

“And there are Djinn down there, as well,” I said, concentrating harder. The residual boiling energies of the fight made a confusing smear of livid color on the aetheric, but I could still see the flitting, telltale motions that betrayed the presence of my former brothers and sisters. “She’s battling them.”

He said nothing to that, just rolled up the window. I took it to mean we were cleared to go, so I gave the Harley its head and picked up speed as it roared down the hill. Luis’s truck raced behind me. I pulled up at the fence and parked the bike, while he bounced his truck off the road and into the dirt, heading for a section of fence that had been completely shredded away in the blast. The torn edges of metal glistened like diamond as he rocketed past; he hit the brakes and slewed the truck to a stop near the edge of the still-burning pit.

“That might have been unnecessarily risky,” I told him, walking over. He flashed me a grin.

“You know me, chica. I live for drama. So. We do this fast. Tunnel down, get her out. The sooner we’re away from here, the better. Countermeasures for the radiation are going to take a hell of a lot of power we can’t afford to spend.”

I nodded and joined him at the crumbling edge. He held out his hand, and I took it, but Luis didn’t immediately start the process of moving earth toward Joanne. He took in a deep breath, and looked at me.

“Cass,” he said. “If we don’t get through this—well, you know. But do your best to get through it, okay? I’m not ready for endings just yet.”

I nodded. If he felt he had to say it, he assessed our chances to be even worse than they’d been so far, and that was poor indeed. I could feel it all around us—the fury was thick in the air, choking and hot as the smoke. The Earth wanted Joanne dead, and if we wanted to join the fight, she’d gladly take us, too.

I suppose we could have turned away, but Lewis’s instructions had been specific: Find Joanne, and keep her safe. She was needed, badly needed, in this fight.

Currently, she looked as if she needed the help very, very badly.

We already had practice at tunneling, but this was a shallower goal than when we’d rescued the trapped Wardens outside of Seattle; this was more of a ramp than a shaft. I helped channel Luis’s power with finer control, slicing through the first layers of dirt, stone, metal, and rubble and flinging them up and out of the way. Once the packed earth beneath was visible, the process became more of a brute-force exercise, carving an opening down at a sharp angle. It took a surprisingly short time, considering, but then the ground had already been shaken loose by the battle that had occurred here before our arrival—which must have been spectacular.

We were still only halfway down our makeshift ramp when I felt something break on the aetheric, something massive and immensely powerful… a Djinn. That had been the death of a Djinn—no, I realized, not the death… the emptying of a Djinn, and the burst of incredibly violent energy around the body of a Warden.

Around Joanne Baldwin.

No Warden could drain a Djinn, but a Djinn could go beyond his limits; it commonly occurred when one tried to violate the will of the Mother, or one of the laws that could not be broken without cost.

Like denying death.

Someone had just saved Joanne’s life… and now the bright star that had been a Djinn was going out, its brilliance twisting in on itself, turning black and inverted and hungry.

I was seeing—and feeling—the birth of an Ifrit. It was what happened to Djinn who drained themselves past the point of no return, and now—like me—could exist only by consuming the power of others. I subsisted on the power of Wardens, but Ifrits didn’t prey on humans; there was not enough power to sustain them.

They preyed on other Djinn, and when they did, they battened on in a mindless fury, to the death.

“Faster,” I breathed. Already, the Ifrit—whoever it had once been—had secured on a victim and was ripping the immortal’s life away in bloody, unspooling strips. The chaos intensified in that narrow battlefield below us.

“Yeah, enough nice engineering,” he said, and just punched through the rest of the way, shoving aside concrete, rebar, fractured steel, earth, anything that was in our way. He dashed ahead and scrambled over the last few enormous chunks of concrete; below us was a mostly intact, though pitted and cracked, floor. I followed his example, and saw a hellish nightmare of smoke, flame, the residual aetheric glow of radiation… and Djinn. There were several facing us, though they’d momentarily paused.

Joanne Baldwin was a few feet away, though for a shocked second I didn’t recognize her. She was filthy, tattered, and underneath the grime and streaks of blood, she had the tender-pink skin of someone very recently healed. Luis didn’t allow it to give him pause at all, remarkably enough.

“Sorry we’re late,” he said, and jumped down the rest of the way, flexing his knees as he landed. His smile was sheer, raw nerve, though there was a hint of terror in the shine of his eyes. “Madre, you don’t go halfway when you blow shit up, do you? There’s enough rads burning in here to barbecue lead. We can’t stay here long.”

Joanne seemed both shocked and relieved to see us. She said something I couldn’t hear over the sudden roar of a Djinn’s attack; the Djinn was quickly countered by a blur that was moving in Joanne’s defense. I was distracted by that, and focused in only as Luis said, with remarkable calm, “… moving fast. Hey, Cass, you remember Joanne?”

It was a foolish question; no one, having met the Weather Warden, ever forgot her. Whether such memories were favorable was another thing entirely, and we had far more to worry about than the niceties.

All I could do was nod, and she returned it shakily. To say that she’d looked better would be something of an understatement; I was amazed the woman was still standing.

I looked at the Djinn arrayed against us, and felt a tremor of memory; I’d faced some of these same ones as we’d emerged from another tunnel, in Seattle. Ashan’s closest allies. “They’re under the Mother’s control,” I said, which was probably unnecessary, given the near-insane pale shine in their eyes. “They won’t stop coming for you. They know you hurt her in what you did here.” And Baldwin had, indeed, scarred the Mother deeply this time with the raw, bleeding radiation—another wound on a maddened and angry beast already snarling with fury.

“I know that,” Joanne shot back. “It was kind of the plan. Here. Rocha, take this. Try to bind one of them.”

Luis gave her a puzzled look. “Try to what? What the hell are you talking about?” He wasn’t following only because he was too busy calculating our chances; I, however, realized immediately what she was saying.

Bind.

She’d been binding the Djinn into bottles—and there, coming out of the shadows, misting into human form, was one of them.

David, the leader of the New Djinn. His human shell had skin that held a subtle bronzed metallic shine to it, and his eyes were the bright, unsettling color of melting copper. Beautiful, and eerie, and at the moment, full of fury directed at those who were coming for his lover. No—his wife. David, the Djinn, had bound himself permanently to a human, a bond as strong as any bottle in terms of vows… though now, I realized, he was bound a second time, into a glass prison that helped insulate him from the irresistible siren call of the Mother.

He nodded to me, as one equal to another. In my bad old days as a Djinn, I would have found it gallingly presumptuous; even the highest of the New Djinn was no match for the lowest of the True Djinn, or that had been my fixed and constant opinion then. Now my horizons had… expanded. David was a burning brand of power, steady and pure, and his origins mattered little.… If anything, the humanity from which he’d been born gave him more