Unbroken

wouldn’t suffer the indignity of Joanne’s Mustang, which was now being crushed, consumed and destroyed somewhere beneath that simmering tarry surface.

I pulled the straps of the backpack on over my sleeveless pale pink tank top. The weight of the bottles was surprisingly light, but then again, they were empty of contents. Just full of power.

“Get everybody in the hotel!” Luis called to me. He was helping Joanne guide David toward the derelict building, and I ran after them, well aware that the night was full of danger, and how vulnerable we were running blind in the aetheric as well as the shadows of reality.

By the time I joined them, David had single-handedly ripped the boards from the front doors, snapped the lock, and levered open the entrance. Luis and Joanne were already inside the lobby, and David nodded for me to follow them. He sealed up the doors with a crash as he stepped in. It wasn’t merely locked; he’d woven the wood itself together into one solid structure.

The lobby reeked of smoke, mold, and the uneasily lingering ghosts of sweat, sex, and desperation. Never one of the showplaces of the town, the materials had been drab and cheap to begin with; destruction had rendered it oddly antique, though I was certain it could not be more than a few years old. Black colonies of mold swarmed the walls and spilled in clumps on the carpeting, and I was doubting sincerely that this was any place to stage our defense, save that it was the only shelter we could reach. It was too large, too porous—even with Djinn at our disposal.

“I think I lost money here once,” Luis said. “Didn’t really look all that much better then. I’ll bet the drinks were stronger, though.”

“Oh, you know they took the liquor with them when they left.” Joanne sighed. “Liquor and cash. And frankly, a big-screen plasma isn’t going to be much good to us in the current circumstances. Not even with free HBO.”

She sounded cheerful, but with a bright edge of mania; Joanne, like the rest of us, had been pushed too close to the edge, and was all too aware of the drop looming below. Still, she was smiling. I was far from sure that I had the same grace within me. I worried that we’d not get out of here alive. I worried what Isabel was doing, and who had charge of her—and I prayed it wasn’t Shinju or Esmeralda. I worried about… everyone.

Including Luis. He was holding together, but there were only so many shocks any of us could take before coming apart, however temporarily. He seemed stolid, but I remembered the ashen certainty I’d seen in him of the fate of humanity. How long before he, too, would lose faith?

Joanne led the way across the destruction and into a back room, which was less affected by smoke, mold, and general neglect; it had a small kitchenette, tables, couches, and bathroom areas beyond. A room for the staff, not guests; the furnishings here were even cheaper and more utilitarian than outside.

Luxurious, under the current circumstances, though I could imagine staff members grumbling about its Spartan pleasures.

As Luis and I helped David—still shaken and blinded by the disruption of the aetheric, as a human would be by a sudden loss of gravity—into a chair, Joanne turned to additional defenses. She called up power and began to melt the metal edges of the door and frame into a sturdy, permanent seal; it took a while and some fine concentration to create a solid barrier. Joanne finally let out a heavy sigh, rubbed her forehead, and must have realized that she was still holding a pistol in a tight, white-knuckled grip. “Probably not going to do much good anyway,” she said, when she saw me watching.

“Maybe not,” I agreed. “But we can ill afford to reject any line of defense.”

She nodded and stuck it in the waistband of her pants, and I made way for her as she came to David’s side. She took his hand, and his fixed stare slowly focused on her face. I turned away to give them privacy, and saw someone standing in the shadows.

Gold eyes gleaming.

Rahel, who must have been listening to Joanne and David’s exchange, because she said softly, “David was right about the aetheric.” Joanne responded instantly, summoning a handful of fire as she spun to face the potential threat, then held it at the sight of the Djinn. “I was following. I hit… something. I had to take physical form to get this far, and I don’t think I can reach much of my power. It’s as if we’re in…”

“In a black corner,” David finished, when she hesitated. “But only at half the strength of a natural-developing one. It feels artificial. Imposed.”

I had never experienced one in physical form, and on the aetheric black corners—which occurred naturally, but with utmost rarity—were easy to see and easier to avoid, unless they formed around you. If this was how it felt at half strength, I never wanted to be trapped in one at full power; when I reached for the aetheric, I felt as if I was suffocating on darkness, and although I could reach my power, it felt muffled, tenuous, vulnerable. It would be worse for the full Djinn, of course. Much worse.

Rahel was eating candy as she contemplated our situation, and it made me feel unexpectedly quite hungry. As if she sensed it, Rahel scooped more snacks from the guts of the machine she’d cracked open, and tossed them to us in turn. I received some sort of chocolate-covered cookie. It was unexpectedly crispy beneath the sweet coating, and there was a lingering kiss of caramel. It was a taste, I decided, that I could have come to love.

A pity that what I was eating would likely be the last candy the human race would ever produce.

Rahel and Joanne were talking, but it was more banter than substantive conversation, I thought— unimportant. Rahel would not be so casual if there was any chance of our enemies striking at us immediately, which meant we could delay our inevitable deaths by at least a bit more. Then again, the Djinn were badly handicapped just now; they depended on the aetheric as their primary reality, with this world as unreal to them as that realm was to humans. It was possible she was… overconfident.

“Perhaps you should keep watch,” I said, raising my voice over their repartee; both stopped and gave me a look, but then Joanne nodded.

“Rahel, that’s your job,” she said. “You see anything, anything, that looks suspicious, you tell Cassiel or Luis. Let David rest. And don’t give me any of that wily Djinn crap, either. You know how serious this is.”

Rahel said, “It doesn’t get more serious, I believe. So yes, I will indulge you, sistah. But where are you going?”

“We’ve got bathrooms,” Joanne said. “Hell, we might even have running water, if there’s a miracle the size of China. I’m going to take advantage.”

As Joanne walked away, heading for the back area, Rahel moved the blinds on a small strip of window that looked out on the lobby and froze in that position, as if she could stand forever.

No doubt she could.

“Let me see your arm,” I said, turning to Luis. He seemed surprised, and looked down at it with a frown. His right was a bloody mess; the wounds still bled, but the eagle’s claws hadn’t reached any significant blood vessels, at least. The shredded tissues looked bad.

“Damn.” He sank down on the tan couch, and his laugh rang hollow. “Kinda forgot about that. Thanks for reminding me.” I sat next to him and examined the wound, then put my hands on either side of it. “Hey, if you’re going to seal it, try to keep the tat intact. Took days to get that inked.”

I gave him a flash of a look, then turned my attention to the problem at hand. There was muscle, nerve, and tissue damage—a surprising lot of it, given the fast and glancing nature of the attack. Birds had real power in them, and this one more than most. I began weaving together the muscles; nerves were trickier, requiring fine control that was difficult with the heavy, dark pressure on the aetheric. Closing the skin was, by contrast, a simple matter.

“Huh,” he said, looking down at what I’d done after I wiped the blood away. “Not bad. Gives the tat some character with the scars. Here. Rest.” He raised the arm—carefully, as it was likely still aching from the accelerated healing—and settled it on the back of the couch, and I removed my backpack and leaned in and against him. We both needed showers, but I could hear water running from the back; evidently, the owners of this place hadn’t shut off all of the utilities before the fog of chaos had descended. That would be Joanne, I would bet; she had been the worst off, in terms of needing a wash. I didn’t mind the way Luis smelled, though; his body smelled sharply male, vibrantly alive in ways that I would not have thought I could appreciate. I breathed him in deeply, and pressed closer. Now that the adrenaline of the ride was passing, even though I knew we were still under threat, I felt the drag of exhaustion pulling at me, trying to close my eyes. Here, in his arms, I felt safe. Illusion though it was, it was powerful.