Unbroken

“She’ll call you back if she needs you!” I shouted.

“She’ll call,” he said. “But she doesn’t hold my bottle. You do.” David didn’t need to raise his voice to be heard over the howl of the wind.

It was in my backpack. Physical location didn’t matter—if I hadn’t touched it, he’d have remained under Joanne’s dominion, but I had put my fingers on it, and that had transferred control of him to me. I should have left the bottle with her, I realized, but in the heat of the moment I hadn’t thought of it, and perhaps Joanne hadn’t, either. “I won’t hold you back,” I promised him. “I’ll send you to her.”

“It might already be too late for that.”

He was right, and the guilt of it gnawed at me. I forced certainty into my voice. “She’ll be all right,” I said. Thin white clouds appeared below us, and we punched through them with vicious speed, heading for a world that enlarged terrifyingly fast.

He didn’t look at me. The lines of his jaw were tight as cables beneath his coppery skin. “No, she won’t,” he said. “She’s never all right. But she’ll survive until I can come back for her. Now don’t talk to me. I don’t want to know you’re here.”

I shut my eyes against the buffeting wind, the disorienting world through which we fell.

We hurtled toward the ground in a heart-stopping rush, and I watched the city of Las Vegas resolve beneath our feet with grim fascination. As a Djinn this would have been entertaining, but now, with flesh to tear and bone to shatter, it was simply terrifying. The city was spread out over a vast grid, but it seemed oddly lifeless at this height, buildings like tiny boxes, defiantly green lawns, blue dots of swimming pool water behind them. As we approached, the houses still had a structured sameness, but the center of the city, where we were descending, exploded into chaos—curved, asymmetrical structures with wildly extravagant grounds, pools, lawns, fountains.

Las Vegas was schizophrenic and beautiful, glowing even at the end of the world with its own false luster and very real power.

We came down in front of a vast glass pyramid, guarded by a sphinx that had never seen the sands of Egypt. David slowed at the very last moment and cushioned our landing, but even so, I felt the impact rattle all the way up my spine.

We hadn’t been expected, but we were definitely awaited, and before I could draw breath, I felt the muzzle of a gun pressing against the back of my head. “Freeze,” said a shaking voice. “In the name of the Wardens.”

I turned around, took hold of the barrel of his gun, and fused it into a crushed ball. He was a boy, hardly much older than Isabel in her new teenaged body, and although I raised my hand to hit, I lowered it again, slowly.

“Stand down,” said a firm voice behind the two of us, and I turned to see Lewis Orwell coming toward us. He looked—battered. Infinitely tired, unshaven, limping, but on his feet and leading a contingent of at least four powerful Wardens behind him.

And Shinju. Pearl. She looked perfectly composed, with that lovely smile fully in place.

“I’m going back for Jo,” David said.

“You’re not going anywhere,” Lewis snapped, “until I get an update.”

“She’s in trouble.”

“Always is. So talk fast.”

David’s eyes flared dark red, a color so violent that it made me take a precautionary step back. “I have to go. Now.”

Lewis, for answer, took a bottle from his pocket. An open bottle. And incanted, quickly, the threefold charm of binding. Be thou bound to my service.

David laughed, a metallic sound with a bitter, biting edge of despair. “Too late,” he said, and slapped the bottle out of Lewis’s hand to shatter fifty feet away on the pavement. He grabbed Lewis’s neck in one hand, and for a moment there was naked fury between the two of them, something so fierce that it was almost blinding. “I’m going.”

“Wait,” I said involuntarily, and David froze. “David, don’t hurt him. Let him go.” He did, releasing his grip almost instantly, and now it was Lewis whose eyes brightened, and focused on me.

“He’s bottled,” Lewis said. “And you have it.”

I’d made a deadly mistake in trying to save Lewis’s life; I’d betrayed a secret I didn’t know would be an issue. David gave a wordless shout of fury, and I screamed back, “Go!” Before the word was fully off my lips, he exploded into shadows and was gone.

But it didn’t matter.

“It’s in her bag,” Shinju said sweetly. “She’d keep it from you if she could.”

I backed up as Lewis came toward me, but three Wardens were behind me now, and Shinju, and the straps holding my backpack simply… disintegrated. Shinju caught the falling bag and held it out with a formal bow to Lewis.

“What are you doing?” I demanded, as he unzipped the bag and took out bottles— the ones for David and Rahel. “Lewis, you can’t.”

He glanced up at me, and I saw all the humanity had been crushed out of him. There was only weariness and the weight of the world. “I can’t do anything else,” he said. “We need them.” He held up one of the bottles and said, with an eerie calm, “David, come back here. Now.”

David misted out of the chill morning air, and he’d never looked more Djinn than he did in that moment, all metallic luster and burning eyes, and a rage to turn the world to cinders. “Don’t,” he said. “She needs me. She needs me now. Let me go to her!”

“I can’t,” Orwell said. There was sadness in it, and infinite regret, but there wasn’t any room for negotiation, either. “I’m sorry, David. Get back in the bottle. Now.”

David screamed, and the sound ripped through me like a saw blade, bloody and torturous, but he misted out. The scream lasted longer than his ghostly image, and then he was just… gone.

Orwell capped the bottle and put it in the pocket of his jeans. “And this one?” he asked me. “Who belongs to it?”

“What did you just do?” I blurted, appalled. “She’ll die out there without rescue!” And Lewis, of all people, would not sacrifice Joanne’s life. At least, the Lewis that I’d known before.

I didn’t really know the man who faced me now, looking so… different. It was, I thought, the losses he’d taken in battle, and something else. Something more insidious. Pearl, or Shinju as they knew her here, wormed her way into his trust, into all them. She’d convinced him of many things that I wouldn’t like, I sensed now.

Lewis didn’t answer me directly; he only held up the other bottle. “Tell me which Djinn belongs to this.”

“How did you know I even had the bottles? Did she tell you?” I jerked my chin at Shinju, who regarded me with utter, maddening gentleness. “Lewis, you cannot listen to her!”

He didn’t answer that, either. I almost didn’t know him in that moment; he looked exhausted and bruised, but the real change was in his eyes. Suffering, those eyes. And full of self-loathing.

“Please, Lewis. You must send him back to her. She needs him.”

“I can’t do that. Get inside the building. It’s not safe out here.” He looked up. Another Djinn was hurtling out of the sky, a black and lime green blur that resolved in an instant into Rahel, and in her arms… Luis, looking windblown and disoriented. She let him go, and he lurched to grab hold of a handy fake-sandstone pillar.

Rahel glanced from Orwell to me, eyebrows raised. “Am I interrupting something private?”

“Yes.” Lewis was seething now, on the wire-thin edge of control. “I assume this bottle is hers, then.”

“Yes,” I said. “It’s Rahel’s.”

“Back in the bottle, Rahel. Now.”

She sent me a furious glare; I supposed she expected me to lie, but it wouldn’t have done any good. I’d added a few more years of torment on to my already lengthy sentence, once she got free of my control.

And this time, I most likely deserved it.

Luis had steadied himself, and he was watching us, frowning, standing with his weight balanced for attack or defense. “What the hell is going on?” he asked. “Why didn’t you send her back for Joanne? Is David going?”

“Ask Orwell,” I said. “Lewis, what are you doing? You can’t leave her out there alone. If Shinju’s told you that she’ll be all right, she’s lying—”