Unbroken

And my partner was frantically and obviously extinguishing the fires he’d started. “Sorry, sorry,” he was saying. “Got it under control, no problem. Must be more tired than I’d thought.… Damn, sorry. Fire’s sort of new for me.…”

I backed up against the case.

My discarded backpack was still lying nearby, all its contents dumped out; I grabbed it and dragged it over, and held it in my right hand, still facing away from the glass case. I used my left to reach behind me, and melted the glass in a neat, round hole through which I retrieved two bottles; it was a simple matter of misdirection, to slide them inside, shift slightly over, expand the hole, and grab two more. Then two more. When I had emptied a shelf, I sealed the glass seamlessly behind me and stepped away.

No one was watching me. The Fire Warden I’d put to sleep began to snore lightly.

And from the meeting room into which Joanne and Lewis had disappeared came shouting that penetrated even the world-class soundproofing installed in this wealthy little enclave. I draped my backpack casually over one shoulder by the handle, and picked up one of the piled cheese sandwiches as I watched Luis slowly weave his way around the Wardens, who regarded him with varying degrees of disgust or suspicion, back to me.

He ate another sandwich as I ate mine, and mumbled between bites, “Hope it was worth it.”

“It was,” I said. “She’s getting ready. I can feel it.”

“Pearl, or the Mother?”

“Both,” I said absently. “The Mother has sensed our interference, pinpointed our location; she’ll send everything she can against us to smash us. And that is what Pearl is waiting for.” I nodded toward the half-open door into the room where Pearl was hiding like a hunting spider, lying in wait with her apprentices for the right moment to strike. I could see a portion of Isabel, sitting cross-legged and in a relaxed pose of concentration. There had been too many children awake in there, focused on tasks. It wasn’t merely energy being expended to keep this place safe. It was… readiness. Watchfulness.

I had to get Isabel away from her before it was too late.

I just had no idea how.

The end came fast and without any warning.

First, the conference room door suddenly burst open, and instead of just Joanne and Lewis who’d gone in there, four came out: Lewis, Joanne, David, and Venna. David looked almost as hard and angry as the last time I’d seen him, when Lewis had confined him to the bottle. I was surprised Lewis had survived releasing him… but the real surprise had to be Venna, who should not have looked so like herself. I was still processing that startling information when I felt a brush of air, and suddenly Venna was standing next to me.

In mortal form, she looked like a small, innocent child, with straight golden hair held back from her face by a simple cloth band. She wore a blue and white dress, neat and proper, very like the illustrations I had seen in the children’s book Alice in Wonderland.

It occurred to me a single second later that she shouldn’t—couldn’t—have looked that way; she’d been sealed into the bottle as an Ifrit, twisted and blackened, unable to heal. A skeleton of her former self.

If Venna had been restored, a Djinn of greater power had been killed to provide that miracle… and there was only one Djinn that it could be.

The magnitude of it stunned me.

“Hello, Cassiel,” she said to me, but she was looking off into the distance, in a stare that made it clear she was watching the aetheric. “I’m so glad you are predictable.”

“I—what?” That was baffling, until she tugged the backpack off my arm. “You. But I don’t understand—”

“Conduits sometimes have the gift of foresight,” she said. “It’s a curse, really. You can’t do anything yourself. You can only try to get others to do it for you. I never realized how bothersome that might be until now.” She suddenly turned her bright blue gaze on me, and the power behind it was astonishing. Venna had always been incredibly old, incredibly strong, but this was… different.

“Conduit,” I repeated, and closed my eyes briefly, even in the midst of all the chaos. “Ashan’s gone.”

She inclined her head. “Yes. Ashan is dead. I killed him. I may kill someone else, too. I’m not sure I’m entirely stable quite yet.” She was very calm about it, eerily so. “But I probably won’t kill you, since you’re not really Djinn. I’m going to try to not get hungry unless it’s really necessary.” In a sudden, startling move, she grabbed my backpack from me, with its load of sealed bottles. “I’ll be needing that. I can do this faster than you can.”

She flashed from me to another Warden, then another, then another. She gave out all the bottles I’d collected, dropped the backpack, and turned to face Joanne, Lewis, and David. “It’s done,” she said, and looked up suddenly. “And it’s here.”

She was right.

A burst of energy hit Las Vegas like a bomb, buckling the floor under us, crashing cots and glass and people into one another, onto the floor, while above us chandeliers swayed, flailed, broke loose, and fell like glass bombs. The walls rippled and leaned, and the entire room twisted as the earth’s torment vibrated up in waves.

The Earth Wardens were on it in seconds, controlling the furious shaking, but it was only the beginning of the end of us. Fires broke out in the walls, where the wiring ran, and took hold in unnatural white blazes that ate through drywall, wood, and steel alike. Luis squeezed my hand in silent apology, and ran to help control the flames that threatened to spill out over the injured who lay moaning on the still-moving floor. One of the Weather Wardens shouted a warning—something about wind shears bringing down high-rises, simply bending them until they broke.

Chaos.

And in the midst of it, I felt Pearl finally make her move.

It came in the form of a surgical lightning strike that blackened a ten-foot circle of space at the end of the room and left slag, dripping metal, and burned flesh behind.

The cabinet where the Djinn bottles had been, and all of the bottles I’d left behind, had just been vaporized.

The Warden I’d left sleeping nearby woke up, screaming in a high, thin, agonized voice, but it didn’t last; her entire bottom half had burned to bones, and there was nothing I or anyone else could do to save her. There was an immediate reaction in the room as more Wardens responded, putting out the lingering flames, rushing to more wounded. They were attributing it to the Mother, and indeed, she was attacking us now, fiercely.… There were Djinn materializing in the room, and we had seconds to live, if that.

Pearl had just removed the Wardens’ final, desperate defense, as those Djinn were set free who could have been used to fight on the side of failing humanity. All, it seemed, except the few that I’d managed to rescue, who were in the bottles in my backpack that Venna had distributed.

I thumbed the cap off the one she had left me. “Out of the bottle!” I shouted. “Now!”

In answer, I got a blur of wild, thrashing color, and then Rahel formed out of it with a world-shaking shout of fury that rattled the broken glass around us. She whirled, black braids flying, to focus those alien, cold eyes on me. Her hands were clawed, and ready to pull out my intestines.

“You can take your vengeance later,” I told her. “For now, help us!”

She didn’t have to do it. For a frozen, terrible second, I thought she’d simply choose to go on with her killing plan, take her last satisfaction where it came… but then she bared her sharpened teeth and said, “This will be a later conversation.” She flashed over to a falling wall and held it up, dragging fallen Wardens away from it with the other hand. Her grin was awful and wonderful at once. “It’s happening, Cassiel. Joanne and Lewis and David have gone to the Mother. They’ve left you all to distract her. Did you know you were so disposable?”

I couldn’t believe her, but it was true, I realized; Lewis was gone. So were Joanne and David. I didn’t know when they’d left us, and the aetheric was a horrible vibrating confusion of fury, light, power. The chaos spread through all the levels of the world.

Go, I wished them silently, and let the anger leave me in a rush. We all have our fates. Go to yours, and I will go to mine.

But mine wasn’t quite done with me yet, no matter what Rahel thought.

I felt the surge of energy as the Wardens uncorked their bottles. From one of them I saw emerge a flash of indigo, of silver, and then Rashid—friend, enemy, New Djinn—was standing quite naked and elegant beside me, skin