Unbroken

anything of the original souls left now; I wasn’t sure they were anything but shells for a virus, burned-out avatars as Xarus had been.

Pearl had used Xarus to strike at us, out there in the desert; the artificial black corner had been her creation, a display of sheer, raw power. She’d created the chimera as well. Mother Earth wouldn’t have been so cruel, so perverse.

“Cassiel!”

“Back in the bottle,” I said to Rashid, half absently. The first Void child was only a few feet away. Rashid vanished, and I stoppered the bottle, pushing the cork in tightly and slipping it into the pocket of my pants. I looked past the children, to Pearl.

She had lowered her gaze to meet mine.

“This doesn’t have to involve them,” I told her. “It’s between us. It always has been.”

“Not anymore,” my sister said, in that silky, soft voice I had once loved, and now hated so much. “My grudge isn’t against you, Cassiel. It hasn’t been for some time. You’re a small, insignificant bug, and I don’t care about you, other than to want you removed from my path. It’s the Mother who’s my enemy. And she’s vulnerable. It’s my time now. All you need do is stand aside, and I’ll let you live a while longer. That’s all you want, isn’t it? That’s all any humans want. To delay the inevitable.”

It dawned on me, late and hard, that I couldn’t see Isabel in the approaching waves of children. She’d matured; she was stronger, faster, taller than any of the rest, but she wasn’t there. “What did you do with her?” I asked. It came out in a cold, clear tone, one that almost shimmered in the air with menace. “Where is Isabel?”

Pearl pointed, and I followed her motion, turning slightly… and saw a body embedded in the plaster of the wall. Isabel’s face was a mask, mouth frozen open in a scream.

One hand still remained free in the open air, and it trembled, finger twisting as if trying to claw at the prison.

I had a nightmare visitation of being sealed in that coffin of earth, of the crystals boring into my bones.

“She thought she could make me trust her again,” Pearl said. “She failed. I’ll keep her for later; you didn’t want to be my angel of death, Cassiel, but she… she will make a beautiful killer, I think.”

I screamed, and with no thought for anything else—not even the hands of the children reaching out for me—I drew a pure bolt of Earth power up from the ground below, blasting through concrete, steel, wood.

I blew out the wall in which Isabel was trapped.

She collapsed in a broken heap of debris, coated with pulverized drywall, but I saw her moving just a little. I saw her dust-pale hair stir as she breathed.

The first Void child touched me, and his small, cold hand closed around my wrist.

Something dark crossed over into me, a small thing, a tiny pinpoint of darkness that moved through my flesh like a burrowing insect, relentlessly seeking out the deepest, hottest flame of my power. Another chubby hand touched me, dark against my pale flesh, and I felt it again, a tiny invasion of something cold, so cold.

I remembered the needles piercing my flesh, driving inward with smooth, unflinching whispers.

“You’re going to breed the future, Cassiel,” Pearl said. “A chrysalis for a great power, a new power. You’re the first of the new angels. My dark angels. But first, you have to accept the gift that they’re giving you.”

More hands on me now. I had to fight. Had to. Rashid was right. I had no choice: I had to kill them or lose myself, horribly. Already, the tiny pinpoints of darkness were starting to draw together inside me, clumping, reproducing. Spreading.

My light was still burning, my power still strong, but I couldn’t turn it inward, against this; I couldn’t fight an enemy already inside me. Earth Wardens were the worst at self-healing, and she’d struck me at my most vulnerable point… not just in my body, but in my mind.

I couldn’t fight these children. I couldn’t hurt them.

The others were flooding around me now. They were heading out into the room with the Wardens, who’d been lulled into thinking that Pearl and her followers were helping, were safe. They’d hardly have time to realize that they’d been betrayed before these children, with their wildly enhanced powers, attacked them. Luis had inadvertently helped that along, by focusing the Wardens on the problem at hand rather than what might be coming for them on their blind side.

I was the only one watching their back now. Their last line of defense… and I had just lost the war for them, unless I acted now. Now.

But I couldn’t look into the faces of these children and destroy them, no matter what logic might say.

Isabel was moving. She pulled herself to her hands and knees, and slowly raised her head. Beneath that caked, tangled mop of hair, her face was a mask of white dust, splattered with drops of shockingly red blood. She did not look human. The fury on her face, in the tight, coiled movements, all these came from some other place, a wound that Pearl had inflicted long ago that had never fully healed.

“You let Cassie go!” she spat at Pearl. Isabel climbed to her feet, and balls of wickedly twisting fire formed around her hands where they hung at her sides. “You let her go now!”

“Peace, little one,” Pearl said, and gave her a fond smile. “Don’t presume you can speak to me as if you matter.”

“You did this to us, to all of us,” she said. Her voice was raw and rough, almost a growl in the back of her throat. “You made us what we are.”

“I made you great,” Pearl said. “I would have made you a queen in this world, if you hadn’t been so weak and foolish. But I will allow you to take Cassiel’s place at my side, if you wish it. The transformation will hurt, of course, just like all the other changes I made to you to help you become what you are.”

“Yeah,” Isabel said. “Thanks for the encouragement. It’s going to help a lot when I do this.”

She flung her arms wide, and I felt a surge of power blast out of the core of the planet, and down from the aetheric, mixing and mingling in a pure white plasmatic burst that glowed eerily from Isabel’s eyes, mouth, even her fingertips. Humans couldn’t pull power directly from the aetheric, not as Djinn could… but Isabel was different. Pearl had made her different, just as she had the Void children, and the other Warden children she’d warped.

Isabel slammed her palms together in a wide, swinging circle, and the power rang out of her in thick, white, glassy waves across the floor, cracking concrete, shattering steel, dropping the entire center section out of the room and down into a dark, cavernous sinkhole.

“No!” I screamed at her, but she wasn’t listening. The children who’d been caught in that section had fallen, tipping and sliding as the floor collapsed, and now they tumbled, along with the floor, into the unknown darkness.

I couldn’t kill these children, but Isabel had been one of them. Children have no sentimentality for their own, not as adults do, and she didn’t hesitate.

Pearl stayed where she was, hovering with her bare feet exactly where the floor had been. She hadn’t so much as flinched. I’d seen the rings of power part and flow around her like water around a stone. For the first time, she was showing her true power—and that made her vulnerable as well.

The void inside me was growing fast now, shooting out dark tendrils. There were fewer children fanning out past me to attack the Wardens than there might have been, because of Isabel’s actions, but still enough to kill what was left of the people—and Djinn—on the other side of that door. It was up to me to stop it.

I sent a fierce pulse of energy back through the hands of the children touching me, and one by one they slumped, unconscious. One slid over the ragged, broken edge of the floor into the abyss below, but I didn’t have time to save him, didn’t have any time at all.

“Isabel!” I shouted. “Stop the children out there!”

She headed past me for the door, lithe and quick, and as Pearl stretched out a hand toward her, I got in the way. What hit me felt deceptively light at first, like a shower of water, but almost immediately it began to burn through my clothing, and open raw bloody holes in my skin. Acid. I coughed and gagged on the burning smell of it. A Weather Warden might have been able to wash it away, but as an Earth Warden all I could do was slowly change the composition of the acid into an inert form, and that took time.

The wounds it left me with were impossible to heal, and I had no time left, because lightning sizzled now