Thin Air

masculine furniture. Warm throw rugs on the wood floor. A big picture window overlooking a field of nodding yellow sunflowers in full bloom, which was wrong, wasn’t it? It should have been fall at least, or full winter. But here… here, it was summer. Bright, cloudless summer.

“Stay with me, Joanne. I’m going to bounce you back in a second, but first I had to tell you something.”

“What?” I asked.

“What’s happening to you has never happened before. Never. That’s a big word, in my world-it was big enough to make a whole lot of forces pay attention. David’s right to look for Ashan, but you’re going to have to do your part, too. If you screw this thing up, I can’t help you. Nobody can.”

“Could you be a little less vague?”

“Yeah,” he said. He leaned back on the leather sofa to take a pull on the beer in his hand. Cold, frosty beer. It made me thirsty, and I didn’t even know if I liked beer. “Do not, under any circumstances, think about throwing your life away. If you die-if you let her kill you-you have no idea what kind of hell will come calling.”

“So that’s your big message? Stay alive?” I felt like pounding my head against the wall, only I wasn’t sure the wall was real enough. “Great. Great advice.”

“Hey, don’t blame me. Most people wouldn’t have to be told, but you? You seem to want to martyr up when you lose a quarter in the soda machine.”

I didn’t know Jonathan, but I wasn’t liking him much. “Funny.”

“Not really, because it’s true. My job is to take the long view, kid. And right now, the long view is that you need to be selfish and stay alive. Got it?”

I didn’t, and he could see it. He shook his head, tipped the bottle up and drained it dry.

“Crap, you really are always a pain in my ass, Joanne. Not to mention the fact that if you keep on dragging David down, he’s going to lose everything, up to and including his life,” he said. “You see that, right?”

“I-what? No! I’m not-” But I was. Lewis had said as much. Even David had hinted around at it. Which of course made me defensive. “David’s free to do whatever he needs to do. I’m not stopping him. I never asked for any of this!”

Jonathan looked amused. Impatient, but amused. “Don’t whine to me about it. I have nothing to do with it, not anymore. I’m just here to tell you to use your head for once.”

Which had the effect of completely pissing me off, even though I was pretty sure he was supernatural, powerful, and could crush me like a bug if he wanted. And besides, hadn’t David said he was dead? I was pretty sure.

So of course I blurted out, “Great. You told me. If you don’t have anything better than that to offer, butt the hell out!”

Jonathan’s dark eyes met mine, and they weren’t human eyes. Not at all. Not even close. I was pretty sure that even the Djinn would flinch from that stare; it froze me like liquid nitrogen, held me utterly still. There was something vast and chilly behind it, only remotely concerned with me and my problems.

“I will,” he said. “Too bad. If you’d been a little bit more on the ball, you could have avoided all the heartbreak that’s coming.”

And then he opened his hand, dropped his bottle to the floor, and it shattered. The noise became a tone, a steady, ringing tone that grew in my ears until it was a shriek, and I jackknifed forward in my chair, hands pressed to my ears…

And then I was in the waiting room of the Wardens Health Institute Extension 12, gasping for breath, and there was no sound at all.

Until Marion put her wheelchair in gear and backed up a couple of feet. Fast. I looked up. She was staring at me, and her expression was distraught. “Oh,” she said faintly. “I see. I think I understand.”

“Understand what?” Something inside my head hurt, badly. I clenched my teeth against the pain and pressed my fingers to my temples, trying to massage it out. “What did you do to me? Who was that?”

She avoided that by simply wheeling the chair around and leaving me. I tried to get up, but I felt unexpectedly weak and strange.

A blanket settled warm over me. Lewis, my hero. “Stay there,” he said, and pressed a hand on my shoulder for a second before going after Marion. They talked in low tones on the far side of the room, careful to keep it under my radar. I didn’t really care at the moment. Pain has a way of making you selfish that way, and this headache was a killer.

When they came back, Lewis looked as grim and strained as Marion. Which surely couldn’t be a good thing. He stopped, but Marion continued forward, almost within touching range, and her dark almond-shaped eyes assessed me with ruthless purpose.

“How long have you had Earth powers?” she asked. I blinked.

“I don’t know what you-”

“Don’t,” she interrupted. “When did you first feel them emerge? Be specific.”

“I can’t! I don’t know! Look, I barely understand any of this, and-”

She reached out and put her hand on my head, and this time it wasn’t a gentle, healing touch. It was a fast, brutal search, like someone rifling through my head, and I automatically slammed the door on it.

Whatever I did, it knocked her back in her chair, gasping.

“She’s strong,” Marion said to Lewis. “But this didn’t come naturally. Somebody put it in her.”

“I figured that. Who? How?”

“I don’t know.” Marion visibly steeled herself. “I’ll try to find out.” They were both acting like I wasn’t even there. Like I didn’t have any choice in the matter.

This time, when she reached out for me, I caught her wrist. “Hey,” I said. “At least buy me dinner first. I don’t even know you.”

“Lewis, hold her.”

“No!” I shot to my feet, but Lewis was moving to block me, and he was bigger than I was, and stronger in a whole lot of ways. His hands closed over my shoulders and forced me back into the chair, and then touched my forehead. I felt an irresistible drag of sleep. “No, I’m not…You can’t do this…I…Lewis, stop!”

But he didn’t, and Marion didn’t, either.

And out of sheer desperation, something came alive inside of me and struck, sinking deep inside of Marion’s mind, and then I couldn’t control it as the world exploded into the map of points of light, beauty, order.

I couldn’t help it at all. It was sheer, bloody instinct.

I began to greedily grab for memories.

SIX

I’m going to have to kill her, Marion was thinking as she watched a much younger version of me walk out of a conference room. I was defiant, I was gawky, I was just out of adolescence, and she thought I was the most dangerous thing she’d ever seen.

“This is a mistake,” said the old man sitting next to her. He had fine white hair, a barrel chest, fair skin with red blotches that spoke of a fondness for the whiskey barrel. “That bitch is trouble.”

“Bob,” Marion said, “give it a rest. The voting’s over. You lost.” She said that not because she disagreed with him, but because she simply disliked the man. Bad Bob, her memories named him. There was something about him that set her teeth on edge, always had. He was, without a doubt, one of the best of the Weather Wardens in terms of skill, but in terms of personality…

He was staring at the door through which the earlier version of me had exited. He and Marion weren’t the only ones in the room; there were three others involved in a separate side conversation, muttering to one another and casting glances toward Bad Bob that made me think he wasn’t exactly well loved, though obviously he commanded respect. Or fear. “I’m telling you, she’s trouble,” he said. “We haven’t heard the last of her. One of these days you’ll be hunting her down.”

It was eerily like what Marion herself had just thought, and not for the first time she found herself wondering if