Thin Air

froze. Oh, God, I thought. We’re lovers. There was no other explanation for the ease of his gesture, and the look on his face, as if I’d stuck a knife in his guts and broken it off. The expression came and went in a flicker, and then he was back to safely neutral.

I took another long drink to cover my confusion, to give myself time to breathe. Lewis glanced over his shoulder at us, and I wondered what the hell the dynamics were of this life I couldn’t remember. David was-I was almost certain-my lover. And he wasn’t human. Lewis was human, but not my lover-at least, I didn’t think he was.

Not that Lewis was exactly the normal choice of the two. He could start fires with a snap of his fingers. And heal people. Whatever it was I couldn’t remember about my life, it definitely wasn’t what you could ever call boring.

David wasn’t much for small talk, it appeared, which was a very good thing, given how confused I felt. He handed over a couple of trail bars, packed with sugar and protein, and I hungrily wolfed them down. Nearly dying takes a lot out of you. Eating served another purpose: It kept me from having to talk. I had a ton of questions, but I wasn’t sure I was ready for any of the answers.

Lewis had the tent up in record time. Outdoorsy, clearly, though I guess I should have known that from his battered hiking boots and easy confidence and the neat, meticulously packed bag he was toting around. It wasn’t a very big tent, barely large enough for two sleeping bags. We were all going to get very friendly.

At Lewis’s orders, I clambered out of my warm nest, dragging my sleeping bag with me, and settled in. Claustrophobic, but at least it would be warm. I turned on my side and listened to the other two, who were still outside. Their fire-cast silhouettes flickered ghostly against the dark blue fabric of the tent.

“I have some MREs. Maximum calorie concentration,” Lewis said. “So…does she like Stroganoff or meat loaf?” He was deliberately casual, but he sounded really, really tired.

“Ask her,” David said. “But I doubt she’d have any idea. She remembers what they are, just nothing about how it relates to her directly.”

“How…”

“He took it from her.” David’s voice had turned hard and brittle as metal. “We have to get her back.”

“I’m not disagreeing, but…look, David, what if we can’t get her back? We’ve got no idea at all what we’re dealing with here. And the last thing we should do is get into this before we know-”

“He’s taken everything!” David didn’t shout it, but he might as well have; his voice ached. It bled. “Djinn can see the history of things, and she has none. Do you understand? As if she never lived. The people who know her-we’re all that’s holding her here. Without us, without our memories of her, she disappears. Unmade from the world. Clearly that’s what he meant to do. We must find a way to undo it.”

Lewis was quiet for a moment. I heard the fire crackle, as if he’d thrown another log on. “Then that’s all the more reason not to go running off into the woods without a better idea of what we’re doing,” he said. “We’ve got problems beyond Joanne.”

“I don’t.” David sounded fierce and furious.

“Yes, you do, David, and you know it. We’re crippled. Both of us. Between the Djinn’s withdrawal and the problems with the Wardens-”

“She’s the only thing that matters to me now. If she’s not the only thing that matters to you, then you shouldn’t be here.”

“I’m just saying that we need to take our time. Be sure we understand what’s happening here.”

“Use her as bait, you mean.”

“No. I didn’t say that.”

“And yet I think that’s what you mean. There’s something out here-you know that. Something very wrong.” Silence, and a rustle of cloth. David’s shadow lengthened as he stood up. “She always thought you were a cold- blooded bastard at heart,” he said, and ducked into the tent.

I hastily squeezed my eyes shut, but there was no way he wouldn’t know I was awake. I could just…sense that. He’d be a very hard man to fool.

He settled down next to my feet, his arms propped on his upraised knees. “You heard,” he said. It wasn’t a question. “What do you want to know?”

I sighed, gave up, and opened my eyes. “Where have I been? Do you know?”

Either my eyes were adjusting to the dark, or there was a dim, suffused illumination running through the walls of the tent. Moonlight. I could see a vague shadow of a smile on his face. It looked bitter. “No,” he said. “I don’t. I’m sorry.”

“Well, tell me what you do know.”

“Beginning where?” he asked. “With your birth? Your childhood? Your first love?”

Just how much did he know about me? “How did we meet?” I asked.

“Ah. That’s a good story. I guess you might say that I tried to kill you.” He paused, head cocked to one side. “Technically, I guess you could say I succeeded.”

“What?”

“It’s a long story. You sure you want to hear it?”

I felt a bubble of panic growing in my chest, making me short of breath. “I want to know who I am. What’s my name?”

“Joanne Baldwin,” he said. “You’re a Warden.”

“A what?”

“Warden,” he said. “You’re part of a small group of humans who have the ability to channel the elemental power of the world. Control fire, earth, or weather. You control the weather. And fire, these days, although you’re still learning that skill.”

“I control the…Are you high?”

That drew a strange smile out of him. “Try it,” he said. “Reach out and feel the wind. Touch the sky.”

“You know, those lyrics must have been lame even back in the seventies.” But even while I was mocking him, I remembered that vivid ghost vision I’d had, of the wind running like a river in the sky. I’d been able to see curls and eddies in the flow.

Was that what he meant? But that wasn’t controlling the weather; that was…X-ray vision. Or something.

“You’re insane,” I declared. Which he found oddly amusing.

“I’m Djinn,” he said. “So yes. At times, at least by your standards. Try, Jo. Try to reach out and touch the clouds. I’ll help you.”

I bit my lip and thought about giving it a try. What was the worst thing that could happen? No, something told me inside, the same thing that had told me to get up and run, out there in the woods. Don’t do it. You have no idea what you’re risking. What kind of attention you might draw.

“How?” I asked.

David held out his hand. I slowly reached out to take it, and our fingers instinctively intermeshed.

Before I could even think about saying no-not that he was asking-he pulled me up and against him, body to body.

“Hey!” I yelled, panicked, and tried to push him away. Not a chance. “Get off, dammit!”

He put a hand over my mouth, stilling my protest-not demanding, more like a gentle caress. “I’m not going to hurt you,” he murmured. “If you allow yourself to feel for a second, you’ll know that.”

I didn’t. I didn’t know. He terrified me in ways that I couldn’t even begin to understand, starting with the too- bright, backlit color of his eyes. I had pressed my hands flat against his chest, trying to hold him back from an assault he wasn’t even contemplating, so far as I could tell. He took both of my hands in his and interlaced our fingers tightly again.

“Deep breath,” he murmured. He pushed me back to a distance, holding me there as if we were involved in a formal box dance. “Not that deep,” he said, very softly, with a wry twist to his full lips. “Bad for my discipline. Relax.”

Not a chance of that. I stared at his shadowed face, and I felt something beginning to unspool inside of me, as if he were drawing it out. “What…? What are you doing to me?”

“Relax,” he said. “Relax. Relax.”

And the world around me exploded into color. Vivid, breathtaking color, shimmering and trembling with fury and