Thin Air

“There,” Venna said, and smiled. “That’s better.”

I should have known that we wouldn’t go unnoticed, but somehow I just wasn’t prepared for the cops to show up.

Not the actual cops, the handcuffs-and-truncheon patrol; these were the other kind. The kind who radiated competence and power, and they showed up after Venna had been demonstrating how to curl the strands of storm one on top of another, building the tightly controlled fury of a tornado.

Two of them. I didn’t know them, but they clearly knew me. The smaller one, female and prone to piercings, circled around to face me, while her partner, the tall, dark, and silent type, shadowed Venna. Not that Venna was paying the slightest bit of attention to him.

“Warden Baldwin?” the woman shouted over the wind and pounding surf, and held out her hand, palm out. Lightning flashed, hard and white, and illuminated something like a stylized sun on her palm. “I need you to cease what you’re doing!”

“Hi,” I said. “I can’t do that.”

“Warden, I’m not messing around with you. I know who you are, and there’s a warrant out for your detention and return to the headquarters in New York. So, please, let’s not make this hard, okay? Nobody has to get hurt!”

I sighed. I felt grimy, tired, and angry. Too much had been taken away from me, and if Venna was right, I was in real jeopardy of losing whatever was left. To a Demon, wearing my face. “What’s your name?” I asked.

“Jamie,” she yelled. “Jamie Rae King.”

“Weather?”

“Yes, ma’am.” She looked cautious, and she kept flicking looks at her partner. “That’s Stan. He’s Earth.”

“Hey, Stan,” I said.

“Hey.” He nodded, and the wet sand suddenly went soft under my feet and dragged me down to my knees, trapping me. “Sorry, ma’am. But we’ve got orders.”

Venna, who’d been oblivious to that point, turned to face him, and I saw Stan gulp. I was busy trying to pull my legs out of the sand, but it was no good; the stuff was like cement, set around my feet to hold me in place. He was good at this kind of thing, obviously. “Stan,” Venna purred. Not a drop of rain had touched her, of course; it just slid off in a silvery curtain about four inches from her body. “You don’t want to do that.”

“No,” he panted. “Probably don’t. But I don’t have a lot of choices. You’re Djinn, right?”

She didn’t answer, but then again, she didn’t really have to. She walked up to him, a force of nature packaged in a pinafore, and put her small hand flat on his chest.

She blew him twenty feet. Stan impacted the wet beach, rolled, and flopped to a limp stop. He groaned and tried to get up, but she held up a finger.

One finger.

And he shuddered and went flat.

“Hey!” I yelled at her over the boom of thunder. I was soaked to the skin, shivering, and more than a little scared by the fact that Jamie Rae was standing there looking from me to Venna as if trying to decide which of us to put the smackdown on first. “Leave him alone!”

“Oh, relax; he’s not dead,” Venna said impatiently. “I didn’t break him.” She turned to Jamie Rae. “You want to stop trying to do that.”

Whatever Jamie was doing-and in the chaos of the storm that was quickly getting worse, I couldn’t tell-she kept doing it, because Venna looked frustrated and annoyed, and flicked her fingers in Jamie Rae’s direction.

Bang. She went down, coldcocked. I felt bad about that. She and Stan didn’t seem like bad types, comparatively speaking.

At least they weren’t trying to bring down a building.

“We should hurry,” Venna said, and glanced at the sand where I was buried knee-deep. It let loose, spilling me to my hands and knees, and I climbed out of the resulting hole. “Focus now. You know what to do?”

I nodded, and followed her into the aetheric. In Oversight the storm was a glittering layered network of tight- spinning forces. I couldn’t see Venna clearly, but I could see what she was doing, and it was amazing. My attempts to help were clumsy by comparison; I could see her reaching to slightly alter the magnetic force of one part of the storm, and what that did to the direction and speed of the wind. See it…not necessarily do it. Or even control it. But I could feel it coursing through me like a continuous warm pulse, pounding harder and louder with every beat.

It was intoxicating. Freeing. I heard myself laugh, and reached out to touch a glittering chain of molecules. Lightning sparked through the net and flashed in my eyes down in the real world.

It was like playing God. Beautiful and terrifying.

The first lightning strike hit the roof, and the concussion was so intense at this close range that I went temporarily deaf and blind, and every hair follicle on my body seemed to rise in the electrical aura. When it passed, I barely had time to draw a breath before the next bolt hit steel, and then a third. Hammer of the gods.

When the wind hit the smoking, glowing structure, spinning down in a dark spiral from the low-hanging clouds, the metal just collapsed in on itself like a dropped Tinkertoy model, and the whole beach seemed to vibrate from the impact. Fire licked and hissed as some of the more flammable components caught, but it wasn’t likely to spread; the rain was intense, and concentrated right on the worst of it.

Venna hadn’t moved. She was smiling slightly, and when she looked at me she said, “Now you have to balance it.”

“What?” I yelled over the roar of thunder and pounding, wind-driven surf. I stumbled toward her and swiped wet hair back from my face. “Balance what?”

“The scales,” Venna said. “Make it all go away, but don’t let the energy bleed over into more storms.”

“You mean it’s not over?”

Venna shook her head. She’d let the funnel cloud dissipate, its purpose completed, and the rain was slacking off from a monsoon to a downpour. “You’d better hurry,” she said. “The Wardens will be screwing it up if you don’t hurry. They never can get it right.”

I had no idea what she meant, but Venna was notably not helping me. She crossed her arms and stood there, Zen Alice, untouched by the chaos she’d helped unleash.

I turned my attention to the storm.

“The Wardens teach you to do this from science,” she said very softly; I didn’t know how it was possible to hear her over the wind, but she came through as if it were a still, silent day. “Science can fail you. Learn to listen to it. Sing to it. It doesn’t have to be your enemy. Even predators can be pets.”

I struggled to make sense out of what I was seeing. So much detail, so much data, all in spectra the human eye wasn’t meant to see, much less understand. I can’t do this. It’s too big. It’s too much.

I took a deep breath, stretched my hands out to either side, and stepped into the heart of the storm.

It hurt. Not only physically, though the windblown sand and debris lashed at me like a dozen whips. It got inside my head, and howled, and I flailed blindly for something I could touch, could control, could stop…

And then, when I opened my eyes on the aetheric, it all made sense. The swirling chaos became a shifting puzzle of infinite intricacy, and where the pieces met, sparks hissed through the dark, bright as New Year’s fireworks lighting the sky. I reached out and moved two of the pieces apart; the spark leaped and died in midair. I tried it again and again, until the grand, gorgeous pattern of the air was whisper-quiet, glowing in peaceful shifting colors.

When I blinked and fell back into the real world, I could see the stars.

Venna gave a very quiet sigh. “Yes,” she said. “Exactly like that. Now you are Ma’at.”

So now I was guilty of some kind of supernatural sabotage, at the very least, but I figured it probably boiled down to plain old insurance fraud. Something simple and skanky, something with an immediate financial benefit for Eamon, of course.

But hey, at least I’d learned a useful skill.

“Astonishing,” Eamon murmured, looking at the wreckage and all of the emergency crews swarming around the