Thin Air

I wanted to ask him harder questions, but the Wardens weren’t letting us have a moment; everybody was talking at once. Paul had grabbed my arm and was trying to hustle me to the van, Kevin and Cherise were blabbing at us, someone was urgently talking on the cell phone, and David…well, David clearly was willing to let me get dragged off if it meant he didn’t have to undergo twenty questions.

I felt the slippery sensation again, heard Paul saying something about magnetic surges as polarities threatened to shift, and the cell phone that the Warden-I knew him now, his name was Otombo; he was a Fire Warden out of Arkansas-the cell phone suddenly let out an earsplitting shriek and exploded into sparks. Otombo winced and dropped the useless piece of equipment. It let out a thin, whiny sound of electronic distress, and a tiny wisp of smoke curled up from the speaker.

“Cell phones off! Off!” Paul bellowed. He was right; it was the only way to save them. People patted their pockets, a couple of women pawed through purses, and most got their phones shut off before anything happened. I heard the electronic wail from another quarter, and a French-Canadian curse. Oops.

“What the hell is going on around here?” Paul demanded-from me, of course. I looked over my shoulder at David. He was staring back at the cemetery, no particular expression on his face.

I started to repeat the question-there had been a lot of cross talk, with the other Wardens all basically asking each other the same thing-but there was no need. David said, “How much do you know about magnetism?”

“Well, if you bang an iron tie-rod on a metal grate, you can make it a magnet,” I said. “I saw it on MacGyver.” And I was ridiculously pleased to be remembering it.

He spared me a glance. Not a patient one. “The magnetic field surrounding the Earth is moving,” he said. “Breaking into islands of polarity.”

Sam Otombo nodded. “Yes,” he agreed. He had a faint tropical accent, and his long, clever face was very serious. “The field has been concentrated as we know it, at the poles, for perhaps three quarters of a million years. But there is evidence that it has shifted before, completely flipped from north to south, and this begins with islands of magnetic polarity shift.” He nudged the remains of his cell phone with his foot. “There was speculation that it could affect some types of communications, global positioning satellites…”

“Wait a minute,” I said. “You mean north is now south?”

“In some places, yes. I mean that if you looked at a compass needle right now, in this place, you probably wouldn’t see north,” Otombo corrected. “Anything but. The magnetic field is moving, but it may take hundreds, even thousands of years for it to settle again.”

I was completely lost. They hadn’t really covered this in weather school. “Is it dangerous?”

“Long-term, perhaps. We could have increased cosmic radiation. The magnetic field shields us from that at all but the most remote places on Earth.”

David nodded. “You’re right that it has happened before, sometimes as often as every few thousand years. But the Djinn and the Wardens have kept the system stable for millennia.”

“Until now,” I said. “Because we’re no longer working together to hold it. Right?”

“That’s why you have to bring them here, Jo,” he said. “Bring the Wardens. Bring the Ma’at. And hurry.”

SIXTEEN

Funny, most people wouldn’t even know it was a crisis. It didn’t have any of the usual signs-no menacing clouds, no tremors in the ground, no forest fires charring acres of homes. This was the quietest, most subtle disaster I’d ever seen. Except for a few cell phones squealing their last, and some random weird magnetic effects, it seemed to go almost unnoticed.

“Yeah, it’s definitely weird,” Paul said when I pointed it out as we made phone calls not from mobiles, or from the tricked-out communications van (which had been hastily shut down, just in case), but the old-fashioned way, from a bank of phone booths in a hotel lobby. David had quietly disappeared, I supposed to go try to persuade his fellow Nouveau Djinn to participate. Did even they take orders from him these days? Had I really seen him lose his place in the world there in the cemetery?

I hadn’t asked him, but surely he was still the conduit of energy for the New Djinn. Through him they were connected to the Mother-that gave him some security.

I hoped.

The list of numbers Paul had handed me included names I recognized, a marvel that I didn’t think was going to get old anytime soon. I liked recognizing and remembering. It was a real thrill.

Talking to the Ma’at, well, not so much. Charles Spenser Ashworth II, in particular, was a great big pain in the ass. “We’re well aware of the magnetic instability,” he told me, in that waspish, precise way he’d once commanded me to tell him the circumstances of his son’s death. He’d tortured me when I’d refused to tell him. Okay, that was a memory I could have safely kept buried. “There’s nothing to be done about it. The Ma’at don’t interfere in the natural order, Ms. Baldwin; you know that to be our guiding principle. If you want to twist nature to your will, then perhaps you should call upon your friends in the Wardens.”

“News flash, Charles: I’m standing with them right now. And we’re asking you to help.” I tapped my fingernails on the chromed surface of the pay phone in frustration. “Come on. Come out of the shadows. The Ma’at have a different take on this, and I for one think they ought to be heard before the Wardens and the Djinn decide what to do. Don’t you? Don’t you want a seat at the big table?”

I’d played directly to his vanity, shamelessly. Ashworth was rich, white, old, and patrician, and he’d never had anything but a seat at the big table. Usually red leather, handcrafted. On his own he hadn’t manifested enough power to qualify for the Wardens-there were thousands of people every year who were either borderline talented, or just below the line, who were left to go about their lives without Warden interference. Most of them never even knew what they had, or what they could do, and those who did couldn’t do much with it. Maybe light some candles without matches, if they were Fire; maybe grow out-of-season plants, if they were Earth. A weak, brief rainstorm, if Weather.

But put those marginal talents together with Djinn who willingly helped channel it, connect it into a series, you got additive power of a unique kind. The Ma’at had been focused on undoing the excesses of the Wardens; they rarely influenced things directly unless forced to it, mostly out of self-defense.

But then, they’d never been asked to step up on the front lines, really. Not until now.

“What do you want?” Ashworth asked.

“I want you, Lazlo, and everybody else in the Ma’at you can pull to get on a plane and come to Seacasket, New Jersey. The Wardens will meet you and bring you in from the airport. Call the Crisis Center number”-I gave it to him from memory, another thrill-“and tell them who you are and when you’re arriving. They’ll coordinate.”

Ashworth was silent for a few long seconds, and then said, “We won’t do anything contrary to the best interests of the planet. You understand that.”

“Believe me, I wouldn’t ask you to. Get moving.”

When I hung up, Paul was hanging up as well. He offered up a big, square hand, and I high-fived it. “Right,” he said. “We got ourselves a party. Before nightfall, there should be about five hundred Wardens here, and however many Ma’at. Throw in the Djinn, and…”

“And you’ve got a real recipe for disaster,” I said, not feeling so high-five-ish anymore. “This could turn bad so easily.”

“But it won’t,” Paul said.

“How do you know?”

He grinned. “Because I’m putting you in charge of it, kiddo.”

We took over the Seacasket Civic Center, and we did that mainly with bags of cash, toted in by Warden security representatives in their blazers, shoulder holsters, and intimidating sunglasses. Whatever functions were going on there, we got them postponed, canceled, or moved.

Even though that was the biggest indoor space in town, it wasn’t exactly spacious. I’d have rather gathered everybody in the cemetery itself, but Ashan wasn’t letting us grubby humans wander around on his sacred ground for longer than he had to.