hands so hard that she thought the bones would break. He was screaming something but the wind was rushing by too fast and all she could hear was it beating her ears.
She could barely see from all the sudden sunlight and the wind making her eyes water, but the ground was way down there. The earth curved in the distance and green and brown and blue and there was a charred black half-circle directly below that terminated against the ocean.
Have to get to ground. When she came out the other side of a Travel, she was always going the same speed as she was going before, and she didn't went to hit the ground and explode like an egg that had fallen out of a bird's next. Her hair hit her in the face as she focused and-
There. She was staring up into the blue sky, Heinrich above her, his eyes impossibly wide, his mouth in a perfect O as he screamed. The rotation continued and the ground spun up to meet them. TOO FAST!
She felt Heinrich's Power shimmer down her arms. His body went grey and blurry and she sure hoped she looked the same. She squeezed her eyes shut as they impacted the ground, but there was no splat, no explosion of guts all over the place, and opened her eyes to blackness as they sunk through dirt. She felt like they were gradually slowing, like they were sinking through thick water.
The head map didn't let her down this time. Clear. They were right beneath the surface, descending gradually, and she Traveled just as Heinrich's Power gave out.
They flopped into a pile of hot ash and crackling branches.
The map showed that the world immediately around them had been scoured clean of life. Trees trunks were laid sideways, all of them cleanly pushed down by a single wave. Fires were still burning on the hillsides. Everything was black and nearly as scary as the place with the big magic jellyfish.
Heinrich groaned as he gradually let go of her hands. 'Never never ever never again will I do anything like that ever again,' he said, sitting up, coughing as he inhaled a lungful of smoke. 'Never!' He made it to his feet, managing a few steps before stumbling off balance and landing on his butt in a puff of soot. 'Never!'
In the middle of the wasteland, Faye began to giggle.
Chapter 18
Among the many misdeeds of the British rule in India, history will look upon the act of depriving a whole nation of magic, as the blackest.
– Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, 1930 Mar Pacifica, California Sullivan did not know how much time had passed in the dark. Delilah's body was cold next to him. Her blood coated him and had dried, sticky on his hands, clotted and pulling at his arm hair, but he would not leave her side. He only partly heard the others over the crash of the ocean. Someone had come to speak to him, but the words had been uncertain, his memory vague. Browning was coughing, dying. Dan was getting worse, but there was nothing he could do about it. He was useless.
Madi had been right. He was weak.
No longer distracted with trying to protect the others his mind turned inward, focusing on his own pain. He'd broken super-hardened bones, torn flesh, bruised muscles, yet the magic design on his chest had managed to keep up. It had burned Power to keep him alive. Even now he could feel the hot itch as his body mended itself far faster than normal.
But why hadn't it worked on Delilah?
He moved back and forth between wakefulness and fitful sleep. His dreams were terrible, and he relived Delilah's wounding, over and over. He saw the assassin's steel wrench out of her body, and he questioned what he could have done different, what he could have done better. If only he'd been quicker, faster, stronger, smarter. Anything. If he'd been able to defeat the Greater Summoned faster, then she would never have come down to help, and he drifted off, hating himself for not accomplishing something that whole squads of Actives had failed at during the Great War.
He awoke once to the noise of chattering teeth and talking. Francis had tried to swim for it when the tide had gone out, only to find that more of the cave had collapsed toward the entrance and he couldn't squeeze through. He'd nearly drowned, and surely would have if he'd gone earlier. There was some talk about Faye and Heinrich disappearing after trying something stupid, but he tuned it out and went back to his stupor. They were dead too, and that was probably his doing as well.
Damaged goods. Delilah told him in his sleep. You understood me, Jake. You were the only one.
Sullivan found himself walking along the top of a trench at Second Somme, the Power visible around him in the land where the dead went to dream. He knelt in the dirt and studied the mysterious being and the geometric patterns that made up its body. It eluded him. There was no way to bring her back. The Chairman was there, reclining on a throne made of barbwire and human bones. He did not mock Sullivan. He understood such pain.
Delilah was dead and it was his fault. The dreams told him that he deserved to die for his mistakes. He deserved to be the corpse, not her. The Chairman told him that ritual suicide was the appropriate response for such weakness, for such total failure. At one point he awoke with his pistol in hand, the safety off, the muzzle pressed against his temple. No. Not like that. Never like that. He unloaded the 1921 before putting it back in the holster.
You don't even have the balls to do that right, his brother's voice whispered in his ear.
Delilah's ghost came to him once. She didn't speak. She just pointed at him, accusing him, and after a while it faded, but the afterimage swam on inside his eyelids. He'd not realized how much damage he had taken in the fight, he knew that he was hallucinating, but he could actually feel his skull mending from where Madi's fists had left it cracked and his brain swollen.
They'd lain together-was it last night? The night before? Weeks? Just like back in New Orleans where he'd saved her from herself, until he'd thrown that all away for a moment of stupid charity trying to protect some kid he didn't even know. There had been letters he'd written her from Rockville, but he'd never gotten a response. Not a single one. He didn't know if he'd ever have worked up the courage to ask her why, but it didn't matter now. She was lost forever. Dead in a cold black hole, her spirit surely stuck between hell and the Pacific Ocean.
Back in the land where the dead dreamed, he watched the Power. It had surely fed well when Delilah had died. The Power made a certain kind of sense. The day of the Second Somme it had feasted, growing fat, and he knew that with the deaths of all those strong Actives, thousands more of the children born on that terrible day in 1918 had been born with the gifts farmed from his dead friends and enemies. The new Actives, teenagers now-had it really been that long?-They too would increase their Power, until they died, and the cycle continued, until…
Until what? Until everyone in the world had magic?
He wondered where the Power had come from. It certainly had not been born on this world. The Chairman had said it came from someplace else.
'It was pursued,' the Chairman said from behind him. 'Chased from the other place. We are its refuge. We are its hope.' Sullivan did not bother to turn. He knew that this was not another dream of a swelling and fevered brain. His enemy was actually speaking to him from the other side of the world. He was glad for the company.
'Why are you telling me this?' Sullivan asked.
'Because you impress me. Because there are very few people that I can discuss such things with who would understand, and these things I tell you will give you no advantage in your struggle against me.' The Chairman stopped beside him. Today he was dressed in an elaborate military uniform, resplendent with braids and medals and gold. The only thing that was not flashy was the well-used sword at his side. It was remarkably utilitarian. The Chairman saw Sullivan taking in the flash. 'I was at a parade,' he explained. 'As I was saying, it fled its old world, as it fled the one before that. You are correct, Mr. Sullivan. It feeds on us. It needs us, and we need it. We increase it, but as we grow dependent upon it, we must also defend it from the thing that preys upon it and has pursued it across the stars.'
'What's it running from?'
The Chairman's expression seemed sincere. 'When the Enemy comes, you will know. The Power wants me to cleanse this world of weakness. Only the strong will be able to defeat the Enemy. If the world is not ready to stand before the Enemy, the Power will flee, and the Enemy will consume us all in its hunger, then the cycle will begin anew.'
He was in no mood for the Chairman's bogus religion. 'Sounds like a load of bunk… Why didn't the healing
