Total Eclipse

ragged holes puncturing my protective white suit. I unzipped it and stepped out. There wasn’t any pain yet, or a lot of bleeding, though red rings were steadily forming on my lab coat around the bullet holes.

“Fantastic,” I said. “That’s just great.”

Gravity was definitely a harsh mistress, and never more than at a time like this. I watched in Oversight, gauging how far I’d fallen, how much farther still remained, and trying to do complicated math in my head. I was approaching seriously terminal velocity, and I was going to have to start slowing my descent.

“Jo!” David’s voice, blasting unexpectedly from the speaker in the elevator. I jerked, and my concentration shattered. Pain began an insidious drumbeat in my side, dammit, too soon. . . . I pushed it, and David, aside and concentrated harder. I was sweating now. Shaking. And there was a growing pool of blood forming around my shoes, how had that happened? Didn’t seem right.

I dropped to my knees, then pitched forward flat on my stomach. I screamed at the impact, because damn that hurt, but it was important to try to distribute impact force over as wide an area as possible.

I reached out for power in the air around me, found it, and began building a thick, cold cushion of air beneath the falling elevator. I increased its density, and felt a significant decrease in the speed at which I was falling.

But I was still falling.

David was saying something, but I couldn’t pay attention, not anymore. I needed more power, more braking, and I needed it now.

I couldn’t get it. When I reached out for power, it slid through my grasp like oil. I felt weak, clumsy, and wet—oh yeah. I was wet because I was lying in a pool of blood.

David was almost screaming at me now. I couldn’t spare a second of concentration; I had to maintain what I’d already done, keep slowing down, try to make this crash survivable. I was running out of elevator shaft.

I threw one last, ultimate effort into it and eased the car to a sliding, jerking stop.

The button dinged, and the doors opened.

For some reason, I couldn’t get to my feet. Maybe because the blood was slippery. I was a mess, and I needed a bath, a nice warm bath to let all of this float away. . . . That sounded good.

But I forced myself up, bracing myself with both bloody hands on the doors of the elevator. My vision was spotty, with circles of darkness swallowing the glare of white lights. Everything seemed to be moving except me.

Walk, I told myself sternly. You have to do this. Now. Because deep down inside, I knew that I wasn’t going to have the strength to wait and do it in a more orderly fashion.

I didn’t make it very far, but then I didn’t have to—this whole area was hot and live with the kind of thing I needed. This was a storage area, deep underground, and the doors were massive affairs on hydraulics. There were six doors. I fell at the first one, flailed around on the floor for a while, and left a hell of a bloody mess trying to get up. The control pad was way the hell up there. That seemed wrong. Why didn’t they build them closer to the floor, for convenience?

Oh, the hell with subtlety.

I blew the door off its hinges in a massive burst of superheated air. It flew over my head, slammed into the far wall with an impact hard enough to be felt in Switzerland, and embedded itself in the concrete to a depth of at least a foot.

Inside that storage locker, about the size of a medium-sized residential home, were stacked row upon row of containers marked with vivid red radiation warning stickers. All very neat and orderly. The aetheric here seethed black, and my own distress didn’t help much.

One more thing to do.

I triggered a reaction.

It wasn’t really all that hard; destruction never is. All I had to do was put some chemical chains together, add heat, pour in energy, stir to a rolling boil.

I didn’t have enough left in me to set up any kind of protective shielding—not that I thought it would have worked in any case. I hoped that the evacuation had worked. I hoped that Dr. Reid and his people were safely outside the facility.

Right now, though, that was a very moot point.

I rolled over on my back, staring up, and my last conscious thought was of David. How much I wished I could die in his arms, if I couldn’t live in them.

I heard his scream echoing through the hallways a second before the brilliant flash of light, and then it took all the power I had left to hold the explosion in, point it down, driving it like a spike deep into the skin of the Mother.

Then there was just . . . light.

And dark.

I didn’t expect to ever open my eyes again—who would, really? After exploding a stockpile of nuclear material? Who the hell survives that?

Me. I’m just lucky like that.

I opened my eyes and found myself floating in a sheer bubble surrounded by flames and destruction. I was still bleeding. There was a pretty significant amount of red pooled at the bottom of the bubble, and my clothes were soaked. My heart was struggling to keep on pumping what little remained.

So, I wasn’t going to go out in a blaze of glory. I’d just bleed to death, lying here inside of this protective cocoon that I swore I hadn’t constructed, and wasn’t maintaining. I couldn’t have, because there was almost nothing left inside me to use.

Someone had saved me. Sort of. And I hated them for it.

Something moved, out there in the fire, in the rubble, in the chaos of smoke. I breathed slowly, steadily, listening to my laboring heart, and watched the figure come clear.

It was the Djinn Venna, in her Alice in Wonderland blue pinafore. Her pale, long hair shone in a shimmering curtain around her shoulders. Her hands were clasped in front of her small body.

Her eyes blazed milk-white.

“I kept you alive,” she said. “Don’t you want to thank me?”

“Not really,” I said, and coughed. That hurt, as if I was tearing pieces of myself loose with every movement. I ended up sobbing, and tried to stop. “Let me go.”

“No,” Venna said, and watched me with icy focus. “You hurt her. We all felt it. The others will all come here to hurt you in return. I have to keep you alive for them.”

This was the part that Lewis and I hadn’t discussed, because it was a terrible thing to even think about. He’d hoped, as I had, that I’d be dead, obliterated in the destruction.

Survival was one hell of a lot worse as an outcome. I wished I could will myself to death, but there are some things I just couldn’t manage, and my heart refused to do anything but keep beating, beating, beating.

“Venna,” I said. “Venna, you have to help me. Please help me.”

“No,” she said. It was a flat, inhuman sound, and there wasn’t even any anger behind it. There was nothing. “You stay alive.”

I should have been dead already, I realized; from the amount of blood I’d lost, and the fact that the flow had slowed to a leak from the wounds, I’d already bled out. Whatever my heart was pumping, with such great effort, through my veins was not my blood.

I was an animated corpse, living at Venna’s whim.

I remembered David’s screams, and I wondered if he knew. I wondered if he could see, from that distant, cold vantage point of Jonathan’s picture window, helpless to stop this, helpless to do anything but grieve. If he left, if he tried to rescue me, he’d be lost himself. Don’t do anything crazy, I begged him silently, through the cord that still, even now, was holding us together. Let me go. Let them do whatever they want, so long as they come here and leave the Wardens alone. I’ll hold out as long as I can.