The bridge officers assuredly knew that their worst fears were coming true; they could see it from their windows.
Cherise was chattering at me, trying to get me to take cover. I shook myself free. She gave me one last, despairing look, then wedged herself in a corner and tipped an armchair over herself.
I heard the wave coming, even through the steel plates. I felt the rumble of it.
The bow of the Grand Paradise lifted sharply, and kept rising, rising. Tables and chairs started sliding, and people screamed and clung to whatever was within reach, stable or not. I heard glass crashing; that was probably unsecured stock somewhere under the counters.
A huge wooden cabinet, designed to look primitive and rough-hewn, began to topple down from one wall. There were six people beneath it. I watched with placid interest.
Cho yelled a warning. One of the Earth Wardens flung out a hand and stopped the falling cabinet.
Disappointing.
A racing bite of energy spread over me like a hot blanket of fire, concentrating on my back and then flowing down my arms and into the core of my body. I went down to one knee, bracing myself as the horizon continued to rise toward the sky. People slid past me, screaming, flailing. I didn’t pay much attention.
“We’re going over!” someone shouted amid the chaos and crashing furniture. We were still climbing. The floor passed a forty-five-degree upward angle, heading for vertical, and I felt the whole ship slip sideways, twist, and start to tumble out of control.
We were falling.
Then we stopped falling, and the ship’s torturous descent changed, smoothed, and entered an eerie kind of calm. The ship slowly drifted back to a stable, horizontal line, but it didn’t feel like we were in flat seas. It didn’t feel like we were in the water at all.
I rose and walked to the large picture window that commanded a view of the promenade.
Lewis was standing just where I’d left him, at the railing, and his glow was Djinn-bright, the color of soft morning sunshine against the blackness of the storms. Yes, the storms were still there, whipping around us in a frenzy, but we were floating in a bubble of force that stretched all around the ship in a perfect sphere. Ship in a bottle, I thought, and for just an instant I was too angry to think properly. No Warden could do this, not alone.
Not even Lewis.
We were floating on the storm in our own little self-contained pocket universe of calm sea and air.
I tried to unlock the watertight door, but it seemed stuck. I sent a snap of Earth power from my fingertips out through the metal, realigning the surfaces, and when I turned the handle again, the door slid smoothly open.
“Jo!” Cher was right behind me. Her eyes were huge and frightened. “What’s happening?”
“I’ll find out,” I said, with utter calm. I felt alive inside, manic with glee, but I didn’t want her to see that. “Wait inside.”
“But—”
I slammed the door between us and hit it with the heel of my hand, hard enough to make a hollow boom. “Lock it!”
I heard the heavy clash of metal engaging, and then I turned toward Lewis, standing like a misplaced figure-head at the rail.
He opened his eyes. I could see the energy spilling out of him, a raw wound that split him open to the core.
He was bleeding on the aetheric. Bleeding himself to death.
“How?” I asked, and leaned on the railing. He didn’t answer me. Couldn’t, perhaps. His nose was bleeding, and his eyes were flushed red under the stress of what he was doing. Fifteen Djinn and four times as many Wardens hadn’t been able to stop the storm, but Lewis was somehow fighting it, toe to toe.
Not winning, though.
Not hardly.
“You’ll kill yourself,” I commented. “For God’s sake, Lewis, what does it matter? What does any of it matter? Just let go. The ship will get torn apart. People will drown. Life will go on, for a while, until it doesn’t.” I shrugged. “Just let go. It’s that easy.”
Lewis let out a gasping sob. His knees buckled, but he held fast to the railing.
He held the bubble of force against the storm.
“You aren’t doing this alone,” I said. “But you didn’t have time to get the other Wardens to help. And even if you did, they’re not capable of this kind of power. Not alone—” I paused, because I finally worked it out. “But you’re not alone, are you?”
Lewis’s breath was coming in short, desperate gasps now. Nobody could sustain this, not even the most powerful Warden in the world.
Not even one with a direct connection to the aetheric.
Which was what Lewis had. He’d always been close to our temperamental Mother Earth, but this was beyond that, way beyond. The power that poured through him to fill this shell of force was like a geyser, tapping directly into the heart of the planet herself.
Only the connection between Lewis and a Djinn Conduit could do that.
He’d claimed David. He’d put David in a bottle and made him a slave, and he was using him to open this portal directly into the lifeblood of Earth, to save the ship.
It would burn Lewis out before David, but not much before.
They’d both die.
Some part of me was screaming inside, begging me to stop it. But that was the very last tiny foothold of the old Joanne drowning in a sea of darkness.
I closed my eyes and sighed. All I had to do was . . . wait.
I felt a warning tingle in the still, calm air, and as I looked up, I saw a tornado striking down at us from the clouds that writhed overhead. Lightning snaked around it, living barbed wire, and it hit the curved surface of Lewis’s protective bubble around the Grand Paradise and began to probe for weaknesses.
Then it bombed us.
I saw the metal shape hurtling down at us through the oddly clear eye of the tornado, that empty funnel space where the cold air and the warm air cycle to fuel the beast’s engines. I didn’t know what it was at first—wreckage, maybe a mass of siding or a barn, or—
No. That was a ship. A whole, intact ship. A small fishing vessel. The black-painted bottom was heavy with barnacles, and as lightning flared brighter I saw the name on her rusty bow—Abigail.
There were living men on board. I could see their terrified faces at the railing as the ship dropped toward us in free fall, her weight turning majestically in the air and driving her nose down like the tip of a spear.
“No,” Lewis moaned, but he didn’t drop the shield. He couldn’t.
The Abigail hit his protective bubble and exploded into shrapnel, scrap, and bodies. I flinched—instinct, not sympathy. The ship’s fuel tanks burst, slopping marine diesel in a wave across the invisible wall.
Lightning ignited it, and flames sheeted over us in a semicircle. It didn’t last long. Nothing to burn once the diesel had flamed out.
The wreckage of the Abigail was gone in even less time, along with her crew. Even if there’d been a chance of saving them—which, after the fury of that crash, I doubted—there was no way to reach them without dropping our own protective shield.
Bad Bob really was bringing his A game.
The tornado’s sloppy mouth slithered over Lewis’s shield for another few seconds, and then it withdrew up into the clouds. Not gone, just reloading. I could see this storm sweeping its way from Bad Bob’s location to ours, picking up ammunition along the way, like a boy collecting stones to throw. Congested shipping lanes out there. Naval vessels flying under various flags. Pleasure craft and yachts and sailing ships and cruise ships smaller than this one . . .