Ortega was dead. His eyes had gone black, burned and lifeless, and his skin was a dull, dusty gray, as if he’d turned to stone. David joined me, standing close but not touching.
“It’s not your fault,” I told David. I could only imagine that he was thinking about ordering Ortega to come here, because he’d known there was a chance. . . .
But that wasn’t what he was thinking at all. David cocked his head slowly to one side, staring at the dead Djinn, and asked, very quietly, “Who is he?”
Chapter Twelve
None of the Djinn knew him, not even Venna, when I insisted that she be summoned from whatever beach resort Ashan had decided to take his people to for the duration of the crisis. I wasn’t sure that Venna would come, but she’d always been her own master, and that hadn’t changed just because Ashan thought it had. He might be her Conduit, but he’d never own her.
Venna, dressed in her vintage Alice outfit, paced slowly in front of the wall and Ortega’s body, studying him closely. It was eerie, seeing that kind of detachment packaged in the body of a little girl who almost radiated innocence.
She and David were the only ones allowed near the body at all. The entire room had been cordoned off in space-age-looking shielding, and all of the rest of us were being thoroughly checked out by a radiation team. Not surprisingly, we’d all gotten a dose. “Not that it’s as unusual as people think it is,” said the Chatty Cathy in the hazmat suit who was drawing my blood. “The average American gets about three hundred fifty millirems a year, just from the environment. Hey, want to know the weird part? Forty millirems of that comes out of our own bodies. We’re little fusion reactors, you know. Potassium-40 in the brain, Carbon-14 in the liver.” She was chatty because she was scared, though her hands were steady enough. She must have realized it, because she sent me an apologetic glance through the plastic visor of her space suit. “Sorry. I jabber when I’m nervous. This is just—well. They don’t exactly train you for this at NEST school.”
I wondered what the government had been told, or was telling them; the whole thing was founded on need-to-know, and I doubted even this woman had a clue. There were some FBI agents stalking the scene in their trademark dark windbreakers, talking into cell phones. Lots of cops. Fire department.
And reporters. Lots of reporters, a cresting wave of them held back by a sandbar of uniformed police around the perimeter. I could hear the dull thud of news helicopters overhead. No doubt we were in heavy rotation on all the news channels.
In the shielded room, Alice finished her inspection of Ortega and came out. The NEST doctor working on me muttered something under her breath, but she kept her eyes down and focused on what she was doing. Keep on living in denial, I thought. Safer that way, lady.
Venna came up to my side and stared at the needle in my arm. “What is she doing?”
“Taking blood.”
“Is she going to give it back?”
“Venna, what did you sense in there?”
“He is not a Djinn,” she said. There was no doubt in her voice at all. “I don’t know what he is. Or was.”
“He was a Djinn,” I said. Venna slowly shook her head. “Venna, that was Ortega. You know Ortega; you remember him—”
Another slow shake of her head. It was exactly the same response I’d gotten from David, and from two other Djinn he’d summoned. None of them recognized Ortega at all. They didn’t classify him as human; they didn’t classify him as anything. Certainly, not anyone.
I thought with a sudden hot pang of the Miami estate, all that fascinating, rich chaos that Ortega had surrounded himself with. I’d barely met him, but I was the only one who could mourn him.
“Never mind. Thanks for the help,” I sighed to Venna, who cut her eyes sharply toward the doctor, who was withdrawing the needle and applying a bandage to the bend of my arm. “You know about Rahel?”
“That your enemies have her? Yes.” Venna continued to stare at the doctor, to the extent that the poor woman fumbled the tube she was holding, but caught it on the way to the floor. “I do care, you know. But this is a mess humans made, and humans must correct. Ashan won’t interfere. He won’t want me to interfere, either.”
“Venna,” I said, “that’s Bad Bob Biringanine in charge of the Sentinels. You know what he did to Djinn before. You think he’s going to be any better now? Any kinder? You can’t stick your heads in the sand and pretend like you don’t live here, too, as if you’re not at risk. Rahel’s proof of that.”
No answer. She transferred her unblinking stare to me, which at least enabled the doc to make a confused, nervous getaway.
“There’s a book,” I said. “The kind of book Star had. You know the one. And Bad Bob has it.”
Her eyes went black. Storm black. She didn’t move, but there was something entirely different about her, suddenly.
I held myself very, very still.
“A book of the Ancestors?” she asked. I nodded. I was very careful about that, too. “Then he has power he should not have. Like Star.”
“Does that change anything?”
She never blinked, and her eyes stayed black. “I don’t know,” she said. “I will find out.”
That sounded ominous. She blipped away before I could ask how she intended to go about doing that, and I didn’t think any amount of calling her name was going to get her back. Not now.
David was still in the shielded room. He was studying Ortega, the way someone might a fascinating abstract sculpture, trying to find meaning in random patterns. I tapped on the window and got his attention; he shook his head, as if he was trying to clear it, and came through the decontamination door. One of the NEST members tried to lecture him about procedures, but he ignored it and came directly to me.
“Radiation,” I reminded him.
“I shed it in the room,” he said. “How about you? How do you feel?” Oh, the joys of being Djinn . . . I wondered how much of the toxic stuff I had crawling through my cells right now. Too much, almost certainly. The Earth Wardens had done their work, so I was probably going to feel sick, but not drop dead.
Probably.
“Fantastic,” I said sourly. “Do you recognize him at all?”
David’s head shake was just as certain, and just as regretful about it, as Venna’s had been. I could see how frustrated he was, how baffled by his inability to comprehend what was in front of him, and it scared me, too. He was one of the most powerful entities on the face of the Earth. He shouldn’t have this kind of blind spot.
I was trying not to think about it as an Achilles’ heel, but that was getting more difficult all the time, especially when the whole thing ran through my head and the person imprisoned on that wall and impaled by the black spear was David, not Ortega.
They wouldn’t know him, I thought, with a sickening drop of my stomach. Venna, Rahel, all the Djinn— they’d just stare at his body and not know who the hell they were looking at. They wouldn’t even remember him at all.
Of all the possible ways to destroy someone, that had to be the worst.
It reminded me, with a sudden snap, of how Ashan had tried to destroy me, not so long ago—on the day that my daughter had died. He’d tried to strip away not just my life, but the memory of my life. He’d been stopped midslaughter, which was why I was still around, but there was something fundamentally similar about what Ashan had done, and what was happening now, to the Djinn.
The Mother had intervened to stop him—but, I thought, that had mostly been because he’d done it on the grounds of the chapel in Sedona, on what was, for them, holy ground. The same kind of protection might not apply for David out here.