No-Name Nice Suit Guy swallowed and lowered his arms. He straightened his lapels with an unconscious gesture and stepped out of the way.
“Damn,” Lewis said. “Kind of hoped he’d go for it, actually.”
Fat chance. This wasn’t a hot potato; it was the entire state of Idaho, fresh out of the microwave.
“Here goes,” Lewis said, and opened the door.
The noise washed over us in a wave, and we walked out into a whiteout of flashbulbs and video spotlights. It was like hitting a psychic wall, and if I’d been on my own, I’d have caved fast and hard. God. I couldn’t focus on anything; the crowd was a faceless mass of shouting faces, all blurring into a snarling, hostile entity. I transferred my probably shell-shocked stare to the buildings on the far side of the street. Somebody was in an office, backlit, looking out at us. Nice to have that kind of distance.
The FBI special agent in charge stepped up to the bank of hastily taped-together microphones and made some brief remarks, nothing incriminating for the agency, and introduced Lewis by name, adding that he was with “a special branch of the United Nations known as the Wardens.” That was it. He got out of the way, ignoring the shouted avalanche of questions.
Lewis took a deep breath and stepped up. He was tall, imposing, and had the kind of personal aura that made people take notice, when he deigned to use it. He used it now. I saw ripples of quiet move through the crowd, and reporters lean forward to catch every word he had to say.
“Earlier today some of you witnessed a battle between two opposing sides in a conflict,” he said. “As you reported, there were casualties on both sides. I’m here to explain to you what that conflict is, what it’s about, and how you can help.”
I expected a torrent of questions, but the crowd stayed still in the pause. Maybe they were stunned that they were actually going to be given information. Or maybe Lewis had sneakily exerted some Earth Warden influence on them. I used some myself, on myself, to slow my racing pulse and get myself ready for the inevitable.
“The Wardens are part of the United Nations,” Lewis said, “in the sense that we are a worldwide organization, independent of governments but working in cooperation with them whenever possible. There is a world around you, a world you see every day without knowing the truth behind it. At its most basic level, the forces at work in the universe, or at least on this planet, are real and tangible.” He paused again and took the leap. “We are the ones who help control and shape that world. Without the Wardens, the disasters you report on, the floods and hurricanes, forest fires and earthquakes—all these things would be far, far worse.”
Somebody laughed. A few others took it up, and it grew in a ripple through the crowd. “You’re kidding. This is what you have to tell us?” somebody shouted from beneath the glare of a video spotlight. “Where’s Gandalf?”
That was pretty much my cue, although I would have preferred Galadriel. I stepped forward. The FBI had furnished me with a change of wardrobe—not my normal style, but workable. It included a navy blue pencil skirt, a severely cut jacket, a white shirt and serviceable granny pumps. I’d put my hair up in a bun, to complete the image of competence and authority, sexy-schoolteacher style.
I pointed up at the sky, which was full of lightly scudding altocumulus clouds—nothing out of the ordinary for Miami.
Lewis waited, patient as a stone, giving them absolutely no indication what was going to happen. We’d agreed that it needed to be big, spectacular, and easily captured on videotape.
I slowed the progress of the clouds and began packing energy into the system, careful to balance the forces as I went. I knew the Ma’at were standing by in case I screwed it up, but it was a point of pride not to need them to clean up after me. The shape of the clouds began to change, from sheer and wispy to solid white, then gray as the moisture condensed. Altocumulus.
Then nimbocumulus.
Once I had the system packed as full as I dared, while still remaining in control, I opened both my hands, palms up. I could feel the dawning sentience in the clouds above, as the energy accumulation granted it some very basic level of awareness, of hunger. Of anger.
What I was about to do was dangerous, and not just to me. If I got it wrong, there could be a lot of collateral damage.
Easy, I heard David whisper on the aetheric. I’m here.
I called the lightning.
Florida is the lightning capital of the U.S. With the daily, constant interaction of wind, water, sandy soil, and marshland, every reporter in the crowd had probably seen close lightning strikes.
None of them had ever seen this.
The bolt streaked down out of the clouds, long and purple, crackling with energy, and broke into two jagged prongs. It hit my outstretched palms exactly on target, and for a long, long second, I kept it there as the video cameras and photographers documented the event.
Then I clapped my palms together, and the lightning vanished. Thunder rolled loud enough to rattle windows, but there was no other visible damage, apart from a slight reddening on my skin. I’d deliberately kept the lightning to the bare minimum voltage necessary to stage a visible demonstration—about forty kiloamperes.
But damn, it ached inside me. I kept my smile in place with an effort, and hoped I wasn’t sweating too much under the lights.
Lewis said, in the same dry, calm tone, “This is Joanne Baldwin. She is a Weather Warden. The demonstration you’ve just seen is one of several we’ll conduct for you over the next few days. The rest will be under controlled conditions, and you can provide your own scientific experts if you’d care to do so, to document and question the experiments. But ultimately, you’re going to find that what we’re telling you is the real thing. We can control the weather. We can control the land. We can control fire. The problem is, all these things fight back.”
Nobody seemed to know what kind of questions to ask, exactly. Already, they were scrambling to find a logical explanation for what they’d seen—some kind of magic trick would be the most likely one they’d land on. I was sure whoever was the most outrageous street magician du jour would be calling in to debunk what I’d already done.
But what gave it weight was the silent presence of the FBI behind me, and the fact that we were standing on the steps of a government building.
Eventually, somebody found a question that made enough sense to voice. “How do you control the weather? Is it some kind of machine, or . . . ?” He sounded as if he couldn’t quite believe he was even asking the question. I understood that, too. An entire street full of very logical people had just been tipped over the edge of a cliff, and were still trying to figure out which way was up.
“That’s the other part of the story,” Lewis said. “The simple answer is magic. The more complicated answer is that the world around you is not how you imagine it to be—it’s deeper and stranger than you know. For many thousands of years, the Wardens have guarded humanity, and we’ve done it in silence, in secret. But it’s time to come out in the open, because now we have a very serious threat to deal with.”
“What kind of threat? Does this have anything to do with what happened at the motel?”
I wondered if the question was a plant. Lewis wasn’t exactly above that kind of thing, bless his soul. He wasn’t particularly worried about our impartial image.
“Let me tell you,” Lewis said, “about the Djinn, and the Sentinels.”
David and his strike team misted into view at the bottom of the steps, right in front of the cameras.
All hell broke loose.
We’d intended to grab the world stage, and we did. The feverish speculation occupied every news channel, every broadcast on the local level. Experts talked about a massive hoax; scientists sneered; magicians explained how all we’d shown on television could have been done by mirrors and illusion.