“Wha?” The word was garbled, but still semicoherent. I yanked him up by the grimy T-shirt to a sitting position. “… gone.”
“Shut up and listen,” I said. “I need your help.”
“… help?” He blinked slowly, like an owl. His pupils were way too large. “Why?”
“Philosophy some other time. Just repeat what I say. Got it?”
“Repeat.”
“Very good.” I resisted the urge to pat him on the head, mostly because I really didn’t want to get greasy. “I order you to destroy the storm.”
“Mmmm?” His eyes were glazing over. I pinched him hard enough to make a welt, and he yelped and cleared up. “What?”
“I order you to destroy the storm. Say it.”
Oops. I’d woken him up too much. “Why?” The vague look was vanishing like snow under an Arizona summer sun. “You. You… you tricked me.”
“Just say it.”
“Or?” His jaw hardened as muscles clenched. He was willing himself awake, and all of the nice happy thoughts he’d been dreaming were slipping away. “You’ll put me to sleep again?” I’d liked him better asleep. Who wouldn’t? “No. I’myour, ah, master. You do what Isay.”
“Then tell me to destroy the storm.”
His eyes narrowed behind the pretty, girl-length lashes. “Why should I? What’s in it for me?”
“Oh, I don’t know… survival? Can’t you feelthis?” But then I realized that of course he couldn’t; for him, like for most people, the storm was just a storm. Bad, yes. A killer. But not sentient, not rabid and scenting fresh meat. Not alive. His talent was fire. “Shit. Please, Kevin. Do one decent thing in your life. I’m begging you. Let me do this.”
He kept staring at me for a few seconds. My bottle was clenched in his fist, my soul in his control, and the lives of thousands hanging in the balance.
“Fine,” he finally said. “Go destroy the damn storm.”
I was almost out of there when he added, “And take me with you.”
I materialized back in the lobby at the Secretariat tower to find it mostly deserted. Martin Oliver was still there; so were some of the security guards. Earth Wardens were shouting to each other over the steady shriek of wind, and a continuous silver curtain of rain was slicing in through broken windows. Everyone on the east side of the building was out, now. The storm had been continuing its grenade attack. The marble was a minefield of ice and glass shards, water, and blood.
Kevin was whooping in my ear. He liked aetheric travel a little too much, even with the smothering blanket of coldlight— ah, that’s right, I remembered, he couldn’t see it. None of them could.
“That is so cool!” he crowed, and did a spastic little dance on the slippery floor. He stopped, stared around. “Jeez. You weren’t kidding.”
“No,” I said. I was boiling over with power now, rich red power that pulsed in time with my fast, adrenalized heartbeats. “Stay here.” I walked over to the nearest broken window.
“Baldwin!” Martin Oliver yelled. I looked back at him and let my eyes flare silver. For the first time that I could remember, he looked outright surprised, but he recovered in seconds. “Be careful.”
I raised a hand in thanks, or farewell, or whatever, and stepped out into the storm.
Different now than it had been, back in my just-plain-girl days. The storm was a delicate latticework of interconnecting forces, with the coldlight swarming around it like a bloodstream, feeding it, insulating it, holding it together. I didn’t get a sense that the light itself was hostile—just mindlessly opportunistic. The storm was alive, therefore it was capable of being parasitized. Eventually, the coldlight would probably grow out of control and consume too much energy and start the chain reaction that would remove the threat—but I had no idea how long that would take. Too long, probably. No way could I count on it to happen in time.
I spread my arms and rose into the clouds, trailing blue sparks like a comet trail. Where I went, the cold-light flocked. The storm sensed me immediately, and recognized a threat; lightning began to stab through me, millions of volts of electricity attempting to explode every cell in my body. I bled the charge off, used it to draw in more coldlight. An ever-increasing spiral of blue, with me at the center.
Up, climbing the sheer gray tower of the anvil cloud. Up into the cold, the thin air, the mesosphere, where if the storm could be said to have a heart, the heart resided.
The storm responded by battering me with ice and more lightning. Plasma balls formed white-hot and flung themselves at me, but the command Kevin had given me was utterly straightforward and the power being pulled out of him was staggering. I just flicked the St. Elmo’s fire away, bent lightning bolts at right angles, and reached for the vulnerable beating heart of the beast.
A scream stopped me. A piercing, panicked cry that went right through me like a sword thrust.
My master’s voice. “Come back! Oh God, come back now! Right now!” Kevin sounded scared— worse than scared, horrified.
I could have gone, but I didn’t have to. I had the choice, because I hadn’t fulfilled the first command he’d given me; the two commands effectively canceled each other.
Free will. Go back and baby-sit Kevin, or kill this thing and save thousands—maybe tens of thousands…
I didn’t think there was a choice. I ignored the screaming—even though it continued, sawing right through me, body and soul—and focused on the storm instead.
I reached in and grabbed the core process that was at the center of the giant. It wasn’t much, really; some overexcited molecules, a pattern of reflecting and replicating waveforms that perfectly reinforced each other. The tough part wasn’t disrupting it, it was finding it and reaching it.
The Wardens couldn’t see it, because it was built out of nothing but coldlight.
I reached in and took hold of it, drew the sparks to me, and consumed them the way they consumed others. We are all born from death. Patrick had told me that. I hadn’t realized he’d meant it literally.
The winds continued to blow, but the waveforms fragmented and began to cancel each other instead of resonating. Clouds began to break apart instead of pull inward. Temperatures began to cool here, warm there, chaos theory taking over.
It would storm for a while, but it was just another freak weather story now, one of those things that would play on CNN and the Weather Channel for the next few days, and be forgotten by everybody except a few cab drivers and weather conspiracy nuts who believed the CIA was behind it all. Rain, hail, lightning. The usual stuff.
I let the power of it soak into me, reviving me, and then slowly drifted back down toward the UN Building. It was hard to see through the swirling, choking mass of coldlight that was being pulled toward me but I could see the place needed about a hundred new windows. The people weren’t so lucky. As I folded back into flesh, blood, bone, and all the necessary fabric accessories, I saw that there were still a lot of people down on a floor that was awash with inches of rainwater. There had been blood, but it had been diluted and flushed by the storm; now that the rain was abating, some of the wounded were leaking red puddles.
Some, more ominously, were not.
I completed the transformation back into human form, felt my hair fall silky and straight over my shoulders, and for the first time thought, I have it right. Finally.
And then I realized what I was looking at. I’d left Marion, Martin Oliver, and a few other Wardens tending to the wounded, trying to get them to safety… and there was nobody moving now.
Instead, there were more bodies.
I skidded to a stop next to a crumpled form in rain-soaked brown suede. Marion’s hair looked dark and thin, pounded by the storm’s violence; she was still and quiet and pale. I checked her pulse and found her heart beating, though slowly. Martin Oliver was down, too, all his grace and fearless strength stripped away. His shirt was soaked through pink, and underneath there was a raw, four-inch-long tear through his sternum. Glass. He’d been skewered.