My fists clenched, and my nails dug in deep enough to burn and cut. “The Wardens have to do something!”
“They are. But this isn’t something Wardens can fight. It isn’t even something the Djinn can fight, although if you command them, they’ll try. Elemental powers are walking the planet now, and there’s no reasoning with them. No clever tricks or last-minute reprieves. The game’s over. Humans have lost.” She said it so gently, and with so much compassion; I knew she’d lost her humanity when Ashan had killed her, but I liked to think that through me, she retained some memory of it. Some sense of the magnitude of what was happening right in front of us.
But what I saw in her was a distance that I couldn’t cross anymore. She was part of the Earth, and the Earth had rejected my species as flawed and failed. So no matter how much Imara still felt for me, she couldn’t bring herself to feel it for all those suffering and dying below us.
I swallowed a hard lump in my throat and managed to ask, “Then why are you here?”
“Because I can help you, Mom,” my daughter said. “I can help you become something else.”
“A Djinn? Been there, done that, not doing it again. I’m human. I like being human.”
“But you’ll be alone. The only human left. I can keep you safe, but only you. No one else. Is that what you want?”
“No,” I said, and then said it more loudly, because the screaming down there was drilling into my head like a vicious power drill. “No! Dammit, Imara, you have to help us!”
“I’d like to,” she said, and it sounded genuine. “I wish I could. But I don’t have any way to do that, and even if I did, maybe it’s for the best, Mom. Maybe this is what needs to happen, so things can start over. Cleanly.”
“I don’t believe that.” I backed away from her and stood several feet away, fists clenched. “I will never believe that.”
“When things die, you have to let them go,” Imara whispered, and I saw eternity in her eyes. “You let me go, didn’t you? You accepted it. You have to accept this, too.”
I couldn’t even speak. My mouth had gone dry, my throat tight, and all I could manage was a violent shake of my head.
Imara sighed and folded her hands together. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Now I have to go.”
“You saved my life! You can save theirs, too!”
“I did,” she said. “But life isn’t a permanent condition. You know that.”
And the sand hissed up over her, whipped into a blinding ball, and then it blew apart in all directions, stinging my skin as it landed.
Imara was gone.
I looked down at the valley. The Oracle was reaching the far edge of what remained of the town. There was a large building there. I could just make out the word HOSPITAL in lights at the top before the power failed.
I grabbed hold of a tree that fluttered its leaves in the hot wind, and watched with dry, aching eyes as the building melted and burned. I thought about the patients in their beds, the babies in their cribs, the doctors and nurses staying at their posts despite the destruction coming at them.
Then I held up my arms and summoned storms. Not the carefully constructed sort that Wardens are supposed to wield, oh no. I slammed together air and water with careless disregard for the balance, the consequences, for anything that I’d ever been taught. I needed rain, a lot of rain, and I needed it fast.
I put together one mother of a hurricane, and I did it in under ten minutes. The clouds were thick and black and stuffed with death, and I unleashed it right over the Fire Oracle as it reached the borders of the town. Water poured down with a vengeance, and I saw steam rising from the Oracle’s body. The destruction of the town cooled, but the Oracle kept burning, and burning, and burning, no matter how much rain I threw at him.
Then the Oracle turned and looked at me, really saw me, and I woke up as suddenly as if someone had slapped me across the face. I jerked upright, and realized I wasn’t standing halfway across the country watching that terrible march; I was in the backseat of the Mustang. I was sweaty, hot, fevered, and scared, and fumbled for some of the supplies that Cherise and I had bought what seemed liked ages ago. Water. I needed water.
David said nothing. He didn’t even ask me what I’d been dreaming about. Maybe he knew.
I choked on the lukewarm liquid, but got it down, and gasped, “It’s true, isn’t it? The Fire Oracle. He’s walking.”
David slowly nodded.
“Can’t you stop him?”
“No,” he said, and I heard the infinite regret in his voice. For the first time, I also heard resignation. “Oracles can’t be stopped—not by you, not by us. Once they’ve been unleashed, they won’t stop until the Mother tells them to stop.”
“There has to be something we can do. David, I saw it. I saw a town—I saw people—I saw—”
He grabbed me and held me as the Mustang plunged on into the night. Stars overhead, cold and precise and uncaring. David didn’t try to tell me it would be all right, and he didn’t try to promise me that we’d find a way to survive. He didn’t promise anything at all.
I sensed desperation in the way he was holding me. He didn’t believe that we could make it.
“No,” I said shakily, and swiped at my eyes with my hands. “No, we’ll make it. We’re going to find a way to stop this. We have to. We can’t give up.”
“It’s not about giving up; it’s about facing facts,” David said. “You think we can fight the Mother. We can’t. She’s judged, she’s made up her mind, and there’s no changing it.”
I couldn’t accept that, I just couldn’t. It didn’t make any sense to me that we couldn’t somehow fix this, make the Earth understand and see humanity as her own.
I pushed it aside, because there wasn’t any point in arguing with David about it. “Where are we?” There was a glow on the horizon, a big one, and since it was due west of us, I didn’t think it was sunrise.
“Las Vegas,” he said. “Lewis brought the unassigned Wardens here. They’ve been working with the Ma’at to fortify the town.”
Vegas would be a prime target, I realized, purely for the fact that it existed in such defiance of the natural order in the desert. So many people, so much artificial water, so much energy being consumed.
I remembered the town I’d seen destroyed, and multiplied that times the huge population of Vegas, and felt shaky all over again. “All right,” I said. “It’s as good a place as any to make a stand. Plus, we might get in a Cirque show and some time at the roulette tables.”
“I didn’t think they let Wardens play roulette. Or slot machines.”
The casinos in the know certainly didn’t. An Earth or Weather Warden could jinx a roulette wheel as easy as snapping fingers, and put a Fire Warden near a slot machine and forget about it. “Look, if the world is going to end, I’m going to win all the money I can. Just because. They say you can’t take it with you, but really, has anybody tried?”
Vegas sounded good to me for another reason—accommodations, and shopping. I desperately needed a shower and new clothes, and even though I could ask David to magically clean me up, it wasn’t the same thing at all as sinking into velvety hot water, scented with lilacs, and floating. . . .
I was fantasizing about a peaceful afternoon and a hot bath the way perverts fantasize about porn.
Hell, maybe I’d throw in some shopping. I’d always loved the clothing stores in the big casinos. Nothing like hitting couture when you’re depressed, and if you’re going to certain death, why not go out wearing Valentino or Prada?
Even the best fantasies have to end, and mine didn’t last long. I went up into Oversight and got the lay of the land. It was unnaturally still, locked down on all fronts. I could see the restless fury of the land and the air, but the Wardens were keeping tight controls on everything, for now. With the amount of energy building, though, it was going to be impossible to hold it off forever.