“I’m not having children just to watch them die, if this turns bad,” I said, and somehow managed not to add, again. Imara’s death, before she’d been made an Oracle, was something that would haunt me forever. “We’re in trouble. Don’t think I haven’t noticed.”
“You know what I’ve learned from thousands of years of watching humanity? It’s always a bad time.” He put his arms around me and held me, and the simple warmth of it made me want to weep. I didn’t. It wouldn’t do for me to get all girly and soft on him now. “But all the bad times end, too.”
“Thus sayeth the dude with a long view.”
“Dude?”
“Sorry, it was my bad eighties teen years coming back to haunt me.”
He kissed me, as if he couldn’t think of any more words. That was okay. It got the point across just fine.
It was very strange to be on the outskirts of the whirl-wind of activity inside the Wardens—a bystander, like Cherise. Someone included me in some of the meetings, out of courtesy, but being outside of the direct flow of crisis information made me feel like I was just holding down a chair at the table. It was, in fact, a literal table, the biggest one on the ship, and it seated about twenty; I supposed they used it for swank corporate meetings on the high seas. Or really large families, with equally large checkbooks. Lewis sat at one end, looking down the long expanse of wood; around it, every chair was filled with some powerful Warden or other.
Except mine and David’s, of course. We were just keeping the cushions warm.
We were an hour into the meeting, and what had started out as a grim list of problems had only gotten worse.
“Reports coming in from South America,” said Kyril Valotte, an exotic- looking young man who missed being handsome by the narrow set of his eyes. “Earthquakes and lava flows in Venezuela. We’ve got teams heading there now, but we’ve also got reports of odd animal attacks in Panama, some kind of disease outbreak in Guatemala. . . . It’s a lot for the Earth team to handle at once.”
“I can send four Wardens out of Texas,” said the head of the Southwest U.S. region, and made some notes on his map. “Earth Wardens I got. Weather Wardens I need.”
“I’ll send as many as I can,” Kyril said with a nod. “We’ll need ground transportation.”
I held up my hand. “I’ll take it. I can still make phone calls.”
They looked up, and I saw the frank confusion in their faces for a second before memory caught up. Then they both just looked uncomfortable. Kyril nodded and murmured something meaninglessly kind. The U.S. Warden—Jerry something?—didn’t bother. He just went back to his maps.
There was a lot of that going on. Lower- ranked Wardens came in and out, delivering notes and whispered messages to their bosses, and with each note, the deployments ended up revised. Thankfully, Cherise had come to my rescue with a genuine computer and network uplink, so I was dispatching travel authorizations and setting up rental cars at the speed of—well, not light, but at the speed of whatever satellite I was bouncing my signal from. It was something useful to do, at least.
I was glad, because listening to the trouble was somehow worse than not knowing about it at all.
Lewis looked at his watch and said, “Hour update,” which was the trigger for us to go around the table, one by one, and list off the emerging issues, the ones being handled, and estimated numbers of casualties. I tallied it up in a spreadsheet. Nice and clean and neat.
By the time silence fell again, and my fingers stopped typing, I was shaking. The pause was deep and profound. I stared at the list of things I’d recorded.
“Jo?” Lewis’s voice was gentle. He already knew.
I cleared my throat. “We’re up to more than a thousand reported anomalies and severe issues,” I said. “Estimated casualties worldwide are climbing steadily. Right now, from what we have reported, the worst case scenario puts human lives lost at about half a million people.”
People who were bad at math took in sharp breaths around the table.
“It’s going to get worse,” David said, in the silence. “The Djinn aren’t intervening. I believe they could be causing some of these events.”
“Why? Why would they do that?” It was an emotional question, not a rational one, and it came from Kelley, down near the end of the table. She was upset, clearly.
“Because they don’t have a choice,” David said. “The Djinn aren’t operating under their own control anymore. At least, I don’t believe they are. Otherwise, at least one of them would be here now. You can’t count on any assistance from the Djinn, and where you meet them, you have to consider them as hostile.”
We all knew what that meant; hostile Djinn were pretty much worst-case scenario all by themselves, and they were now only a part of our problems. I felt sick and light-headed, and I was pretty sure from the faces around the table that I wasn’t the only one.
“Focus on what we can control,” Lewis said. “We’re dispatching Wardens to cover the hot spots, but that’s reacting. We need to get ahead of this.”
Someone let out a hollow laugh. “How?”
“We need to get to the source of the problem,” Lewis said. “We need to get to the Mother herself.”
This time, I felt David take a breath. A sharp one, which he let out slowly before saying, “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”
“I realize that we’re just humans,” Lewis said, “but sooner or later, she needs to understand what she’s killing.”
“You think she doesn’t?” David asked, very mildly. That brought another few seconds of silence around the table. “Humanity has done stupid things in the name of its own blind survival, worse in the name of its own comfort. She’s not concerned with individuals, Lewis. She’s concerned with balance. If you put all of humanity on one side of the scales, and all of the other life on Earth on the other side . . .”
“You know what? I’m not here to debate humanity’s crappy conservation record,” Lewis snapped, and then he rubbed his face and sat back in his chair. “Sorry. I get your point, but this has been brewing for a long time. If we can’t establish direct contact with the Mother, we have to rely on the Djinn to influence her. Frankly, I’m not feeling good about that plan, since the Djinn are already on her side. Are you?”
“Not at all,” David said. “But then, I’m not feeling good about putting a human face to face with a being so vast and powerful that the Djinn themselves won’t go there.”
“Oracles do,” I said. “Imara does.”
“And Imara’s done all she can to make humanity’s case. She’s young, she’s new, and the Mother may not listen.”
“I could do it.”
“No, Jo, you can’t. You had a lot of advantages the last time you tried something like this; you were a Warden, you had access through Imara and through me. It’s not a good idea.”
“Because mere humans shouldn’t be front and center?” I shot back to David. “Come on, this is about mere humans. Not Wardens. Not Djinn. It’s about millions of regular people who are going to die, and their voice needs to be heard. They’re not invisible. They’re real.”
“I know they’re real,” he said. “But they have no voice—not that she can hear and understand. You have no voice, Jo. Not as you are.”
“Bullshit!”
He smiled. “Yelling isn’t going to solve the problem, you know.”
“But it makes me feel tons better, sweetie.” I wasn’t about to let his charm veer me off course. Well, not far off course, anyway. “We needed to go to the Oracles anyway. They’re our one real hope of getting our powers back, fast. I’m the logical one to do it. Lewis, if I get burned out, you’re not losing much at this point.”