Not surprisingly, it was cloudy; the day was chilly, but not cold. Not yet. It would be bone cold in the wind, but Brennan had helpfully thrown in an extra coat—too large for me, but the warmth would be most welcome. I accelerated as we hit the street, the freeway dead ahead.
We wouldn’t be taking it.
The road out of Portland was clogged solid with cars, vans, trucks—anything with wheels that would roll had fled in the initial panic, and many had run dry of gas on the road. There wasn’t enough equipment, time, or energy now to deal with removing the blockage; instead, the police had simply blocked off the freeway itself. I veered right instead, taking a side road, and checked the aetheric for guidance. The van eased in behind me, a silver ghost moving almost silently through the gray day. There were still vehicles on the road, but most people seemed to be staying inside, glued to whatever news agencies still broadcasted. Few wanted to leave the illusion of safety for whatever might be available elsewhere, until the illusion collapsed.
And then, of course, it would be too late, just as it had been for so many in Portland and in Kansas and Missouri. Not everyone was dead there, it seemed, but those who were trapped were—according to the scattered news reports—rapidly devolving into chaos. It was spreading fast.
The road I located was a small, two-lane blacktop, but it was clear of any traffic, and I opened the throttle and flew. Misty rain began, but the jacket kept me warm and relatively dry. Behind me, the van turned on its lights. We were back in the tall, silent trees, and although the glow of Seattle was behind us, what lay in front seemed dark by contrast.
Wilderness, more dangerous than ever.
The mine where the Wardens had been trapped was geographically not far from the city, but the terrain was difficult; as we rose into the more mountainous areas, I slowed around curves, blind corners, and finally had to pull over as I saw the road that lay ahead. Luis parked behind me, and we stood together in silence, in the misty rain, staring.
“When the Djinn go full crazy, they commit,” he said. The words were flippant, but his tone was not; there was no way to see this any other way than devastation. The forest was simply… gone, though fragments remained—the thick, splintered wrecks of trees, the tangled mess of branches and undergrowth ripped and thrown about like an uneven blanket. The road had disappeared under the mess. Part of it had burned, and smoke still rose in sullen wisps into the air.
It was eerily quiet. No birds called. No human voices, except ours, disturbed the silence. Except for the soft, almost subliminal hiss of the rain, it seemed lifeless.
“We need to clear the road,” I said. There were tons of debris to be shifted. Even though the trees had been splintered and ripped apart, the shredded mass was unbelievably heavy, and it would be the work of giants to clear enough of a path to allow the vehicles to pass—assuming that the road beneath was still intact, which was far from a given. I was beginning to calculate how much power it would take when I felt a sudden warm, dry breeze on the back of my neck.
I turned, and so did Luis.
Edie stood on the roof of the van, hands held out to her sides, and around her, light seemed to physically bend; it was as if she stood in full sunlight, while the rest of us were in shade. When I used Oversight to layer the aetheric into the real world, I saw the tremendous shadowy burst of power that rippled out of her, an aurora of the darkest colors—storm black, corpse gray, vein blue. It snapped together above us, a dizzying and complex arrangement of polarities and elements, heat and cold and brute-force power that almost ripped apart the sky as it reformed the clouds.
The sullen neutrality boiled and turned into ugly darkness, edged with gray-green. The whole sky seemed to turn on our axis, but no, those were the clouds, spinning slowly and disorientingly over the wasteland.
The tornado came down in a white, whipping rope that slammed into the field of debris. As it sucked up the shredded remains of trees, leaves, and limbs, it grew wider and darker, taking on the ominous appearance of a wall.
Edie’s control of that wall was precise, and it stopped its growth at the edges of the road. Luis and I had instinctively fallen back to the shelter of the van, and Alvin hadn’t even left the vehicle, but above us Edie stood firm and exalted, face upturned to the clouds. Her blond hair writhed and rippled in the whipping winds, but the pure force of the tornado was focused away from us. The noise was astonishing, a roar that achieved an almost human pitch, like a scream magnified into millions.
Beneath the tornado, the road cleared.
Edie lowered her gaze to the road, and the screaming, roaring destruction of the tornado obediently began to move at a leisurely pace, flinging off debris in all directions except ours. I saw shattered tree trunks hurled out in chunks that vanished into the far distance. Edie kept her full concentration on the tornado as it continued down the road.
“She can’t keep it up,” Luis said. He was clutching my arm in a painful grip now, and I could understand the impulse; the feeling of vulnerability in the face of what Edie had conjured was overwhelming. As a demonstration of raw power, it matched or exceeded anything I had ever seen—not just the power, but the fine control. “She’s killing herself.”
“No,” I said softly. “She’s not.” And that was, by far, more terrifying. He was right—Edie should have been draining herself at an awful pace, and putting her very life at risk. Instead, she was laughing, like the child she was, with joy. Her eyes had taken on an unnatural sheen that was—however impossibly—like that of a Djinn.
Whatever Pearl had done to these children, these survivors and thrivers in her training program… it had made them not as human as I had thought. They weren’t merely Wardens with more power; they were defying the very laws that governed nature, and power itself. Djinn were built to do what Edie was doing; it was coded in their smallest components. Humans were built to survive here, in this world, and it was a very different thing.
Edie’s tornado continued to sweep the road, back and forth, with precision and regularity, until the way was completely clear. Then she slowly closed her hands, and I felt the pressure above me collapse into overdriven chaos.
“Backlash!” Luis screamed, and tackled me to the ground just as that power erupted all around us in a hundred burning, stabbing lightning bolts, screaming down from the churning clouds. If a single bolt held the power of a nuclear device, this was the equivalent of the detonation of an entire nuclear arsenal.
And it lasted for almost a full minute before the energy spent itself back into the ground and the aetheric.
In the aftermath, my ears ringing from the splitting roar of thunder, I slowly raised my head. I was seeing afterimages of the lightning, even though I’d been facedown for most of it and had kept my eyes tightly closed. It had been like being trapped inside an open circuit, and my skin felt hot and fried.
The landscape looked, if possible, even more like something out of a nightmare. Instead of the debris lying in blankets, it was heaped into hills now, and the hills were on fire. Even the bare ground was blackened and smoking, and the surface of the road only twenty feet away seemed melted and sizzling.
Edie jumped down off the roof of the van and said, “That was cool, right? Did you see it? I’ve never seen lightning so close. It’s whiter the closer you are to it. Did you know that? Only there was some dust in the air; some of it looked orange because of that.” She was manic with excitement, I realized, utterly unconcerned for the damage that she had just done.
“You don’t do things like that!” Luis came up yelling, fists clenched, and Edie took a step back from him. “Didn’t anybody ever teach you how to balance your energy? How to ground it? What if there had been people around, or animals? How many would you have killed with that stunt?”