The power simply passed into the boy, and… vanished. Gone.
The Djinn shrieked and tried to pull himself back; he managed, at least partially, but as he tried to re-form into a visible body it was plain that what was left was mutilated and badly wounded.
And the boy hadn’t so much as raised a hand.
“You should go,” Alvin said to him. “I really don’t want to hurt you. We just want to get by and save those people. Could you go?” He was astonishingly polite, but also completely unmoved by the torture he’d just inflicted. In his own way, he was dead, I realized. Merely better mannered than an average living person.
The Djinn snarled and attacked—not the boy, but me. I felt the hot, burning premonition of the assault an instant before the power erupted out of the ground below my feet and connected with a snap in the air above.
I was the conduit for the energy of the lightning bolt. And as I had no Weather Warden abilities, there was no chance I would have survived such an experience… except that Edie simply stopped it in midstrike, leaving only a pop of energy that exploded somewhere above, and a hissing sizzle of steam. In the time it had taken me to realize what was coming, the child had utterly destroyed the Djinn’s attack, without moving from her seat in the van.
Alvin shook his head and said, “Okay, then.” He sounded sad, but resigned, and in the next instant a complex net of something that I couldn’t quite see, couldn’t quite understand, emerged from the boy’s slender body. It was like a living thing, something boneless and alien, but still anchored in his power and flesh… and it engulfed the wounded Djinn and simply ate him. No sound, no drama, no flashes or explosions. It was… easy.
I felt utterly, filthily sick, and grabbed for Luis. He seemed just as unsteady as I felt, but the two of us balanced each other. “God,” he breathed, staring at the boy. “My God.”
Alvin looked up and at us with a sudden, eerily predatory focus. He said nothing, but the two of us went still, instinctively. The thing that had emerged from him was slowly crawling back into his skin—a thing I could almost see, almost understand, though I didn’t wish that. Not at all. “I won’t hurt you,” he told us blandly. “You’re not enemies.” I heard the unspoken yet hanging at the end of that sentence.
“How many Djinn can you handle like that?” Luis asked. He was struggling to sound offhand about it, as if he were merely interested and not terrified by the child’s potential. Alvin shrugged.
“Three or four,” he said. “It gets harder the more there are, of course. I get full.”
I saw Luis’s Adam’s apple bob as he swallowed. He glanced at me, and I knew what he was thinking. I thought it—felt it—as well. “Full,” I repeated with as little emphasis as I could manage. “You consume them.”
“Of course,” Alvin said. “I wouldn’t let them go to waste. Not unless I can’t help it.”
He kept watching us with that eerily flat interest for another long moment, and then the last of the—shadows?—retreated back into him, and he was just a little boy again. Tired, and small for his age.
He trudged back to the van, opened the door, and climbed in next to Edie, who leaned out the window and said, “Can we go now, please?”
Luis said under his breath, “We can’t. We can’t do this.”
“Do what?” I whispered back. “Use them to rescue trapped Wardens? Yes, we can. And will.”
“We can’t win when they turn on us.”
I smiled grimly. “No,” I agreed. “No, we can’t.”
And then I climbed back on my motorcycle and fired up the engine. When I looked back at him, Luis was still standing there, staring at me, but he shook his head in surrender and got back in the van.
And we drove down that smoky, lifeless, hellish road toward what I could only think of as the inevitable.
In about a quarter of a mile, the road curved and ended in a huge, tumbled mound of steel wreckage. It had once been some kind of structure, likely an administration building located near the mine shaft.
The only sign of the mine itself was an inset depression in the bare ground, curved like a bowl to a depth of almost twenty feet at its center. Featureless and silent.
I parked, and Luis pulled his vehicle in next to mine. As the engines died, the only sounds were the creaking of bent metal in the wind and the crackle of the fires burning sullenly around us. No birds crossed the silent, watching sky. This is what the world will become, I thought. Wreckage and emptiness, with nothing left to feel, or remember, or mourn.
Nothing but Pearl, staring into the dead cinders of her triumph, and smiling.
Luis and the two children got out of the van, and he grabbed the other canvas bag full of supplies. Mine was still secure against my back, but I opened it and checked the stoppered beer bottle that held our emergency option: Rashid. That, I rewrapped carefully and added it back to my bag.
“Right,” Luis said, as I nodded my readiness. “Cassiel and I will open the tunnel. Edie, your job is—”
“I know what I’m supposed to do,” she interrupted, looking annoyed. “I’m not stupid. I’m the one who keeps you breathing. And Alvin’s the one who kills Djinn. Right?”
“Yes,” I said, since Luis didn’t seem to be inclined to answer at all. “We won’t try to keep the tunnel open the entire length; we’d need to reinforce as we go, and there won’t be time. We’ll allow it to collapse behind us. We can open it again in stages as we come up.”
“You hope,” Edie said. “Maybe you won’t be strong enough, and you trap us down there with you. What do we do then?”
“Die,” I said blandly, and met her eyes. “What is your point?”
She raised her eyebrows just a fraction, and—unexpectedly—giggled. “None, I guess,” she said. When she smiled, she looked like a lovely, adorable child, with a dimple denting her right cheek and light shining in her eyes. It was unfair, and I felt a surge of bitter anger at Pearl again. What might this child have been, if left to her own destiny? What might any of them have been? She’d taken the future of the next generation of Wardens and… twisted it. Corrupted it.
She’d left me no choices, and I hated her for that.
I closed my eyes for a second, and turned blindly toward Luis. My hand found his by instinct, and squeezed tightly. When I finally looked, I saw him frowning at me in concern. “You okay?” he asked. I nodded. I wasn’t, because knowledge had come to me in a cold, furious burst, and illuminated everything, every hard, cutting corner of the road ahead. Even if by some miracle we survived all this, what future did these Warden children have ahead of them? The Wardens themselves had been destroyed and didn’t even realize it yet because there was nothing to take up the fight after them.
Brennan had only seen the necessity of saving every possible Warden for the fight now. I was seeing that we needed every one of them for what would come after… when these superpowered Warden children might be left alive, disillusioned, and bitterly angry at the world. We couldn’t only think about the immediate. The long-term outlook was just as grave.
I pulled in a breath and said, “Yes.”
We focused our attention ahead and down, on the hole. “Opinions?” Luis asked. “We could pack the sides, or push the dirt up. What’s best?”
“Up,” I said, without really thinking. “Packing the sides will use more force. We need to conserve power.”
He nodded, rolled his shoulders to loosen his muscles, and reached out his right hand. I held out my mangled left; part of the metal that served as skin for the artificial muscle-cables was ripped away, and two of the cables had sheared, leaving most of the hand useless and stiff, but it didn’t matter, in terms of conveying and directing power.
Earth power rose up through Luis, thundered into me in a flow like a geyser, and out through both of us into the ground… and the ground exploded in a fountain of loose dirt and rock that piled up to the sides, like a volcanic eruption of soil. We dug down twenty feet, and then I nodded to Edie. “Help us down,” I told her, and before I could finish saying it, a dizzying combination of winds had lifted us, stabilized us in an upright position, and moved us over the hole. She could have dropped us, and I thought it must have crossed her mind, but instead she lowered the four of us with elaborate care slowly until our feet touched the loose ground.