“Jesus. I can’t believe I’m agreeing to this, to just leave them here, all alone, but…”
“You can’t!” The Warden Salvia said, and thrust herself out in front of the group of adults, staring at us with horror. “What are you talking about? You can’t just leave children down here. I don’t care how much food and water you give them—they’re just kids! We have to take them with us!”
“You don’t understand,” I said. “They’re not—”
“You don’t understand,” she said, and I felt the sharp prickle of Weather power coming to her call. “I’m not letting you do this. We’re not. Right?” She sent a glare at Mel, the nominal leader of their group. He was still frowning, trying to understand what was going on, but he slowly nodded.
“No matter what you might think they are, they’re kids,” he said. “And you can’t abandon them like this.”
“I’m saving their lives,” I said. “If you wish to start a fight here, then do so, but I warn you, I’m not inclined to lose.” I lowered my chin, and felt the instincts boil up inside me—all the anger and trapped desperation that I’d kept so well under control during the endless trip down. “I came to rescue you, but if you want to be left with them, I will oblige you. You’ll find that the view from within the tiger’s cage, with the tiger inside, is not as innocent or charming.”
Luis stepped in front of me. “This isn’t a fight. Listen to me,” he said. There was a quiet, controlled energy to him now, something that drew all their focus away from me. Unlike me, he invited their trust in a subtle application of Earth power that I couldn’t possibly have matched; I could feel it surrounding him like a warm, soft cloud. “These aren’t normal kids. I wish they were, believe me, but I saw them do things today that no adult Warden would have done, much less could have done.”
“Even so…” Salvia began, but he cut her off—softly but firmly.
“They destroyed a Djinn today,” he said. “Consumed him, like candy. You have no idea how dangerous they are, but we can’t let them out of here. There’s enough danger up there already.”
He stopped there, and the silence spoke for itself. The other Wardens shifted and exchanged looks; even Salvia looked shaken.
“I’m not just leaving them here to die,” Luis said. “We’ll send help for them, but we have to get out before they wake up, because believe me, if we don’t have a ton of barricade between us and Edie, she’ll burn us all without a second thought.”
That got them moving, though from the frown on Salvia’s face, I thought she wasn’t quite done with the issue yet; Luis and I joined hands and began forcing open the passage ahead. Behind us, we began to let the debris fall in a curtain, to block off the cave again.
Burying two children alive.
Mel turned toward us, eyes large and all pupil in the fire-lit darkness. “We can’t just leave them alone,” he said. “I’m sorry, but I can’t do it.”
Before I could stop him, he lunged through the falling rocks, and was gone.
“Dammit!” Luis spat, and tried to slow the flood of debris. I fought him. “Cass, let me get him out of there!”
“No,” I said. “He made the choice. He knows the risks. Let him go. Maybe he’s right. Maybe an adult should stay with them. Just not one of us. If Edie got her hands on an Earth Warden…”
Luis understood; he could imagine what she’d do. I felt the shudder move through his flesh. “Yeah,” he said. “We have to keep going. You pulled the pin on that grenade. Focus on the fill behind us. I’ll do the front.”
From then on, it was pure concentration, effort, sweat, dirt, and pain, physical pain that drove everything else away, for a time. Moving so much earth was hard enough the first time; the burn was blowtorch-hot in my muscles now, aching in my head. The air was fresh, at least, and kept as cool as the Wardens could manage.
There was no room for claustrophobia, only focus. On effort.
I felt the roar of power explode behind us when Edie and Alvin woke; we’d tunneled a long way toward the surface, and there were metric tons of rock, dirt, and clay between us, but even so, I felt the temperature of the air ratchet up, trying to broil us alive. Edie’s pique, expressed in fire. The Weather Wardens controlled it, looking shocked by the child’s power. Salvia, at least, realized what might have happened had we given in to good impulses. She was the first to say what we all knew: “Mel’s dead. They killed him.”
“Burned him,” one of the Fire Wardens said, shaken. Phyllis, I thought. “They burned him alive. All he wanted to do was help them.”
Luis didn’t say that he’d warned them.
We didn’t say anything at all, just put our hands and heads back to the hard work of saving us. Luis and I were gasping for breath, sweating, trembling by the end of it; it was only the helping hands of the Wardens tearing their flesh and fingernails that broke through the last barriers. We were too weak.
And so it was that we were helpless, drained, and entirely off guard when the harsh glare of the sunlight through smoke resolved and showed us what stood before us.
“I’ve been kept waiting,” Ashan, my Djinn brother, lord, and master, said. He stood facing us, flanked by others, a row of impenetrable and immortal force. He’d clothed himself in a human shell, a pale and perfect imitation of humanity down to suit and gleaming silk tie, but his eyes were a bright, unearthly swirl of colors that, taken together, made up white. “I don’t like to be kept waiting, humans.” He looked at the Djinn standing at his right and left, and nodded. “Take them.”
There was a sound around us then, a kind of crystalline creaking, like frozen wind chimes, and everything seemed to grow darker. Even the Djinn seemed surprised. Ashan lifted his head, and whatever he saw on the aetheric made him gesture to the other Djinn in a blur.
But it was too late. I don’t know what descended on them, and on us. I saw the Djinn grabbing for the Wardens, for Luis, and Ashan came for me, but something got between us. Something worse than Ashan.
Something that had me.
I tried to rise. Tried to fight.
Darkness took me down, fast and merciless, and the last thing I saw was Ashan and the Djinn retreating, and abandoning me to my fate.
They kept me in the darkness, and the worst of it was that I didn’t know why. Why keep me alive? Why not kill me outright, as would have been best and safest?
But there was no doubt they wanted me alive. Suffering. Waiting.
I was aware of time passing, but there was nothing I could do except count the ticking seconds by the measured, rapid pace of my heartbeats. I was confined in a tiny space, but there was air flowing against my face. Whoever had me didn’t wish me dead.
Not yet.
I had no illusions that miracle—or nightmare—would last forever, but it seemed to stretch to the breaking point. My mind was full of questions and fears. The Wardens we’d rescued… the children we’d abandoned.
And, always, Luis. I could no longer feel his presence, or the bond between us… yet I wasn’t dying the slow, starving death of a Djinn cut off from the aetheric, either, so he must have been alive. That was all I could hold to for hope.
I was in a prison. A prison built to hold Djinn, indefinitely; it would do equally well to hold a Warden, no matter what their specialty. I could call no powers, not even a spark of light, and the tiny opening around me seemed to shrink, inch by inch, as my panic increased. I forced myself to breathe more and more slowly, focus on small sensations and details. The Djinn wouldn’t understand human instincts, human frailty; if I panicked in this tomb, I would go mad before they noticed my lapse.
And then the pain began.
It started in small ways at first, a burning sensation on the outside of my left thigh, a pinch in my right upper arm… and then it grew worse. It wasn’t burning, or pinching. It was something pressing into me, with exquisite slowness. Pushing, and pushing, and pushing, sharp points digging until they broke the skin and bored deeper.