Perhaps David didn’t know, either. He shook his head and settled against the wall, tense and fluid, eyes penny-bright. “Not me,” he said. “Watch the lobby. They’ll be coming soon enough, now that they know they can’t cut us off from the aetheric any longer. You two should rest while you can.” That last was directed at Luis and me.
“The avatar,” I said. “It was an empty shell?”
“It was a Djinn once,” he said. “You know him. Go and look.”
I stared at him for a moment, frowning, and then nodded. I walked past Luis, who was now sitting again on the couch; he started to rise to go with me, but I gestured for him to stay.
This I needed to do for myself.
The body of the avatar lay limp on the wet floor tiles. Its eyes were open, but entirely dead black now. It was just flesh, real down to the circulatory system, and blood ran sluggishly down the tile crevices toward the drain, but it was leakage, not true bleeding. One had to be alive to bleed.
I crouched down, staring at his face. It seemed familiar, and I took each of the features individually, trying to place him. Djinn could, and did, change appearance, but for some reason once we settled on a human form, we didn’t often shift out of it and into another. It became part of our self-image, I supposed. My memory was long, but human faces had never formed much of a meaning for me.…
And then I knew.
He was one of my brothers, a True Djinn.
The memory came back to me, shockingly painful. His name was Xarus, and unlike me, he’d always been fascinated by humans. He’d walked in human flesh often, formed friendships, attachments. I’d always thought him peculiar, and weak.
Years ago, he’d been pulled apart on the aetheric—a natural accident, one of the few that could claim the life and soul of a Djinn. Had he not been trying to save others, humans, he could have saved himself, but he made the choice to destroy his immortal existence for the sake of a handful of fragile, temporary creatures.
And I had hated him for that. I’d hated the memory of him still more when I’d discovered that his flesh shell still lived and breathed. Jonathan, then the leader of the Djinn, had decreed that the flesh of Xarus, the avatar, be spared. I hadn’t known why, but perhaps Jonathan had known something. He often did, annoyingly. He’d had a gift for foresight that had bettered anyone’s, even Ashan’s.
Why, now, did I feel Xarus’s loss at last, seeing his lifeless body reduced to meat? Why did it matter?
I put my hand on his cheek. It felt like human flesh. It was human flesh, Xarus’s flesh, crafted like mine from the deepest instincts, the desires none of us ever acknowledged to be mortal, to know what their brief and bright lives were like…
It was the last of something that had been born immortal, and now it was gone.
I sat in the dark silence, with his blood crawling slowly toward the drain, and I grieved in ways that I never had, for one of my own lost. I’d felt anger before; I’d felt betrayal, and sometimes, loss.
But never emptiness. Never the raw knowledge of caring in the way that humans cared for each other, and missed each other.
And the ironic thing was that he’d been gone for almost a thousand years, and I’d never really liked him in the first place.
When I returned to the outer room, Luis was asleep. So was Joanne. David and I said nothing to each other, but he knew, and in a way, that eased my pain a little; I had more in common with him than I’d ever fully realized. More in common with all of them.
David was right. I needed to rest.
I couldn’t sleep.
Instead of resting, although I was tired, I found myself pacing in the narrow confines of the common room as Luis and Joanne sprawled and dreamed on the couches. There was something nagging at me, something beyond my grief and worry, or even the anticipation of a fight to come. There was something we had missed. Were missing. It ticked in the back of my mind like a bomb, and as the humans slept, as David and Rahel kept a silent and vigilant watch, I struggled to understand what it was that bothered me so much.…
Joanne woke, and David moved to speak with her in a low voice. She was upset; bad dreams, perhaps. I paid no attention. I admired her survival skills, but not her emotional instability.
“We should go,” I said to Rahel, who was still silent and vigilant at her post. Unlike a human, she didn’t feel the need to fidget, shift, relax, or even look away—the Djinn version of a motion sensor. “There’s no need to linger here now. We can defend ourselves adequately, if pressed, now that we can reach the aetheric.”
“Can we?” She smiled a cynical little smile, and lifted her shoulders in a tiny shrug. “Look at her in Oversight and tell me what you think then.”
By her she meant, presumably, Joanne. I leaned against the wall next to Rahel and shifted my eyes into the aetheric spectrum, and saw what she had seen… what David must have seen as well. Joanne was not an especially powerful Earth Warden, able to fight the effects of radiation as part of her natural gifts; Weather Wardens had no such protections, and she’d taken the very worst of the beating down in that pit.
She was saturated with it, cells cooking and dying from the inside out, as if she’d been trapped in an invisible microwave.
“If she and her child are to live,” Rahel said, “then David needs time to heal her. It won’t be easy, and it’s beyond the capacity of Earth Wardens. So we stay. She has to rest.” This time, just for a split second, her eyes veered from their focus to rest on me, a flash of gold and warmth. “And you, mistress, ought to rest as well. You’re not as strong as you believe.”
I settled into a chair then, unwillingly. I don’t need rest, I thought, but as soon as I released my iron hold on my body, it begged to disagree with aches blooming in every muscle. David’s whispering in the Djinn language was a soothing litany meant for Joanne, but it lulled me as well, into an exhausted tumble into the dark.
At the last second, what Rahel had said struck me, rather forcefully. If she and her child are to live…
Joanne Baldwin was pregnant, and it must have been David’s child—the child of a Djinn. And somehow, I hadn’t seen it.
I turned my gaze on her in Oversight, and yes, there it was, the clear though subtle signs of life stirring inside her—curiously, not Djinn life, but something more tethered to the human world. David’s child, but human in form and power.
Joanne and David had something more to fight for, it seemed, than just the world in general. The way that Luis—and yes, me—found strength in our love for Isabel.
David saw me watching them, and looked up. I smiled, just a little, and he returned it. “You think I’m mad, don’t you?” he asked.
I shrugged. “Perhaps,” I said. “And perhaps I’m not mad enough. But I believe that I’m learning.”
Waking up came with a surge of adrenaline and terror, and I didn’t know why. It was utterly silent. Nothing had changed in the room, except that David had fallen silent. I opened my eyes and saw Rahel at the window, looking out, and in the next second I saw her take a step back and allow the blinds to fall closed.
She turned to David, who looked up. They both nodded.
“Wake him,” Rahel said to me, and pointed to Luis, who was blissfully snoring on the couch. “We need everyone now.”
I shook Luis awake and endured his muttering about the lack of coffee, and we were joining hands to assess the situation on the aetheric when the first attack came.
Something wild and very angry slammed headlong into the sealed door. I was surprised that the cheap barrier held; it flexed against the impact, and a thin crack formed down the middle. “Brace it,” I said, and Luis nodded, throwing our combined Earth power into the wood to stiffen it to a packed-steel density. Another, stronger power overlaid ours.