“Yes,” I said. “Ready.”
Unexpectedly, what he gave me was not addresses, but coordinates—numbers. I memorized them and repeated them back, and then, just as quickly, Lewis was gone, the phone call ended.
When I tried to call back, the number didn’t respond.
The Wardens were facing dangers that had nothing to do with me. Even the Djinn were involved. I had the strong feeling that my survival now rested solely with me, and if I wished to find any kind of justice for Manny Rocha, any kind of justice for his wife and his daughter, then I would need to save myself first.
Alone.
I descended the remaining flights of stairs and slipped out a service entrance. My appearance was no longer simply exotic, but dangerously obvious. I would need things.
Luckily, the human world was full of them.
I dyed my hair in the restroom of a gas station. The harsh chemical smell clung to me even after I had wiped away the excess and dried my hair as best I could using the bathroom’s blower mechanism. It no longer looked like a white puffball, at least. Instead, it looked like a pinkpuffball, lighter at the ends. I resembled, I realized, one of the unhealthy-looking pink snacking cakes in the convenience store’s shop.
With the last of my cash, I bought changes of clothes and makeup. I deliberately chose unusual styles, in garishly colored layers, and made up my face in dramatic neon strokes. I looked young and outrageous, and I noticed that following this transformation most humans avoided eye contact with me.
I was no longer immediately recognizable as the pale albino woman in white who had been spotted at the scene of so many deaths, and that was all I wanted.
Lewis’s coordinates led me to the heart of Albuquerque, in OldTown, to a shaded spot next to the blocky tan-and [blot s-brown structure of the NationalAtomicMuseum. It was just a bare patch of earth, and a large flat rock. Humans had scrawled obscure messages on its surface, but time was bleaching them into history, and I wondered for a moment how he expected me to find anything in so empty a place.
One of the obscure messages caught my eye, because it was the glyph of the Wardens—an odd place for it to be lurking, most surely. I traced it with a fingertip, and then lifted the rock.
Beneath it was damp earth, but it formed a slight hollow—as if something had been buried beneath. I dug with my fingers and brushed cool metal—a cylinder, a type of container with a screw-on lid. It was welded shut, in a way that any competent Earth Warden would have been able to unseal but that would resist simple human tampering; I burned my fingertips opening it, but the reward was a folded piece of note-paper and three plastic bags.
The note, although unsigned, was clearly from Lewis Orwell, and it said,
If you’re holding this, you’re an Earth Warden in trouble, and I decided you were worth helping. The bags contain cash, two new credit cards with high limits, and a set of clean ID documents for you to alter. One thing: If you use any of this without my authorization, I’ll kill you. Call first. You know the number.
I presumed that since Lewis had sent me here, there was little need for another phone call. I opened each bag in turn. Cash—several thousand dollars in old bills. Two credit cards, as he’d promised, in the neutral-gender name of Leslie Raine. The identification—a Texas driver’s license, birth certificate, and passport—were in the same name. The photograph was of an extremely generic human, androgynous. I concentrated on each of them in turn, adjusting the pigments within the photographs until the image more closely resembled me, including my newly pink hair.
I wrote my name and the date on the back of the note and put it back in the cylinder, sealed it, and buried it beneath the rock again.
Leslie Raine.
It seemed as much my name as any other.
I left Albuquerque on a newly purchased motorcycle. The motor vehicle permit that had come with my new identity, I was told, would not allow me to operate the machine legally until I took the tests necessary, but despite my new disguise I didn’t feel comfortable placing myself on police property to achieve that goal. I simply asked to see an example of a motorcycle license, which would allow me to make the necessary alterations to the license I had.
I solemnly lied to the vendor that I would go straight to the appropriate authority to obtain the proper documents. He was less inclined to question me once the credit card purchase went through, and I added a black helmet, white leather jacket, gloves, and chaps. I donned those in the changing room, picked up the helmet, mounted the motorcycle, and taught myself the mechanics of it in a few moments.
“You sure you can handle that?” the salesman asked me as I went over the controls. “That’s a lot of motorcycle, lady.”
Indeed, it was. The motorcycle was a sleekly designed Victory Vision in gray and steel, and it had cost the Wardens quite a bit of money. Still, I felt it was better than buying a car; I was doubtful that I’d want to be trapped in a steel box for hours on end, but this seemed freeing. Powerful.
I started the engine and savored the shivering purr of power. I pressed the throttle and listened to the finely tuned roar, and for the first time in my human life, it felt entirely natural to smile.
“It’s perfect,” I said. I put on the helmet, raised the kickstand, and put the machine into gear.
The salesman waved good-bye to me in my rearview mirror. I concentrated on operating the motorcycle. It was a complex dance of balance, intuition, and control, and I felt a rush of excitement I had not felt since falling into flesh. This—this was freedom. I was alone, I had escaped my enemies, and for the moment, at least, I could simply exist.
I opened the throttle as I left the city limits, and the motorcycle leaped eagerly into action with a deep-throated roar. The vibration rang through me, clear and clean, and there seemed to be nothing ahead of me but empty, open road. The wind pushed at me like a solid wall, seeking entrance to my clothes, my hair, fanning across my neck in a cooling jet.
In time, my human concerns returned, whispering in the silence. Manny and Angela are dead. You can’t simply run. You owe a debt.
It was a debt that Luis Rocha did not want me to pay. I could leave, and he would be happy with that outcome.
I decided, with deep regret, that I would not be. I needed answers. I needed to be sure that the child Manny and Angela had left behind knew the truth about her parents—their dedication, their bravery, their kindness to me.
She would need to know the truth about their deaths, as well. I had part of the answer, but not all. Scott Sands had been no normal Warden, and there had been a reason he had gone after Manny.
I could not believe that it would simply end.
The Ranch.
I would need to find what it meant, or it was likely that Luis and Isabel would never really be safe.
The trip from Albuquerque to Sedona, Arizona, took only about five hours—a remarkably short time, given the pleasurable experience of riding the motorcycle. It felt like effortless gliding, a reminder of all that I had once been. Despite the helmet, I felt less closed-in than I had in either airplanes or cars, and the sense of the wind passing over me, the sun beating hot on my back, gave me a kind of peace I hadn’t realized I had missed.
As a Djinn, I had been connected to the Mother through Conduits—for most of my memory that Conduit had been a Djinn named Jonathan, a mortal who had died well before recorded human history had begun. Many thousands of years later—and only a year ago, if so much—Jonathan had chosen to die so that his friend David could live on, and that had splintered the Djinn. It had ultimately divided us, made Ashan the connection for the Old Ones, like me, and David the Conduit for New Djinn.
But there were other ways to reach the Mother than the Conduits, and the place I was going was one. I had chosen the location that was not only closest, but most likely to welcome me; the Chapel of the Holy Cross in Sedona was holy to Djinn as well as humans, and served two purposes. The human worship was unimportant to me, but in that chapel resided an avatar of the Earth herself—an Oracle.