Ah, yes, of course. I had chopped off my hand.
Their reactions made perfect sense, then.
“I’m all right,” I said. Indeed, I was. My pain had receded, and the light- headed feeling was going away. The absence of the invading darkness left me feeling unreasonably strong. “Were you able to stop the bleeding?” As if I was inquiring politely about the health of a distant relative, or the weather. Something that had no bearing on my own ability to survive the night.
Luis swallowed. His skin looked cream- pale beneath its burnish of bronze. “It’s stopped,” he said. “I deadened the nerves and sealed the blood vessels. But it’s not good, Cass. Christ, why?”
“Pearl,” I said. “If I hadn’t acted, she’d have destroyed me. It had to be done.”
“I could have stopped it,” Rashid said. I gave him a long look. “Perhaps.”
“It wouldn’t matter,” I said. “You wanted the list. I can’t give it to you. I couldn’t depend on your goodwill, Rashid. Or would you say that you would have acted to save me, regardless?”
He didn’t answer. He didn’t have to. I’d felt it from him, felt that avarice and pure, selfish desire. I knew him.
I had once been Rashid, or very like him.
“It was the only way,” I said, and for some reason it came out almost kind. I deliberately hardened my tone. “If you want to make amends, Rashid, you may. The girl, Gloria. Go and get her. There will be no bargain. You will do it because I tell you to do it.”
Rashid’s eyes widened. He looked at the table, where my blackened, severed hand still lay pinned by the knife. Not dead. Quiescent.
“If I save her now,” he said, “you will lose your way to the one you seek. I can follow instead, and retrieve the girl before more harm is done.”
“She’s alone,” I said. “She’s in pain. She’s a child.
More harm is done every second. Do this, Rashid. You owe this to me.”
He thought about that, and unwillingly inclined his head.
Then he vanished.
In the silent aftermath of his departure, Ben Turner said, “You cut your hand off. Jesus Christ, you cut. Your hand. Off.”
“It wasn’t my hand,” I said. “Not anymore. And it couldn’t be saved.”
Turner looked a little queasy, and stared hard at the unmoving black thing that sat crouched and nailed to the tabletop. It still didn’t look dead. It looked like it was simply waiting for an opening, for a careless moment. I was not entirely certain the knife could hold it, if it truly exerted itself, although Rashid had certainly buried the metal deeply into the wood.
“Yeah,” Turner said softly. “I see your point. So . . . what the hell do we do with that now?”
“You are a Fire Warden, aren’t you?” I asked. “Burn it. Please.”
He sent me a narrow, disbelieving look, then silently asked Luis if he agreed. Luis did, with a bare, silent nod. Turner took in a deep breath, focused his energy, and the wood on the table, for a respectable distance around the severed hand, burst completely into flame.
The hand began to struggle against the knife, jerking, slicing itself blindly as it tried to escape. Luis and I opened the floodgates of power to pour it into the wood the hand was touching. What wasn’t yet burning warped, folding over the fingers, trapping it. Fire, metal, earth—it was bound by all the powers, save air, which in this case fed the fire. The hand flopped wildly, trying to pull itself free, and finally, with a crackle of baking bones and sizzling flesh, went completely, utterly limp.
Dead.
A black, viscous liquid flowed from the severed stump of the wrist, turning wood to powdery, rotted ash where it touched, and smothering the flames. But it didn’t live long beyond its flesh host, and vanished into black, greasy smoke that faded into nothing on the air.
Turner kept the fire burning hot until my hand was a lacework of bones, bright white and crumbling, and then he let the flames die.
He promptly stumbled to the bathroom and slammed the door. I watched him go without comment. Luis, moving like a man who’d taken a gut wound, let go of me and walked to the kitchen, opened the refrigerator, and took out a beer. He popped the cap from it, still staring into a distance full of horror, then upended the bottle and drank until all that was left was foam. Then he leaned forward and rested the cold empty glass against his forehead.
I stood up, swaying a little from the loss of blood and lingering shock, and retrieved the bronze hatchet from where it lay in a pool of crimson on the floor. I cleaned it carefully against the towel wrapped around my left wrist, then sat down on the sofa and worked the tight knots of cotton twine that bound the towel in place.
“What the hell are you doing?” Luis asked wearily, and tried to stop me. I shoved him away with my good hand and held him there, pulling at the frayed cord with my teeth until it loosened enough for me to slip the towel away.
I had enough control of my body to keep the blood vessels clamped, and the nerves deadened. I wrapped the twine tight again, then contemplated the bronze weapon in my right hand.
“Cass.” His voice broke a little. “Cass, what the hell are you doing?” He was afraid, I realized, that I had gone entirely mad. That I was about to start mutilating myself again, to no real purpose.
“Shhhhh,” I said, and reached out with power. The metal of the weapon softened, melted, formed itself into a complex and delicate structure. I built it with a Djinn’s instinctive understanding of the world, of my own lovely, finely engineered body, the interconnectedness of all things. I think in a way Luis was right—I was quietly, oddly mad. It had seemed completely rational to me to do these things, from the moment I had recognized that I had a choice none of the others—not even Pearl—had foreseen. Sever my hand. Burn the remains.
Now the same ruthless, cold Djinn instinct was telling me to make myself a new hand, out of the weapon that had been my salvation.
I began by building hard metal bones, then overlaying them with fine, strong cables in patterns that mirrored the muscles and tendons of my right hand. Then, over all of that, a light, flexible bronze skin. Fingers. Even delicately etched fingernails, each slightly and sharply pointed, like finely manicured claws.
Then I slipped the complex mechanism over the open stump of my arm and joined up the parts, with little regard to what was metal and what was flesh. It fused together with a hiss and a smell of burning flesh, and I began to move my fingers slowly, one after another, before Luis’s wide, disbelieving eyes.
Then I made a fist, with my new bronze hand, and uncurled it to lay it flat in my lap. It was an exact mirror of my right hand, perfect in every visible detail. Even the shine of the metal mimicked living flesh. It was as if I’d dipped my living hand into metal.
I heard the water running in the bathroom, and then the door opened and Turner came out, wiping his mouth with a towel. “We need to get you an ambulance and—what the hell is that?” He sounded like a man who’d gone beyond surprise, into weary resignation.
I held up my metal hand and said, “No ambulance. No hospital.” I wiggled the fingers to show him that it worked, then lowered it and closed my eyes. “I will sleep now.”
I don’t know, but I imagined that Turner and Luis exchanged long looks. I simply drifted off into a half-drugged distance of shock, artificial calm, and true, genuine exhaustion.
It felt like I slept only a few minutes before coming awake again, shaking. The calm and shock had left me, the cold Djinn certainty had left me, and there was only the knowledge of what I had done to my fragile human flesh.
Luis was sitting beside me on the couch. I looked mutely at him, my eyes blurring with cold, lost tears, and he put his arm around me, pressed his lips to my temple, and whispered, “Thank God. Thank God you’re back.”