“The first man,” I said. “Did you know him? Recognize him? Had you seen him before?”
Gloria nodded, small braids bobbing around her face. “He was at camp, the camp last summer,” she said. “His name was Mr. Holden. I didn’t like it there, so my dad brought me home. But Brianna stayed.”
“Brianna,” I said. “She’s your friend?”
“Yeah. Her parents travel a lot. She spends a lot of time with me. She liked it there.” Gloria made a sleepy face of distaste. “They seemed nice, but I could tell they weren’t. I told Dad I wanted to leave, and he got me. Bri-Bri wouldn’t go.”
I took a guess. “Brianna is about your age? With blond hair that she wears in braids on the sides of her head?”
Gloria could not have looked more impressed if I had suddenly waved a magic wand and produced an elephant from thin air. “Yes. That’s Bri! How did you know?”
“Magic,” I said, straight- faced, and she smiled in delight. “Gloria. I need you to understand something. You, and your parents as well. You are not safe. These people could come for you again. I think they will try. You must stay on your guard, all right? And—” Now, I looked at Gloria’s mother steadily. “And you must be trained, so you understand what is ahead of you.”
Gloria’s mother flinched, then nodded. She patted her daughter’s shoulder gently. “It’s because you’re special, sweetie,” she said. “Like me. Like I used to be. And you need to understand what that means.”
Gloria looked over at her and said, very calmly, “I know already, Mom. I saw the news and stuff. It’s magic, right? Like those people who can make rain.”
Gloria’s mother heaved a sigh. “Yes. Like that. And yes, your powers are probably going to be weather. Like mine were.” Another sharp look in my direction. “Will the Wardens protect her?”
“I doubt the Wardens can protect themselves just now,” I said. “Look out for your own. That is all I can say.”
I started to go, but the pleading look in Gloria Jensen’s eyes stopped me, and instead, I took her small hand and said, “You are a fighter, Gloria Jensen. And you won’t let this stop you. I know how afraid you were in the car; I could feel that. I know how much pain you were in. But you’re strong. I believe you will make a great Warden someday.”
“But not right now?”
“No,” I said. “Not right now. And you shouldn’t let anyone make you try.”
I squeezed her fingers and poured some of Luis’s healing force through her, which brightened her eyes and damped down some of her lingering pain and fear. Then I nodded to her parents, and took my leave.
Before I did, though, I thought of one more question to ask her father.
The answer, ultimately, did not surprise me.
Brianna was, according to the roll I carefully examined, a girl named Brianna Kirksey. Her location was shown as La Jolla, which was consistent with the hospital in which we stood. When Turner consulted the Warden HQ officials, he found that Brianna’s parents were not merely traveling . . . they were dead. Gone in a recent Warden skirmish with something in Florida, whether supernatural in nature or not was unclear. But undoubtedly, both were gone. Their bodies had only recently been recovered.
“Do you think they’re killing off the parents?” Luis asked tensely. “To keep the ones they want?” He was doubtless referring to the deaths of Manny and Angela, but I couldn’t see how Pearl could have been behind that attack. It had seemed genuinely driven by human motives, not supernatural ones.
“Maybe it’s just an accident,” Turner said. “Poor kid. She’s an orphan and doesn’t even know it yet. You think she’s been at the Ranch all this time?”
“I doubt it,” I said. “Schools would have reported her as missing, unless they had some kind of word that she’d moved. Perhaps someone covered that by telling authorities she was being—what is the term? Homeschooled.”
“If they did that, they could have had her the whole time.” Turner let out a wordless growl. “Jensen had the chance to take that kid home.”
“Not his fault.” When the two men looked at me, I shrugged. “She wanted to stay. Mr. Jensen had no legitimate reason not to allow it. It was supposed to be a camp, after all, and she had her parents’ permission at the time, I suppose.”
“How many?” Luis asked. “How many kids at this camp?”
That was the question I had asked Gloria’s father on my way out of her room. “Hundreds,” I said. “And the camp was here, in California. Not Colorado.” Colorado was where the Ranch had been located when first we’d discovered it, but it had vanished without a trace before the Wardens and the Ma’at could come to finish the job. Pearl had covered her tracks.
I was no longer convinced that there was only one location, either. Perhaps there were dozens, scattered throughout the world. Pearl wasn’t any longer a physical presence upon the Earth; she was like an Oracle. She could be anywhere. Everywhere. The spider at the center of a dark, delicate web of power.
Brianna had likely been a sort of private joke between us. Look, I can take a child from your own hometown, corrupt her, send her after you anywhere I wish. Pearl could have used a resource local to California, after all. She’d made a special point of bringing Brianna here and using her, knowing we would find out who she was.
I had the scroll. I had the means to track the children, but she had set traps for me, too. Each name I touched in hopes of tracing them was a potential opening through which she could attack. Not all, certainly; I thought she could only attack through the connection to the children she controlled. But I had no way of knowing which doors were safe to open, until I had already opened them and been bitten by what lay on the other side. A nice dilemma, one that must have appealed to her sense of irony. I’d outmaneuvered her in gaining the list. She had outmaneuvered me in poisoning its usefulness.
“Hundreds of kids,” Turner echoed, appalled. “All Warden kids, you think?”
“Maybe not. It seems likely she would attract other children, for protective coloring. Possibly to use as distractions for us. Even the children gifted with powers won’t be of equal strengths. She’ll only keep the ones she thinks are most valuable. The others—the others are expendable.” I looked at Brianna, and thought of Ibby, in her miniature uniform with the poisonous darkness in her eyes. Ibby was expendable?
No.
“What are you thinking?” Luis asked me. He was touching Brianna’s forehead lightly, monitoring her sleep, but he was also reading my expression.
“I am thinking about history,” I said. “Your history, not mine. Child soldiers have been used in many eras. They’re still being used today, in some parts of your world. They’re easily trained, easily replaced. There is little doubt that Pearl would see their value in fighting against humans, but the Djinn . . . the Djinn do not, in general, share the same scruples. Some do, of course, particularly among the New Djinn. But others see all humans, of whatever age, as expendable. A child is no different than an adult, in terms of threat. You see?”
“No,” he said.
“The children are weapons against the Wardens,” I said. “Not the Djinn. But her fight is with the Djinn.”
Luis let out a slow breath. “You mean that she’s got something else. Something worse.”
“I think,” I said, my eyes fixed on Brianna’s sleeping, innocent face, “that we must stop this before she can finish with the Wardens and launch her true war, or my choices will become more and more limited.”
“To what Ashan wanted you to do in the first place.”
“Yes,” I said softly. “I feel like an animal in a trap, Luis. How many parts of myself will I have to cut away to survive?”
His gaze moved involuntarily to my hand, then wrenched away. I closed the metal fingers, and my phantom sensation told me that the metal was cold to the touch. I lifted the fist and opened it. Engraved in delicate etching on the bronze were the lines and whorls of my fingerprints, and the patterns in my palms—ghosts of what had been in flesh. I rubbed the fingertips together, and felt a phantom friction.