Undone (35 page)

She came toward me.

I didn't move.

She knelt next to me and put her hand on my hot pink hair, feeling for the fracture.

I opened my eyes, bared my teeth, and dislocated my arm to wrap fingers over her wrist. It was a tenuous hold, but she was startled, and in those vital seconds I ripped power from her in great, bloody swatches, stripping her clean of all aetheric energy. She wasn't as powerful as Luis, but she would serve.

I melted away my chains.

She didn't even have the ability to scream. I held her silent for it, and stared into her wide, agonized eyes, drinking in her pain.

I let her form a word. Just one. “Please . . .”

“I am Djinn,” I told her softly. “Do you understand?
Djinn.
And I give you the mercy of the Djinn.”

I sealed her mouth with contemptuous ease by stilling her vocal cords; all she was able to produce was a torturous, hoarse buzzing. I put a knee in her back to hold her down and rifled through her pockets. I took the gun, extra clips of bullets, her identification, and a curious medallion holding a silver key.

Then I put the gun to her head, released her vocal cords enough that she could whisper, and said, “Where is the child Isabel Rocha?”

“You Djinn bitch,” the Warden wept. “You
hurt me
.”

“And I am not finished,” I promised. “Tell me where to find the child.”

“Fuck you!”

“I'm not attracted to you,” I said. “But if by that you mean you won't help me, then I have no use for you.”

I sealed her mouth forever by exploding a blood vessel in her brain. Relatively painless, and instantly fatal.

It was better than she deserved.

I dragged her body behind a sofa and covered it in silky furs. The bloodstains came up easily, and then I methodically searched the room for a way out.

There was only one.

The way the Warden wanted me to go.

I transformed the neon yellow jumpsuit and prisoner shoes into soft leather trousers and jacket in light pale pink, with war slashes of black. Heavy riding boots.

I moved the curtain aside, expecting another room . . . but it was a hallway, like a long, curving throat. Slick and featureless. There was no sound.

She knows I'm here,
I thought.
She's waiting.
My Djinn side refused to say anything, or to give me the name of my fear.

I sensed nothing but cold and ice ahead of me.

I moved on, and as I did, doorways appeared—closed, with no markings. Each felt slightly different beneath my fingers. One was hot enough to blister, even at a brush. One felt damp, and I sensed a vast pressure of water behind it. One was a living grave, rich with the smell of rotting things and the work of scavengers.

The voice vibrated in my ears the way Luis's had done, but it was not Luis. It was not any voice I knew. No, it was
every
voice I knew, Djinn or human, a massive and strange chorus of sound.

I stopped where I was, my hand on a closed door, and felt every nerve shrink with fear.

“She deserved it,” I said.

The laughter was the laughter of every murderer. Mocking, cold, and free of any trace of a soul.
So do you,
the voice said.
For your crimes, murderer of the eternal.

The nacreous hallway began to close in on me. The pearly layers grew and thickened before my eyes, pushing inward. It would grind me apart. I looked behind and found the way back already closed to me. This structure was the mouth of a hungry predator, and I had no escape but down its throat, the way it wanted me to go. There was something dark and terrible at its heart, waiting to devour.

I took a deep breath and opened the door that stank of earth and rot, and plunged into darkness instead.

If I died here, I would choose my death.

 

Grave dirt filled my mouth, my nose, my ears. It was heavy and wet on my skin. I knew death intimately, and it tried to push inside me, insistent as a blind worm.

Interesting,
the alien voice whispered to me.
But you cannot leave me. I know you now. I will have you.

I spat it out and pushed through the dirt, swimming in muck, until I fetched up against a hard surface in the darkness. Nacre. The slick, pearly surface had a living structure to it, like bone. Why? Why have this room of grave dirt?

I had no time for riddles.

I blew the wall apart in an explosion of shards, and the house—if one could call it a house—
shrieked.
My strike, even as powerful as it was, had only opened a hole the size of a fist. I battered at it, widening it, and the house fought to close its wound even as I struggled to widen it. The instant I paused, it shrank the gash again.

I rained down destruction until the hole was barely wide enough to pass my shoulders, and then wriggled in. This was the most dangerous moment of all; if my concentration faltered, the house would close the gap and chop me in half or amputate a limb. I could sense the Voice screaming, though I had stilled my eardrums and rendered myself effectively deaf. I'd shut off all other senses, too, save sight. I wanted no sensory attacks to distract me at a critical moment.

The nacre had jagged, knife-sharp edges, and it sliced my skin as I crawled and wiggled through the narrow opening. I felt it shift as I hauled myself through, and for a heart-skipping moment I felt the sharp edges press on my thighs enough to draw blood. It wanted to snap shut. I didn't let it, but it was a very near thing. I hauled my feet free seconds before the nacre mouth snapped closed, gnashing only air.

I was on the white gravel outside of the white house, on the smooth, curving side facing away from the park and the children. I rolled to my feet and began to run, releasing my hold on my senses. I would need every advantage now.

This time, the human inhabitants of the compound did not ignore me. I drew shouts, screams, and shots. One bullet grazed my leg, but I dodged the rest, using cover and even the bodies of others. I had little empathy for anyone caught in the cross fire just now. They were only faces, and the terrible thing behind me, the terrible knowledge pressing in on me . . .

What was in that white building, so close to where those children played . . . was nothing less than a monster.

And these adults served it
willingly
.

A squad of armed soldiers came after me, but I was no longer unarmed, thanks to the gun I had taken from the dead Earth Warden. I dropped two men with shots; the others with a burst of power that crippled them, at least temporarily. I had no interest in killing them, but I didn't particularly care if that was the outcome.

“Ibby!” I screamed, turning in a circle.
“Isabel Rocha!”

I ran on, crying out her name, searching for her individual whisper in all this chaos.

The park.

I reversed course, avoiding the hail of bullets by dodging behind a truck. To get to the park, I would have to go around the bone house, that terrible white place that housed the heart of the monster.

Those hunting me had grown organized in their attacks, and there was little cover left. Even the confused civilians had withdrawn.

I took in a deep breath and dove for the ground. It parted for me like thick water, and I used my body like a dolphin's, pushing against the resistance in sinuous curves.

The bone house extended
down
, into the ground. I sensed its vibration and swam away from it, careful not to touch it.

My breath grew hot in my lungs, rancid and used, and I kicked against the dirt and swam up, tearing my way through the roots of grasses to the surface.

The children were being rounded up in the park. Unlike the rejects I had seen in the forest, dirty and ragged, ill-fed, these were glossy, lovely children in impeccable clothing, all of stainless white.

There were perhaps twenty of them, and they were all under the age of ten.

“Ibby!” I screamed, and one small face came into focus, kindling like a star.

“Cassie!” she shrieked, and threw herself forward, racing toward me.

She was intercepted by one of the adult caregivers, who closed ranks between me and the children. The woman who restrained Isabel was wearing a medallion similar to the one in my pocket, the one that held a silver key.

Ibby stretched out her arms to me, tears streaming down her face, and I aimed the gun at the woman blocking her. “Put her down,” I said. There were more soldiers coming now. The tower guards also realized something was wrong, and of a surety, at least two of them could reach me where I stood. I was an easy target.

But I wasn't leaving without the child.

“Put her down,” I repeated, “or I'll kill you all.”

The woman, wide-eyed, shook her head and held on to the struggling child.

“Your choice,” I said, as cold as I had ever been in Djinn form.

I shot her. Isabel shrieked and fell, rolling on the grass. Another adult scooped her up and ran away with her, toward the pearl white building. I saw her chubby arms still reaching out for me, her tear-streaked face desperate, and in that instant I felt the anguish inside me coalesce into true hatred.

I couldn't stop the instincts she triggered, the feverish need to protect her at all costs. I'd kill them all to save her, if I had to, and never look back.

She's
my
child,
the Voice whispered in my ears.
She will never be yours. I will make her one of my warriors, and you and your kind will be wiped from existence, thrown into the darkness where not even memories remain. She will destroy you.

Isabel disappeared into the door of the white house, which sealed itself against me.

I had to abandon her. It was the hardest thing I had ever done, to turn away, to run with the sick taste of rage and defeat in my mouth.

I darted around buildings, running with as much speed as I could manage. I had no goal now, nothing but the blind desire to live, escape, find another way to get to Isabel. Bullets spanged and cracked around me, and sometimes found their mark. I couldn't heal myself from the wounds, but I could close it off and ignore it for a time, and I did.

It burst upon me, with a blinding jolt, that there
was
still a goal.

I turned toward the prison.

When I reached it, moving so fast I was a blur, there were guards at the door. I barely slowed enough to disable both in screaming agony, then melted the metal outer door.

And then the vault door of the first cell.

Luis Rocha was slumped in a corner, pale and unshaven, barely conscious. His head lolled when I tried to raise him to his feet, and although I could sense the power inside of him, he was blocked from the source by the blanket of drugs circulating in him.

I couldn't heal myself as easily, but I could clear his bloodstream. It was an investment of power, not a cost; as soon as he was cleared, his power began to flow back to me, through our touch.

His hands wrapped around my wrists, and our gazes locked.

“Cassiel,” he whispered. “Oh, Christ, what have you
done
?”

I must have looked very different to him.

“Whatever was necessary,” I said. I was leaking blood on the floor from wounds I didn't feel. “Stand. We have little time.”

He scrambled up. They had also outfitted him in the flimsy yellow jumpsuit and prisoner shoes. I glared at it but decided our power would be better spent toward gaining our escape from this place, before—

The entire building rumbled. Dust sifted from overhead, and the lights flickered.

“Was that you?” Luis asked me. I shook my head. “Me, neither—”

Tree roots exploded up from the floor, cracking concrete. Sharp, jagged roots like daggers, then swords. It happened fast, too fast for us to counter it immediately, and one of the roots erupted under Luis's feet, stabbing through his foot and into his leg.

He screamed and tried to pull free. As I was helping him, another root ripped through the stone floor, thick and strong as a telephone pole, and almost skewered me from below. I stumbled aside. It continued to rise, slamming into the ceiling above and shattering the impact-resistant plastic cover of the lights.

“Go!” Luis screamed at me. I shook my head and pulled his leg free of the root that impaled it, picked him up in my arms, and began to run.

It was only nine steps, I told myself. Nine steps from the back of the room to the door.

I jumped the last three, praying I had guessed right, as a whole forest of roots erupted from the floor and sliced in all directions.

We hit one of the thick, pale structures and bounced—but we bounced
out
, not in. I didn't pause. I hit the ground with both feet and kept running, because the roots followed us, trying to outpace and outflank me. But it was a doomed effort—too much open space, and once we had gained the outside air, too many of their own people in the way to continue an indiscriminate attack.

There was a jeep—possibly the same one that had brought me to this prison in the first place—parked next to the prison building, with the keys dangling in the ignition. I dumped Luis in the seat, climbed behind the wheel, and in seconds we were rocketing for the gate.

I didn't particularly care if adults got out of my way. I hardly slowed as the bumpers sent them flying from the path.

I knew by this time that they would try to use the children to stop me, so it was not a surprise to see those ragged young bodies lined up in front of the gate, only a grim confirmation.