Rachel Caine - Unbroken

It didn’t yield.

Pearl looked down at me, remote and cold, and her eyes were the lightless empty of the Void. “You reject what I offer, Cassiel. You offend me.”

“Good,” I said. It came out raw and bloody, but satisfying. “Kill me, then. If you can.”

She walked down a set of invisible steps, as her children parted for her—some of them had already collapsed, their white light guttering out, and the rest were burning like candles in a furnace. All their power was flowing into Pearl, I realized; it was in the unearthly pale glow of her skin. She had embodied it, and the darkness.

If she completed this last, cruel act, she would be more powerful than anything else in this world.

I couldn’t break this shell, or the cycle of power that was feeding back on itself inside it. I couldn’t save myself, or the children. I couldn’t do anything except kneel there, cold and empty, as Pearl glided toward me.

But I could do one simple thing, after all.

I could duck.

The power that lanced out of her erupted in a pure white bolt, heading straight for me; if it touched me, it would burn me to cinders.

But it didn’t touch me. I let myself fall backward, anchored by my knees, and Pearl’s strike hissed and burned the air an inch above my chest.

It bored straight through her own shell of power, lanced out into the room, slammed into the back wall, and kept going.

And I rolled out through the burned opening of the shell as it began to knit itself closed, sealing Pearl and the children in.

I barely made it over the closing threshold before it irised shut.

The black-and-white sphere containing Pearl and her followers began to rotate now, slowly at first, but growing in speed and strength.

I collapsed gasping on the broken stone floor, and wondered if I had enough strength to battle Esmeralda, who was the only living thing in the room left now outside of the sphere… but as I rolled myself over on my back and looked at her, I realized that I needn’t have worried.

Esmeralda had felt it, too, that whispering touch of the Mother. Her eyes had gone wide and very dark, and they were filled with blind tears. She was still clutching Rashid’s bottle in one shaking hand, but I didn’t think she even realized she still had it.

She didn’t see me at all.

“She forgives me for what I did,” Es said. “I feel it. I feel it. I can—I can change—”

And she did, drawing in a deep breath; the thick, muscular coils began to shift, contract, drawing together in a smooth, tapering glide… and Esmeralda was standing. She looked down at her long, smooth legs, slender feet, and cried out—grief, joy, shock all boiling together. The white shirt she was wearing reached almost to her knees now, and it left her looking younger than before, a child playing at dress-up. I wondered how many years it had been since she’d been herself, been truly and completely human.

Just in time to lose everything again.

She blinked and looked down at me. “You don’t look so good, lady,” she said. “I’ve seen dead things on beaches with better color.”

“Esmeralda,” I whispered. “Get out. Go. Find Isabel.”

“She doesn’t need to find me,” Isabel said from the doorway. “I’m right here, Mom.” She was still covered in plaster dust, smeared and dirty, but she was alive. And behind her was Luis, bloody but still upright. He ignored Esmeralda, ignored the spinning sphere hovering in the middle of the room, and limped to me.

“We’re okay out there now,” he said. “Lots of sleeping kids. Djinn are holding the power bubble over us.” He collapsed down on the floor next to me, and pulled me into his arms. “God, you’re cold, Cass.”

I couldn’t tell him I was dying, but it was true; the darkness that I’d been infected with was eating away, steadily and quietly killing me. It was a kind of virus, I decided; as it fed on me, it reproduced. Soon, I’d be a vessel for it, like Pearl’s Void children.

And then I’d be unacceptably dangerous.

I’d failed on every level. Luis, Isabel, even Esmer-

alda… they had succeeded. But I hadn’t stopped Pearl. I hadn’t even slowed her. All my power, all my history, and it had come to this.

To nothing.

Ashan was dead now; whatever plan he’d foreseen for me, it had been false, or it had died along with him. My failure would cancel out all of the great victories won by my friends, my family, by humanity , because I had not been strong enough, fast enough, Djinn enough.

I was doing worse than killing humanity. I was killing the Mother herself, through my failure.

But I could do one last thing right.

I could stop my transformation into the dark angel that Pearl wanted me to become.

I pulled free of Luis and touched his face very gently. “I love you,” I said. It was a good-bye, and he knew it; I saw the shock ripple through him, and the awful resignation in the rigidity of his muscles. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t do this,” he said. “Whatever you’re thinking, don’t.”

“Mom?” Isabel took a halting step toward us, then stopped. “Mom, what are you doing?”

“What I have to do.” I said it gently but firmly. “We always knew it would come to an ending, didn’t we?”

She shook her head. “No. I don’t believe in endings. I’m not going to let you—”

Her eyes rolled back in her head, and she collapsed back into Luis’s arms. He’d given her just a touch, a gentle push into the darkness, and now he held her gently in his arms and kissed her forehead. He wasn’t looking at me any longer. “She’s going to win, then,” he said. “You can’t stop her.”

The room was lurid with the cream-and-black of the sphere, now spinning fast, whipping between black and white so fast that it blurred into a smear of gray. The power in the room was like needles in my skin, a burning, stinging rush.

“No,” I said. “I can’t.” She was, I sensed, almost there, almost ready to unleash all that power into the heart of the world.

Almost ready to kill the very soul of our Mother.

And here, at the end, filled with a growing darkness, I felt an unexpected sense of… peace. Of quiet inside me, and in that silence, I heard a voice speak.

Make the choice.

Ashan’s voice, an echo of his imperious tone. He might be gone from the world, but he was still demanding things of me.

I opened my eyes and said, “Esmeralda. I need your help.”

“I CAN’T DO THIS,”Es said. She was scared—very scared, in fact, uncertain in her newfound humanity. “I don’t know how anymore.”

“You can,” I told her. The darkness inside me was reaching critical stages. Only a moment had passed—a moment that had been taken up by the difficult task of getting Luis to withdraw, with Isabel, to a safe distance, because I couldn’t guarantee what would happen next. “Your venom killed a Djinn. It’ll certainly kill me. And I need to destroy this body, Esmeralda. I can’t leave it, otherwise.”

“But I just got out of being a snake,” she said. “What if I can’t shift back again?”

“You will,” I promised her, and took her hands in mine. “Or it won’t matter.”

“Wow, you are such a cheerleader.”

I smiled. “It’s been interesting knowing you, Esmeralda.”

“Likewise.” She sighed, shook her head, and reached for the Warden powers she’d been so long denied.

And she shifted back into Snake Girl.

When she opened her eyes, they were reptilian, vertically slitted, veined with red and gold… and then she opened her mouth, unhinged her jaw, and the sharp, gleaming daggers of fangs descended and locked in place as she struck in a blur.