Rachel Caine - Unbroken

All starting… today.

“Cass,” Luis said. “What are you thinking?”

I reached over and took his hand in mine. Warm, strong, human. Fragile and temporary as a breath, yet strong and resilient as a river.

There was hope. Always hope. And it was those like Luis who would be the bearers of that hope, and the victims of it; heroes they were, and heroes died so that others might live.

I took a deep breath and said, “I wish we had more time, Luis.”

He misunderstood me. “Yeah, things are happening fast. Can’t travel much faster, though. Not unless you intend on hijacking a plane, which I’m pretty sure would not be a good idea, either.”

I’d meant something far different. Far more personal. When he touched me, my mind flashed to sensations… the stroke of his fingers along my eager flesh, the indrawn breaths, the taste of sweat on his skin. The quiet, hushed, beautiful moment at the top of the pleasure curve, when the universe expanded before me with the beauty of a Djinn’s dreams.

I wished we had more time together. Not like this, not tired and dirty and exhausted, speeding to another confrontation. Together.

I started to speak, but then I caught the sad, gentle look in his eyes, and realized that he hadn’t misunderstood me at all. The echo came through the link between us, soft and subtle, a sense of loss. Of letting go.

“Survival tactics,” Luis said aloud. “It’s what humans do. We either cling to things so desperately we can’t let go, or we let go before we get hurt. It’s not that I don’t want… us. It’s that we can’t afford to put us ahead of them , Cass. We can’t.”

He was right, but it was because he was, in his deepest heart and soul, a hero. I was not. I wanted to cling to him with all my strength and not allow anything to come between us, not even the fate of the world and humanity.

But instead, I smiled. “I know,” I lied. I’d become very good at the lies, I realized. “We should focus on the mission at hand.”

“No distractions,” he said.

I nodded as if I truly believed it, and focused on driving. The less I thought about him, about me, about us, the better it was.

But God above, it hurt.

The weather worsened as we drove toward Seattle; rain at first, a slow mist that turned to drops, and then to curtains of near-freezing downpour. The tank had run low, and I pulled the truck in at last at a small roadside gas vendor. His lights cast a welcome red-and-white glow into the chilly sameness of the rain-washed road, and I pulled in and stopped at the fuel pump.

“Cash only,” Luis read on the sign, and sighed. He dug out his wallet and handed it over. “Make it fast. Get us some food and water for the road, too. Extra blankets and pillows if they have them.”

I nodded and slipped out into the rain. The shock of it was breathtaking, and I quickly uncapped the gas tank and inserted the pumping nozzle before dashing into the small store.

There was a dead man behind the counter, sitting on a stool like some ghoulish prop for a cheap horror movie. He had fallen back against the wall, but was delicately balanced so that he hadn’t quite tipped off his seat and to the floor. The details of him surfaced in my mind slowly, from the shock: older, with graying hair; no obvious wounds, but there was a thick, dried crust of vomit streaking the front of his shirt and chin. His eyes had filmed over, but I could see the broken blood vessels underneath the glaze.

Dried blood had gathered at the corners of his eyelids, and cherry-black threads of it ran from his nose to his mouth.

I stopped where I was, and slowly, carefully extended my senses toward him on the aetheric. What I saw there, on that plane, was far worse than this—a rotted, horribly ripe thing throbbing with living sickness.

He was dead, but the infection inside him was alive, and violently hungry.

I slowly backed up, touching nothing. Little details began to surface, now that the initial shock had passed. Disordered shelves. An open cash register a few feet away, its drawers lolling empty.

I look at the scene through Oversight and found a confusion of colors, shapes, hints, and images. Others had been in the store before us, and at least some of them had taken items. But glowing brightly, very brightly, was the ghostly image of a Djinn, stretching out a hand and touching the proprietor’s head with a fingertip.

I knew her, or the her she’d been before Mother Earth had awakened. Priya—like me, one of the original Djinn, formed out of fire and primal instincts. But Priya had always been kindly disposed toward humans, and this… this was none of her doing. Not of her own choice.

In that image burned upon the aetheric plane, Priya’s face was cold and set, her eyes blazing with power. She had simply walked into this place, touched the man on the forehead, and left.

And he’d sickened and died, within minutes.

Luis saw me, wiped fog from the window of the truck cab, and frowned in concern. He rolled the window down and said, “What’s wrong?”

“Look at me in Oversight,” I said. “Check me for infection. Do it quickly.”

He didn’t waste time asking; I saw his eyes lose focus as he used another kind of vision to inspect me. It didn’t take long.

He shook his head. “Nothing. What the hell?”

“The man inside is dead,” I said. “Infected with… something. Something very nasty. We can’t take the risk of touching anything in there. It must be burned, all of it.” I felt shaken, I realized. No, more than that: I was actually shaking. My muscles were loose and trembling. “Others have been here. We have to find them. This will spread quickly.”

Luis froze for a few seconds, then nodded. “We need the gas for the truck,” he pointed out, ever practical. “There’s a button inside, behind the counter. Somebody has to press it.”

“No,” I said. “No one goes inside.”

I heard the door slide up at the back, and the sound of someone jumping down… then the whispering slither of Esmeralda’s descent. Isabel looked around at me, then at the store. “What are you doing standing in the rain?”

I didn’t feel like explaining again. “Can you trip the switch to get gas from here?”

“Yeah, but there should be someone in there who—”

“Just do it, Isabel!” My voice sounded unlike my usual self—to raw, too sharp, too shrill.

She gave me a dark look. “Tell me why.”

Esmeralda slithered toward the door, and before I could tell her not to proceed, she recoiled—literally, pulling her snakelike body into tight, defensive coils. I heard a faint rattle. “Dead guy,” she said. “Damn. He looks sick.”

“He was,” I said. “And is. Going in is not an option.”

“Then what?”

“There is a switch under his hand. It must be flipped from out here. ”

Isabel looked toward Esmeralda, who nodded decisively. “I wouldn’t be eating no Ho Hos out of this place—that’s for sure. Flip the switch and let’s get the hell out before we’re puking all over ourselves and bleeding from the eyeballs. Vámanos. ”

Ibby was stronger by far in Fire Warden powers than her uncle; for her it was a mere shrug to trigger the connection that powered the pump. As I set it in action, the counters rolled on a price that would never be paid now. I filled the truck to the brim, then replaced the nozzle and climbed back inside to drive the vehicle off away from the building, slowly.

Esmeralda and Ibby stayed behind, and Luis watched them in the rearview mirror. It took only a moment for the fire to begin, consuming the little store. The two girls made it to the truck and slammed the door down just as the gas pumps blew in a spectacular orange-and-red mushroom of power. What was left of the station store collapsed in on itself, burning even more fiercely.