Rachel Caine - Unseen

Ashan made a sound of frustration, and I felt a cold silvery power glide through me, from the crown of my head downward. I tried to resist it, but his touch was seductive and powerful, and the comfort it left behind it was so extreme that I felt an urge to weep. I didn’t. My eyes were dry by the time Ashan stepped back, and I looked at myself disorientingly from the aetheric.

My head still ached, but the broken skull was fused together, and the ragged tear in my scalp had closed. The broken ribs had likewise reset, and the blood in my lungs was gone. He hadn’t bothered with my collections of bruises, but overall, I was in sound condition, considering my recent injuries.

“I could have destroyed your physical body,” he said. “But I wasn’t sure that even at the last, you’d choose to regain your rightful place. This has to stop. I need you with me, Cassiel. We can’t allow Pearl to pursue this course, and there’s still only one way to stop her.”

“Genocide,” I said.

“Extinction,” he corrected me. “As it has been before, as it will be again. It’s the reason we were created, to protect the Mother. And we will, with or without you.”

I got off my knees. “Then you’ll do it without me,” I said, brushing the dirt from my filthy, shapeless gray uniform with both hands ... and only then did I realize that he’d repaired my metallic left hand. I left it to the faint starlight, examining the finely detailed flexible metal skin, the precise movements of the metal fingers. He’d done a better job of it than I had, originally. I rubbed my fingertips together, and the sensation that came to me was absolutely realistic. Except for the warm matte color of my forearm and hand, it might have been the original appendage.

“That’s a gift,” he said, nodding toward it. “And I think you’ll find that in the end you’ll know I was right about the humans. They were a mistake, and they need correcting.”

I sensed he was about step into the aetheric and leave me behind. “Wait! My connection to Luis. Restore it.”

He met my eyes, and in his silver ones I read a trace of the man I’d liked, back in the camp. A trace of regret, and kindness. Then Ashan blinked, and it vanished. “Very well,” he said. “But you won’t like what you find. I was trying to spare you the pain.”

I felt a hot snap inside—not something breaking, this time, but something reforging. It burned, then cooled, and I felt ... nothing for a few seconds.

Then, distantly, I felt pain, echoing through the connection like a scream from a long distance away. Pain, anguish, fury, fear.

I opened my eyes and stared at Ashan. “What have you done ?”

“Nothing,” he said. “You destroyed Pearl’s brightest acolytes. Did you think she would simply let that go? She’s like you. Emotional.”

The shock of it wore off, and now the dread set in, heavy and black in the pit of my stomach.

I’d done this. We’d done this. Luis was under attack, injured, maybe dying. I had a flash of Manny Rocha, my first Warden partner, dying in a hail of bullets while I’d stood at a distance, unable to save him—only this was more intense, worse, because what I felt for Luis—no, the love I felt for him—left me horrified, frantic, and desperate.

I had to save him.

Ashan was already beginning to fade away. “No!” I screamed, and lunged for him. His form was solid, then softened into mist. For an instant he stood in his True Djinn form, something human eyes weren’t meant to comprehend. I had to look away.

“Please,” I said. “Please take me there. Please , Ashan. I will beg, if that’s what you want.”

“It isn’t,” he said, and I felt him slip away, into the aetheric. Only his voice remained, a whisper on the wind. “I want you to remember what it means to be one of us, not one of them. If you’d chosen to join me, you could have saved him. You could have saved them all.”

And then he was gone, and I was alone, cold and alone, in an unknown forest.

And far away from me, my love was fighting for his life.

I let out a scream that shook leaves from the trees, and began to run.

I had only gone perhaps a mile before I ran into Ashan again, standing in my path, shining like the moon. He looked at me strangely, as if he’d never seen me before.

“You run,” he said. “You have no idea where you are, and yet you run.”

I could feel Luis’s presence, like a compass tugging me onward. I didn’t slow down, only ran around Ashan’s still form and kept going. I didn’t know how far it was; I only knew that I couldn’t risk not trying.

If Luis died, I would die with him, one way or another. And I would wish it to be so.

Ashan, again, standing near the trunk of a massive, shadowed tree. I was remotely thankful for his presence, as he illuminated a hidden branch that stretched across the trail and might have tripped me. I vaulted it and kept running. “You won’t make it!” he called after me. “Cassiel!”

He was lying to me. I had to believe he was lying.

And so I ran. I ran until I was breathless, shaking, covered in sweat. I ran until my muscles trembled with exhaustion. Ashan continued to appear like a ghost in the darkness, silently watching me.

I didn’t stop, until with Djinn suddenness he formed right in my path, close enough that I had to slide to a flailing halt to avoid hitting him. He caught me silently when I faltered, and held me there, staring down at me. He was dressed in an immaculate gray suit now, human but with an inhuman perfection to him. His eyes, and his tie, were teal blue, with glints of silver. I had never felt so grubbily human as that moment, face-to-face with the eerie beauty of what I’d left behind.

“Enough,” he said. “If you must destroy yourself, do it in battle, not ... like this. Not uselessly.”

And he whirled me away into a nauseating swirl of color, sound, taste, the rancid scent of death ... and out again, into a blast of cold air, smoke, and the roar of fire.

I tripped over a corpse and fell face forward into bloody, churned ground.

THE CORPSE I’D TRIPPEDover was someone I didn’t recognize—a man, dressed in dark clothing. He had a rifle with him, and a handgun holstered on his belt. I tugged it free, picked up the rifle, and slung it across my shoulder as I rose to my knees.

Ashan had brought me back to the school, but the school was unrecognizable. It was a burning inferno, only vaguely defined by the shapes of walls; the fire was incredibly hot and violent, with the flames in places leaping fifty feet into the night sky. Trees burned from their leafy crowns downward all around me. At first I thought that the school had been in the path of a forest fire, but that made no sense; there were powerful Fire Wardens present who should have been able to turn the flames away, even if they hadn’t been able to extinguish them completely.

No, this was an attack.

And a successful one.

I didn’t hear the sound of the shot fired at me, but I felt the bullet slice across the meat of my upper arm, drawing a bloody slash; it felt like a hot poker applied to my skin, and for a second I didn’t register what had occurred. My instincts saved me; I threw myself flat and crawled to take the only shelter available—behind the corpse that I’d fallen over earlier. I rolled him on his side and curled up, unshipped the rifle, and carefully looked around for my assailant. It was impossible to hear the shots, but I saw a spark of misplaced flame from the trees—a muzzle flash in the darkness—and aimed and fired, using the power of the Earth to guide my shot to its target.

I sensed the shock of the bullet’s impact through bone, brain, and out the other side as my shot found its home, and then I took another moment to study the scene more carefully. He seemed to have been the only remaining gunman, or the one assigned to prevent reinforcements from arriving; no one else fired on me.