Rachel Caine - Unknown

“Now,” he breathed, and sent power out in a tightly focused wave. It plowed through the metal of the tractor trailer, slicing it cleanly in two. The two halves spun away from each other, spiraling outward from the release of energy, and Luis arrowed the van directly into the gap.

As we passed the wounded truck, I glanced over and saw the mangled remains of some large household appliance, which had been sliced in two by Luis’s strike.

“Man, I am hell on insurance companies today,” he said, with a trembling manic edge to his voice that was not quite humor. “Hold on. Could get bumpy.”

The ice was already thinning, and a hundred feet on, it ended altogether. The tires bit into asphalt with an almost physical hiss, throwing us to the side.

Luis hit the gas and arrowed us onward. I looked back over my shoulder. The driver of the truck was out, duckwalking cautiously on the ice, shaking his head at the mess that had been made of his load. He probably did not understand in the least what had just happened, which was best for us all, I thought. We drove for a few tense moments.

Nothing else came at us.

“What do you think?” Luis asked. “You think she got ahead of us somehow? Set a trap? You sense anything else?”

“I didn’t sense that one,” I pointed out. “But somehow—I don’t think so. It must have come from . . .”

From the boy. I felt that conviction strike me hard, and quickly twisted over my shoulder.

The boy’s eyes were open, wide, and focused darkly on me.

I waited, but he didn’t blink. There was an emptiness in his gaze that chilled me.

“Pull over,” I said to Luis, as I unbuckled my seat belt. I climbed over the seats to land lightly next to the boy, who still lay bundled in his red-and-yellow blanket. He didn’t move, not even to shift his gaze to follow me.

There was a dry flatness to his eyes.

I pressed my fingertips to his neck, feeling for a pulse. Nothing. No spark of life responding to my touch at all.

The boy was empty.

Candelario was dead.

Luis bailed out of the driver’s side up front, slid the cargo door back and climbed inside the van. I sat back and watched as Luis performed the same search I had, but with more effort, more anxiety. He came to the same result, but he didn’t simply accept the fact; he pulled the boy down into the flat open space between the seats and began pressing rhythmically on the unresponsive chest, sharp downward pumps that mimicked the beating of a human heart.

He glared at me. “Breathe for him.”

I didn’t move. “It’s no use.”

“Fuck you, Cassiel, just do it! ”

This time, I didn’t answer at all. His look should, by rights, have melted the life from me as well, but then he dismissed me and bent to breathe into the boy’s slack mouth himself.

It took a long few moments for him, Earth Warden though he was, to admit what had been obvious to me from the beginning: The boy’s life force was not struggling to remain, it was long departed. Destroyed. No matter what efforts were put in, he would not be miraculously waking.

Luis sat back against the metal wall of the van, breathing hard, eyes unfocused, and then pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes. He was trembling. I wanted to reach out to him, but I knew he wouldn’t welcome the touch, not at this moment; instead, I reached down and gently closed the boy’s open eyes, then lifted his heavy, limp body and put him back on the seat of the van.

When it finally came, Luis’s voice was rough and uneven. “What the hell, Cass. What the hell is happening?”

“He was expendable,” I said. “Pearl didn’t get ahead of us; she used him to attack us. When he became of no further use, she used him to power the ice on the roadway; she hoped that you would be unable to avoid a wreck, perhaps fatal. She ripped so much power from him that he couldn’t survive it. She killed him to try to get to us.”

“I get that,” he said raggedly. “But why kill him? Why now?”

I shrugged. “She doesn’t have the respect for young life that you do,” I said. “You are all insects to her, regardless of your circumstances. It means nothing to her to kill. Sometimes, she does it for her own amusement.” Or she did, once, in my distant memories.

I had, in thousands of years past, watched Pearl stand at the leading edge of a storm of destruction, tall and wild, only vaguely holding to a shifting human shape that glittered and flowed on the wind. Before her a wide, pleasant valley stretched out, covered in thick yellow flowers. There was a settlement there of creatures who were not humans, as we would later recognize them, but shared most of the same ancestry.

Pearl rode the wave of destruction down the hill, sweeping everything before her in a storm of ashes and death. She was terrible and beautiful, and insane.

It was the last settlement of its kind, and Pearl destroyed every last life in it, erasing the existence of that race of prehumans, erasing any trace that they had ever been. She unmade them, leaving behind the clean, green meadow, the nodding flowers, and an Earth that remained, for a time, the sole province and plaything of the Djinn. Before the rise of humans.

I had watched. Watched, and done nothing. Only later had I acted, when we all realized just what Pearl had become. When her selfish desires no longer ran in concert with our own.

And I had made the fatal mistake of defeating her, but not fully destroying her.

“She isn’t at her full strength,” I said, almost to myself. The Pearl of that ancient memory was a primal force, a goddess, something that woke shivers in me even now. “If she were, she’d destroy us without a thought. Us, the entire city, the nation. She doesn’t understand restraint, and the losses mean nothing.”

“Great,” Luis said. “And this bitch has Isabel.”

“She wants Ibby alive. Ibby could not be in a safer place for now.” Far safer than she would be with us, at least until we worked out what it was Pearl was doing. “We should perhaps worry about ourselves.”

“Trust me, I’m worried.” Luis turned his gaze back, unwillingly, to the boy. “Why didn’t she just kill us the way she did him?”

“I don’t think she can,” I replied. “Yet. The boy must have trained at the Ranch, where she kept the children. It’s likely that she has access to those who’ve surrendered their will to her in ways that she doesn’t to others, like us, who resist. But she’s powerful, and growing more powerful with every passing day. The more who surrender their wills to her . . .” I shook my head. There was no point in taking it further; he understood my concerns fully.

“If she’s killed her only connection to us, maybe we can make it to Las Vegas before she gets another one in position to take us on.”

“Maybe,” I said slowly. Something did not seem right about that, however, and it dawned on me precisely what it would be. “Luis. We have to leave him.”

Silence in the van, deep and weighty. The wind outside rattled sand against the windows, and the metal frame rocked slightly from the pressure. Luis’s face was blank, his dark eyes hot.

“I’m going to pretend you didn’t just say that.”

I raised my eyebrows. “Why?”

“Because if I seriously thought you would dump this poor kid like trash at the side of the road—”

“Luis,” I interrupted him. “ Think. She did not have to kill him. Why would she? He was perfectly placed to destroy us, if we gave him time to recharge, and he is young enough that we would have hesitated to fight him with full strength. It would be a significant advantage. She sacrificed a pawn who was in position to destroy us. Why? ”