Rachel Caine: Undone

Rejects from what?

I didn’t know. I suspected that was the question on which so much hinged, including our lives.

Although he tried, Luis lost focus, and our contact dissolved in eardrum-splitting shrieks and growls of out-of-control vibrations. I stilled it hastily, but I continued to lean against the wall, and I thought that on the other side of the concrete, so did he.

“I don’t know if you can still hear me,” I said, “but if you can, save your strength. I will do the same.”

Practicality dictated that I curl up on the lumpy, uncomfortable mattress and sleep to conserve as much energy as possible.

I dreamed of Isabel, alone in the woods, and a bear.

When I woke, there was a tray being shoved through a slot at the bottom of my vault door. The food did not look appetizing, but that hardly mattered; it wasn’t food I craved.

I rolled out of bed, crawled to the slot, and seized the wrist of the man who was pushing the tray inside. He gave a startled yelp that turned to a harsh scream as I attempted to pull power from him.

He was merely human. I got only the lightest tingle of power, not even enough to fuel a single continuing breath, and then he broke my grasp and was gone.

I ate the contents of the meal tray slowly, with great concentration. It would help, but without an infusion of power from a Warden, soon, I would be in real trouble. Unlike a natural human body, mine was not self-sustaining. The equations did not balance, and energy leaked away with every beat of my heart.

All the proteins and carbohydrates on the tray couldn’t stop that drain.

Half the day passed in silence. I tried to contact Luis, but he didn’t—or couldn’t—respond. They might have drugged him even more, to silence him. I still sensed his presence, so I did not think they had removed or killed him.

I grew all too familiar with the confining, featureless space of my cell. Six steps across. Nine steps deep. The ceilings were twice my height, the light fixtures inaccessible behind reinforced panels. There were no windows, only a narrow opening in the door and the slot at the bottom through which the trays came.

Both were bolted shut, with massive vault locks, and I could not summon up enough power to matter against that.

I called on Djinn that I knew, from friend to foe; even an enemy might be an inadvertent ally in this situation. But if anyone could hear my weak calls, they ignored them.

I was alone.

My captors allowed me to wait for two more days, in silence, in growing desperation, before the vault door finally opened, and I was put in heavy chains and taken outside, so weak I could hardly walk.

It was daylight, dazzling bright, and I squeezed my eyes closed against the glare as the soldiers prodded me along. I sensed no Warden abilities in any of them. If I had, I wasn’t certain I could have stopped myself from attacking them out of hunger, and that certainly would have ended my fragile human life; the soldiers were deadly serious in their guard duties, and would not have hesitated to shoot.

It was odd even by human standards. There were many people out in the streets—talking, walking to or from some unknown destination. All the rainbow colors of humanity, some dressed in military fatigues, some in simple human dress from a variety of countries. From the park in the central part of the compound came the shrieking laughter of children at play.

No one cast a look toward me, garishly costumed in brilliant yellow, chained, surrounded by armed guards. It was as if I didn’t exist at all. I wondered for a few moments if they had placed some sort of Djinn invisibility shield around us, but no—some of the humans passing by did see us; they simply and utterly ignored us.

“Move,” my guard said, and guided me up the street.

“I want to see Luis Rocha.”

“People in hell want air-conditioning,” he said, which seemed completely off the topic I had proposed. “You’ve got a meeting already.”

As we came nearer to the main building, the one next to the park, I realized how much larger it was than the others. There were organic lines to the flow of the building’s long curves. Where everything else formed squares and angles, this building seemed more grown than constructed, and the material seemed more like mother-of-pearl and bone than wood and stucco.

A Djinn built this, I thought. There were few examples of Djinn artifacts; as a species, we left far less trace than humans on the planet we inhabited. But those that we did make had an unmistakable signature to them, a kind of singing resonance that was visible even to my human-dulled eyes.

I felt a deep surge of unease. The design impressed itself on me, and I realized what it represented: half of the ancient symbol of yin and yang. The park where the children played mirrored the sinuous lines and formed the other half. It had a resonance, as well, a subtle, deep power.

Harmony.

We approached the broad, curving end of the bone house, and a door that gleamed with shifting pearlized color opened without a touch on its surface.

The guards stopped. Their squad leader gestured me on.

I walked up the shallow steps and passed through the portal, into an opulence those outside would hardly imagine possible. The surfaces were breathtaking sweeps of nacre, the colors ranging from ice-cool greens to warm whites. The building had indeed been grown, not built, though there were concessions to human comforts in the form of sleekly rounded furniture, cushions, velvets and furs.

There was a simplicity to it that brought a sense of peace and a terrible kind of stillness. I studied the resonance again, and it was familiar to me. I know this place. Yet I’d never been in it before. I know the one who shaped it. Yes, that was what troubled me. The Djinn who had formed this exquisite, frightening place was someone I not only knew, but feared on levels I could neither identify nor understand.

I was too exhausted, too weak to think.

The door closed. The guards stayed outside. After a moment, the pinch-faced Earth Warden who’d tormented me stepped out of a curtained alcove at the far end of the room.

“This way,” she said. She had a silver gun in her hand. “If you try anything, I’ll kill you.”

Dying seemed almost inevitable, at this point. I hesitated.

“You want to see the girl, don’t you? Isabel?”

Something terrible was waiting for me in the direction she wished me to go. I knew it. I felt it in every screaming nerve. I could not go through that door. If I did, I would not just die. I would die screaming. I would suffer agonies that I could not begin to imagine, but could feel heavy in the air like poisonous smoke.

She.

The thought brushed across me like a ghost, and I knew it came from my Djinn side, the side that was almost dead now, starved into submission. A mere flutter of resistance.

She waits.

I stared at the Warden without moving. She frowned. “Did you hear me? Move it!”

My eyes rolled back in my head and I collapsed. I didn’t try to cushion my fall, didn’t try to turn my body, and when my head struck the ground, it struck hard enough to crack bone and split skin. Blood began to trickle past my nose across the pristine pearl floor.

“Goddammit,” the Warden sighed. “Just what I needed today—another goddamn epileptic fit.”

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.