Rachel Caine: Heat Stroke

“Hurt I can fix.” Jonathan stretched, working out the kinks, and pulled a dull green baseball cap from his back pocket. He tugged it in place, one hand on the bill, one on the back. “Ready?”

I looked down at myself and changed into business-ready mode. A black peachskin pantsuit was appropriate anywhere, even inside the UN Building. “Do we have a plan?”

“You distract ‘em, I get Lewis to open the vault, we boost David’s bottle. Outta there.”

“Hell of a plan,” I commented dryly. It scared the hell out of me, actually.

His eyes were as hard as frozen flint, and the soft evening light did nothing to make him look any less frightening. He looked serious . “It’ll do. Move.”

We strolled right past security. I was reminded of the Empire State Building, and surprised myself by missing Rahel intensely; I had liked her. A lot. And it’s my fault she’s… What? Gone? Dead? Discorporated? The Djinn Formerly Known As…? I remembered her skin sloughing away, and couldn’t control a sick tremor. The coldlight was intense now, up in the aetheric. Like a constant blizzard. Any Djinn— except, presumably, me or David—who went up there was doomed. Even Jonathan.

The Wardens Association floor required a card key for the elevator, which I didn’t have, but it didn’t seem to be any big deal for Jonathan; he just put his finger over the slot and got the green light and a lit-up button. The elevator was showing its age, and the trip was slower than usual. We didn’t talk, just waited in that pocket-universe silence that people inhabit in elevators, until the door chimed and rolled back on a long, straight hallway lit with featureless pale squares of indirect lighting.

The Hall of Fame. Important-looking heavy plaques recognizing Wardens for achievement above and beyond. They stretched in a row all the way to the end, most of them black-bordered to indicate posthumous awards. The place smelled of artificial vanilla, wood, and the faintest hint of flop sweat; it was a bad day at the office for everyone there. Except the Earth Wardens, presumably, who at least had the comfort of knowing Hollywood wasn’t going to become a new coral reef.

The place was buzzing with activity. From a human perspective, it looked like any other busy New York office—smartly dressed people walking with purpose from one room to another, talking tensely to each other or cell phones, carrying reams of paper or folders or computers. No Djinn in attendance. I could see why, as I walked through the halls and dodged around unwary staffers; I was trailing blue glitter like Pinocchio’s fairy.

It came to me finally that I was alone. I looked back, but Jonathan had vanished. Poof . Apparently that was part of the plan I wasn’t privy to, up front.

I paused in the doorway of a huge round conference room and saw close to twenty of the most powerful Wardens in the world clustered there while a War Room map showed detailed schematics of weather patterns, real-time satellite imagery, infrared scans of the planet’s surface to pinpoint hot spots. Yellowstone looked like a whiteout, but it wasn’t the only one; there were fires raging in India, in Africa, and in Chile.

Paul Giancarlo was there, looking tired and stressed; he was arguing softly with somebody I didn’t recognize, gesturing at the weather map and the Doppler radar display. From the hand gestures, I figured he was talking about the massive potential for hail. He was right, if that was where he was going; I could sense the ice forming up in the highest levels of the atmosphere, thick and gray and heavy. Freight-train winds intercepted the ice on the way down, added moisture, tossed it back up to freeze again.

New York City was going to be pelted with a disaster of biblical proportions. This would make baseball-sized hail look like Styrofoam. I had power, but not much, and certainly not enough to disrupt a process with this kind of momentum behind it. There were thirty or forty Wardens still working on it, I sensed. But none of them had Djinn.

And none of them were going to be able to stop it. Not singly, not collectively. It was simply too big, and had too much control of its own destiny. Lewis could stop it, but even then, it would be a tough battle.

Paul’s eyes swept over me without pausing as he turned away from the heated debate; his weightlifter-dense muscles were tensed under the soft cotton of his shirt. His tie was loose, his sleeves rolled up. I could feel the anger coming off of him, the metal-sharp smell of sweat.

He knew they were losing.

I wanted to say something to him, anything , but I didn’t have the time and it was too much of a risk. I backed out of the doorway and continued down the hall.

Sandwiched between the main conference room and a smaller one just as frantically occupied was a recessed alcove with a bubbling fountain and a whole lot of names inscribed in marble.

The roll of the dead. I paused for a few seconds to look over the names.

Yes, at the bottom, sharp and new-cut: Robert Biringanine. Estrella Almondovar. Joanne Baldwin . There was something really final about seeing that. What was the old saying? It was set in stone. In a way, it was even more final than a coffin.

“Move,” a voice at my side whispered. I looked up to find that Jonathan had popped back out of whatever hole he’d gone into; he tugged my elbow in a way that definitely discouraged memory-laning. I walked with him down to the end, where the hallway split off into a T-intersection. We had to dodge an oblivious gopher with two overfull cups of coffee and a wildly scared look in his eyes; trainee, I judged, who was probably going to be begging for an assignment somewhere safe and peaceful, like Omaha, when this was all over. The building seemed to shudder underfoot, and I heard glass rattling in the windows.

The storm was starting to roll in.

“Can’t hold it,” Jonathan said. His lips were tense, white rimmed, and set in a straight hard line. “Faster we can do this, the better for everybody.”

As if to underscore the point, thunder boomed outside, unbelievably loud. This monster had come roaring in fast—too fast for natural forces to be the only thing going on. The blue sparklies were busy little critters.

In Oversight, just about every doorway glowed, due to the accretion of years of Wardens working here. Some were flickering madly, like magic lanterns in a high wind. One near the middle glowed especially brightly, and the power spilling out had a dense, almost gravitational feel to it.

Definitely Lewis, behind that door. I waited for Jonathan to make the next move, but he just put a hand on my arm and pulled me out of the way of another fast-moving clique of Wardens rushing to do damage control. Some of them looked white faced, on the very edge of panic. The pallid smell of L’Air du Temps mingled with the sharp organic aroma of fear.

Distraction , Jonathan said. Keep them looking at you. Do whatever you have to, but keep their attention for at least five minutes. That should give me enough time to get Lewis and get to the vault .

I nodded and opened the door. In the space of three seconds, I moderated my eyes to a demure dove gray, and replaced my black conservative pant-suit with my distraction outfit.

Thank you, Kevin Prentiss, for being such an inspirational little jerk.

French Maid outfit, a handful of colorful balloons, Shirley Temple hair, and a big fake smile. I strolled into the room and found it was an infirmary, full of sterile white room dividers and one occupied bed at the far end, with three people clustered around it.

My high heels clopped loudly on the linoleum, and one of the people leaned out of the range of the curtains to take a look. He stopped, did a double take, and gave me the full-body X-ray scan. A middle-aged man, definitely not immune to the outfit.