Rachel Caine: Heat Stroke

“Baldwin!” Martin Oliver yelled. I looked back at him and let my eyes flare silver. For the first time that I could remember, he looked outright surprised, but he recovered in seconds. “Be careful.”

I raised a hand in thanks, or farewell, or whatever, and stepped out into the storm.

Different now than it had been, back in my just-plain-girl days. The storm was a delicate latticework of interconnecting forces, with the coldlight swarming around it like a bloodstream, feeding it, insulating it, holding it together. I didn’t get a sense that the light itself was hostile—just mindlessly opportunistic. The storm was alive, therefore it was capable of being parasitized. Eventually, the coldlight would probably grow out of control and consume too much energy and start the chain reaction that would remove the threat—but I had no idea how long that would take. Too long, probably. No way could I count on it to happen in time.

I spread my arms and rose into the clouds, trailing blue sparks like a comet trail. Where I went, the cold-light flocked. The storm sensed me immediately, and recognized a threat; lightning began to stab through me, millions of volts of electricity attempting to explode every cell in my body. I bled the charge off, used it to draw in more coldlight. An ever-increasing spiral of blue, with me at the center.

Up, climbing the sheer gray tower of the anvil cloud. Up into the cold, the thin air, the mesosphere, where if the storm could be said to have a heart, the heart resided.

The storm responded by battering me with ice and more lightning. Plasma balls formed white-hot and flung themselves at me, but the command Kevin had given me was utterly straightforward and the power being pulled out of him was staggering. I just flicked the St. Elmo’s fire away, bent lightning bolts at right angles, and reached for the vulnerable beating heart of the beast.

A scream stopped me. A piercing, panicked cry that went right through me like a sword thrust.

My master’s voice. “Come back! Oh God, come back now ! Right now!” Kevin sounded scared— worse than scared, horrified.

I could have gone, but I didn’t have to. I had the choice, because I hadn’t fulfilled the first command he’d given me; the two commands effectively canceled each other.

Free will. Go back and baby-sit Kevin, or kill this thing and save thousands—maybe tens of thousands…

I didn’t think there was a choice. I ignored the screaming—even though it continued, sawing right through me, body and soul—and focused on the storm instead.

I reached in and grabbed the core process that was at the center of the giant. It wasn’t much, really; some overexcited molecules, a pattern of reflecting and replicating waveforms that perfectly reinforced each other. The tough part wasn’t disrupting it, it was finding it and reaching it.

The Wardens couldn’t see it, because it was built out of nothing but coldlight.

I reached in and took hold of it, drew the sparks to me, and consumed them the way they consumed others. We are all born from death . Patrick had told me that. I hadn’t realized he’d meant it literally.

The winds continued to blow, but the waveforms fragmented and began to cancel each other instead of resonating. Clouds began to break apart instead of pull inward. Temperatures began to cool here, warm there, chaos theory taking over.

It would storm for a while, but it was just another freak weather story now, one of those things that would play on CNN and the Weather Channel for the next few days, and be forgotten by everybody except a few cab drivers and weather conspiracy nuts who believed the CIA was behind it all. Rain, hail, lightning. The usual stuff.

I let the power of it soak into me, reviving me, and then slowly drifted back down toward the UN Building. It was hard to see through the swirling, choking mass of coldlight that was being pulled toward me but I could see the place needed about a hundred new windows. The people weren’t so lucky. As I folded back into flesh, blood, bone, and all the necessary fabric accessories, I saw that there were still a lot of people down on a floor that was awash with inches of rainwater. There had been blood, but it had been diluted and flushed by the storm; now that the rain was abating, some of the wounded were leaking red puddles.

Some, more ominously, were not.

I completed the transformation back into human form, felt my hair fall silky and straight over my shoulders, and for the first time thought, I have it right. Finally .

And then I realized what I was looking at. I’d left Marion, Martin Oliver, and a few other Wardens tending to the wounded, trying to get them to safety… and there was nobody moving now.

Instead, there were more bodies.

I skidded to a stop next to a crumpled form in rain-soaked brown suede. Marion’s hair looked dark and thin, pounded by the storm’s violence; she was still and quiet and pale. I checked her pulse and found her heart beating, though slowly. Martin Oliver was down, too, all his grace and fearless strength stripped away. His shirt was soaked through pink, and underneath there was a raw, four-inch-long tear through his sternum. Glass. He’d been skewered.

He didn’t have a pulse at all. Just a vast, echoing silence.

I looked up as lightning flashed white, smelled hot ozone and cooling blood, and realized that someone was missing, someone I’d left behind.

Kevin.

I misted and felt that gravitational tug, down and to the left—he was still in the UN Building, but somewhere at least a level below. I sank through concrete, steel, cold empty space, more concrete and steel…

… to a hallway that lit up in Oversight like Broadway. Lots of power rattling around in here, wild and barely contained; the place was a blizzard of sparkles. The barely felt tug of Kevin’s presence led me down through the deserted corridor, around a corner, and I saw a sudden flare of auras ahead, so bright they even punched through the curtain of glitter. I pulled back, still in mist form, and tried to get a sense of where I was and what was going on.

Kevin was definitely up ahead. So was Lewis. I couldn’t tell if Jonathan was there or not, Djinn auras were all over the place, like wildfire…

Where the hell was I? I slowly misted forward again, found a convenient recessed doorway, and came down into skin to take a look.

At the end of the hall was a huge shiny door, like the kind you see in the movies when there’s something really cool to steal. It was standing half-open.

There was a body lying a couple of feet away, human, bleeding hideously into the carpet from what looked like a fatal slash to the throat. The security guard was still breathing, but just barely… As I watched, his eyes glazed over, and the last whisper rattled out of his throat.

I heard voices, and carefully moved out of the cover of the doorway, hugging the wall. Whoever was there, they were inside the vault.

Lewis’s voice. “—don’t have to do this. Let him go.” Lewis sounded calm, but I felt the effort underneath it. Something bad was going on, something worse than the head injuries I knew he’d already sustained. I could feel the pulse of his distress, mental and physical, across the empty space separating us.

I advanced slowly, one step at a time, wondering where the hell Jonathan was, where David was, what had gone so wrong about all of this. I couldn’t believe Kevin had killed the people upstairs, or taken out the dead guard on the carpet. Then again, maybe I was underestimating his capacity for desperation, or fury…

By moving all the way to the right side of the hall, I could see a slice of the interior, beyond the open door.

There were more unmoving figures in there, down on the ground. One wore a UN Security blazer. I extended my senses and found they were both dead.