Rachel Caine: Thin Air

“Lewis?” I asked. “Please tell me. Do I have a kid?”

A long, long silence. “No,” he said. “No, you don’t.”

I didn’t remember anything about my life. For all intents and purposes, I’d been born a few hours ago, on a bed of icy leaves and mud. I’d been dropped out of the sky into a bewildering world that wasn’t what my instincts told me was normal…into the lives of two men who each had some agenda that I wasn’t sure I could understand.

But one thing I knew for sure: Lewis was lying to me. I was certain of that. For good reasons, maybe…and maybe not. I didn’t really know him. Lewis and David…they were just strangers. Strangers who’d helped me, yes, but still. I didn’t know them. I didn’t know what they wanted from me.

Deep down, I was scared that the next time I asked questions, they were going to start telling me the truth.

We broke camp at dawn-well, Lewis broke camp, moving as if doing it were as normal as stumbling out of bed and making coffee. I mostly sat off to the side, huddled in his down jacket. Lewis had layered on all the clothes he had in the backpack-thermals next to his skin, and T-shirts, flannel, and sweaters over it.

He was going to die if he didn’t have a coat. I was still shivering, and I was practically certified for the arctic in the down jacket.

I made a halfhearted attempt to give it back.

“No,” he said, not even pausing. “Zip it up. You need to keep the core of your body warm.”

“But…you’re-”

“I’ll be fine. One thing about Earth Wardens: We’re not likely to die of the cold.” Maybe not, but his lips looked a little blue, and so did his fingernails. As I stared at his hands, he noticed, frowned at them, and dug a pair of insulated gloves from a zippered pocket in the backpack. He continued to break down the camp. I shoveled sand over the fire pit, smothering the embers, and looked around for something else to do. Nothing, really. I shoved my cold, aching fingers back into the pockets of the jacket.

There was still no sign of David. Lewis didn’t refer to his absence. Neither did I. Lewis rolled the sleeping bags into tight little coils, tied them off, and then broke down the tent into a small pouch and some short telescoping rods. It all went into the backpack. He handed me a bottle of water and a granola bar-no coffee-and I frowned at the bottle and shook it.

Frozen solid. “Um…”

“Melt it,” he said.

“What?”

“Melt the ice,” he said. “You’re a Weather Warden. Melt the ice.”

I had no idea what he was talking about. I remembered the world that David had shown me, but I couldn’t think how to apply that to the simple, practical problem in my hand.

Lewis let out a growl of frustration, took the bottle and held it in his hand for about two seconds, then handed it back.

It sloshed.

“How did you-”

“We don’t have time for lessons,” he interrupted. “Let’s move.”

“Um…shoes?”

He stopped in midstride and looked back at me. I was fully dressed down to the thermal socks, but those were rapidly getting muddy and damp.

“Shit,” he said, surprised. “I forgot all about-”

“I didn’t,” said a voice from behind me. I whirled to find David walking out of the trees, making a grand entrance that I instinctively knew must be standard procedure for a Djinn. He was holding a pair of hiking boots.

And a fresh pair of thermal socks.

And a backpack.

“Shopping,” he said, and handed everything over.

“Don’t suppose you bought a Jeep while you were out,” Lewis said.

“I can do a lot of things, but rearranging forest trails without attracting attention on the aetheric…”

“Rhetorical question.” Lewis kept not quite watching David, who’d picked up a stick and was idly poking it into the damp ground. “Any sign of trouble out there?” Which I supposed was a graceful way of asking if David had been off keeping watch, rather than brooding. Not that one precluded the other. I sat down on a fallen log, tugged off my muddied socks and put on fresh ones, then laced up the hiking boots. They fit perfectly.

“There’s snowfall two miles away,” David said. “Heavy. You’re keeping it to the south, I take it?”

“Trying,” Lewis said. “This whole region’s soaked with moisture. Sooner or later it’s going to start coming down. There’s only so far you can push the system before it starts pushing back, and the last thing I want is to start a winter storm while we’re trying to get out of here. How’s Mom, by the way?”

“Quiet.”

Mom? I debated it for a few seconds, then asked aloud. Both men turned to look at me as I tugged the laces tighter and knotted the right boot.

“Mother Earth,” Lewis said. “The primal intelligence of the planet. Mom. She’s been a little…unhappy lately.”

I tried to figure out if he was joking, and decided-rather grimly-that he wasn’t. Great. Wardens who could control all kinds of things. Spooky disappearing Djinn. And now the ground I was walking on had some kind of hidden intelligence.

Losing my memory was turning out to be a real education.

I tied off my left boot and stood up, shouldering my pack. David had balanced it well; it seemed to ride nicely, with no extra strain.

“I can take it if you get tired,” David said, walking past me.

I snorted. “I’m surprised you didn’t try to take it in the first place.”

“I know better,” he said. “When you want help, you’ll ask for it.”

We’d left the campsite and gone about a mile before I broached the question again. David was in front of me, Lewis ahead of him. It was as private as this was likely to get. “David? About last night…what I said…about children.”

No answer. He kept walking, long strides, following Lewis’s progress. I had to hurry to keep up.

“Is there a child?” I asked. My heart was hammering, and I didn’t think it was from the exercise. “Mine, yours, ours? What’s going on?”

“Not now.”

“Yeah, now. Look, the way you reacted-”

“I can’t talk about it now.”

“But-”

He turned, and I stumbled to a halt, suddenly aware of just how tall he was. He wasn’t especially broad, but I’d had my hands pressing against his chest, and I knew that there was muscle under that checked shirt. Plus, he’d thrown Lewis across the clearing like a plush toy.

“What do you want to know?” he asked, face taut, voice intense. “That we had a child? We did. Her name was Imara. She was part of our souls, Jo, and how do you think it feels for me to know that you don’t even recognize her name ?”

He turned, olive coat belling in a gust of cold wind, and followed Lewis up the slope. Lewis had paused at the top, looking down at us.

He didn’t say anything, just plunged down the other side. I saved my breath and concentrated on putting one foot in front of the other.

Imara. I kept repeating the name in my head, hoping for some kind of resonance, some spark of memory. I’d had a daughter , for God’s sake. How could I remember the brand name of the shoes I was wearing and not remember my own child? Not remember carrying her, or holding her, or…

Or how she’d died. Because even though nobody had said it, that was what everybody meant. Imara had been born, and Imara had died, and I had no memory at all of any part of it.

And of everything I’d lost, that was the piece that made me feel desperately, horribly incomplete.

Lewis led us through what I could only guess was an old-growth forest of the Great Northwest. Oregon, Washington-somewhere in there. He set a brutal pace, moving fast to keep his body heat up. We didn’t take breaks. When we finally stopped, I dropped my pack and staggered off into the woods to pee. When I came back, Lewis had another fire going, and he was wrapped in one of the unrolled sleeping bags, shivering.