Rachel Caine: Chill Factor

He was certainly not averse to causing me trouble, at least.

So. We hung there in midair, and watched the landscape below rise and fall like the ocean. Mona slowly evened out from her tilt to a nice, even hover.

"Do I need to ask?" I asked. My voice was more or less steady, but my skin was burning from the sudden rush of adrenaline.

"Earthquake," David said.

"It was rhetorical."

"So I gathered." He looked icy calm, but his eyes were glittering behind the glasses. "Jo. You can slow down now."

Right, I was still pressing the accelerator through the floor. I let up and, for no apparent reason, shifted to the brake. My legs were shaking. Hell, my whole body was shaking. I couldn't get my hands off of the wheel.

"You know, there are three kinds of waves associated with earthquakes," I said, in an attempt at nonchalance. "P waves, S waves, L waves. See, the sonic boom is caused by the primary waves-"

"And the ancient Chinese believed it was the dragon shifting in its sleep," David interrupted me. "None of that is very useful right now."

Again, he had a point. "Okay. What if I order you to stop it?" I asked.

David shook his head, looking down at the continued waves moving through the ground. "Power against power. It would only make things worse. I can't oppose him directly."

"So it is Jonathan." As if I had any doubt. We'd been playing keep-away with the state of Nevada for nearly three days, circling around. And every time, there'd been something to stop us. Hail the size of basketballs that I'd barely been able to keep from smashing the Viper into scrap. Lightning storms. Wind walls. You name it, we'd run into it.

And from it.

I'd spent a considerable amount of my time and energy fixing the careful balance of the ecosystem. Kevin/Jonathan didn't seem to give a crap that tossing fireballs at us might seriously screw up the entire matter-and-energy equation, or that whipping up a tornado might rip apart the stability of the weather half a continent away. Kevin I could understand; he was a kid, and kids don't think of consequences. But Jonathan… I knew he had the capacity to balance the scales. He just hadn't.

Hanging in midair wasn't getting us anywhere. I sucked in a deep breath and said, "Plan B, I guess."

"I think we're midway through the alphabet," David replied. "Jo, I really thought we could get through to Las Vegas, but we're not even coming close. Maybe we should-"

"I'm not giving up, so don't even think about saying it."

I couldn't give up. Kevin and Jonathan were a partnership made in hell, and it was my fault. I'd given Kevin the opportunity to do that. Also, I should have been able to stop Kevin from stealing the powers of the most gifted Warden in the world, my friend, Lewis Levander Orwell.

So I was not giving up now. The cost could be incalculable in lives and property, and one of them I knew personally. Lewis would die. He was dying right now, the same way he'd die if somebody came along and ripped important biological parts out of him that his body needed to keep functioning. Lewis was so powerful magically that magic was part of him. He couldn't do without it.

However, the trouble was that Kevin now possessed so much power that David and I-and any other poor, stupid, magically talented idiot trying to make it to Las Vegas-were as obvious and vulnerable as black bugs on a pristine white floor. No place to hide. Nowhere to go, except onward, hoping we'd be able to avoid the giant's crushing power.

We had, so far. But clearly they were just playing with us.

I had a dreadful thought. "Is there anybody else on this road?" Kevin, I knew, wouldn't go out of his way to rack up civilian casualties, but I was far from convinced he'd go out of his way to avoid it, either.

"Not in range. I can dampen the vibrations a little, at the outskirts, and he's focusing it right beneath us. No one's been hurt." The unspoken yet made me wince.

"How long can he keep it up?"

David shot me a look. "You're kidding."

"As long as he wants?"

"Exactly." From the desert-dry tone, David was feeling a little inadequate. "We'll have to wait him out." Again.

"So," I said, and forced a little lightness into my voice, "how will we pass the time?"

David wasn't in the mood for banter. He watched the road writhe like a living thing below us and said, "Catch some rest while you can. I'll keep watch."

Not exactly what I was hoping for, but I got his point. I was tired, and unlike David, I was only human these days.

Not that I was bitter about that, or anything.

Much.

Weather is nothing but the practical application of quantum mechanics. There's no way to make quantum mechanics simple, but ultimately it boils down to the interactions of particles so small they make atoms look big. Everything is divisible by something else, down to particles so small the human mind can't grasp them or even measure them in any way except by the effects they leave behind. Particles behave like waves. Nothing is what it seems.

Controlling quantum interactions is a macro/micro science, or magic, or art-or the true marriage of all of those. When you're controlling the weather, manipulation occurs at subatomic levels, gaining or losing energy, annihilating quarks against antiquarks or protons against antiprotons, and it's both destructive and clean. It can mean the difference between a sunny day and a gentle spring rain, or a thunderstorm and a killer F5 tornado. It can mean flood or drought. Life or death.

It's a lot of responsibility, and I'm afraid the Wardens don't really take it all that seriously sometimes. We're human, after all. Like everybody else, we've got lives, and families, and all the normal human complement of sins and vices. Hey, nobody likes getting the four a.m. call from the office, especially if it's to fix somebody else's mess.

And sins, yes, we've got plenty of those. Greed, for one. Greed and power have always been really good bedfellows, but greed and magic are the deadliest of evil twins.

I'd had a few brushes with how absolutely power could corrupt. The Wardens were built on solid, idealistic principles, but somewhere along the way some of us-maybe even a lot of us-had lost the mission. There were a few faithful, altruistic ones left (I didn't dare count myself among them).

It's never been my job, or my nature, to worry about whether or not what I was doing was right in the grand scheme of things. I'm a foot soldier. A doer, not a planner. I like being useful and doing my job well, and so far as lasting satisfaction goes, owning a killer wardrobe and bitchin' shoes doesn't hurt.

I never wanted to be in an ethical struggle. It shouldn't be my job to decide who's right, who's wrong, who lives, who dies. It shouldn't be anybody's job, but most especially not mine. I'm not deep. I'm not philosophical. I'm a girl who likes fast cars and fast men and expensive clothes, not necessarily in that order.

But you do the job you're handed.

I couldn't sleep. I mean, could you? Hanging in midair over an earthquake, waiting for the other shoe to drop? Even as exhausted as I was, fear kept me from closing my eyes for more than five seconds at a time.

So we were hanging there, watching the road ripple in the bright merciless sun, when something occurred to me and made me sit up straight, blinking.

"Can I fly this thing?" I asked. As if we weren't already hanging a ton of steel in midair without benefit of an airplane engine. D'oh! "I mean, move the car to another highway. Without them knowing."

That got David's complete attention, with a slight puzzled frown. "It's not exactly built for gliding, but yes, I suppose. Why?"

"Because if you can keep an illusion on the aetheric of us staying here, I can move the car with wind power to another route, and maybe we can gain some time before he figures it out." I hesitated, then asked the question I'd been afraid to put into words. "He could kill us, right? Anytime he wants."