Undone (34 page)

He was in the first vault we passed. I saw the familiar flash of his brown eyes through the narrow slot in the door as we passed. “Cassiel?” His voice sounded slow and uncertain. “You okay?”

“No,” I said.

Knowing he was here and alive filled me with a water-sweet relief I had not expected. They locked me into a room next to Luis's cell, and it was grim indeed—plain, seamless floor, plain walls, a stainless steel toilet in the corner, a sink with a water tap. A rolled mattress in the corner.

Nothing else. Nothing at all.

They had not removed the restraints, which begged the baffling question of how they expected me to make use of any of the lavish facilities they'd provided, until I heard the ponderous movement of the locking mechanism rattle, and an Earth Warden stepped into the room.

She was tall, severe, with short brown hair and a pinched mouth, a sharply unpleasant expression that seemed to find me and all I stood for—whatever that might be—in utter contempt. She wore a standard olive green jumpsuit, which fastened with snaps in the front; again, curiously, there was no insignia to be seen. I had always thought humans were compelled to self-identify.

She dropped a neatly packaged bundle to the floor and made a twirling gesture with one finger. “Turn around.” I did, a full shuffling turn, coming back to face her. She rolled her eyes. “No, idiot, put your back to me.”

“Then be precise,” I said.

Once I had my back to her, she advanced with a few quick, light steps, and I felt the plastic straps holding my wrists part with a snap. She stepped away again, holding the remains of my restraints. “All right,” she said. “Strip. Everything comes off.”

If this was a human effort to make me feel awkward or humiliated, it was doomed to failure. The only issue I found with stripping naked was that it was difficult to bend and stretch without waking new waves of agony from my side. Once I'd managed it—she did not offer help—the Warden walked closer again.

“Raise your arm,” she said, and bent to examine the wound in my side. “Nasty. One of our little pets do that to you?”

“Pets,” I echoed.

“Rejects,” she said. “We still find a use for them. Hold still.”

She did not say,
This will hurt
, because I suspected she didn't care. I braced myself against the wall with my other palm, trying desperately not to whimper at the acid wash of agony as she poked and prodded.

At length, she seemed satisfied. “You've got an infection in there,” she said. “Damage to your liver, nicked a couple of blood vessels. I'll fix the worst of it. Try not to scream.”

She put her hand over the wound, and I learned that not all Earth Wardens who
could
heal
should.
She seemed to have little knowledge of how much pain she caused, and cared even less. In the end, I couldn't stop the scream. It felt as if she had filled the wound track with boiling lava.

Once she'd exacted the price of the scream—which, I realized, she'd been waiting for—the Warden closed up the cut and stepped back to admire her handiwork. It wasn't neat: A hand-sized patch of reddened, blistered skin, and a knotted scar. “You should consider training,” I said. She hadn't given me any power through the contact, hadn't so much as replenished my lost blood supplies. Her healing had, in fact, left me weaker, not stronger, and I believed that was exactly her intent. She'd left me in a position that I would not sicken and die, but I'd be too weak to present an effective threat.

She bared her teeth at me—I would not call it a smile—and kicked the bundle toward me. “Dress,” she said. “Unless you prefer to stay naked. I don't really care.”

She left, taking my clothing, and the vaultlike door closed behind her. I crouched and picked up the bundle. Unrolled, it contained a paper-thin jumpsuit of brilliant yellow, the color of reflective paint, and a plain pair of cotton underwear. No brassiere, but my body was lean enough that it wasn't an important omission. There were socks, and a pair of flimsy shoes with the word PRISONER printed on the bottoms.

I would have manifested my own clothing, if I'd had power, but I didn't, and I was cold. The vault had a chill to it, like a cave.
Or a crypt.
I imagined them sealing the room and walking away, leaving me to starve alone. A Djinn would have found that frustrating and boring.

A human would find it fatal.

The clothing didn't warm me much, but it made me feel less vulnerable—I supposed I had overestimated how much my human body had influenced me along those lines. A human of this time, this culture, needed coverings to feel safe.

As I unrolled the mattress, I found a folded thin blanket and a small pillow. The blanket I wrapped around me as I paced the room. I could sense Luis's presence, dim and indistinct, on the other side of the wall. If I could touch him . . .

But they had gone to great lengths to be sure I couldn't.

I pressed my hands to the wall, then my forehead. I could feel him there, possibly even making the same attempt at contact.

My eardrums fluttered, and then I heard his voice, in startlingly clear stereo.
Cassiel?

“Here,” I said. I didn't know if he could hear me, but I supposed he could. He had, even on the road. “Are you all right?”

That bitch Warden keeps filling me full of drugs,
he said. He sounded angry and unfocused.
Can't keep myself straight. Withdrawal's going to be a bitch. You?

“She left me weak,” I said. “I don't think she found it necessary to drug me.” If I could find a way to touch Luis, she'd regret that, at length. “What do you know about these people?”

Nothing, except they've got a pet Earth Warden and some mad building skills.
Luis's voice turned dark.
They have Ibby. They told me they'd hurt her if I tried anything.

Yes, the Earth Warden would definitely have time to regret her actions. “I found C. T. Styles,” I said. “Rather, he found me.” I explained about the ambush and the odd way the children acted. “I don't believe they are themselves. I think someone is controlling them. Using them.”

Something the Earth Warden said returned to me. “Rejects,” I said. “They're rejects.”

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.

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.

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.”