“I’ll bring her back safe,” Griffin said to the chief. “The Source will remain untouched.”
He heard Bane walk away, the Chimeran’s signature trailing after him, the sound of the glass panes rattling in the back door as he made his exit. But Griffin didn’t go after him. If the general refused to give him any answers about his cryptic plea, Griffin didn’t owe him anything in return. Keko’s life was Griffin’s goal. His sole purpose.
The chief’s gaze drifted over Griffin’s shoulder and out the window that framed an overgrown garden. “Yes,” he murmured, almost to himself. “I’m sure it will remain untouched.”
And Griffin didn’t know what suddenly bothered him more: the troubled, conflicted look in the chief’s tired eyes and the anxious bounce of his knee, or the fact that his Chimeran signature was essentially nonexistent.
SIX
Griffin hiked out of the Chimeran valley on the opposite side from which he’d arrived. Even if he’d wanted to hop in a car and close the gap between him and Keko with an engine, there was no way even the best four-wheel drive could have managed on this landscape. It wasn’t vertical, but pretty damn close. He had to pay smart attention to where he put his hands and feet, the land soft from rain, the vegetation sometimes giving out and making him slide.
This terrain had probably been kid’s play to Keko. Her stamina and strength were already something incredible, a gift of her Chimeran blood, but she’d also grown up here, among the birds with their strange songs, and the ferns and vines that looked injected with steroids. A dangerous advantage for her to have, and he dared let himself worry that maybe he’d underestimated how far ahead she’d gotten.
But then, he had a damn good advantage over her.
When he was well away from the valley, heaving for breath on top of a rise that swept back down to the stronghold and even farther away to the ocean, he unzipped his pack and pulled out Adine’s sensor. A slim silver piece with a screen larger than most smart phones, it fit perfectly in one hand. He flicked it on and the screen jumped, coming to life as it slowly scanned and displayed in uneven, colorful circles the altitude pitches of this mountainous land. Red for the tops of the hills that faded into dark blue at sea level. A jumble of hills and crags, canyons and bodies of water.
He could feel the faint tug of the signatures of the collective Chimeran population far off to his right. There, on the screen, in blinking, shifting white, a graphic cloud echoed what he sensed.
Also, a thin, faint, white streak smeared northwest across the screen, zigzagging through the concentric, colorful circles, traveling down the slopes and back up again. Away from the valley. Away from the spot in which he stood now.
Keko.
He could not physically sense her signature anymore, but it was right there in brilliant clarity, in a visual form no Ofarian, or anyone else, had ever laid eyes on before. The perfect trail for him to follow.
He realized, with a cold feeling, that if this kind of technology should ever fall into the wrong hands, it wouldn’t just be Adine who would be compromised. Every Secondary would be vulnerable. He’d have to get her assurance that this particular device—since he had been the one to commission and pay for it—was the only type of tracker in existence.
But . . . one situation at a time.
Griffin stared at the device and memorized Keko’s path, intermittently dropping the screen to look up and match the digital signature trail with the topography spread out before him. Once he had it committed to memory, he turned off the tracker and stashed it in his pack.
He would never catch up with her on foot. Not with her physical ability, not with her two-day lead and knowledge of the landscape, and not with the day’s light starting to die.
But he’d close a good chunk of the distance if he used his magic.
He opened his mouth and filled it with Ofarian words. He threw out his arms, tilted back his head, and opened up his whole being to let his magic take hold. The language of his ancestors, the one that had originated on another world somewhere up among the stars, spun through him, taking his human body. It sank into him, shifting the molecules of his hair and bones and organs to water, to the element that defined his people.
In fiction, Primaries called magic “power.” He remembered that the first time he’d heard that term as a boy, he’d found it odd. But that was before his body had changed, before he’d actually wielded water and discovered how truly special he was. As soon as he matured he understood the synonym for magic as “power,” because that’s exactly how he felt. Powerful. It had never changed for him. Using it this time in the wet Hawaiian forest as a thirty-five-year-old was as humbling and wonderful as the very first time in his parents’ living room at age thirteen.
Opening his eyes, he looked at his arm, a translucent, shimmering appendage that defied the rules of this world. To transform his body entirely into water was simple and demanded little from either himself or his magic, but he needed his clothing and he needed what he carried on his back. That was a different process entirely, and it required an awful lot.
Digging deep, as deep into his powers as was possible, he centered his concentration, and then pushed his magic outward. It shot out from the confines of his body, stabbing into the cotton threads of his clothes and the nylon strands of his pack, and the many solid pieces of the contents inside. He changed everything, from Adine’s signature sensor down to his scant camper’s food.
Everything, water.
But with gravity and the steep up-and-down terrain dotted with more types of plants than he could ever hope to know, pushing a flow of water overland wouldn’t be the best way to go. Unless . . .
It was risky—it would drain his energy even faster; it would put him in danger of losing his magic altogether—but in the end it would help him the most.
He weighed the options. Chance losing Keko and the Senatus, or chance kissing his water magic good-bye.
It was a no brainer. He was strong. He was centered. He was steadfast. Catching up to Keko would keep her alive, give him the Senatus, and create a better future for Henry. Magic was nothing, in the grand scheme of things. Being Ofarian meant more than magic; Cat Heddig had taught him that. If he had to let it go, so be it. The end absolutely justified the means.
So he became vapor.
The magic tugged hard at his senses and his control, but he took hold of it, quick and firm. His body and belongings divided, dissipated, rising up from the earth. Water to steam. He’d only done this a handful of times in his life—the risks of going to vapor were impressed upon young Ofarians very early—but the skill came back easily. It was the energy he worried about. So what was he doing hovering around navel-gazing for?
He grabbed a gust of wind and rode it. The invisible force yanked him from his hilltop and whisked him northwest. Over the steep drop of the land, across the open space, above the trees. Cutting his pursuit time in half, maybe even more.
Still, he wished he had an air elemental with him to speed things up, to direct traffic so to speak. As it was, he had to ride the existing air currents, expelling even more energy to keep himself on track to follow Keko’s trail.
But that wasn’t even the toughest part. It was keeping himself together. That was the danger of this form. If he spread his vapor too thin there was the threat of it snapping, coming apart. Separating. And if an Ofarian in vapor form lost control of his molecules, too much space coming between them, there was no getting them back together again.
The most tame Ofarian campfire stories described water elementals regaining their bodies after going vapor only to find their magic was gone. The most evil, the most disgusting, had Ofarians coming back into human form without limbs or heads.