I blinked. “Are you trying to intimidate me?” I was honestly curious, because I had been cowed before—rarely—but it was not very likely to come from this man, with all his rules and limits. “Because for all your posturing, I don’t think you are a bad man. I think you are afraid of me. You shouldn’t be. As long as you don’t interfere with me—”
He gave a short, hard bark of laughter. “Interfere with you?Lady, you’ve done nothing but fuck up our lives around here since you landed on Earth. Now, you tell me what I need to know about how the Wardens and the Djinn are involved in this.”
“Or?”
“Or you’re not going to like me very much,” he said.
I didn’t like him now. I didn’t see how that would be much of a change.
He didn’t push me. Agent Klein returned with two disposable cups filled with thick black coffee. I accepted one and held it in both hands, breathing in the fragrant steam. Agent Sanders guzzled his.
“Where is Turner?” I asked.
“Sent him out,” Sanders said. “Figured that with the bad blood of him selling you out like that, you might want a piece of him. So you can consider him off the case, as far as you’re concerned. All right?”
“Turner worked with you on countermeasures for Wardens,” I said. “For how long?”
“How about I don’t discuss classified government programs?”
“Oh, I assure you, you will discuss it. Whether you discuss it with me, with Lewis Orwell, with Joanne Baldwin, with David or Ashan or some of the others—well, that is your choice. But that will be a much more . . . energetic conversation. One Mr. Turner won’t enjoy, I would think.”
“Turner’s our asset. We’ll protect him.”
I didn’t like the direction this was going. Inevitably, it would end one place—with a civil war between the normal human world and the human Wardens. The Djinn would not have to take sides, but some would. Destruction and wrath would follow.
It was, as Luis would have phrased it, a cluster fuck.
Which brought my mind back to the subject I was most interested in. “I want to see Luis,” I said. “Now.”
Sanders and I engaged in another staring contest. He finally broke it and looked at Agent Klein, who was standing at rest, with his hand not very far at all from his gun. “Get him,” he said.
“Sir—”
“Just get him.”
We waited in silence while Klein was gone. I sipped my coffee. Klein had disappeared around the edge of the tent, and I’d heard a vehicle start and pull away. They weren’t keeping him here, at their forward base; there was a secondary encampment, one where they would probably take me, eventually. There was no virtue in acting too soon. And the coffee wasn’t bad.
Agent Sanders had sense enough to know I wouldn’t speak again until my request had been fulfilled, so he stood up, drank his coffee, and conferred with other agents in the room. When he was done with that, he came and stood over me.
“You made it inside,” he said. “Actually inside the compound.” He sounded impressed.
“In,” I said. “But just getting in is not the problem. There are safeguards. Alarms. Guards.” I thought of the bear-panthers, coursing in packs in the trees, more effective than any human force that could be deployed. “If you think to raid that compound, you’ll be destroyed.”
“Oh, I’m not trying to raid it,” he said. “Not yet. But I’m veryinterested in exactly what you saw while you were there.”
“Nothing,” I said. “Manicured grounds. A gravel road. A large curved building that glowed from within. That’s all I had time to see.”
He tried asking me more questions, but I had already given him as much as he was going to get from me, and eventually he recognized that fact and fell silent.
Fifteen minutes later, I heard the growl of an engine, the crunch of tires, and then the silence as the driver shut down the vehicle. Slamming doors.
I stood up. That brought a change in posture from all the agents in the room—straightening, bracing, hands moving to weapons. “Sit,” Sanders snapped. I ignored him, and he pulled his sidearm, although he didn’t aim it. “Sit down, Cassiel. I’m not playing.”
Shadows at the opening of the tent. Agent Klein . . . and Luis Rocha.
My breath went out of me, because he was being carried on a stretcher by two other men. Unconscious. The men settled the stretcher on top of one of the folding tables and, at a nod from Sanders, withdrew to wait. Klein took up his post again only a few feet away, gun drawn.
I looked from Luis’s slack, blank face to Sanders. Everything seemed to have a red tinge to it, and I was having difficulty breathing.
“He’s alive,” Sanders said, as if that was even a question. “Whoa, Cassiel. Take it down a notch. He’s going to be okay. He put up a hell of a fight. They had to go hard on him, and then they had to put him out to treat him. He’ll wake up in a couple of hours.”
I saw blood on Luis’s shirt. I lifted the hem of it and saw a bandage as large as my hand beneath it, on his right side. Beneath it I sensed a cut, a long and deep one, that had perforated organs and nicked a bowel. The human physicians had repaired the damage with stitches, cleaned out wounds, and left him to heal.
“Take these off me,” I said, and held my cuffed hands out to Sanders without looking away from Luis.
“Can’t do that.”
I wanted to issue the sort of threat I would have in Djinn form: Refuse me, and I’ll destroy you, your colleagues, every trace you were ever alive.But, in human form, that would not only be extremely difficult to accomplish, it would also get me imprisoned, or shot out of hand.
“I can heal him,” I said, and put a note of pleading in my voice. It was not precisely acting. “Please. Let me help him. Otherwise it will take weeks for him to get back to full strength, and he risks infection.” I left unspoken the obvious: If Luis Rocha died of his wounds, or even complications of them, then he would be held responsible. Not just by me. By his superiors. By the Wardens. Possibly even by one or two Djinn with a random interest.
Sanders obviously recognized the risk.
He fixed me with a long, steady look. I tried my best to convey a lack of threat, although that was hardly my strong suit.
He sighed. “Fine. But you do anythingI don’t like, and Agent Klein here will shoot you a whole lot. Okay?”
He wasn’t waiting for my agreement. He unlocked the cuffs, both wrists, and removed them. They lookedlike regular handcuffs, which was curious; I had expected some small technological addition, but I saw nothing of interest.
Sanders stepped back and nodded toward Luis, lying silent on the table. “Clock’s running,” he said. “You’ve got five minutes.”
He had no experience with Wardens, other than Turner, that much was obvious. I shook my head and put my right hand on Luis’s forehead. It felt cool and slightly clammy. The left—the metal hand—I left at my side. I was no longer sure if I could control the flow of power through it at a fine enough level to perform this kind of task.
The damage within Luis had been surprisingly light, and repaired by skilled surgeons; he was, in fact, not in any danger at all, but merely needed rest and recovery. That, at least, was easy enough to fix, by simply replacing his lost energy with some of mine, although I had precious little to spare. Had he truly been badly injured, I doubted I would have had the reserves to repair him on my own . . . but this, I could do.
And did.
Luis opened his eyes. They were blank for a moment as his brain came aware and began processing information at a pace that was astonishing even to the Djinn—memory, sensory input, aetheric input. Then his eyes focused, fixed on mine, and he did nothing for a long second.
Can you hear me?I performed the Earth Warden trick, murmuring the words directly into his ear by delicate vibrations of the membrane inside. Don’t move. Don’t let them see you’re awake.