I felt a cold wave of anger push back the simple human anguish of my injuries, and I looked up sharply at him. “Maybe it’s time for a change,” I said.
He laughed. “You won’t fight me. Look at you. You can’t stand on your own, and you refused my gift. You can hardly exist at all.”
I climbed slowly to my feet, moving with great deliberation. I didn’t wince, even when the pain bit deep; I didn’t allow so much as a flicker of hesitation. I never looked away from him as I stood, unaided, and faced him.
The wind bent the trees around us, and pitiless starlight rained down. The silence seemed to stretch for an eternity.
“All right, enough,” Ashan said, finally. “I never doubted your stubbornness. Only your ability.”
“I have ability,” I replied. “And will. And I don’t need more than that.”
“I’m not battling you. It isn’t the time, or the place.” Ashan’s pale lips twitched into a brief, very cool smile. “If you would be polite enough to wait, it’s more than likely I will be destroyed soon enough. We live in a dangerous world, Cassiel. And all of us will pay a price for survival, if we survive at all.”
“I’ve never heard you say such things.” Ashan was, after all, self-interested and a coward first, before all things except his protection of the Mother herself. That made him less of a pessimist than most.
“There has never been such a time,” he said. His tone was calm and dispassionate, and all the more powerful for it. “The disease the Wardens have brought to this world may destroy us yet; even Pearl has taken advantage of it, in her use of the Void. With Pearl seeking our destruction at the same time as the Wardens’ mortal enemies, do you really believe we can win without great loss?”
“I’m only surprised you even consider that youmay be one of those losses.”
He bared his teeth in an almost genuine smile. “David has no reason to protect me.”
“Nor you him, though it hasn’t seemed to have worried him a great deal.”
David, the leader of the New Djinn, probably bothered far less about Ashan than Ashan did about David; I suspected that David’s intense and legendary love for the human Warden Joanne Baldwin had wakened both contempt and confusion within my brother, which manifested in—predictably, for Ashan—real hatred. David, from the few encounters I’d had with him, held little or none.
My attempt to show strength was spoiled as my knees weakened. My body gave me no real warning—a thick wave of dizziness, and then I felt myself falling. I put out my hands to brace myself—or my one human hand, and the misshapen lump of bronze that weighed down my left arm—but I never hit the ground. Instead, Ashan stepped forward, caught me, and eased me down to a kneeling position. I was having difficulty breathing—my lungs felt thick and wet—but I still managed to wheeze, “This is how you like me, on my knees to you,” before I began to cough, explosive mouthfuls of hot blood.
Ashan made a sound of frustration, and I felt a cold silvery power glide through me, from the crown of my head downward. I tried to resist it, but his touch was seductive and powerful, and the comfort it left behind it was so extreme that I felt an urge to weep. I didn’t. My eyes were dry by the time Ashan stepped back, and I looked at myself disorientingly from the aetheric.
My head still ached, but the broken skull was fused together, and the ragged tear in my scalp had closed. The broken ribs had likewise reset, and the blood in my lungs was gone. He hadn’t bothered with my collections of bruises, but overall, I was in sound condition, considering my recent injuries.
“I could have destroyed your physical body,” he said. “But I wasn’t sure that even at the last, you’d choose to regain your rightful place. This has to stop. I need you with me, Cassiel. We can’t allow Pearl to pursue this course, and there’s still only one way to stop her.”
“Genocide,” I said.
“Extinction,” he corrected me. “As it has been before, as it will be again. It’s the reason we were created, to protect the Mother. And we will, with or without you.”
I got off my knees. “Then you’ll do it without me,” I said, brushing the dirt from my filthy, shapeless gray uniform with both hands ... and only then did I realize that he’d repaired my metallic left hand. I left it to the faint starlight, examining the finely detailed flexible metal skin, the precise movements of the metal fingers. He’d done a better job of it than I had, originally. I rubbed my fingertips together, and the sensation that came to me was absolutely realistic. Except for the warm matte color of my forearm and hand, it might have been the original appendage.
“That’s a gift,” he said, nodding toward it. “And I think you’ll find that in the end you’ll know I was right about the humans. They were a mistake, and they need correcting.”
I sensed he was about step into the aetheric and leave me behind. “Wait! My connection to Luis. Restore it.”
He met my eyes, and in his silver ones I read a trace of the man I’d liked, back in the camp. A trace of regret, and kindness. Then Ashan blinked, and it vanished. “Very well,” he said. “But you won’t like what you find. I was trying to spare you the pain.”
I felt a hot snap inside—not something breaking, this time, but something reforging. It burned, then cooled, and I felt ... nothing for a few seconds.
Then, distantly, I felt pain, echoing through the connection like a scream from a long distance away. Pain, anguish, fury, fear.
I opened my eyes and stared at Ashan. “What have you done?”
“Nothing,” he said. “You destroyed Pearl’s brightest acolytes. Did you think she would simply let that go? She’s like you. Emotional.”
The shock of it wore off, and now the dread set in, heavy and black in the pit of my stomach.
I’d done this. We’ddone this. Luis was under attack, injured, maybe dying. I had a flash of Manny Rocha, my first Warden partner, dying in a hail of bullets while I’d stood at a distance, unable to save him—only this was more intense, worse, because what I felt for Luis—no, the loveI felt for him—left me horrified, frantic, and desperate.
I hadto save him.
Ashan was already beginning to fade away. “No!” I screamed, and lunged for him. His form was solid, then softened into mist. For an instant he stood in his True Djinn form, something human eyes weren’t meant to comprehend. I had to look away.
“Please,” I said. “Please take me there. Please, Ashan. I will beg, if that’s what you want.”
“It isn’t,” he said, and I felt him slip away, into the aetheric. Only his voice remained, a whisper on the wind. “I want you to remember what it means to be one of us, not one of them. If you’d chosen to join me, you could have saved him. You could have saved them all.”
And then he was gone, and I was alone, cold and alone, in an unknown forest.
And far away from me, my love was fighting for his life.
I let out a scream that shook leaves from the trees, and began to run.
I had only gone perhaps a mile before I ran into Ashan again, standing in my path, shining like the moon. He looked at me strangely, as if he’d never seen me before.
“You run,” he said. “You have no idea where you are, and yet you run.”
I could feel Luis’s presence, like a compass tugging me onward. I didn’t slow down, only ran around Ashan’s still form and kept going. I didn’t know how far it was; I only knew that I couldn’t risk nottrying.
If Luis died, I would die with him, one way or another. And I would wish it to be so.
Ashan, again, standing near the trunk of a massive, shadowed tree. I was remotely thankful for his presence, as he illuminated a hidden branch that stretched across the trail and might have tripped me. I vaulted it and kept running. “You won’t make it!” he called after me. “Cassiel!”