Undone (8 page)

“You can say it again. It won't offend me.” Manny rested his back against the bare wall, pulled up his knees, and rested his forearms on them. “Christ. We've got to work on that. You can't take it out of me like that. If we're in real trouble, you could kill us both, not to mention anybody we're trying to help.” He rested his head against the wall and sighed. “And at the risk of sounding like a woman, that hurts when you do it wrong.”

I stayed silent. I felt a strange burn of shame, deep down, that wouldn't be smothered.
I hurt him.
I hadn't meant to do so, but that hardly mattered.
If I'd killed him, he leaves behind others.
The interconnectedness of human life had never truly made itself real to me until I had sat at the table, eating food prepared by his wife, watching his daughter laugh and smile.

Manny didn't speak again. I crouched down across from him, eye level, and stared deep into his eyes.

“I can't promise,” I said. “I will do my best, but I may not always be able to control this. You must be prepared to defend against me.”

His gaze didn't waver. “That's not real comforting.”

“It wasn't meant to be.” I smiled slightly, but I didn't imagine that was comforting, either. “I assume the Wardens are keeping track of what I do.”

He had the grace to look a little embarrassed. “I turn in reports, yeah. They want to make sure you're not—”

“Out of control.”

“Exactly.”

“Am I?”

It was Manny's turn not to answer. He held the silence, and the stare, and I could not read his impenetrable human eyes at all. So much lost in me. So much that could go wrong.

“Help me up,” he said, and held out his square, muscular hand. I did, careful to keep it only to surface touching, although I could sense the power coursing through him even through so light a contact. “Get your coffee. Let's go to work.”

 

Work was a new and interesting concept for me. I understood duty, of course, and using one's skills and powers for a purpose. But
work
was a completely different thing, because it seemed so . . .
dreary
.

Manny Rocha had an office. A small, cheap single room in a building full of such accommodations. The sign on the windowless door read, ROCHA ENVIRONMENTAL SERVICES. He unlocked the office and stepped inside, gesturing for me to follow as he picked up a scattering of envelopes from the carpeted floor. “Sorry about the mess,” he said. “Been meaning to pick up a little.”

Whatever Manny's skills might entail, clearly organization was not one of them. Mountains of paper and folders towered on every flat surface, leaning against each other for drunken support. There was not a single spot, other than his chair behind the broad, rectangular desk, that held clear space.

“Yeah,” he said, seeing my expression. “Maybe
mess
doesn't really cover it. I've been meaning to get around to it—it's just that—”

“You hate such tasks.”

“Filing. You got it.”

“How would you prefer it to be filed?”

He stopped in the act of picking up a handful of fallen papers and turned toward me. “What?”

“How would you prefer it to be filed?” I repeated, exercising patience I had not known was available to me until that moment.

“Listen, if you can file this shit, you can do it any way you want.” He sounded both hopeful and doubtful, as if I might believe that the filing of papers was beneath me. What he did not seem to understand was that when
everything
humans did was beneath me, a mundane task such as filing made very little difference.

“Very well,” I said. I could have done it in a dozen different ways—from subtle to dramatic—but I chose a Djinn-style flourish. The paperwork vanished from every surface with an audible
pop
of displaced air, even the sheafs held in Manny's hands, and I expanded my consciousness to analyze the fundamental structure of every folder, every file. Destroying and re-creating at will, even though it was a ridiculous expense of power. “Open the drawer.”

The far wall of his office was a solid block of cabinets with sliding drawers. He hesitated, then opened one at random.

Inside, a neatly ranked system of folders, filed papers.

“I filed them by subject,” I said. “I can change that, if you wish, of course.”

“You're kidding,” he said blankly. “
Dios mio
, you're not kidding. There's a folder here on boundary disputes. On acid levels in the water. On—what the hell is this?” He pulled a folder out and frowned at it. “Boundary adjustments in
Colorado
? That's not supposed to be here. Hell.”

Manny closed the file drawer and sat down in his chair. Hard. He looked around at his office as if he'd never seen it before, placing his hands palm down on the empty desktop. “Holy shit,” he said. “You—how did you do that?”

I shrugged. “Simple enough. It's only paper and ink, after all.” Except that I had expended far too much power in doing it, though I decided I would not tell him that. I sat in the leather armchair across from him. “What else shall we do?”

He was staring, and suddenly he barked out a sound it took me a moment to identify as laughter. “You do windows too, Cassie?”

“Right, sorry.”

I sensed I might be in danger of becoming too accommodating. “No. I do not do windows.”

“Then we can go right to the Warden stuff, I guess.” He cleared his throat and reached for the computer keyboard off to the side, sliding it in front of himself. The machine was angled toward him from a corner of the desk. “Can't believe I can actually see the damn screen without moving things around. Let me check e-mail.”

“You have forty-seven messages,” I said. “Six of them have to do with requests for support from other Wardens. Shall we focus first on those?”

“I never had a Djinn,” Manny admitted. “This how it was before? Working with a Djinn?”

I had no idea, but the idea of being compared to one of my kind enslaved to a bottle turned my too-human stomach, and I knew my expression hardened. “I doubt it.”

He knew dangerous ground when he stepped upon it. Manny nodded. “I guess you can read the e-mails?”

“Of course.”

“Which one is most urgent?”

I gave it a second's thought. “The new instability Warden Garrity identified in Arizona is classified as a strike/slip fault.”

“Garrity, Garrity—” Manny clicked keys and pulled up the e-mail in question. He read it through, nodded, and said, “Yeah, that's a place to start. Okay. Here's what we do—we mark it on the aetheric; we tag it so it's clearly visible. If there's a stress buildup, we bleed that off through surrounding rock in smaller tremors. Otherwise, the spring keeps on coiling, and we get a big shake when it releases. Usually that's no big deal, but it can cause a lot of damage if we don't head it off.”

I nodded, familiar with the concepts. It was different as a Djinn, but still similar enough. “How do I assist you?”

He took his gaze from the screen to glance at me for a second. “Don't know. Just follow me and see if you've got any ideas.”

I was anchored to human flesh. “I—need to touch you. To rise into the aetheric.”

“No biting,” he said, and held out his hand. I reached across the desk to take it. It was his left hand, and the metallic gold of his wedding ring felt an odd contrast to the skin and bones. “Ready?”

“Ready,” I said. I didn't know if I was, but surely rising into the aetheric was as natural to me as breathing was to a human.

It wasn't. Not anymore. It felt wrong, the way I had to fight free of the heavy, dragging anchor of my body. Only Manny's sure touch kept me from falling back. Even after we had risen, and the spectrums shifted to show us auras and the mysteries of perceptions, I felt the continuing pull to return.

I had not known it was such hard work.

Manny couldn't speak in the aetheric, but he didn't need to. I was pulled along like a child's doll as he arrowed up into the higher plane, leveled out, and looked down on the Earth. It was a dizzying view, all opalescent colors, sparks, whispers. In the aetheric Manny looked startling—younger than in his physical form, slimmer, and almost completely covered with the shifting ghosts of tattoos. I didn't know what they symbolized, but clearly they were important to him.

His aura was a pale blue, tinged and sparked with yellow and gold. Not as powerful as others I had seen, but powerful enough for the work he was doing.

He pointed, and I nodded, bracing myself for the fall. When it came, it was shockingly fast. The ground rushed toward us, and the snap of energy whipped us to a hovering stop above a landscape alive with a twisting line of fire. Not real fire, but energy, stored deep beneath the planet's skin. Building toward explosion.

Had I still been Djinn, I would have simply admired the violence of it, the beauty of the incredible forces at work. But Djinn weren't at risk from such things, and so had nothing to fear. We did not build. We rarely died.

Humans were not so fortunate. For the first time, I found myself wondering about the fates of those milling thousands in their homes, towns, and cities, oblivious to the explosive danger under their feet.

I found myself
caring.

I wasn't sure whether I found that intriguing or annoying.

Bleeding off the energy through surrounding rock was a delicate, slow process, but gradually the fault's energy faded from a throbbing, urgent red to a pale gold, stable and calm. It would present a constant threat, but with regular maintenance from the Earth Wardens, it would only threaten, not destroy.

When Manny released his grip on me, it was like a giant steel spring snapped tight, and I spun out of control away from him, hurtling through the aetheric, through the oil-slick layers of color. The descent was sickening.
Terrifying.
If I had been able to scream, I would have; how was it humans traveled this way, dragged down by their anchoring bodies?

I slammed back into flesh with a spasmodic jerk that nearly toppled the armchair. Across from me, Manny Rocha barely flinched as he settled into the human world again.

He opened his eyes to look at me, and there was a glow in his eyes that took me by surprise. Power, yes, and something else.

Rapture.

It faded quickly, as if he didn't want me to see it in him. “You okay?” he asked. I shook my head. My mouth was dry, my stomach empty and growling. Worse than that, though, I felt . . . exhausted. Drained again. I felt a soul-deep stab of frustration.
I can't live this way, off of the scraps of others. I am Djinn!

Ashan had made me a beggar, and in that moment, I hated him for it so bitterly that I felt tears in my eyes. Now I would weep like a human, too. How much more humiliation could I bear?

Manny's hands closed on my shoulders. I drew in a startled breath, and my pale fingers circled his wrists. I had intended it to be defense, to throw off his touch, but the sense of his skin on mine stilled my panic.

“I need—” I couldn't speak. I'd taken so much this morning, and yet it was already spent. I felt on the verge of collapse, horribly exposed.

Manny understood. “Promise you won't take more than I give?”

I nodded.

It was trust, simple and raw, and I did not deserve it.

It took a wrenching, painful effort, but I took what was offered, and nothing more.

Perhaps I could learn to deserve it.

Chapter 4

WE HAD WORKED
only a half day at reducing the stress in the fault, but Manny decreed that I needed rest.

“I'm fine,” I told him sharply, as he gathered up his keys on the way to the door.

“Yeah, you're fine now,” he said, “but you're going to need some sleep. Trust me on this, Cassiel. Wardens go through this when we first start out. It's natural to have to build up your endurance.”

Not for a Djinn,
I thought but did not say. None of this was natural for a Djinn, after all.

Manny had locked the office door behind us and we were on our way to the elevators when a stranger stepped out to block our path. Clearly one of my kind, to my eyes; he was wreathed in golden smoke, barely in his skin, and his eyes were the color of clear emeralds.

Not a stranger, after all.
Gallan.
He didn't so much as glance at Manny; his stare stayed on me. I came to a halt and reflexively put a hand out for Manny to stay behind me.

“What do you want?” I asked. Gallan—tall in this form, long-legged, with long, dark hair worn loose—seemed to find me amusing in my fragile human form. He leaned against the wall, with his arms folded, still blocking our path.

“I came to see if it was true.” His eyebrows slowly lifted. “Apparently, it is. How did you anger him so, Cassiel?”

There was only one
him
, for us. Gallan was, at times, a friend and ally, but first and foremost, he was a Djinn. An
Old
Djinn, one of Ashan's, and I could no longer trust him. “It's not your business.” I meant it as a warning. He couldn't have taken it any other way, but something about it amused him.

“Have you seen any others? Since—” His gesture was graceful, vague, and yet all inclusive.
Since this happened.
The event being, of course, too embarrassing and humiliating to mention directly.

“No,” I said sharply. I had, but there was no reason to tell him. “Leave, Gallan. I don't want company.”

“You never do.” He smiled slowly. “Until you do. Tell me that it is completely done between us, and I won't trouble you again.”