Right up until Cherise threw open the bedroom door and stood there, panting, staring at us with eyes that didn’t really see us at all.
“You’d better get out here,” she said, as David sat up. I did too, swiping hair back from my face and grabbing at the thousand-thread-count sheets as they threatened to slide away. Cherise, shockingly, didn’t seem to notice any of that—not even David’s exposed chest, which frankly should have at least gotten a double take, or a stare, or a patented Cherise come-on.
She just delivered her message and dashed away.
“That’s not like her,” David said, swinging his legs out of bed. “Is it?”
“Nope. Clothes?”
“Closet.” He was already heading there. He pulled open the door and inside was a rainbow of choices, some for him, some for me.
“Underwear?” I asked.
He raised eyebrows. “Is it absolutely necessary?”
“Right now? Yes.”
“Top drawer.” He nodded toward a delicate-looking dresser, something that would have made
Antiques Roadshow
stars buzz with excitement. In it, I found new bras, panties, stockings—pretty much anything I might need, or crave. Or David might crave. I picked out something plain and put it on. As I turned, David threw me a shirt and pants. Jeans, and a navy blue shirt that clung in all the right places.
He was dressing too, the old-fashioned way. As a Djinn, he could have easily just gone the magic route, but I stole a few precious seconds enjoying the sight of him wiggling into Joe Boxers, which might have been intended, from the smile he gave me.
Even with mutual appreciation, it took us only about a minute to dress, and then we headed down the stairs.
Cherise was there. So was Lewis. He was self-contained again, only the shadow of trauma left in his dark eyes.
“I need you,” he said bluntly. He turned and walked out of the cabin, moving fast. David and I exchanged a look and followed.
There was a dead body in the hallway. I stopped when I saw her, shock slamming through me. She looked like she’d been turned to crumbling clay, or ash—lifeless, a mockery of something that had once been real and vital.
“God,” I whispered, and slowly crouched without touching the corpse. Lewis knelt on the other side of it. “Who—?”
“That’s the problem,” Lewis said. “I don’t know. I think she’s one of the Djinn.”
I looked up at David, who was staring down at the two of us with a frown. He focused on the body on the floor.
“That isn’t a Djinn,” he said. “I don’t know what that is.”
He realized, then, what he was saying. Djinn couldn’t
not
know, in the normal course of events; they could spool back the history of things. They saw
time
—it was a real sense to them, the way touch and taste were to humans.
The only way he couldn’t know who this person was, was if this was a Djinn and the Djinn had been murdered by Unmaking, the special new weapon of Bad Bob Biringanine.
Antimatter. It was deadly to the Djinn in all kinds of hideous ways.
The next thought came to me with sickening speed and impact.
He had access to the ship.
I snapped a lightning-fast glance at Lewis, and saw that this was not news to him. He’d already come to the same conclusion, presumably well before he’d come to summon us. David’s reaction was just his confirmation. “Fuck,” I said. “He’s been here, on board, or at least he’s gotten one of his minions through our defenses. We should have known. Our early warning system—”
“Clearly isn’t working,” Lewis finished. “Which means he, or any of his people, could be here. This place is big enough to hide an army if they didn’t want to be found.”
“But if hiding was the point, why leave this poor lady right here in the open?” I asked. “They could have hidden her anywhere. Her Conduit wouldn’t even know she was missing.” Which was the awful part of it. David, as Conduit for the Djinn, had a personal connection to each and every one he was responsible for. Ashan had the same connection to his half of their numbers. Bad Bob’s weapon of choice did worse than kill; it
erased.
The Djinn couldn’t recognize their own dead, or the weapons that killed them. The moment the victim died, it ceased to have ever been.
My nightmare was that it might be David lying here, with another Djinn staring at him in that same annoyed confusion, not even remembering his existence.
There was something so chilling in it that I had a hard time wrapping my head around it.
“That’s not a Djinn,” David murmured. He wasn’t trying to convince us, only himself. “It
can’t be.
” We’d been through this. He understood, intellectually, what was happening, but this was a kind of phobia for the Djinn—a blind spot that left them vulnerable, one that couldn’t be overcome by knowledge or experience. It wasn’t seated in the rational parts of their brains.
“Count your people,” Lewis said. He said it quietly, a little regretfully, as if he didn’t really want to know, either. David continued to stare at the corpse.
“Counting myself,” he said, “fifteen Djinn are on this vessel.” In other words—exactly the number we’d started with.
I exchanged a baffled stare with Lewis. “You’re sure?”
“Of course I’m sure. Ten of my people, myself, and four of Ashan’s. Fifteen.”
“Then where did this one come from?”
He couldn’t answer that. It was like his brain locked up and refused to produce an answer. Instead, he shook his head, stubbornly unable to get past the paradox.
“Maybe Ashan sent another Djinn,” I said. “A new one.”
“You’re sure this isn’t one of his four?” Lewis asked.
“I’m sure.” I’d seen the four of them, and Venna had been the only one representing herself as female. While the Djinn
could
change sexes, in my experience they rarely did it without a damn good reason. “This is insane. Can you get Ashan on the line and ask him?”
David’s attention went elsewhere, but only for a moment, and then he shook his head in the negative. “Venna’s coming,” he said. Before he finished the sentence, I caught sight of Venna’s sparkly pink shirt at the end of the hall. She didn’t seem to be in a hurry, but in the next breath she was there, standing at David’s side.
“What’s this?” she asked, staring down at the dead Djinn with academic interest. It was creepy.
“We were hoping you could tell us,” Lewis said. “Anything?”
She studied the body intently, then shook her head. “No. I don’t know what it is.”
I cleared my throat. “Radiation?”
“Nothing dangerous left on the body,” Lewis said. “It looks as if she died the same way the other Djinn did, from antimatter poisoning—but there’s no residual energy. She’s just—dust.”
There wasn’t any way to resolve this, not through the Djinn, in any case. “Thanks,” I said to Venna. “Don’t worry about it.”
She didn’t give it a second thought. She skipped off down the corridor as if stepping around dead, dust-and-ash bodies was an everyday occurrence.
“I’ll be back,” David said abruptly, and misted out before Lewis or I could protest. He was deeply bothered; I could see that, but there was no way I could help him. He’d have to come to terms with this, or not, in his own time.
“So what do we do?” Cherise asked. I’d almost forgotten about her. She was standing a few feet away, arms wrapped around her chest as if she was fighting off a chill. “We can’t just leave the poor thing out here. God. I can’t believe this is happening. This is just
awful.
”
Lewis and I looked at each other, and I knew he was thinking the same thing I was: the way the body had disintegrated into dust and ash, I wasn’t sure moving her was much of an option.
But it seemed like the only decent thing to do was to try.
“We’ll save a sample,” Lewis said. “Maybe we’ll find some kind of clue if we analyze it in detail. But Cherise is right—we can’t leave her here. And there doesn’t seem much reason to store the body.”
No, because we both knew the body was going to disintegrate as soon as we started trying to move it.
We retrieved a shower curtain and repurposed it as a body bag. There was something very disturbing about having pieces of the dead Djinn break off and float away as we went about it, but we managed to get her scraped onto the makeshift bier and carried her away. Cherise didn’t follow. She stood there, staring at the flecks and smears that littered the carpet. It looked like a spilled ashtray.
“Nobody even knows her name,” she said. “That is just so—sad.”
Burial at sea was the best we could give our nameless victim. As Lewis and I tipped the crumbling remains over the railing, I felt we ought to say something, anything, but nothing came to my mind.
It did to Lewis’s, though. “You may be forgotten,” he said, “but you won’t go unavenged. I promise you that. We’ll find out what happened to you.”
Her corpse disintegrated almost instantly in the pounding waves, returning to the embrace of nature. I hoped that the vast intelligence that made up this world remembered her, named her, gathered her close.
I hoped that her life had mattered to some human, somewhere, who still had fond thoughts of her.
White spray was soaking my thin shirt and leaving my skin cold and stiff. Lewis’s warm hand touched my back. “Inside,” he said. “There’s nothing we can do here.”
“I’m tired of hearing that,” I said. “I’m really tired of being helpless. Aren’t you?”
Turning, I caught the flash of outright rage in his eyes. “Yes,” he said. “And we’re not going to be helpless much longer, I promise you that. Come on.”
He stalked away from the rail.
I followed.
“Where are we going?” I called, as Lewis’s long legs pulled him several steps ahead of me. The hallways were narrow, even in these upper-class areas, but they were nicely appointed, with paneling and original artworks, some of them by artists I recognized. He wasn’t giving me time to sightsee. I hustled past the art so fast that it could have been clown paintings, for all I knew.
He didn’t answer.
When our little mini-parade came to the less exclusive areas, the design standards changed. Still nice but less art, more lithographs. Cheaper carpeting, and the wood was trim, not wall. I glimpsed a sign that said we were heading for the Main Gallery, whatever that was.
“Lewis, dammit, slow down!” I wasn’t slow, but he was acting like this was an Olympic event. “Where are we going?”
We turned a corner and stepped out into upper-middle-class opulence. Maybe even nouveau riche opulence. There was a waterfall in the middle of the open space that spilled a graceful, sinuous wave over curved rock three stories tall, with lush tropical vegetation carefully complementing the lines of the design. Five levels of decks, all with railings circling this part of the ship. As I looked over, I saw that two of the dining areas were below, at the foot of the waterfall—one casual, one formal. All eerily vacant at the moment, except for some staff—I guessed they were staff—taking advantage of the slow moments to grab themselves lunch and drinks. A few Wardens were wandering around in groups of two or three, rubbernecking while they had the luxury of not being marked for death.
Somewhere in the back of my mind, Celine Dion was singing again, dammit. Well, one thing was certain, my heart would
not
go on, not if this voyage went badly, and I wished she’d just shut the hell up.
Lewis turned, leaning on the rail, with the waterfall as a backdrop. Its hissing rain formed white noise around us.
“I wanted to go someplace we could talk uninterrupted,” he said. “And someplace it would be harder to overhear.”
“You think someone’s watching us?”
“I don’t think we can assume that our enemies are on the beach perfecting their tans.” He shook his head and leaned against the railing, weight on his elbows. Mist from the impossible waterfall behind him made pearly rainbows around the lights. “I’m sorry. I didn’t want to do this. I really tried.” He sounded genuinely dispirited and angry about it, whatever
it
was.
“What are you talking about?”
“We’re fighting shadows,” he said. “We’re guessing and flying blind. I didn’t want to have to use the resources I knew we had.”
“What kind of resources?”
He didn’t answer me, not directly. “I’ve been thinking about Paul.”
The name hit me hard, in unguarded places. Paul had been my friend, my mentor in many ways, and somebody I’d thought I could always count on in a pinch.
But he had betrayed us, and I’d killed him for it. I hadn’t meant to do it—it had been in the heat of battle, and my real enemy had used him as a human shield. I didn’t know when Paul had chosen the wrong side, or how, or why; all I knew was that at that last, desperate minute, he’d been standing next to Bad Bob, and that had destroyed him.
I’d
destroyed him.
“I’m wondering,” Lewis said, “if Paul was really planning to funnel information back to us. He could have betrayed Kevin and Rahel anytime he wanted. He didn’t. I think he was trying to do the right thing. Maybe he was still on our side after all.”
Did he think that made it any better for me, carrying around the memory of his death? “I hope so,” I said. I really did. I’d much rather Paul died a hero.
“And now,” Lewis said, “I’m wondering the same things about you. Whether you’re really on our side . . . or not.”
I took a deep breath. It’d be too easy to turn this into a blame-fest, and the last thing we needed right now was to gouge pieces out of each other over nothing. Lewis was so exhausted I suspected he’d welcome a fight, just to keep his pulse moving, but I’d hurt enough people recently.
“You don’t think I’m loyal?” For answer, Lewis reached over and put his hand on my numbed shoulder. I shook him off with a little too much anger. “Screw you, Lewis. I’d
die
for these people. Hell, I
have
died for them!”