“I know we can’t alter the agreement,” I said, very carefully. “So I am not attempting to do so. I only say that should you wish to leave this place, no one will be able to stop you. And should you take the scroll from our friend Mr. Turner, I don’t suppose anyone can stop you from doing that, either.”
“Or destroying him like a small bug,” Rashid noted.
“Or that, of course.”
He didn’t move. I had supposed that a mere mention of the fact that he might lay his hands on the scroll would cause him to flicker out of existence and into Mr. Turner’s very nightmares, but instead Rashid sat, patient and silent.
I asked, “Are you waiting for something?”
“No,” he said. “But there’s no great hurry. I can take the scroll from him anytime I please. He is not the rightful owner. Therefore, it’s fair game to take it, so long as I return it to you.”
Was it? I didn’t know that; I supposed it made sense, by Djinn logic. I was specifically given the list—officially granted it by an Oracle. That meant it was my possession, exclusively, until such time as I voluntarily gave it up. Humans didn’t have those types of rules of ownership, which reflected the transfer of power on the aetheric; hence, Turner hadn’t thought twice about taking it from me.
But, I realized, the scroll itself wasn’t just some mere piece of paper locked in a case. It was
living.
It was capable of reacting, as it had when it sealed its case shut.
I smiled slowly. “And if you take it into your hands without me granting it to you, it won’t open for you, will it?” I asked him. “That’s why you wanted to bargain for it, not simply take it from me. I have to give it.”
Rashid didn’t bother to deny it. “So in liberating it from your friend Mr. Turner, I am only its temporary custodian. Not a thief.”
“Not a thief at all,” I agreed. “Well then.” I felt my smile fading. “While you have it, you’ll be a target. Whatever you do, you must not let it be taken by Pearl or those she commands.”
“And now you’re putting conditions on me,” Rashid said, and shook his head. “Cassiel. I’ll do as I please, when I please, and you will have to trust that these things will also please you.” He looked up at me, and his eyes were bright and direct, entirely inhuman. “Time to go.”
He’d sensed something, but I didn’t know what. I nodded. That was all the goodbye we said, or needed; Rashid simply melted away, a whisper on the wind, and his empty handcuffs thumped to the ground where he’d been.
That got a reaction from the agents watching us—quick steps in to tighten the cordon, and one small red-haired woman with a pretty, no- nonsense face snapped, “Where is he?”
For all that they’d been briefed on the nature of the Wardens, the nature of the Djinn, the primal terror of a human confronted with the unknown was still there, showing in the tense lines of her body and the flash of disbelief in her blue eyes. She repeated her question, more loudly, pointing her weapon straight at me in unmistakable threat.
I ignored her as I tried to locate what had triggered Rashid’s sudden decision to depart. Nothing obvious; the government agents had control of this side of the chasm, separated from Pearl’s area by a harsh divide that would be difficult to cross without attracting notice. Likewise, Pearl
could
send her child-soldiers here, but even Pearl had her limits. I didn’t imagine she would stage an all-out assault against an armed camp of the FBI. Her followers weren’t Djinn; they couldn’t travel the aetheric at will. So their approaches would be human in nature—extra-human, possibly, but not Djinn.
I sensed no power stirring in the aetheric toward us. When I directed my attention toward Pearl’s camp across the divide I got a sense of shielded, harnessed, focus energy, like the potential of a bomb, tightly contained. Was Pearl there? I wasn’t sure she was. I wasn’t sure she was
anywhere,
in a purely physical sense. Her followers, yes, but Pearl could manifest herself in ways I didn’t fully understand, and that meant she couldn’t be tied down to a single focus.
Not yet.
I was still searching for a sign as to what had driven Rashid on his way when Agent Sanders, looking harassed and angry, strode back into the clearing. He looked at the spot where Rashid had been sitting, glared at the agents, then at me. I shrugged.
“Djinn,” I said. “He can leave when he wishes. There’s really not much you—or I—can do about it.”
“Your friend really doesn’t value
your
life too highly, does he?” Sanders said.
“He isn’t my friend,” I said. “We had an agreement, not a relationship, and my life is my own to worry about.”
“Yeah, you got that right. Come on. Up and at ’em.”
I had been sitting cross-legged for a while, and since my hands were still cuffed behind me, it was difficult to rise. Sanders assisted me with a hand on my arm, and kept the hand there as he directed me away from the clearing, past the watching agents, and down a game trail that cut through the brush.
We emerged into an open area where tents had been erected—camouflage canvas, sturdy government issue that had probably been used for everything from disaster relief to combat. They were large structures. One held cots and a meal area; the other, where Sanders directed me, had long folding tables covered with paper, maps, computers, and equipment whose purpose I couldn’t guess. Communications, perhaps. There were at least ten other people in the tent as we arrived.
Agent Turner was not among them.
There were also folding chairs, and Sanders sat me down in one for a moment to look down into my eyes. “Must be uncomfortable,” he said. “Hands behind you like that. Tell you what, I’ll cuff you in front, but I need your promise not to try anything stupid. I’m not your enemy. Your enemy’s out there, other side of that gully.”
I didn’t like making any kind of deal with Sanders, but he was right; my shoulders were aching, my arms trembling from the strain of trying to relieve the constant pressure. Sitting was awkward, at best.
I nodded.
“I’m going to loosen one cuff,” he said, “and you move both arms in front. No other stunts. You try anything woo-woo and my friend Agent Klein there will put a bullet right in you, are we clear?”
Agent Klein certainly was. He was a young man with curly brown hair and a semiautomatic pistol, which he held unwaveringly pointed at the center of my chest.
“I understand,” I said, and looked straight at Agent Sanders. “I will cooperate.” For now.
He did exactly what he said, stepping behind me to unlock one side of the manacles. I moved both hands forward, sighing a little in relief, and held them out, wrists together. Sanders reattached the cuff with a snap, and I felt a spark go through me—not enough to hurt, just enough to verify that the cuffs were still live. I lowered my hands to my lap.
“Better?” he asked. It was a rhetorical question, and that was very likely the only consideration I would get from him, so I did not respond at all. Sanders likewise didn’t wait for an answer. “So here’s what we know. We know that this camp over there is run by an organization of fringers. On their recruiting materials they like to call themselves the Church of the New World. They’ve got a Web site, bulletin boards, social networks, and a YouTube channel where they post all kinds of crazy, earnest crap about how we need to remake the world. Standard stuff, really; my team’s been tracking these guys for years. But in the last twelve months, something changed with them. They were talking a good game before, but all of a sudden they’ve got money, they’ve got recruitment, they’ve got real physical facilities set up in at least four states that we know about. You following?”
He paused to take a drink of bottled water. When I nodded, he walked over to a laminated map of the United States, with locations circled in red marker. La Jolla, California, where we were now. An
X
mark was over a circle in Colorado, where the original version of the Ranch we’d found had been located. There were two more places circled. Both, to my eyes, looked remote, far from the nearest large city.
Sanders tapped the crossed-out circle in Colorado with the closed cap of a marker. “We were just setting up the surveillance for this place when you and your friend Luis busted the door and raised hell. Great job, by the way. Lots of dead people, missing kids, one hell of a mess left for us to try to make sense of. Thanks for that.”
“I was not aware I had to clear my plans for rescuing a stolen child with you.”
“Well, you do now.”
“For how long?”
“How does forever work for you?”
“Better than it does for you,” I assured him, and smiled, very briefly and sharply. “I don’t care about your problems, Agent Sanders. I want Luis Rocha. I want to rescue the children. I leave you to deal with the rest, if you can.”
Sanders dragged a chair over across the uneven ground, thumped it down in front of me, and sat with his elbows on his knees, leaning forward. He held my gaze as he said, “That’s not good enough. Far as I can tell, this is a Warden mess of some kind. A Djinn mess. And we’re in it now, because you people can’t take care of your own shit. So read me in, Cassiel. Right now.”
“
Read you in?
”
“Tell me everything I need to know.”
“Simple enough. Nothing. Withdraw your people. Shut down your operation. Leave.”
Sanders sighed and sat back, folding his arms across his chest. The folding metal chair creaked in complaint. He looked over at Agent Klein, who was still aiming his gun straight at me, and said, “Greg, why don’t you get me and my guest a couple of cups of coffee? You drink coffee, right?” That last was directed at me. I said nothing. “Two. Thanks. This is going to take a while.”
Klein looked startled, and he looked over at his boss for a moment. “Sir? You sure?”
“I’m sure. We have an understanding, right, Cassiel? You try anything with me, and I will bury you and your friend Rocha so deep that the president and the Joint Chiefs wouldn’t have high enough clearance to even know you ever existed. You think Guantánamo was bad? You ain’t seen nothing yet.”
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
very
interested 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.