"Sometimes," I agreed, straight-faced. "Will you do it?"
"Of course I will," Luis said grumpily. "I'm not going to waste my energy on pain maintenance."
I did not blame him. Turner, for his part, looked apprehensively relieved, if such a thing were possible. Luis glared at him, then went to him and took his wounded hand. He was true to his word; I heard the tiny snaps and pops of bones straightening, being forced back into their shapes and sockets, and Turner's face went dirty-pale, and he leaned his head back against the tree, rigid and fighting to control his impulse to scream, faint, or vomit. Or some combination of those three. But I suspected Luis did, after all, put in some nerve blocks. He wasn't unnecessarily cruel. Merely . . . proportional.
It took a few long moments of concentration, and then Luis let go and stepped back. Turner lowered his hand and stared at it in bemused wonder. Tried to move his fingers, and winced a little.
"Yeah, the muscles will complain for a while," Luis said. "They got beaten up too. But the bones will hold, as long as you don't do something crazy with them, like hit somebody. Best I could do on short notice."
"It's better," Turner said, with a little sense of wonder to it. "I think it'll do."
"It will have to," I said. "We're going into the compound."
Turner's head came up, and his eyes widened. "What? When?"
"As soon as the other teams are in place," I said. "Luis will be able to hide our presence from any regular humans; if they have Wardens on their side, it might be a bit more difficult, but we can manage."
Fooling Pearl would be the much greater challenge. That was why I had asked for the coordinated raids on each location; if her attention was split, if she realized she was under threat on all fronts, she might miss me until it was too late.
Perhaps. Or perhaps she'd simply recognize my presence, withdraw from every other front, and focus on killing me.
If killing me was her intent, of course. I wasn't altogether certain of that. If she'd wanted me dead, surely she could have sent overwhelming force to manage it by now. No, I thought she wanted this. She wanted me to come here.
I didn't think it was merely for the satisfaction of watching me die, although that might easily be a consideration. No, there was something else.
Something I was missing.
Luis was watching me. "You all right?"
"Fine," I said. "And the Wardens?"
"Got them to coordinate something out of New York, but we're screwed having any Wardens on the ground for this--it'll be remote attacks at the other locations, but they'll make it as good as they can. I've got them on standby. All you have to do is give me the go."
"We go now," I said. "I will give the signal for the attack when we are in position there. Get ready."
Agent Turner raised his eyebrows, but didn't respond otherwise; he walked into the tent. A moment later, his superior burst out, looking thunderous. "Are you out of your mind?" he demanded. "I'm not letting you take people in there now. You don't even have cover of darkness!"
"It wouldn't matter if I did," I said. "Either we'll be able to hide, or we won't. Light or darkness is irrelevant to her. But if you want to be useful, make a distraction that will draw the attention of her soldiers."
"What kind of distraction?"
"Mass our people at the chasm. Make it look like you're going to come across," Turner supplied, unexpectedly. "Start using the bullhorn. Tell them you want to talk."
I nodded. I had been frankly thinking of something more violent, but that would work and expose the men and women here to less risk overall. "One hour," I said. "It will take that long for us to get across the chasm, deal with her countermeasures, and reach the dome."
"Without being detected," Sanders said. "Right. Sure."
It was not a perfect plan. And I knew, knew that I was missing something vital. But my conviction was that I had no time to waste, or this would be intensely worse, very soon.
Chapter 10
KITTING OUT LUIS, TURNER, and me in FBI-issue bulletproof vests--worn beneath my leather jacket, for my part, and with the FBI identification blacked out with tape for Luis--was the work of moments. Turner was freely given one of the compact assault weapons. Luis and I were flatly denied, although Sanders did, in private, slip us sidearms.
I looked at the other two Wardens in silence for a moment, standing on the edge of the chasm, as a light breeze blew across the open space and rustled the trees above us. "This will be dangerous," I said bluntly. "Very dangerous. If you wish to stop here . . ."
Luis made a rude noise. "Shut up and dance, Cass. Ibby's over there, right? I want her back. Now."
I nodded and turned my focus to Turner, who was staring into the distance as if reviewing all the choices that had led him to this somewhat distressing moment. Turner finally shrugged. "I'm in," he said. "You were right. I may hate what the Wardens stand for these days, but these are kids. Innocent kids. And they need our help."
That settled, we began to climb down.
Luis and I had agreed to preserve power whenever possible, so the climb was managed the normal human way--hands and feet, carefully placed. Straining muscles. An ever-present, patient threat from gravity, and a fluttering fear that never quite could be brushed aside. Pebbles and dirt rattled constantly, and although I went slowly and carefully, this use of human skills was new to me. I was confident enough on trails, however steep, but this . . . this verticality was different. It looked easier, in theory. In practice, I was out of breath and trembling well before the bottom was close enough to promise a survivable fall.
A small but robust creek ran through the muck at the bottom, and we paused to wash the sweat from our faces and necks. "Don't drink that," Luis told me, and tossed me a bottle of water he'd put in a net holster on his belt. I gulped down several mouthfuls and passed it on to Turner. Luis drank last and returned the now half-empty bottle to its carrier. "She could have poisoned the creek," he told me. "I don't see any fish or insects down here."
He was right. The bottom of the chasm seemed eerily devoid of the usual creatures. Just the water, hissing on its way.
"Later," he said. He knew I was thinking of repairing the damage she'd done, if he was right about the environmental poison. "We're saving our strength, remember?" I did, but I didn't like it much. "How are we on time?"
Ben Turner checked his watch. "Twenty minutes," he said. "That gives us another twenty for the ascent, and twenty to deal with whatever's at the top and get in position. And you're sure that's reasonable, right?"
I wasn't, but there were no reasonable expectations to be had in any of this. I just faced the upthrusting wall and began to pull myself up, one painful foot at a time.
We were halfway up when I felt a surge of power coming through the aetheric. "Luis!" I called sharply, and he looked up. "Hide us!"
He took a deep breath, and lowered his head. We all froze in place on the rock face, and when I glanced down again, I saw nothing. No men below me, only vaguely man-shaped juts of rock.
Pebbles fell from above as someone leaned over the edge. There was a soft, inaudible report made in a child's high voice, and then another, adult voice clearly said, "Raise it anyway. It's good practice for you."
I rested my forehead against the stone and tried not to interfere with Luis's concentration. It was, at the moment, all that stood between us and death. We were too high to fall without serious injury, and too far from the top to launch any kind of effective attack. With one of the child-Wardens above us, we couldn't strike in any case.
Below, I heard something odd. The hissing of the water took on volume, depth, built to a roar. I felt harsh gusts of wind whip up, battering me against the rock, and the cold spray as the stream built in volume, being forced from its underground source at an ever-greater volume. In the distance I heard a sudden boom of thunder, and felt the snap of lightning. Clouds were moving overhead now, driven by the unbelievable fury of Warden magic, clumping and thickening into a storm.
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Raise it anyway.
The Warden had been instructed to use wind and water to scrub the entire chasm clean of any potential threats. I assessed our options. There weren't many.
Luis's voice suddenly whispered in my ear, in that eerie nonvocal communication. I'm going to lock us all down, he said. It's the wind that's a danger. The water won't come high enough to drown us.
Agreed, I sent back.
Beneath my hands, the rock suddenly softened, flowing around my hands, and I felt the same happening where my boots were jammed into precarious footholds. The rock solidified, trapping hands and feet into secure pockets. I couldn't fall now.
I also couldn't move on my own will, without undoing the power Luis had put in place.
The winds rose, whipping through the narrow chasm. At first it felt like shoves, then battering blows. Debris slammed through--lighter things first, then larger pieces of wood, flat rocks, discarded metal. I kept my face down, pressed to the stone, partially protected by my arms. It was all I could do.
Lightning flared in lurid, graceful fans overhead, and just when I felt that the wind would rip my arms out of my sockets with its relentless push, it began to slacken. Rain pounded down, instead, hard and silver, ice cold. I gasped and waited for it to stop.
I rose into the aetheric, anchored by Luis only a few feet away, and watched the glow of the two Wardens standing at the edge of the chasm, above. One--the child--glowed in colors that shouldn't have been possible, and the damage was awful and obvious in the persona he projected out into the world; a twisted gnome of a boy, scarred and melted. He'd been taught this. Forced into it.
The woman with him was little better, though her particular darkness glowed like poison through her veins. Her own choice, not imposed on her. She had power of her own, though not enough to have been a Warden in her own right. Possibly, once, one of the Ma'at.
The adult and the child stopped their interference with the energy of the storms, the river, the wind, and almost immediately it all slackened and fell into a confused, roiling mess. Neither of them bothered to balance the power out. That was dangerous; aetheric energy, summoned and left undirected, could trigger all manner of disasters, especially here, near the brilliant flood of energy that was the ley line, the invisible network of energy that linked together nexus points.
They're gone, I told Luis. He released his hold on the rock, and it flowed away from our hands and feet, back to its original configuration. My muscles had taken advantage of the support to rest themselves, and my pace upward increased dramatically.
Close. So close.
There.
My hands touched the grass at the top, and I pulled myself up, rolled, and immediately fell flat, facedown so that I could institute my own protective cover, which made me a slightly uneven rise and fall in the velvety green lawn. I hardly saw Luis at all, or Turner, but I knew my partner had placed the same chameleon measures over them.
Very slowly, we began to make our way, on our bellies, across the lawn. Not in the way you see in films . . . not crawling, with our bodies in the air, braced on forearms. We slid along the grass, bellies flat, pulling ourselves slowly forward with flattened hands. It was slow, tedious work, but effectively silent and almost impossible to spot, even on the open ground, with the kind of camouflage we employed.
But with the time we had lost, I was worried we wouldn't make it to the dome before Sanders triggered his distraction, drawing people directly toward us.
And then I saw one of the bear-panther chimeras emerge from the trees at the perimeter, sniff the air suspiciously, and begin to pad across the grass, nostrils flaring for scent.
Cass, Luis whispered.
I see it.
It's going to smell us.
No question of that. It already had, though it was baffled by the lack of visible evidence of our presence. It padded around us in a slow circle, orange eyes fixed on the open space where one of its senses reported we were, and the others reported we were not.
Can you put it out? I asked Luis.
Maybe, he responded. If it gets close enough. But that leaves us with a huge unconscious problem for anybody to notice. Which is not the point of stealth.
I closed my eyes, pushed my face into the clean, springy grass, and sent my aetheric senses out to find something, anything we could use.
I found a deer. A magnificent young buck, sharpening his antlers against a tree just beyond the tree line.
I panicked him with a pulse of Earth power and sent him bounding into the clearing, where he froze in shock at the sight of the huge, feline form of the chimera snuffling at apparently empty grass.
The chimera's head snapped up, the elusive smell of humans suddenly overridden by obvious prey.
Run, I told the deer, and released it. It turned and crashed back into the trees, bounding for its life.
The bear/panther roared after it, powering on massively muscled legs. Other howls answered it from all sides--the pack, taking up the hunt. I felt sickened, but the deer had already made the fatal error; I had only exploited it to our advantage.
We crawled as fast as such things could be accomplished.
We were not quite at the glowing curve of the dome when I heard the revving of engines on the other side of the chasm. Agent Sanders was making noise, a lot of it. Voices shouted. Metal banged. They were relocating all their tents to here, right within sight of the compound. No more hiding and playing coy.
I heard Agent Sanders's voice, magnified into a giant's deep shout, roll in a wave across the distance. "You in the dome," he said. "I want to talk to the leader of the Church of the New World in this location."
No response. I lifted my head and took reckonings. The access road was less than ten feet ahead of us, and to the left was a cleared open area, dirt only, neat as if it had been cordoned off by nature herself. The supply drop. That meant that at least one access was located right there, as close as possible to that spot; human nature and efficiency dictated that to be the case. One didn't build a road and a drop point if the access was on the other side of the building.
And Pearl, I knew, would have built access in whatever ways she liked.
Follow, I whispered to both Luis and Turner, and crawled around the edge of the supply area, almost to the dome itself.
Then we waited.
It took some time. Agent Sanders repeated his request, over and over, in a bland and annoyingly exact manner. When his voice got tired, Sanders put on blaring recorded music by a singer who offended even my limited sensibilities for his lack of imagination.
And after almost half an hour, an access point opened on the dome, and a single person stepped outside.
Not Pearl, of course. I didn't recognize this man. He was tall, sun-browned, lean, and with a hardened face that looked strong, but not kind. He had a bullhorn as well.
He came out of another access point, one further along the curve of the dome.
"Who are you?" he demanded, his own voice just as strong and deep as Sanders's had been. "What do you want from us?"
As if that wasn't obvious. The man couldn't be oblivious to the abduction of children going on within his own house.
See if you can open it, I whispered to Luis, and felt him crawl past me and touch his hand to the dome near the supply drop point.
While Pearl's spokesman and Sanders carried on their make-believe negotiations--and there was really no doubt how that would end--the area of the dome where Luis's hand had rested suddenly belled inward, and parted with a cool whisper of air to form a circle.
Like a mouth.
I hesitated, staring at it. The last time I had entered one of Pearl's lairs, it had almost destroyed me, and I'd been alone at the time. I hadn't had to worry about two other lives trailing along behind me.
Luis started to enter the opening. I reached out and grabbed his arm, hard.
No, I said.
What the hell? Why? We're exposed out here! Because this was what she wanted, or sh
e would not have driven me to this point. Picadors, and bulls. She had opened only the doors she wanted me to go through. Pearl understood me. On some level, we were the same--outcast, angry, vengeful. I had taken one road, and she another, but in parallel, not opposition.
I closed my eyes for a moment, shivering, and then whispered, Stay here, both of you. Stay down. I will open it to bring the children out.
Luis stared at me from shocked, wide eyes. You can't go in alone.
I won't be alone, I said. You're always with me. He involuntarily reached out to me, cupping my cheek in his warm, dirty palm, and the look in his face was horrified, heartbroken, and angry.
Start the attack at the other domes, I told him.
You can't do this, he said. Beside him, Turner was making urgent go motions; without the Earth Warden talent for silent communication, he was left frustratingly out of the loop.
She'll have the children waiting, I told Luis. If we go in as a group, there will be deaths. I can't let that happen. It was what Pearl wanted. For us to be trapped in close quarters, fighting these children for our lives. The more of us there were, the worse the toll would be.
You can't do this alone, he said again. He wasn't wrong, but I also understood now that there was a price for victory here, as everywhere.
And the price was too high. She meant it to be too high.
Follow, I said. Wait five minutes, and follow. If I'm dead, do what you can.
I didn't bother to argue with either one of them. I just lifted my body and lunged inside, slamming the opening shut behind me and locking it with a twist of my will. He could force it, but it would take time.
I didn't think there was much left.
When I turned back, I faced an organic sweep of cool, iridescent walls--not quite stone, not quite bone, not quite nacreous. It curved as it followed the outer shape of the dome, and I ran lightly along the path, looking for what I knew I would find.
I rounded the curve and found Isabel.
"Ibby?"
I slowed my steps, my metal left hand touching the outer wall, and stared at her with the intensity I reserved for those I loved, and for enemies. I wasn't sure which she was now. Or whether she was still both.
Isabel was still, in body, a chubby little girl, but she had put aside the behavior of a child. She stood very still, very alert, watching my approach. Behind her were three other children, each older than she was. They were dressed the same, all in that durable camouflage material, which I now realized had the same properties that Luis had used in his efforts to conceal us; the material mimicked its surroundings, and now it was a shimmering ivory, like silk.