He slammed the Unmaking down onto the rocks, and a ringing vibration rippled out from its quivering length - the same frequency I'd used before, but a thousand times more powerful. Every crystalline skeleton exploded into powder.
Another glass ball fell, but it exploded well before contact with the ground when he slammed the point down again and woke that awful sound.
I'd clapped my hands over my ears. I couldn't help it.
"I thought you'd welcome their help," I said. I kept watching Rahel, hoping that she'd be able to somehow break out of her paralysis, but she was as still as the rocks around me, and just about as lifeless. My only ally was completely out of commission. "Since it looks like it's just the two of us."
"What would they be good for? You can kill them. I've seen you do it." He shook his head.
"We're on to bigger things. You feel the lines of force under us? This is a nexus point, Jo.
It's the thinnest space between the planes, and between the worlds." The island hadn't come to this place by accident. I could feel the humming power underneath my feet, and in the air around me. He'd been very careful about his choice of location for this. A born manipulator.
Like Lewis. Where are you, Lewis?
"Basic principles of magic, Jo," he said softly. "Like calls to like. And sacrifices have special weight here."
He threw the Unmaking to me - not at me, but to me, a low underhanded pitch.
I dodged it easily, but it didn't fall; it turned and hovered in midair, pointing at me. Menace radiated off of it like black light. I backed up, carefully, not taking my eyes off it.
It darted straight for my chest. It was too fast, and I had no room to maneuver.
My body reacted instinctively, and wrongly.
I put out my hands and grabbed it to hold it back from my exposed chest.
It was like plunging my hands into a vat of dry ice - instant, agonizing cold.
The pool of Djinn power inside of me turned toxic and black, poisoned at its source, and I felt myself begin to rot from the inside out. I was just enough Djinn to be vulnerable, and just enough human to be corruptible.
He'd counted on that. And on my survival instincts.
The spear felt hot and heavy in my hands. It had burned me, before, but now its touch felt different - almost like flesh. I could hear it singing to me, a fascinating whisper of noise that had nothing in common with the music of our world, any of our worlds.
It made me sick and dizzy at first. I tried to drop it. I gagged and tried to throw up the darkness inside, but it wasn't the kind that sat heavy in the stomach. This darkness filled me to the brim.
It took me over, completely.
When I opened my eyes again, I saw things differently. Literally. Holding the Unmaking made colors shift and burn, the whole structure of matter and light twist around me. It was beautifully destructive.
"We need more," Bad Bob said. He was a pillar of blazing darkness in front of me, alien and somehow not alien at all. "You know how to make more of it, Joanne." I knew. I'd seen the process at work. The antimatter incubated inside the body of a Djinn, converting the power into its raw, black opposite, stabilized into a form we could handle and use.
Rahel knew it, too. I saw the fatal acceptance in her face, and the haughty courage, even though she was trapped in place by the bottle that Bad Bob held in his hand. Come, then, she seemed to be saying. If you can.
If I'd been myself, any version of myself, I wouldn't have done it. Couldn't have.
But holding the Unmaking had taken all that away from me, just as Bad Bob had intended.
I heard myself scream, a raw sound that fused oddly with the music of the Unmaking as it crawled through my nerves.
I lifted the spear in both hands and plunged it toward Rahel's chest.
It never got there.
A pulse of pure hot Earth power rolled up through the rocks and blasted them into knife-edged fragments under our feet, sending me flying in one direction, Rahel in another.
The attack came from underneath us.
Bad Bob was caught by surprise. He staggered, leaped for stable ground, but it dissolved underneath his sandals. He fell. The Ancestor Scriptures skittered across stone, and the bottle dropped toward a fatal impact with the edge of a piece of lava rock.
I got to Rahel before the bottle hit stone. I felt the firm impact of the spear hitting her flesh, and then - then she was gone, and the spear was broken off at the tip, vibrating like a tuning fork in my hands.
Rahel's bottle had shattered into pieces, and she was gone.
Rahel was free.
The Unmaking howled at me. It was angry at being cheated.
"Son of a bitch !" Bad Bob clawed his way out of the hole in the island, and jumped again as another hole was blasted up through it from beneath. Water geysered into the air between us. I held the spear in both hands and cast my own awareness out, too.
It was an impossibly stupid thing to do, but Lewis had taken the Grand Horizon down, like the world's most unwieldy submarine. It floated in its protective, glistening bubble right below the island, and as I looked down into one of the holes, I could see people on the decks looking up at me a dozen feet below.
Something hit me from behind with stunning force, and I toppled into the water. The spear was as heavy as an iron bar, and it dragged me down toward the ship below.
Rahel wrapped her arms around me and pulled me back before the spear could touch the fragile surface of Lewis's protective shield that kept everyone on the ship alive beneath the waves. I fought to get free, and when that didn't work, I tried to move the spear around to stab her from behind.
She pinned my elbows and dragged me back, swimming like a dolphin at attack speed.
The protective dome sparked with golden light, and I saw Wardens emerging. Lots of them. They were accompanied by the bright silver glow of Djinn, and it was all bright, and weirdly beautiful, and I realized that I was running out of air. The screaming of the Unmaking in my head was so loud it blotted out everything.
Rahel wouldn't let me breathe. I fought with everything I had, trying to throw her off, and for a moment it seemed like I'd succeeded.
I seized the opportunity and shot myself through the water at cannon speed, heading up. I blasted a path through the rocks and came up in the middle of the floating island, gasping and shuddering. I grabbed the husk of a dead palm tree and pulled myself from the water just a second before the hole sealed itself over beneath my boots. I used the Unmaking to lever myself to my feet. Where it touched, the rocks blackened and dissolved as if I'd doused them with acid.
My hands were black now, and my forearms were the gray of dead flesh, but I didn't hurt at all.
Bad Bob slid down a small mountain of rubble, and it exploded into flame and shrapnel behind him. He thumped down next to me, and we both looked up.
The storm circling overhead had taken on a thick darkness, pregnant with menace. As I watched, the clouds inverted their colors - a negative image, just a flash, and then emerald lightning tore through the sky, breaking in all directions.
"Time," Bad Bob said. "Take that up, Jo. Take it to the other side." Now I knew what he wanted from me. The Unmaking had made it clear to me, in ways that nothing had ever been clear before. None of this mattered. None of this was real. I'd been living an illusion all this time, a sad little nightmare of a life that started nowhere and ended in darkness.
Beyond that portal lay the real world. The only world.
This was just a fiction, and it needed to end so that we could all go to a better place.
I took a firmer grip on the spear, and rose up into the aetheric, into the heart of the storm.
Chapter Twelve
At the center of the slowly rotating mass of energy was the portal to the other world. The real world.
It was like a drop of pure darkness, maybe a dozen feet across - space made liquid. I could feel a kind of pull coming from it - not gravity, not force, nothing so simple as that. It was aware, and awake. It was hungry and endlessly patient, and I realized that it was like the slow, vast intelligence of the planet below me... like, but so much more . The Earth was a virus, a microbe. What lay on the other side of the portal was God. Not ours, though. A jealous, angry, hungry God.
In the aetheric, the spear I was carrying was tremendously heavy, and the higher I tried to rise, the heavier it got. It was like swimming with an anvil.
Then a truck full of anvils.
Then the world in my arms.
I screamed in soundless frustration and gained another few feet.
Then another. I was so close. I could see the shimmering waves in the portal, feel its draw.
I could feel the answering vibration in the Unmaking, the key for the lock, and the lock that wanted to be turned.
My whole aetheric body was on fire. My senses had shifted, changed into a different spectrum, and I could finally see what was holding me back from completing my mission...
The Djinn.
They were all around me, grabbing on to me, pulling me down. So many of them. Between me darted human forms - Wardens, trying to stand between me and the destiny of everything.
It was the magical weight of the world, and it was all against me.
I snarled and surged forward, again. I tried stabbing at the Djinn with the spear, but they easily avoided me.
The Wardens did, too.
I was being dragged backward, and as I was pulled, I gouged bloody holes in the aetheric in my fury. The spear left a gaping black trail, a scar between worlds - not enough to open the door, though.
I reversed my efforts, and instead of trying to break free and go up, I charged down, arrowing through the unprepared Djinn line, and used a burst of hot black power to brake myself back into my body.
Bad Bob was on his back, trying to crab-walk away from the Djinn who was advancing on him - who had already hurt him, from the burns and scars on his face and arms. His hair was half burned off, and his eyes glittered with absolute insanity.
I didn't recognize the Djinn, because it was shining like a golden sun, power incarnate. It reached down and picked up the Ancestor Scriptures from where Bad Bob had dropped them.
The Djinn's back was to me. I didn't think, I just acted.
I raised the spear.
He turned.
It was David. David standing there, facing me. Facing his own death at my hands. I couldn't identify what I saw in his face, in his eyes, except that it was not anger, not at all.
I snarled and lunged for him. The Unmaking had me now, dark and cold and certain, and it was going to take us both.
He said, "Fides mihi , "and touched his hand to his chest, over where a human heart would be.
And suddenly, the world went quiet. Time stopped.
The Unmaking swallowed its unending shriek.
And I remembered.
I was an observer to the past.
The lifeboat, where Lewis had killed me.
I was dead on the floor, lying in David's arms. Pale and limp and open-eyed. Done, and yet still trapped inside the shell.
My old self took in a convulsive breath and tried to fight her way free. I knew this moment. I recognized the agony that rippled through her body as Bad Bob's torch fought her for control.
I watched her pass out, head lolling against David's body as he poured energy into her to seal off the mark and cut her off from the black influence of the thing, one last time.
I didn't remember anything else, but the scene played on, a bare few seconds that changed everything.
"The containment won't last," Lewis said. "You know it won't. I used one fail-safe on her.
We can put in a second one while she's out."
"Not without her consent."
"She already gave consent." That was lawyering the point, but David allowed it to slip past.
"We can't kill her. We can't save her. The best we can do now is to make sure that she can be controlled if this goes bad."
David bared his teeth like a wild thing, and I thought for a second that he really would lunge right for Lewis's throat. " You'renot deciding when she lives or dies," he said. "Not you. "
Lewis closed his eyes in what looked like gratitude and relief. "I don't want to," he said. "I never wanted to. You have to be the one, David. You're the only one she trusts enough to get close at the last moment. If it's Joanne or the world, you have to choose." David froze, and the people clustered around the edges of the tableau shuffled. Cherise was the one who finally spoke.
"She'd want it to be you," she said. "She really would." There were tears shining in my friend's eyes.
"I'll put the fail-safe in place," Lewis said. "You choose the codes." It was a combination, of course. Words, and deeds.
Fides mihi.Trust me.
And his hand, giving me his heart.
Fides mihi.
David's use of the fail-safe should have killed me. If I'd been myself, only myself, it would have turned me off like a light, gone forever.
The Unmaking deflected it from shutting down my body, but it couldn't stop the memory from returning, and the memory brought its own clarity. Its own powerful, unstoppable force.
In the second that passed, the terrible certainties that had filled me since Bad Bob put the Unmaking in my hand began to unravel. No. This is wrong. This is all wrong. I can't do this.
David wasn't the enemy.
This life wasn't a fiction. It was the only reality I had. The only one I wanted, no matter what the creature beyond that portal promised me.
But even though my brain caught up with the realities and horror of being taken over, I couldn't stop the physics of what was already in motion - me. I was already lunging for him, and I was too close to miss him.
David put the Ancestor Scriptures between us.
The Unmaking hit the book, and for a second it pushed deep into the pages, tunneling through toward David's chest. Then it stopped moving, as if it had hit an impenetrable wall.
Another glass ball fell, but it exploded well before contact with the ground when he slammed the point down again and woke that awful sound.
I'd clapped my hands over my ears. I couldn't help it.
"I thought you'd welcome their help," I said. I kept watching Rahel, hoping that she'd be able to somehow break out of her paralysis, but she was as still as the rocks around me, and just about as lifeless. My only ally was completely out of commission. "Since it looks like it's just the two of us."
"What would they be good for? You can kill them. I've seen you do it." He shook his head.
"We're on to bigger things. You feel the lines of force under us? This is a nexus point, Jo.
It's the thinnest space between the planes, and between the worlds." The island hadn't come to this place by accident. I could feel the humming power underneath my feet, and in the air around me. He'd been very careful about his choice of location for this. A born manipulator.
Like Lewis. Where are you, Lewis?
"Basic principles of magic, Jo," he said softly. "Like calls to like. And sacrifices have special weight here."
He threw the Unmaking to me - not at me, but to me, a low underhanded pitch.
I dodged it easily, but it didn't fall; it turned and hovered in midair, pointing at me. Menace radiated off of it like black light. I backed up, carefully, not taking my eyes off it.
It darted straight for my chest. It was too fast, and I had no room to maneuver.
My body reacted instinctively, and wrongly.
I put out my hands and grabbed it to hold it back from my exposed chest.
It was like plunging my hands into a vat of dry ice - instant, agonizing cold.
The pool of Djinn power inside of me turned toxic and black, poisoned at its source, and I felt myself begin to rot from the inside out. I was just enough Djinn to be vulnerable, and just enough human to be corruptible.
He'd counted on that. And on my survival instincts.
The spear felt hot and heavy in my hands. It had burned me, before, but now its touch felt different - almost like flesh. I could hear it singing to me, a fascinating whisper of noise that had nothing in common with the music of our world, any of our worlds.
It made me sick and dizzy at first. I tried to drop it. I gagged and tried to throw up the darkness inside, but it wasn't the kind that sat heavy in the stomach. This darkness filled me to the brim.
It took me over, completely.
When I opened my eyes again, I saw things differently. Literally. Holding the Unmaking made colors shift and burn, the whole structure of matter and light twist around me. It was beautifully destructive.
"We need more," Bad Bob said. He was a pillar of blazing darkness in front of me, alien and somehow not alien at all. "You know how to make more of it, Joanne." I knew. I'd seen the process at work. The antimatter incubated inside the body of a Djinn, converting the power into its raw, black opposite, stabilized into a form we could handle and use.
Rahel knew it, too. I saw the fatal acceptance in her face, and the haughty courage, even though she was trapped in place by the bottle that Bad Bob held in his hand. Come, then, she seemed to be saying. If you can.
If I'd been myself, any version of myself, I wouldn't have done it. Couldn't have.
But holding the Unmaking had taken all that away from me, just as Bad Bob had intended.
I heard myself scream, a raw sound that fused oddly with the music of the Unmaking as it crawled through my nerves.
I lifted the spear in both hands and plunged it toward Rahel's chest.
It never got there.
A pulse of pure hot Earth power rolled up through the rocks and blasted them into knife-edged fragments under our feet, sending me flying in one direction, Rahel in another.
The attack came from underneath us.
Bad Bob was caught by surprise. He staggered, leaped for stable ground, but it dissolved underneath his sandals. He fell. The Ancestor Scriptures skittered across stone, and the bottle dropped toward a fatal impact with the edge of a piece of lava rock.
I got to Rahel before the bottle hit stone. I felt the firm impact of the spear hitting her flesh, and then - then she was gone, and the spear was broken off at the tip, vibrating like a tuning fork in my hands.
Rahel's bottle had shattered into pieces, and she was gone.
Rahel was free.
The Unmaking howled at me. It was angry at being cheated.
"Son of a bitch !" Bad Bob clawed his way out of the hole in the island, and jumped again as another hole was blasted up through it from beneath. Water geysered into the air between us. I held the spear in both hands and cast my own awareness out, too.
It was an impossibly stupid thing to do, but Lewis had taken the Grand Horizon down, like the world's most unwieldy submarine. It floated in its protective, glistening bubble right below the island, and as I looked down into one of the holes, I could see people on the decks looking up at me a dozen feet below.
Something hit me from behind with stunning force, and I toppled into the water. The spear was as heavy as an iron bar, and it dragged me down toward the ship below.
Rahel wrapped her arms around me and pulled me back before the spear could touch the fragile surface of Lewis's protective shield that kept everyone on the ship alive beneath the waves. I fought to get free, and when that didn't work, I tried to move the spear around to stab her from behind.
She pinned my elbows and dragged me back, swimming like a dolphin at attack speed.
The protective dome sparked with golden light, and I saw Wardens emerging. Lots of them. They were accompanied by the bright silver glow of Djinn, and it was all bright, and weirdly beautiful, and I realized that I was running out of air. The screaming of the Unmaking in my head was so loud it blotted out everything.
Rahel wouldn't let me breathe. I fought with everything I had, trying to throw her off, and for a moment it seemed like I'd succeeded.
I seized the opportunity and shot myself through the water at cannon speed, heading up. I blasted a path through the rocks and came up in the middle of the floating island, gasping and shuddering. I grabbed the husk of a dead palm tree and pulled myself from the water just a second before the hole sealed itself over beneath my boots. I used the Unmaking to lever myself to my feet. Where it touched, the rocks blackened and dissolved as if I'd doused them with acid.
My hands were black now, and my forearms were the gray of dead flesh, but I didn't hurt at all.
Bad Bob slid down a small mountain of rubble, and it exploded into flame and shrapnel behind him. He thumped down next to me, and we both looked up.
The storm circling overhead had taken on a thick darkness, pregnant with menace. As I watched, the clouds inverted their colors - a negative image, just a flash, and then emerald lightning tore through the sky, breaking in all directions.
"Time," Bad Bob said. "Take that up, Jo. Take it to the other side." Now I knew what he wanted from me. The Unmaking had made it clear to me, in ways that nothing had ever been clear before. None of this mattered. None of this was real. I'd been living an illusion all this time, a sad little nightmare of a life that started nowhere and ended in darkness.
Beyond that portal lay the real world. The only world.
This was just a fiction, and it needed to end so that we could all go to a better place.
I took a firmer grip on the spear, and rose up into the aetheric, into the heart of the storm.
Chapter Twelve
At the center of the slowly rotating mass of energy was the portal to the other world. The real world.
It was like a drop of pure darkness, maybe a dozen feet across - space made liquid. I could feel a kind of pull coming from it - not gravity, not force, nothing so simple as that. It was aware, and awake. It was hungry and endlessly patient, and I realized that it was like the slow, vast intelligence of the planet below me... like, but so much more . The Earth was a virus, a microbe. What lay on the other side of the portal was God. Not ours, though. A jealous, angry, hungry God.
In the aetheric, the spear I was carrying was tremendously heavy, and the higher I tried to rise, the heavier it got. It was like swimming with an anvil.
Then a truck full of anvils.
Then the world in my arms.
I screamed in soundless frustration and gained another few feet.
Then another. I was so close. I could see the shimmering waves in the portal, feel its draw.
I could feel the answering vibration in the Unmaking, the key for the lock, and the lock that wanted to be turned.
My whole aetheric body was on fire. My senses had shifted, changed into a different spectrum, and I could finally see what was holding me back from completing my mission...
The Djinn.
They were all around me, grabbing on to me, pulling me down. So many of them. Between me darted human forms - Wardens, trying to stand between me and the destiny of everything.
It was the magical weight of the world, and it was all against me.
I snarled and surged forward, again. I tried stabbing at the Djinn with the spear, but they easily avoided me.
The Wardens did, too.
I was being dragged backward, and as I was pulled, I gouged bloody holes in the aetheric in my fury. The spear left a gaping black trail, a scar between worlds - not enough to open the door, though.
I reversed my efforts, and instead of trying to break free and go up, I charged down, arrowing through the unprepared Djinn line, and used a burst of hot black power to brake myself back into my body.
Bad Bob was on his back, trying to crab-walk away from the Djinn who was advancing on him - who had already hurt him, from the burns and scars on his face and arms. His hair was half burned off, and his eyes glittered with absolute insanity.
I didn't recognize the Djinn, because it was shining like a golden sun, power incarnate. It reached down and picked up the Ancestor Scriptures from where Bad Bob had dropped them.
The Djinn's back was to me. I didn't think, I just acted.
I raised the spear.
He turned.
It was David. David standing there, facing me. Facing his own death at my hands. I couldn't identify what I saw in his face, in his eyes, except that it was not anger, not at all.
I snarled and lunged for him. The Unmaking had me now, dark and cold and certain, and it was going to take us both.
He said, "Fides mihi , "and touched his hand to his chest, over where a human heart would be.
And suddenly, the world went quiet. Time stopped.
The Unmaking swallowed its unending shriek.
And I remembered.
I was an observer to the past.
The lifeboat, where Lewis had killed me.
I was dead on the floor, lying in David's arms. Pale and limp and open-eyed. Done, and yet still trapped inside the shell.
My old self took in a convulsive breath and tried to fight her way free. I knew this moment. I recognized the agony that rippled through her body as Bad Bob's torch fought her for control.
I watched her pass out, head lolling against David's body as he poured energy into her to seal off the mark and cut her off from the black influence of the thing, one last time.
I didn't remember anything else, but the scene played on, a bare few seconds that changed everything.
"The containment won't last," Lewis said. "You know it won't. I used one fail-safe on her.
We can put in a second one while she's out."
"Not without her consent."
"She already gave consent." That was lawyering the point, but David allowed it to slip past.
"We can't kill her. We can't save her. The best we can do now is to make sure that she can be controlled if this goes bad."
David bared his teeth like a wild thing, and I thought for a second that he really would lunge right for Lewis's throat. " You'renot deciding when she lives or dies," he said. "Not you. "
Lewis closed his eyes in what looked like gratitude and relief. "I don't want to," he said. "I never wanted to. You have to be the one, David. You're the only one she trusts enough to get close at the last moment. If it's Joanne or the world, you have to choose." David froze, and the people clustered around the edges of the tableau shuffled. Cherise was the one who finally spoke.
"She'd want it to be you," she said. "She really would." There were tears shining in my friend's eyes.
"I'll put the fail-safe in place," Lewis said. "You choose the codes." It was a combination, of course. Words, and deeds.
Fides mihi.Trust me.
And his hand, giving me his heart.
Fides mihi.
David's use of the fail-safe should have killed me. If I'd been myself, only myself, it would have turned me off like a light, gone forever.
The Unmaking deflected it from shutting down my body, but it couldn't stop the memory from returning, and the memory brought its own clarity. Its own powerful, unstoppable force.
In the second that passed, the terrible certainties that had filled me since Bad Bob put the Unmaking in my hand began to unravel. No. This is wrong. This is all wrong. I can't do this.
David wasn't the enemy.
This life wasn't a fiction. It was the only reality I had. The only one I wanted, no matter what the creature beyond that portal promised me.
But even though my brain caught up with the realities and horror of being taken over, I couldn't stop the physics of what was already in motion - me. I was already lunging for him, and I was too close to miss him.
David put the Ancestor Scriptures between us.
The Unmaking hit the book, and for a second it pushed deep into the pages, tunneling through toward David's chest. Then it stopped moving, as if it had hit an impenetrable wall.
