Thin Air

THREE

I fell asleep, lulled by the gradual warming of my body and general exhaustion, and woke to find some trail bars and water sitting next to me. No sign of David. Lewis had draped his own thermal blanket over me, and clearly he’d gone out. Scouting, maybe. Foraging. Peeing. I had no idea.

I yawned, stretched, and got up to work out the wincing stiffness in my back and neck. Once I felt more or less human again, I folded up the foil blankets, replaced them in their little packets, and added them to the backpack leaning against the wall. I cautiously sniffed myself, to bad results, and wondered what the odds were of a nice, hot bath appearing if I wished really hard.

I squeezed through the opening and emerged in predawn darkness-well, it could have been midday; it was hard to tell. The sky was a uniform gray, the color of melted lead, and the clouds had a heavy, solid consistency that threatened real trouble. Somewhere way above, lightning flashed and was visible as a distant blue-white strobe. Thunder drummed, and it sounded just miles away.

It was freezing. I hadn’t realized how accustomed I’d gotten to the relatively balmy temperatures inside the cave, but the first icy slice of wind reminded me. Convulsive shivering made me move faster, and in seconds I made the tree line, found an appropriately screened area, and took care of bladder issues. Once the immediate biological crisis was averted, I started back toward the cave…and then hesitated, because I could hear something.

Something like splashing.

I followed the sound over a low rise, down another steeper drop, and through a thick clumping of scrub trees.

I peeked through the branches and saw Lewis, naked, up to his waist in a small pond. And it was steaming with heat, like a natural thermal spring. Wisps of white curled up from the surface, drifting in a low layer of fog that obscured my view only a little.

Did I mention Lewis was naked?

I stayed where I was for a few seconds, getting quite a view of the lean strength of his body, water glistening as it ran in slow trickles down his abs. I felt guilty about it, but that didn’t stop me. I wondered if there’d ever been anything between the two of us. If there had been, I clearly had some severe neural damage not to remember it. Vividly.

I had enough of a conscience-twinged epiphany to look away when he swam for the shore. Gawking I could justify. Actual peeping was something else.

When I looked back, Lewis was zipping up his blue jeans, water dripping from his brown hair to patter on his strong, tanned shoulders. Without looking up he said, in the most studiously normal tone I could imagine, “The water’s going to stay warm for the next half hour or so. Might as well use it. You need it.”

I hadn’t made a sound; I was certain of that. But he wasn’t shooting in the dark; after he’d toweled his hair dry with his T-shirt, Lewis lifted his head and focused his stare right on the scrubby trees that screened me from immediate view.

Busted.

I cleared my throat and pushed through, earning a few scrapes in the process. Apart from another distant mutter of thunder, the lead-colored day was very quiet. Water lapped the shore. Lewis shook out his T-shirt and pulled it on, then a thermal top, then added one of those well-used flannel shirts on top, which he buttoned almost to the neck.

I took the plunge. “Lewis, did we ever-you know…?

He concentrated on his shirt buttons, even though it wasn’t like they took a lot of effort. I could see he was thinking about lying to me, and then he gave up and said, “Once.”

“Wow.” I tried to smile. “Was it that bad?”

“No, it was that good.” He kept his eyes fixed somewhere else, not on me, but I still felt a flash of heat and nerves. “Look, I’m not in love with you,” he said. “Maybe I used to be, but I’m not anymore. So you don’t have to worry about any complications from me.”

I nodded. His gaze finally brushed over me, moving fast; even though his eyes didn’t linger, I felt another wave of corresponding heat.

“I just want you to understand where I stand,” he said. “You don’t love me, I don’t love you, and that’s it. Right?”

“Right,” I said. My lips felt numb. “I love David.”

“Yes. You do. You don’t know it right now, but you do.” That warmth-inducing gaze came back to fix on me. With a vengeance. “You’ll remember.”

“What if I don’t want to?”

He let out a breath, and it plumed white on the sharp-edged breeze. For a long, perilous second, it seemed like he had something to say to me, but I felt him give it up before he could make the leap. He looked away. “Hurry up. We have to be on the trail in the next hour.” And with that he sat down on the shore, put on thick socks, laced up his hiking boots, and sauntered off.

I guess his ribs had healed. He wasn’t favoring them, although there had been a spectacular multicolored bruise on his left side.

On the one hand, it was good that my sole human ally and-to be fair-protector was back in top form.

On the other hand…the rib thing had been convenient for us to use as a shield between us. Now gone.

I watched, but he didn’t glance back. The water was still steaming. I bit my lip, sniffed myself again, and stripped even though the bone-chilling wind made it torture.

I’d forgotten how good warm water felt. I guess I’d known intellectually, but the second I waded in and felt it immersing me, I could barely breathe for the pleasure of it. I sank down to my neck, then held my breath and slipped under the surface. I stayed under for at least thirty seconds, then broke through to take in a gulp of air. The bottom of the pond was slimy and the rocks were sharp, so even though I had no specific recollection, I was pretty sure I’d had better baths. It just didn’t feel that way at the moment. This was the first real memory I had of one, and it was magical. I couldn’t really relax, though. I kept watching the tree line, waiting for the bad guys to jump out.

Nothing. The day was silent, brooding, with a sharp smell of incoming rain or snow.

When the water began to chill I waded out, hastily dried off, dressed, and ran back to the cave. My teeth were chattering by the time I arrived, and Lewis paused in the act of shouldering his pack to toss me a chemical heat pack.

“Open it, rub the pack, and put it in your shirt,” he said. “It’ll help keep your core temp up.”

I tore the package open and shook out what looked like a really big sachet, rubbed it between my palms, and was instantly rewarded with a burst of steady heat. I dropped it down my buttoned-up shirt, between shirt and undershirt, and gave Lewis a trembling good-to-go high sign. My fingernails were a little blue. I scrambled into my coat and gloves, and hefted my own backpack. It clunked with plastic water bottles.

“Enjoy your bath?” Lewis asked. His tone was about as neutral as you could get, so I couldn’t read anything into it. I just nodded. “Good. Let’s move out.”

“What about Kevin and Cherise? Do you think they’re still…?”

“David’s scouting,” he said. “He’ll warn us if they come anywhere close.”

He took off. I had no choice but to follow.

I’ll skip over the day from hell, which was spent scrambling through razor-edged brush, climbing steep hills of loose shale, falling, cursing, sweating, panting, and generally having the sort of outdoor experience most city girls dread. I had no affinity for this whole hiking thing, and while the outdoors looked pretty, as far as I was concerned it’d look even prettier seen from the window of a passing car.

When my road-show Daniel Boone finally called a permanent halt, it was because of the snow. Flakes had begun to drift silently out of the clouds just an hour after we’d started the trek, light and whispery and dry, brushing against my sweaty face like cool feathers. At first I’d been grateful for it, but that was before it started to stick to the cold ground. A few random flurries became a full-fledged blizzard within the next couple of hours, and what started out a nuisance became more of a hardship with every trudging step. Lewis held my hand, and sometimes the only thing real in the world seemed to be the pressure of his hold on me. I sometimes heard rumbles, as if miles up it was raining, and I supposed I ought to feel grateful that it wasn’t sleeting. Sleet would have been a step down, circles-of-hell-wise.

No cave this time, but Lewis put up the tent and we crawled inside, into our sleeping bags, too tired to do more than murmur a couple of words before sleep sucked us down. I wanted to ask Lewis where we were going, but I didn’t have the energy. I no longer cared all that much, frankly. Just kill me and get it over with, I thought. I ached all over, and I was still aching when, with the suddenness of a light switched off, I fell asleep.

It didn’t even occur to me to wonder where David was, or why he hadn’t joined us. The ways of the Djinn, I’d already guessed, were not necessarily easy to figure out, even if you were dating one.

I woke up alone. All alone. The tent was silent, not even a breeze rattling the fabric, and it was deeply dark. And very, very cold. The chemical pack I’d gone to sleep with was an inert, stiff, dead thing next to me in the bag, and my hands had taken on a waxy chill. I burrowed deeper in the sleeping bag, conserving warmth, and listened for some sign that Lewis was up and around and doing something useful, like making the weather balmy or at least making coffee.

It was quiet as a grave out there.

“Lewis?” I whispered it, because somehow it seemed like the time and place to whisper. No response. I contemplated staying where I was, but that didn’t seem practical in the long term. Lewis’s sleeping bag was neatly rolled up and attached to his pack, which was leaning where his body had been when I’d fallen asleep. I crept out, wrapped myself quickly in my coat, jammed gloves on my hands and a knit cap over my head, and ducked out of the tent into the night.

Only it wasn’t night. It was full daylight, and the reason it had been so dark in the tent was that the tent was covered at least four inches deep with snow. It looked like an igloo. My first step sank almost knee-deep in pristine white powder: great for skiing, terrible for hiking.

Lewis’s tracks went off in the direction of the tree line. One set, though midway through the unbroken snow another set of footprints joined him.

Had to be David, since the two of them had walked on without any obvious trouble.

So I was on my own, at least for a little while.

I swigged some water-on Lewis’s advice, I’d taken a couple of bottles into the sleeping bag with me, to keep it sloshy-and tried to ignore a dull, throbbing headache. Caffeine withdrawal, pressure, general stress…who knew? I had no idea if I liked caffeine, but it seemed likely. I felt a surge of interest at the idea of hot coffee.

And then I heard something. Not Lewis, I was pretty sure of that; Lewis had that woodsy thing going on, and this sounded too heavy-footed for him. Bear? Something worse, maybe? I swallowed the water in my mouth in a choking gulp, screwed the cap back on the bottle, and hastily stowed it in my pack as I surveyed the underbrush. The lead-gray light seemed to bleach color out of everything that wasn’t already piled with snow, and all of a sudden the tent was looking quite cozy.

“Lewis?” I didn’t say it loudly, because I felt stupid saying it at all. Obviously it wasn’t Lewis. There was another confused flurry of sound from the underbrush. Bear, I thought. Definitely a bear. I am so dead.

And then the underbrush parted, shedding snow, and a small woman pitched face-forward into the drift. Her skin was a sickly white, and her hair was matted and tangled with leaves and twigs and…was that blood? And she was definitely underdressed for the weather in a hot-pink sweater and blue jeans…

It was the girl who’d attacked us before. Cherise. She wasn’t looking so tough anymore. In fact, she wasn’t looking good at all, and as I hesitated, staring at her, she moaned and rolled over on her side and pulled her knees in toward her chest. Her half-frozen hair, now caked with snow, was covering her face, but I could see that her eyes were open.

She blinked slowly. “Jo?” she whispered. “Jo, help. Please help me.”

I wanted to. She looked pathetic, and she looked desperately in need…but I couldn’t forget how she’d been earlier, when not even bullets could stop her. She certainly didn’t look invulnerable anymore, though; she looked like she was in deep trouble.

The kind of trouble that kills you.

“Cherise,” I said, testing out the name. She was either nodding or shuddering with the cold. I didn’t come closer, but I slowly crouched down, at least indicating a willingness to hang around. “What happened?”

Lag time. A long, unresponsive second of it.

“D-d-d-d-don’t know.” Her teeth were chattering like castanets, and her lips were an eerie shade of blue in her pale, pale face. Her eyes were huge, and they were the color of her lips. “Kevin…I remember Kevin was…he was trying to…”

“Was trying to what?”

“Jo, I’m so cold, please!” She didn’t seem to have heard me at all. Her voice was faint. Her shuddering was lessening, and I wasn’t so sure that was a good thing. “Kevin was trying to show me how to fight the fire.”

“What fire?”

Another lag, as if she had to wait for the words to circle the globe a couple of times before comprehending. “The one…” Cherise seemed confused by the question. “You know the one. The one they sent him to fight.”

“They, who?”

She just stopped talking. Blinked at me, like she had no idea why I was being so cruel to her. And honestly, I was starting to wonder about that myself. She looked so helpless, so fragile, that I couldn’t just leave her there. Not like some little match girl in the snow.

I looked around for Lewis, but he was a no-show, the fickle bastard. I could have used his ruthless practicality right now. Granted, he probably would have filled the poor kid full of bullet holes, but at least then she wouldn’t have been my problem.

No sign of him. No sign of David, either. Just me, Cherise, and the falling snow.

“Hold on,” I said. I might have sounded angry, but the truth was that I was scared. My heart was pounding hard, and I wished to hell that I knew the rules of this world, which didn’t seem to be the world I expected. Or knew. Or had known. Or maybe I was just going crazy; that would explain a lot.

I shook that idea off and focused back on Cherise. “Can you get up?” I asked her. She nodded, or at least that was what I took the convulsive jerk of her head to be, and tried. She managed to get to her hands and knees, but seemed stuck at that point, trembling like some poor wounded bird. I stood up, reached down for her, then hesitated. If this was a trap…

Then you’ll at least die with good intentions.

I sucked down a deep, cold breath, grabbed Cherise under her arm, and hauled her upright. It didn’t take much effort, as small as she was. The fuzzy pink sweater rode up, revealing a tattoo on the small of her back. Some kind of little gray alien dude waving hello. That implied a sense of humor. Maybe she wasn’t a bad kid, after all.

And maybe you’re crazy, part of my brain reminded me. I didn’t like that part. I wished to hell it would shut up.

I half dragged Cherise through the snow to the tent. She seemed barely capable of staying on her feet, even with me taking most of her weight, and I was glad I hadn’t hesitated about it too much longer. She was hardly breathing.

Getting her through the narrow tent opening was an engineering problem, but I managed, and soon I had her settled, wrapped in two thermal blankets, with heat packs warming her core temperature. In the light of the battery-powered lantern, Cherise looked ghostly, like the living dead. Which, I thought, might not be far from the case.

She didn’t say anything for a long time, and I didn’t, either. I couldn’t think what questions to ask, and obviously she wasn’t compos mentis enough to be coming up with conversation on her own. When she finally did speak, it wasn’t anything I expected her to say.

She asked, “Where’s Imara? I thought she’d be with you.”

Imara. I suddenly felt short of breath and I wished David were here. No, I didn’t wish that, because I didn’t want to think about what he’d be feeling at the sound of that name. This was all hard. It was hard not knowing, but it seemed to get worse the more I found out. Maybe ignorance really was bliss.

Cherise was shaking again, but I figured that was good; shaking meant her body was trying to warm itself, which meant she was coming out of shutdown mode. “Imara? Is she okay?”

I remembered the agony in David’s eyes, and again I just knew there was something there it would be better if I never had to face. “Where’s Kevin?” I asked instead, because I figured that if he’d recovered from whatever crazy spell he’d been under, he was in the same boat as Cherise…freezing to death out there.

Cherise seemed to try to remember. One second. Two. Two and a half, and then I saw comprehension flood her expression. Then get driven out by fear. “I…I don’t know,” she said. Her voice was high-pitched with sudden panic. “Jo, we were in the forest. He was showing me…showing me how he did the fire stuff, and it was really cool, you know. He was proud of himself, and he was saying we could help people…”

I nodded. Not that I really understood. “And then what happened? Cherise, can you-”

“I don’t remember!” she said. “We were there, and everything was fine. We were doing fine, and…” Something darted through her expression like an electric shock, and her eyes widened. “There was someone else. She came out of the forest. She was…there was something…” Her voice failed, or at least her vocabulary. She shook her head, sniffled, and wiped at her nose. I dug in the backpack for a travel pack of tissues and handed one over. It took her the now-familiar couple of seconds to see what was being held in front of her face, and then she clumsily grabbed it and honked. She sniffled some more, and seemed better. “Something bad happened to us, didn’t it?”

I had no idea, but it seemed pretty likely she was right. Something very bad indeed had happened to her and Kevin. The problem was, I had no idea if it was still happening, and if it was, what that meant for my own safety.

I watched her like a hawk, but Cherise didn’t display any special powers, monomaniacal or otherwise. The lag time didn’t go away. She napped for a while, lulled by the warmth returning to her body-yeah, I knew how that felt-and when she woke up I broke off some energy bar and shared it with her, washed down with plenty of water. I noticed her fingernails. She’d been out there scraping her way through the forest, but once upon a time she’d had a nice manicure. Her skin had that well-lotioned look, too. No wrinkles. A smooth, flawless complexion. She’d had better hair days, but I had the feeling she’d clean up fine.

So what was going on with her? What did her missing time signify, and how did that relate to my missing time, if at all? And why was she Time-lag Girl?

As if she were reading my thoughts-scary idea-Cherise suddenly blurted, “Do you think we were taken?”

“Taken?” I paused in the act of loading the water bottle back in the pack. Cherise looked nearly human again. Amazing what a little color in the cheeks can do for a girl.

“You know. By them,” she said. She pointed upward with a trembling finger.

“They…?” And then I remembered the gray alien tattoo. “Oh. Them. Right.” Not that I wanted to sound judgmental, and hey, I’d hooked up with a former boyfriend who was apparently made out of liquid metal and could disappear at will, so who was I to scoff? “Uh, I don’t think so, honey.”

She was staring at me as if she were waiting for my reply, and then, two seconds later, she looked agitated. “But it makes sense! What if they…what if they did something to us!” Cherise suddenly threw off the thermal blankets in a crinkle of foil and began frantically groping at the back of her neck. She twisted the hair up and anxiously turned toward me. “Is there a scar? Did they put the chip in my neck?”

“There’s no chip.” I waited for her to grasp the fact that I was replying to her, and this time it seemed to take even longer. “Cherise, get a grip. There’s no scar, there’s no chip, and I don’t think you were abducted by little gray aliens. I don’t think you were probed, experimented on, or beamed up. I don’t think you went to the planet Bozbarr, either. Whatever happened, I think there’s a different explanation.” Not necessarily one any less crazy.

Cherise frowned, then looked disappointed. “But…it fits all the stories. We were away from people, and I don’t remember what happened. There’s missing time, and suddenly I’m back out here in the middle of nowhere…”

“This is something else.”

She was already talking over me by the time I got the words out. “Unless it’s something to do with the Wardens,” she said.

“You’re sure you don’t remember anything? Anything at all?” Cherise, after several seconds of silence, shook her head. I changed the subject. “Do you remember anything about what happened to Kevin? Where he could be?”

The conversational train clickety-clacked along tracks for the required two heartbeats before she caught up. “No. But…” A faint wave of color bloomed in her cheeks. “But if he could, he’d be here with me.”

So the beach bunny had a thing for skinny slacker boy? I’d thought they were just unrelated strangers, but clearly it wasn’t even just a Mutt-and-Jeff partnership; it was a choice. Her choice, at least, and his, if he wasn’t a total idiot.

I kept my voice low and quiet. “How long have you been with him?”

That got me an odd look. “You know. You were with me when I met him.”

Great. More big black hole to fill in. “Pretend I don’t know,” I said. “When-”

There was a scratching at the tent, and I shot up to my feet, grabbing the nearest blunt object-which turned out to be a bottle of water-but my doubtful turf-defending skills weren’t necessary. It was Lewis. He snaked through the narrow entrance, reached for his pack, and then he saw Cherise.

His stare fixed on her, and there was this sensation of something happening, something I couldn’t see or control. Needles all over my skin. My hair blew back in a sudden gust of breathlessly cold wind, and I felt gravity give a funny little lurch, as if it were thinking of canceling its regular appearance.

I blinked, and however I did it, I saw things. First of all: Lewis. He looked taller, stronger-not substantially different, just…more. He radiated some kind of aura for several feet around him, shifting like oil on water. And outside of that aura was a storm. Not literally, not with clouds and things, but still: a storm. There was no other way to think of it. It was sheer bloody power, sparking and gathering and flaring, coming from everywhere, out of the air, up from the ground, flowing into and out of him. And it was focused directly at Cherise.

I looked at her, and she almost vanished. Not totally, but she’d faded like some sepia-toned photograph, and her aura was weak and pale by comparison. There were broad, ugly, jagged streaks of pure black running through it, like claw marks. The tent around us glimmered with heat and power, and the light was getting stronger, so strong I could hardly stand to look at him.

“Lewis!” I turned back to him. “Don’t. She’s okay.”

“No,” he said. “She’s not.”

Lewis wasn’t letting down his guard. When Cherise looked at me, terrified, he held out a hand toward her, palm out, as if he were warning her to stay away.

“How’d she get in here?”

“I brought her. I know, that was probably stupid, but I couldn’t just leave her!” Lewis transferred that X-ray stare to me. I got the impression that he was mortally worried about what he was going to see, but then it must have been better than he expected, because he blinked and seemed to back off from spiritual Defcon One.

“What’s happening to her?” I asked.

“What we thought. The Demon used her, and now it’s let her go. She’s been badly hurt.”

“I didn’t see any wounds…” There’d been blood on her sweater, but nothing wrong with her skin. As if the bullet holes Lewis had put in her had fully healed.

“This isn’t the kind of damage you see outside,” he said. “And it’s not the kind that heals.”

I wasn’t sure how much of this Cherise was following; she seemed confused, her eyes flickering back and forth between the two of us. Lewis kept staring at Cherise, frowning, tilting his head first one way, then the other.

“This makes no sense,” he muttered, and took a step closer to her. Then another one. “No sense. Why would it go after her? She’s not a Warden. No power, nothing like what they’re usually drawn toward. She barely shows up on the aetheric even when she’s not…” He didn’t seem to find a word for it. “Does she remember?”

“Ask her yourself. She’s not deaf.”

He blinked, as if he’d forgotten she was something more than just a collection of interesting problems, and then hunkered down and started asking Cherise questions. It was a short conversation, since it didn’t take too many repetitions of time-delayed “I don’t know” before Lewis began seeing the light. The light being, of course, more of a murky, indistinct confusion.

When he was finished, he cast a dark look in my direction and said, “Outside. Now.”

I wasn’t particularly fond of being ordered around, but I was willing to go along, for now. Seeing as he’d probably saved my life a couple of times already. We squirmed through the narrow tent aperture, I made a joke about birth canals that probably wasn’t particularly appropriate, and then we were outside in the cutting, frosty wind. Little miniature tornadoes of blown snow whipped by, ruffling my hair and fanning it in a cold sheet across my face. I folded my arms, put my hands in my armpits, and said, “What? What’s wrong?”

Lewis was facing kind of toward me, but mostly away. Like he knew he had to have this conversation but didn’t particularly want to. “It’s bad,” he said. “She may seem okay now, but she’s not.”

“Then do your voodoo and fix her up,” I said. “Make her all-”

“She’s dying,” he said.

I felt like he’d punched me in the stomach, and for a second or two I was at a loss for words before I rallied. “No, she’s not. She’s getting better. Look, she nearly froze to death, but she’s recovering, and-”

He met my eyes, and the bitter fury rolling in him cut me off cold. “She’s dying, Jo,” he said. “The stuff that keeps her alive, the…I don’t know, the soul, is gutted. Cored out. I can’t save her. Once a Demon rips at someone like that, so completely, what’s left after it leaves can’t sustain itself. She’ll just…slow down and die. You saw how hard it is for her to focus. That’s only going to get worse. Fast.”

“I don’t believe in Demons!”

“You should!” he shot back. “You were killed by one!”

I had officially entered la-la land, and obviously it was no longer safe to be traveling on the crazy train with Lewis. Next stop: Lithium City. “I’m not dead,” I pointed out to him.

“No, of course you’re not…” He stopped himself with an effort, an overwhelming expression of frustration.

“There’s got to be something we can do for her,” I said. “Something. Anything.”

“No. Look, I’ve seen this before. She’ll just fade. Quietly. She’ll stop responding to us, and then she’ll just…go.” For a second there was a sheen like tears in his eyes. I couldn’t remember anything about him prior to his finding me in the woods, but I was fairly sure that crying wasn’t his usual thing. He’d seen it before. I was guessing it was someone who’d meant something to him.

“So what do we do now?” I asked. Lewis crossed his arms.

“What we were going to do before she showed up,” he said. “David and I scouted the route this morning. We hike to the rendezvous, make contact with Wardens we can trust, and find a place to hole up until David can lay his hands on Ashan and find out how to solve this thing.”

“Well, we can’t just leave her!” I said. “And I don’t think she’s strong enough to hike it right now. Not in this weather.” Wasn’t too sure I was, either.

“I’m sorry, but we can’t wait. Kevin’s still out there somewhere, and I have no reason to believe he can’t find her. Or worse, he might know where she is already. We have to leave her. We can get David to lead a rescue party back for her. We’ll leave her the tent, food, water, a supply of heat packs.”

“You think she’ll last long enough to be rescued? Even with all the supplies?”

Silence. Lewis rocked back and forth, restless and weary, and shook his head.

“Then no,” I said. “I’m not leaving her here to die alone.” Not because she was supposed to be my friend; it’s hard to have friends when you don’t remember the good times, not to mention the bad. But because it was just plain wrong.

Lewis looked like he wanted to argue with me, but I saw the torment in his face.

And the guilt.

“All right.” He sighed. “We’ll see how she is in the morning. But I still think it’s a mistake.”

Cherise looked better when we went back in the tent, but one glance at Lewis told me that was deceptive; he wouldn’t be that grim if her condition had improved. At least she didn’t seem to be in pain. Certainly she was giving off no on-the-verge-of-death vibes. The only thing strange about her was the haunted, empty look in her eyes, and the fact that she seemed to have a longer and longer lag in responding to anything around her.

I tried to ignore it. The rest of the day was consumed with small talk, nothing very deep or probing. I didn’t ask her much about my own life; I wasn’t sure I was ready to hear how close we’d been. She volunteered details, though, mentioned people and places that I didn’t and couldn’t recognize. I was grateful when she fell asleep, finally, and zipped myself into my own sleeping bag next to her. Lewis sat cross-legged, crammed in the corner of the tiny shelter, lost in what looked like meditation but could have been a sitting-up nap for all I knew.

I was about to drift off to sleep when Cherise said dreamily, “Jo?”

I sat up and did some unnecessary adjustments to her burrito-style wrapping. Her eyes seemed to take ages to focus on me, and she smiled slightly.

“You don’t have to pretend. I know something’s wrong,” she said. Her voice was soft. “Look, if I did anything…said anything, you know, earlier…I didn’t mean it. You know that, right? I didn’t mean it. Don’t be mad, okay?”

I didn’t even know her, not really, but that hurt. I tried not to let it show. “I’m not mad,” I said. My voice actually stayed mostly steady. “You should sleep for a while. Rest.”

Another one of those eerie lags, like talking to someone in space. While she was waiting to get the message, she seemed to be just…vacant. Then she excavated a hand from the foil wrapping around her and took mine. She had a tattoo around the ring finger of her right hand, some kind of Celtic knot work. I figured, given the alien gray tat on her back, she probably had more body art, probably in places that only her boyfriends knew about. A normalish girl, one who loved her looks and devoted a lot of time to their enhancement. A girl who probably had the guys buzzing back home.

A girl who’d been my friend. Who still was, in ways that counted.

She said, “Don’t leave me here. Not by myself.”

“I wouldn’t. I won’t.”

“I’m scared.” She didn’t seem to be hearing me, although her huge blue eyes were locked on mine. “I can’t just die, Jo. I didn’t even do anything heroic yet. Not like you.”

I looked over at Lewis, whose eyes opened as soon as I focused on him. Serene as the Buddha. I took in a trembling breath. “Isn’t there anything you can do?” I snapped. I was displacing anger, I knew that, but it felt good to let a little of it out.

He sighed. “I can try, but it won’t be enough, and it will only prolong things. It can’t stop the process.”

Cherise was visibly fading away now, panic in those huge blue eyes. She tried to move but her arm barely twitched.

Trapped inside her own body.

“Help.” Her lips formed the word, but there was no breath behind it.

I was watching her die.

Sudden fury spiked through me. Not at Lewis-at everything. At the unfairness of the world. At losing someone I’d barely begun to know and like. “No!” I said sharply. “No, I’m not just going to sit here…”

I reached out and put my hands on her head. I had no idea at all what I was doing, but the frustration and fury inside left me no choice. I had to act. I had to try. It seemed like instinct, to put my hands where I did, but then I remembered David had used the same kind of placement when he’d healed Lewis.

“What the hell are you doing?” Lewis barked, scrambling up, but I wasn’t listening to him. If this was magic, then I could do it, right? David had shown me how to reach for power…except that I had no idea what to do with it. I could grab the power and hold it, but handing a child a scalpel didn’t make her a surgeon.

Show me, I begged. Come on, somebody, show me what to do. SHOW ME!

I felt a slow, warm, syrupy pulse come up through my body, flowing through my legs, up through my body’s core, spilling out of my hands. Cherise dissolved into a sparkling network of tiny bright points of light, millions of them, layer upon layer upon layer, like a city at night. Some of the lights were bright white, some blue, some shading toward yellow and red.

And, ominously, a substantial part of her head was simply black. No lights at all.

And the black was spreading.

I heard Lewis shouting something at me, but I ignored him. I was expecting him to physically try to drag me away, but he must have had more sense than that.

Cherise’s nervous system was an incredible design, mesmerizing and intensely beautiful, and I found myself mapping the lines of color and light in a kind of trace, my hands moving above her body just inches from skin.

I paused over the dead areas, both hands hovering uncertainly, and then I reached inside and touched one of the dead nodes.

Cherise screamed, both in my ears and-chillingly-inside my head.

“Stop!” Lewis was yelling in my ear now, but he wasn’t touching me. I was radioactive, and he knew it. “Jo, you’re not an Earth Warden. Jesus, you’re not meant to do this. Stop!”

I was hurting her, but I knew, somehow, that it had to hurt. There wasn’t any choice, if I wanted to save her. The blackness was spreading across that network of lights, slowly consuming her, and if I didn’t do something she’d be gone, this beautiful creation would be gone, and I couldn’t let it happen.

I just couldn’t.

Smells and sounds and chaos rolled over me, a huge vista of things I couldn’t comprehend, a presence that guided my hands and my powers to touch here and there and there, a tiny spark of pure white power jumping from one burned-out node to another, jump-starting and dying.

It’s not working!

The presence inside wordlessly soothed me, and showed me again. And again. I was no longer seeing or hearing anything in the outside world; the world was what was under my hands and in my head.

And this time, the bridge sparked, flickered, and held, and the network of lights raced and flared and ignited through the dark.

I felt things shift into place. Click.

Cherise lit up with a blaze of power, and I heard her take in a whooping, gasping breath in the real world.

I did it.

Yeah. But now that the feverish desire to do it was passing…what exactly had I done?

“Let go!” Lewis was yelling at me, frantic. I tried. Before I could get free, another spark jumped from my fingers, accessing a network of brilliance in Cherise’s mind, and although I had no idea what I was doing…

I was suddenly inside her head.