The security designers were good, but not quite good enough. I managed to intercept the signal that zipped over to the door to tell it to lock down and sound the alarm, and converted the energy into the all-clear electronic pulse.

The door popped open, and I stepped into a sterile little anteroom, with another, identical scanning system at the far end. Protective gear was neatly stored, and I put on a suit, more for blending in than for what it would offer me. Second door, same verse, and then I was inside a hallway. There, a large, colorful map indicated that I was in a blue section.

Blue section was the least dangerous, I gathered.

There were a few workers in this part of the plant, but a confident walk, a wave, and a badge seemed to do the job nicely. Nobody was doing much at the moment; operations were at an idle, and boredom had set in. I followed the color-coded maps to the elevators at the far end. More biometrics, which was a pain in the ass; I hoped they hadn't security-locked the bathrooms, too.

Finally, after the third biometric I had to destroy, I decided to take an end run around the problem. Fire codes said that all security doors had to open in the event of a fire emergency.

I created one. Not a big one; I didn't want to bake anybody, or even give them smoke inhalation, but I pulled some jittery power from the electronics and built myself an impressive-sized fire in a nest of empty boxes in a storeroom. Fire suppression kicked in, but with a little concentration, I was able to keep the fire blazing despite the countermeasures.

Thirty seconds later, the biometric scanners began flashing FIRE EMERGENCY, and I heard the clicks as secured doors began to unlock. The elevators stopped working, but I could get around that; it was a simple mechanism, and I needed to go all the way to the bottom anyway.

I stepped inside just as three people in protective gear--one with an automatic weapon slung over it--entered the corridor and looked straight at me. He had fast reactions, and I couldn't jam his gun and keep the fire going at the same time. Too many balls in the air.

He got off five shots, aiming straight for my chest.

Chapter Nine

I don't remember getting hit; my entire concentration was on slamming shut the elevator door, cutting the cables, overriding the friction brakes, and letting the car drop in a free fall. At first I felt sick and dizzy, and figured that was an effect of the falling, but then I smelled blood. I looked down and saw two separate wounds in my side, ragged holes puncturing my protective white suit. I unzipped it and stepped out. There wasn't any pain yet, or a lot of bleeding, though red rings were steadily forming on my lab coat around the bullet holes.

"Fantastic," I said. "That's just great."

Gravity was definitely a harsh mistress, and never more than at a time like this. I watched in Oversight, gauging how far I'd fallen, how much farther still remained, and trying to do complicated math in my head. I was approaching seriously terminal velocity, and I was going to have to start slowing my descent.

"Jo!" David's voice, blasting unexpectedly from the speaker in the elevator. I jerked, and my concentration shattered. Pain began an insidious drumbeat in my side, dammit, too soon....

I pushed it, and David, aside and concentrated harder. I was sweating now. Shaking. And there was a growing pool of blood forming around my shoes, how had that happened?

Didn't seem right.

I dropped to my knees, then pitched forward flat on my stomach. I screamed at the impact, because damn that hurt, but it was important to try to distribute impact force over as wide an area as possible.

I reached out for power in the air around me, found it, and began building a thick, cold cushion of air beneath the falling elevator. I increased its density, and felt a significant decrease in the speed at which I was falling.

But I was still falling.

David was saying something, but I couldn't pay attention, not anymore. I needed more power, more braking, and I needed it now.

I couldn't get it. When I reached out for power, it slid through my grasp like oil. I felt weak, clumsy, and wet--oh yeah. I was wet because I was lying in a pool of blood.

David was almost screaming at me now. I couldn't spare a second of concentration; I had to maintain what I'd already done, keep slowing down, try to make this crash survivable. I was running out of elevator shaft.

I threw one last, ultimate effort into it and eased the car to a sliding, jerking stop.

The button dinged, and the doors opened.

For some reason, I couldn't get to my feet. Maybe because the blood was slippery. I was a mess, and I needed a bath, a nice warm bath to let all of this float away... . That sounded good.

But I forced myself up, bracing myself with both bloody hands on the doors of the elevator. My vision was spotty, with circles of darkness swallowing the glare of white lights. Everything seemed to be moving except me.

Walk, I told myself sternly. You have to do this. Now.

Because deep down inside, I knew that I wasn't going to have the strength to wait and do it in a more orderly fashion.

I didn't make it very far, but then I didn't have to--this whole area was hot and live with the kind of thing I needed. This was a storage area, deep underground, and the doors were massive affairs on hydraulics. There were six doors. I fell at the first one, flailed around on the floor for a while, and left a hell of a bloody mess trying to get up. The control pad was way the hell up there. That seemed wrong. Why didn't they build them closer to the floor, for convenience?

Oh, the hell with subtlety.

I blew the door off its hinges in a massive burst of superheated air. It flew over my head, slammed into the far wall with an impact hard enough to be felt in Switzerland, and embedded itself in the concrete to a depth of at least a foot.

Inside that storage locker, about the size of a medium-sized residential home, were stacked row upon row of containers marked with vivid red radiation warning stickers. All very neat and orderly. The aetheric here seethed black, and my own distress didn't help much.

One more thing to do.

I triggered a reaction.

It wasn't really all that hard; destruction never is. All I had to do was put some chemical chains together, add heat, pour in energy, stir to a rolling boil.

I didn't have enough left in me to set up any kind of protective shielding--not that I thought it would have worked in any case. I hoped that the evacuation had worked. I hoped that Dr. Reid and his people were safely outside the facility.

Right now, though, that was a very moot point.

I rolled over on my back, staring up, and my last conscious thought was of David. How much I wished I could die in his arms, if I couldn't live in them.

I heard his scream echoing through the hallways a second before the brilliant flash of light, and then it took all the power I had left to hold the explosion in, point it down, driving it like a spike deep into the skin of the Mother.

Then there was just ... light.

And dark.

I didn't expect to ever open my eyes again--who would, really? After exploding a stockpile of nuclear material? Who the hell survives that?

Me. I'm just lucky like that.

I opened my eyes and found myself floating in a sheer bubble surrounded by flames and destruction. I was still bleeding. There was a pretty significant amount of red pooled at the bottom of the bubble, and my clothes were soaked. My heart was struggling to keep on pumping what little remained.

So, I wasn't going to go out in a blaze of glory. I'd just bleed to death, lying here inside of this protective cocoon that I swore I hadn't constructed, and wasn't maintaining. I couldn't have, because there was almost nothing left inside me to use.

Someone had saved me. Sort of. And I hated them for it.

Something moved, out there in the fire, in the rubble, in the chaos of smoke. I breathed slowly, steadily, listening to my laboring heart, and watched the figure come clear.

It was the Djinn Venna, in her Alice in Wonderland blue pinafore. Her pale, long hair shone in a shimmering curtain around her shoulders. Her hands were clasped in front of her small body.

Her eyes blazed milk-white.

"I kept you alive," she said. "Don't you want to thank me?"

"Not really," I said, and coughed. That hurt, as if I was tearing pieces of myself loose with every movement. I ended up sobbing, and tried to stop. "Let me go."

"No," Venna said, and watched me with icy focus. "You hurt her. We all felt it. The others will all come here to hurt you in return. I have to keep you alive for them."

This was the part that Lewis and I hadn't discussed, because it was a terrible thing to even think about. He'd hoped, as I had, that I'd be dead, obliterated in the destruction.

Survival was one hell of a lot worse as an outcome. I wished I could will myself to death, but there are some things I just couldn't manage, and my heart refused to do anything but keep beating, beating, beating.

"Venna," I said. "Venna, you have to help me. Please help me."

"No," she said. It was a flat, inhuman sound, and there wasn't even any anger behind it.

There was nothing.

"You stay alive."

I should have been dead already, I realized; from the amount of blood I'd lost, and the fact that the flow had slowed to a leak from the wounds, I'd already bled out. Whatever my heart was pumping, with such great effort, through my veins was not my blood.

I was an animated corpse, living at Venna's whim.

I remembered David's screams, and I wondered if he knew. I wondered if he could see, from that distant, cold vantage point of Jonathan's picture window, helpless to stop this, helpless to do anything but grieve. If he left, if he tried to rescue me, he'd be lost himself. Don't do anything crazy, I begged him silently, through the cord that still, even now, was holding us together. Let me go. Let them do whatever they want, so long as they come here and leave the Wardens alone. I'll hold out as long as I can.

It sounded brave. I didn't feel brave, not at all. I felt sick, weak, and dying, and more than anything, I didn't want to hurt anymore.

Venna was joined by more figures, moving out of the aetheric shadows and into the real world. Some of them I recognized--there was Rahel, glowering at me with real hatred.

Ashan, the leader of the Old Djinn--he, at least, didn't need any incentive to loathe me.

He'd gotten a jump-start, early on. I saw plenty of Djinn I'd clashed with before, only a handful of whose names I'd ever learned.

So many Djinn, all with those eerie pearl-white eyes. All stalking me like tigers. Talk about overkill.

I floated in my blood-soaked bubble, waiting for the end.

Venna was the one to make the first move. She reached through the force bubble and ripped a hole in it, gutting it from within. It made a sighing sound, and disappeared, and my blood fell in a sudden rain to the smashed concrete and steel. Followed by my body. I screamed as I hit, although I'd sort of promised myself I'd keep my dignity and not give them the satisfaction. Yeah, that hadn't even lasted until they actually touched me.

Venna leaned over me as I struggled to right myself. She reached out with her little-girl hand and touched my cheek in a curiously gentle way, cocked her head to one side, and then--with no warning at all--she walloped me so hard that I flew ten feet into a broken wedge of folded steel. It had once been a door, I supposed. If I could have bled more, I would have. It didn't seem at all fair that I could hang here in this state, on the edge of death, and that my nerves hadn't shut themselves off yet. It would be okay if I couldn't feel this. But that was the whole point: they wanted me to feel it.

Every last bloody second of it.

I coughed and clawed my way out of the rubble. I got to my feet and stood there, trembling but erect. I lifted my chin and said, "That's all you've got? You hit like a girl, Venna."

She bared her teeth and became a feral animal, rushing at me with clawed fingers and snapping teeth, and I knew this wasn't going to go well, not at all.

But I'd signed up for the whole ride, hadn't I? I'd known what I was getting into, and in that split second before Venna actually reached me, I gave up all hope of living through any of it. That was a black kind of peace, perversely comforting.

Something hit Venna before she reached me--a pale blur, something big and muscular.

Venna was knocked off course, into a pile of rubble. Her screams of rage pulverized a few of the concrete blocks into beach sand, and I blinked, amazed that I was still standing.

There was another Djinn standing in front of me--facing away from me, toward the others.

Oh.

It was the nameless Djinn who'd been chauffeuring us around the country. The vessel. The avatar.

And now, it said, with my own voice, "Stay away from my mother, you bastards!"

Imara. My daughter, the Earth Oracle. Like David, she couldn't leave her own personal stronghold, where she was holding out against the madness of the Djinn ... but she'd found a way to remote-pilot the avatar, the same way David and Whitney had done.

"Imara?" I blurted. "What are you doing?"

"Saving your life, I think. Honestly, do you ever stop doing insane things? What were you thinking?" The Djinn glanced over his shoulder, and in his expression I saw my daughter's harassed shadow. "You shouldn't be here. I can't believe you walked into this with your eyes open."

"Would you feel better if I'd blundered into it stupidly?"

"Maybe I would." Imara snapped the Djinn's head back around as Ashan walked forward, and I felt the energy change, grow darker. Ashan had killed my daughter, in her original Djinn form. She hadn't forgotten that, not at all. "Back off."

He didn't seem to even hear her, or care that there was any kind of obstacle standing in his way. When he got within reach of the Djinn, Ashan simply reached out and pushed, and the Djinn went flying, off balance and overmatched. The only comfort I took was that Imara herself wasn't being hurt. She was safe, somewhere else.