It was as startling as opening up a broom closet at the Ritz - all of a sudden, there was no expensive thick carpet, no indirect lighting, no artwork. Just metal, some indoor-outdoor carpet for traction, and plain fixtures that wouldn't have been out of place on a fish trawler. Aldonza stepped over the watertight lip of the door and gestured me inside. Clark tried to go with us, but I stopped her with an outstretched hand. "No," I said. "Get to the lifeboat stations. The captain's probably going to try to get you off as quickly as possible."
"In this storm? How?"
"Trust me. He'll find a way." I shook her hand. "Love your movies, by the way. Sorry about incinerating your cabin."
"These things happen," she said, deadpan. "And I hope you find a way to stop this before it goes any further."
Me too,I thought, but I didn't even really know what I was heading toward in the first place.
Aldonza shut the watertight door and spun the locking mechanism. Nobody would be getting in that way, not now.
"Come on," she said, and offered me her shoulder. "You want the hold, yes? Where your friends went?"
I nodded, and off we went.
The hallways here were narrow industrial constructions, and as we passed larger open spaces they were uniformly workmanlike. A TV lounge area big enough for a few dozen, with comfortable but un-fancy Sears-style furniture. A computer area with banks of monitors and keyboards. A mess hall with all the charm of mess halls everywhere.
The place was deserted. "Where is everybody?"
"Duty stations," Aldonza said. "Organizing the passengers." All of them? I supposed that made sense; we were heading down now, flights of narrow stairs descending into the emergency-lit bowels of the ship. Stairs. Lovely. Feel the burn, Baldwin.
I wondered where David had gone.
"One more," Aldonza murmured, when I had to stop for trembling breaths. "You're sure you want to do this?"
"No choice," I said, and coughed. "Let's go."
The bottom of the stairs opened into another hallway. This one held crew quarters - four narrow bunks to a room, top and bottom on each side, with small lockers in the middle on the far wall. Most had homey touches - photos of family, home, friends. Magazines to read, or books. Colorful nonstandard blankets and pillows.
Aldonza stopped.
"What?" I asked. She let go of me and took a step back. I braced myself on the metal wall, looking first at her, then down the hall.
Lights were going out, one by one, marching up the corridor toward us.
"Which way to the hold?"
"That way," she said. "Straight on, then go left when you must turn. The crew entrance to the hold is there."
"Get out of here," I said. "Run."
She stared at me in confusion for a few seconds, then she must have seen what was happening inside me.
She backed away and ran.
And I went toward the darkness.
And the darkness went into me.
Chapter Seven
The danger sign was that I felt... better. Calmer. Steadier.
I shouldn't have, not at all. I was operating on threads, and yet suddenly I felt assured, in control, and powerful.
The containment was leaking. Leaking badly. I was starting to turn around again, and I needed to do what I'd come to do before that happened.
I wasn't totally blind. Earth Wardens can sense heat, shapes, all kinds of frequencies not usually accessible to other regular folks (or Wardens), and with my night vision, I could see the hallway, the cool shapes of closed doors, and a long empty stretch.
The hallway ended in a blind T-shaped intersection, and I turned left as Aldonza instructed. At the end was a big double-sized watertight door with all kinds of warnings and crew restrictions blazoned next to it.
I spun the wheel and pulled. The air on the other side felt heavy and thick, unpleasantly stale. No fire, at least. And no ocean flooding in, which made me wonder why we were sitting so low in the water.
The hold was massive, a cave of treasures that would have taken months to map and explore. Cargo containers were stacked in neat, symmetrical rows that glowed cool greens and blues in my night vision.
And I saw the bright red and yellow flicker of bodies up ahead.
None of them were moving.
I struggled with a fiery hot pulse of primal satisfaction, of pleasure. I pushed it back.
I limped ahead, stopping for breath when I had to, and the scene slowly came into focus.
There, near the center of the hold, were cages where I supposed duty-free items like liquor and expensive perfumes were kept. There was a massive freestanding safe, too, which no doubt held all those precious goodies the rich passengers had been so loath to leave behind. I wondered how much of it was drugs.
Standing, sitting, or lying in a circle near the safe were bodies. Some had the white-hot glow of Djinn, some the merely warm spectrum of human flesh, but none of them were moving by so much as a breath.
Still alive, though.
Not for long,the darkness inside me whispered, and purred. I felt it stretch its claws.
I limped as close as I dared before I felt something tingling along the edges of my nerves.
There was some kind of energy field here that I really didn't want to encounter directly.
This was the team, Wardens and Djinn, that had come here to fight the skin. I didn't sense the signature of the one they'd been hunting at all, though. Instead, I saw a broken heap of crystal, and some slagged flesh.
Score one for the good guys. So what had gone wrong?
Kevin was standing only a few feet from me, frozen in midstep. Up on the aetheric, I could see his fury boiling like lava, so he was aware, if unable to move.
"Hey!" I yelled. One of the Djinn - Lyle, with his lead gray skin and rust-colored eyes - was closer to me than the others. "Lyle, can you hear me?"
"Yes," he said. He couldn't move, but he could speak.
"What's happening?"
"We are all that's holding the ship out of the water," he said. "We have to hold our concentration, or the forces won't balance. This deck will collapse. The ship will sink." Instead of merely being frozen, the Wardens were in danger of being smashed, because there was a force below us, rising up from the blackest, coldest depths of the ocean...
and it was pulling us down.
That was why the ship was riding low in the water. It was caught in a downward suction, like a ball at the end of a vacuum hose.
If the Djinn let go, it wasn't just the team of Wardens who were fatally screwed.
We all were.
Good.This time, the darkness pooled in my guts, warm and velvety, and I had to choke back a sob. It would be so easy to let go. So utterly easy.
There was a grating sound in the hold, something scraping over metal. I crouched down, making myself as small a target as possible, as the voice echoed off of metal, wood, and immobile bodies. I heard the shuffle of footsteps, and saw an odd shape moving among the stacked cargo and luggage. It had the outward shine of a human form, but it was like a superimposition - beneath it lay something dark and twisted.
The skin. It had created some kind of decoy, which was what the pile of glass was not far from Kevin, for the Wardens to chase while the rest of the plan had gone into motion.
Great. We might have killed the powerful one first, but this one was the clever one.
The skin ducked behind a parked, covered Porsche, then flitted around some hanging chains and weights, more like nightmare than human form.
It paused long enough in the glow of an emergency light for me to get a good look at it.
The body it wore was one of those fresh-faced kids who looked like they'd be more at home in a television ad for soap than running around murdering people. He was almost as pretty as a Djinn.
"Angelo," I said. "Angelo Marconi?"
It just looked at me. I could see now that Lyle was right - it was literally just skin, stretched like a Halloween mask over the darkness inside.
Like you,laughed my dark side. Like you are becoming. Not long now...
The skin flitted out of the light and into the darkness.
I had no idea what I was going to do if it came to power-on-power, because I was barely staying on my feet.
Ten feet away, the frozen statue garden of Wardens and Djinn glowed steadily in my night vision. I caught a moving glow, much cooler than the others, blue instead of yellow or white.
Angelo darted into the middle of the standing figures. I switched back to regular sight, and saw him put his hands on one of the Djinn. One of Ashan's, who snarled and struck back with invisible force that bounced off of Angelo's body like the impact from a water balloon.
Angelo's skin blackened, crisped, and flaked away, revealing the crystal underneath, as the Djinn fought him. I felt the ship lurch sharply downward as the Djinn's attention was pulled away from the task of holding the opposing forces in balance.
The Djinn began to turn a soft ashy gray. Rotting from the outside in, the way the Djinn who'd died outside my room had ended her life.
I settled my back against the cold metal of the safe. If I was going to do anything at all, I didn't want to worry about falling down while I was about it. If what Venna had said was right, this thing was the forerunner of something much bigger, something that devoured on a universal scale. I thought about all those lifeless planets spinning in space that our telescopes and probes had found. How many of them had once been like us? How many had fallen prey and been wiped clean of life?
Why fight it? It's nature. You are all aberrations, a momentary mistake in the plan of the universe. Let go.
The ship bounced and settled deeper in the water. I heard the almost-human groan of the metal around me. It couldn't withstand this strain, not for much longer.
And neither could I.
I closed my eyes, visualized the frequencies I needed, and began to set them up in a tightly enclosed ring around the skin and his Djinn victim.
Nothing happened.
The Djinn struggled now, no longer interested in maintaining the balance, but he'd waited too long. He couldn't break free of the crystal claws that were digging into him, siphoning away his power and his life. He was losing.
I shifted frequencies.
The Djinn shrieked in unworldly agony as his body began to crumble away. The dark part of me met that with trembling eagerness, drinking in every agonized second of it.
I shifted frequencies again, blind to everything but the dance of molecules, the music of the energy being expended and absorbed.
Come on...
It wasn't strong enough.
Venna had been able to blow her victim to kingdom come, but she was Venna, a power of the ages. I was just a wounded, exhausted Warden up against something I didn't understand.
I was losing.
The Djinn who'd screamed was no longer recognizable as a Djinn at all. It was a pile of disintegrating ash and dust, sliding away from cohesion to scatter on the deck.
And I felt everything slipping away inside.
The ship groaned again, and I saw metal buckling, vast rivets ripping out of place, and the first jets of water blow through into the open space of the hold.
We started sinking again.
The skin turned to the next Djinn. Lyle.
I felt the shift of power in the room.The water stopped rushing in. The metal sealed and strengthened.
Where David walked, the world mended around him.
"No," I whispered, but he wasn't going to stop, not for me. Not this time.
He wasn't going to allow Lyle to die.
Another watertight door opened on the other side of the hold, and a swarm of Wardens poured in, led by Lewis. In seconds, they had the skin surrounded.
But the skin had its claws buried in Lyle's chest, like some giant parasitical tick.
I switched frequencies one more time. Lewis saw what I was doing, and joined me; the other Earth Wardens quickly supported us, creating a resonance that was so powerful it began to shatter glass and crystal stored in the crates. Someone's eyeglasses broke under the strain.
I felt feedback - the exact frequency that this creature's bones sang to. I began to focus harder, refining the sound until it was at a lethal intensity. I could see the waves now, a standing well of ripples in the air around the creature, battering it from all sides.
"Jo, let go!" Lewis shouted. "Drop out!"
I couldn't do that. Instead, I reached inside and came up with more power than I'd thought was hiding down in the empty storehouse of my gifts.
Because it felt so good to kill.
The vibrations ramped up into a shriek of power, and instead of Lyle dissolving into ash, the skin that had been Angelo Marconi blew apart into glittering crystal dust.
Lyle sagged and hit the deck, too weak to continue, but David stepped into his place and froze, concentrating.
The ship leveled out - still fighting the downward force but no longer being pulled down.
As quickly as it had come, the extra power I'd found was gone. Vanished. I was just me again, frail and fragile and ready to drop. If Angelo hadn't been a pile of ragged flesh and demonic parts on the metal floor, he'd have had an easy meal of me.
Lewis reached me a few seconds later, as I slid down to a sprawl against the safe. "I told you to step out!" he snapped, and touched my forehead. "Damn it. What the hell did you do?"
I struck out at him. I couldn't help it; his anger woke the beast inside, the one that had patiently stalked and laughed and waited.
I couldn't hold it back anymore.
I burned him.
If it had been anyone but Lewis, I'd have killed him; I wasn't pulling punches, and the fire that boiled out of me onto him was thick, plasmatic, and clung like napalm. It flickered with a sickly green tint.
Lewis reacted instantly, stepping back from me and concentrating all his will on putting out the fire before it could eat him up. He succeeded, but my attack left him with nasty third-degree burns on his hands and arms.