"Allow me," I said, and twisted a small thread of Fire into a wick, then set it alight inside a bubble of air. I levitated it into the room ahead of us and turned up the brightness until the flickering magic lantern revealed rusted metal steps, going down, and mold-streaked concrete walls. "You're sure about this?"
"You want to get to it; we go down there," Silverton said. "Tell you what - makes you feel any better, I'll let you go first."
It didn't, but I was probably the best equipped to deal with any hostile force that popped up out of the darkness. Damn, I hated being competent sometimes. "How radioactive are we, exactly?"
"On a scale from one to ten?" Silverton asked cheerily. "Dead, ma'am. Or we would be, if we weren't Earth Wardens. Got some natural immunity against that kind of thing."
"Some?"
"The longer we stay, the worse off we are," he pointed out. Right. I was taking the lead. Fantastic.
I stepped onto the rusting metal, heard something creak, and hastily pushed my awareness down through the stairs, checking for structural integrity. They'd hold, thankfully, but just to be sure I added a little stiffener at the welded joints.
Twenty-two steps later, I arrived at the basement level, where the building's power plant was contained. At least that was what I assumed it was: a huge block of metal, dented and rusted, with inert panels of darkened indicators. I summoned the floating light closer as I walked around it.
"Should be close," Silverton said. In the dark, his voice sounded like the whisper of a ghost. And there were ghosts down here; I could feel their presence on the aetheric. People had definitely died hard in this place. Enough of them could have spawned a New Djinn. Nobody knew where the Old Djinn, the ones from the dawn of time, had come from, but the newer ones were born out of enough energy being set free at the same time. Disasters and mass killings were particularly prone to it.
I kept looking into Oversight and templated it across the real world as I eased around the generator. Whatever this thing was, it ought to be right there . . . and it was.
It was a severed head.
I screamed and recoiled - reflex - and slammed into Silverton's hard chest. He steadied me, moved me out of the way, and crouched down to stare at the dead, still face.
"That's a Djinn," he said softly.
"Can't be." I was getting control of myself again, willing myself back to some kind of mental balance. My heart was still thumping like a speed-metal drummer, but my hands were only shaking a little. "Djinn don't die. Not like that. And they don't leave corpses when they do."
"This one did," Silverton said. "Recognize him?"
I didn't. I didn't want to, either. "How can you cut the head off a Djinn?"
"You can't." Silverton reached out and touched the head. It wobbled backward a little, but didn't roll. "He's buried in the concrete up to the neck."
Okay, that was - if possible - even creepier. "What about the black thing? Is it him?"
"No," Silverton said. "It's inside him. We have to get him out."
He put both hands flat on the floor, on either side of the Djinn's head, and the concrete began to liquefy. Silverton reached into the wet concrete and gave me a glance. "Grab his other arm."
Last thing I wanted to do, but I did it. I reached down into the cool, wet cement and found something that felt more like flesh than liquid, and pulled. Silverton matched me, and we stood and walked backward, still pulling.
The Djinn's body slipped free, covered from the neck down in a gray, dripping mass. He was naked, and he looked very, very . . . human. The only way I could tell that he wasn't entirely human was the gauzy signature on the aetheric, barely perceptible now that we had him free of the ground.
Silverton was right. The black knife was inside him, driven in like a spike. This close on the aetheric it looked even deadlier than before. Glittering, sharp, lethal.
Silverton took a deep breath. "We're going to have to open him up."
I ran through all the reflexive denials and arguments in my head, and finally said, "You tell me what to do."
Silverton reached in his backpack and pulled out two pairs of thick, black rubberized gloves. He handed me one and donned the other pair, then took out a long, wicked-looking knife.
"You going to be okay?" he asked me. I must have looked pale. I nodded, poured on the power to the light drifting overhead, and swooped it closer to give Silverton as much visibility as possible. "Quick and dirty. We're not doing an appendectomy here. This is an autopsy."
I had no idea what a Djinn looked like beneath the skin. Human, I supposed - full of organs and blood and nerves and all the things that sustained us.
I was wrong about that. Maybe this Djinn had only assumed a human shape, or maybe the black thing inside him had corrupted him from within.
In any case, as soon as Silverton's knife pierced the graying skin, what poured out wasn't blood. . . . It was a toxic black liquid, like oil. It didn't leak; it pumped - as if some part of him was still alive. God, I hoped that wasn't true.
Silverton didn't pause, but his face went tense and still. He ripped the knife from neck to groin in one fast motion, put it aside, and yanked the cavity open. "Hold it," he snapped at me. Before I could come up with the very good reasons why I didn't want to do that, my gloved hands moved, grabbed the slick edges, and braced it open for him.
Silverton reached inside the Djinn, got both hands around the thing inside him, and pulled. It resisted, but then he rocked backward, as if something had broken free, and the top of the black shard swam up out of the black liquid and caught the light.
It flared into a galaxy of stars, glittering, and I gasped and looked away from it. There was something deeply wrong about it. Deeply alien.
"Oh God," I whispered. Silverton's face had gone an unhealthy shade of gray, and his hands shook as he pulled the thing out. "Drop it. Jerome, drop it!"
He got it free of the Djinn's corpse and let go. It fell to the concrete floor - not like the glass it resembled, not at all. It fell with a thick, metallic clunk. Drops of oily black dripped from its sharp edges, and both Silverton and I stared at it without saying a word for a few moments.
Then Silverton said, "This shouldn't be here. This can't be here."
I licked my lips and tasted sweat. "What is it?"
He met my eyes, and I saw real fear in him, the big tough military guy. "I don't know. If I had to apply some kind of scientific principle to it, I'd say it was antimatter. Antimatter in suspension, made stable in the real world."
I knew the theory of antimatter, of course. Back in the 1970s, a scientist named Dirac had been trying to figure out an explanation for the way matter behaved in certain circumstances, and he came up with a theory about something called the Dirac Sea - a kind of negative energy that exists underneath the positively charged matter in a vacuum. That led to scientists talking about contraterrene matter, and antiparticles.
Human scientists had actually managed to artificially create antimatter - in fact, they regularly did it, in places like CERN and Fermilab. Of course, their antimatter was unstable - it had to be, considering that it was manifesting and interacting with the matter-based world. The longest antimatter had ever lasted, even with all their technology sustaining it, was about fifteen seconds before it annihilated itself.
But if this was some kind of bottled, stable antimatter, that was bad. Very, very bad. When matter and antimatter collided, gamma rays were one side effect, which would explain the radiation. Even this container, whatever it was, wasn't able to completely contain the antimatter, so there was a continuous stream of radioactive energy pouring off it.
"Antimatter collisions are about ten times more powerful than chemically based energy," Silverton said, and wiped his sweating forehead with his sleeve. "One kilogram of antimatter annihilating itself is supposed to produce about 180 petajoules of energy."
"Which is . . ."
"Catastrophic would be charitable."
"And how much do you think is in there?"
We both looked at the thing lying on the concrete floor, alien and deadly enough to destroy a Djinn even without being released.
"I think," Silverton said slowly, "that we're looking at about two kilograms."
In other words, double the worst-case scenario he'd just described.
"We need the Djinn," I said. "At the very least, they need to know about what happened to him." I nodded toward the dead Djinn.
Silverton nodded. "I think we're going to need more than the Djinn," he said.
"Like who?"
"God."
Chapter Three
There was no way we could safely remove the black antimatter shard by ourselves. Touching it had damaged Silverton already; he was trying to hide it, but I could see the pain in his face, the way his gloved hands were trembling. I remembered Lewis's blistered hands - and that had been on the aetheric.
"Let's get out of here," I said. Silverton didn't argue. He had trouble getting to his feet. I dumped the equipment, stripped off his pack, and supported him on the way up the stairs. He made it about halfway before his knees gave out. He was a big guy, and I had to work hard to get him up the rest of the way and out into the hallway.
"Leave," he said. In the light from my floating lantern, he looked drawn and sick. "You need to get the Djinn here, fast. Go."
"I don't need to go anywhere to do that," I told him, and concentrated on the invisible thread that linked me with David. It was thin here, but still a connection. I pulled, and distantly felt his attention shift toward me. I couldn't communicate with him over the aetheric, at least not from this spot, but he knew I was looking for him.
I put my back into pulling Silverton down the hallway, trying to avoid the worst of the debris. It seemed like a very long way, and I had to superoxygenate my lungs to keep spots from dancing in front of my eyes. I'd pay for it later, but for now, I just wanted out.
My heels hit an inconveniently placed broken computer monitor, and I tipped backward.
David caught me. "What the hell is going on?" he asked. "What are you doing?"
I whirled to face him. I can only imagine how I must have looked - wild-eyed, sweating, scared. He took a step back. "Help me get him outside," I panted. Without comment, he scooped up Silverton in his arms and walked down the hall, olive-drab coat belling behind him. I hustled after, feeling a shake in my knees that definitely hadn't been there before. In fact, I felt distinctly sick now, wobbly, light-headed, but I was determined not to show it. We had enough problems to talk about.
David simply blew the glass doors off their hinges at the entrance - effective, if a little showy. The resulting hail of broken glass melted away in midair and formed a soft mound of sand, which served as a bed on which he placed Silverton. "Now," he said, and turned to me, "what the hell - "
He caught me as I collapsed. Which actually came as a surprise to me - the collapse, not that he caught me. I hadn't felt it coming on; I'd thought I was coping just fine. David pressed his warm hand to my forehead as he lowered me to the sand beside Silverton. "Jo?" He muttered under his breath, something about stupid Weather Wardens and their foolish sense of invulnerability, which really wasn't fair because I didn't feel at all invulnerable at the moment. I felt scared.
David's magical touch poured warmth into me, but it was like pouring it into a black hole. Whatever was affecting me, it was wrong in ways I couldn't even begin to realize.
"Wait," I said, and held his gaze with all the determination I had left. "David, I need you to go into the basement. There's a dead Djinn there, and a thing - a thing we think is antimatter. Don't go alone. Be careful - "
I had more to say, but it got lost somewhere, and the light was too bright in my eyes, and then it was dark and still and quiet, and I was all alone, floating.
Well, dying always had been kind of peaceful for me.
I woke up in a hospital, hooked up to tubes, and I was alone. No David by my bedside. No Lewis loitering in a chair. No Cherise, even.
All alone.
I pressed the call button, wondering if I was in a Warden hospital. Pressing the call button seemed like an Olympic event, and one I wasn't likely to medal in at that. I was unreasonably exhausted, considering I'd just woken up. While I waited for attention, I looked over the room I was in. Typical hospital issue - an adjustable bed, with rails that were up. Machines that beeped. A silently playing TV high in the corner, tuned to the Weather Channel, which led me to believe that at the very least I'd had Warden visitors.
Nobody was responding to my call. I pressed the button again, sweating with effort. My mouth tasted like metal, and it was sticky and dry. Everything smelled wrong. My whole body ached, the kind of nasty, all-over body aches you get with high fever, and there were some white-hot spots of pain in various joints. I'd been hurt worse, but somehow, being all alone, hooked up to machines and left ignored, made this seem worse.
I gulped down a breath and pressed the button again, convulsively.
The door banged open, admitting a nurse wearing the latest scrub fashions - floral print, with a predominantly red color. She didn't look familiar, and she didn't look happy. "Ms. Baldwin," she said. "Awake, I see."
I tried to nod. Appallingly, I couldn't seem to get my throat to produce sounds. I gestured at the water pitcher; she poured me a glass and held it for me. I gulped. Water had never tasted quite so good . . . until I realized that it was taking on a red tinge. I was bleeding into it. I pulled back, gasping, and wiped my lips. Blood on my fingers. It was coming from my gums, which were seeping red.
