Thin Air

At Lewis’s orders, I clambered out of my warm nest, dragging my sleeping bag with me, and settled in. Claustrophobic, but at least it would be warm. I turned on my side and listened to the other two, who were still outside. Their fire-cast silhouettes flickered ghostly against the dark blue fabric of the tent.

“I have some MREs. Maximum calorie concentration,” Lewis said. “So…does she like Stroganoff or meat loaf?” He was deliberately casual, but he sounded really, really tired.

“Ask her,” David said. “But I doubt she’d have any idea. She remembers what they are, just nothing about how it relates to her directly.”

“How…”

“He took it from her.” David’s voice had turned hard and brittle as metal. “We have to get her back.”

“I’m not disagreeing, but…look, David, what if we can’t get her back? We’ve got no idea at all what we’re dealing with here. And the last thing we should do is get into this before we know-”

“He’s taken everything!” David didn’t shout it, but he might as well have; his voice ached. It bled. “Dji

Lewis was quiet for a moment. I heard the fire crackle, as if he’d thrown another log on. “Then that’s all the more reason not to go ru

“I don’t.” David sounded fierce and furious.

“Yes, you do, David, and you know it. We’re crippled. Both of us. Between the Dji

“She’s the only thing that matters to me now. If she’s not the only thing that matters to you, then you shouldn’t be here.”

“I’m just saying that we need to take our time. Be sure we understand what’s happening here.”

“Use her as bait, you mean.”

“No. I didn’t say that.”

“And yet I think that’s what you mean. There’s something out here-you know that. Something very wrong.” Silence, and a rustle of cloth. David’s shadow lengthened as he stood up. “She always thought you were a cold-blooded bastard at heart,” he said, and ducked into the tent.

I hastily squeezed my eyes shut, but there was no way he wouldn’t know I was awake. I could just…sense that. He’d be a very hard man to fool.

He settled down next to my feet, his arms propped on his upraised knees. “You heard,” he said. It wasn’t a question. “What do you want to know?”

I sighed, gave up, and opened my eyes. “Where have I been? Do you know?”

Either my eyes were adjusting to the dark, or there was a dim, suffused illumination ru

“Well, tell me what you do know.”

“Begi

Just how much did he know about me? “How did we meet?” I asked.

“Ah. That’s a good story. I guess you might say that I tried to kill you.” He paused, head cocked to one side. “Technically, I guess you could say I succeeded.”

“What?”

“It’s a long story. You sure you want to hear it?”

I felt a bubble of panic growing in my chest, making me short of breath. “I want to know who I am. What’s my name?”

“Joa

“A what?”

“Warden,” he said. “You’re part of a small group of humans who have the ability to cha

“I control the…Are you high?”

That drew a strange smile out of him. “Try it,” he said. “Reach out and feel the wind. Touch the sky.”

“You know, those lyrics must have been lame even back in the seventies.” But even while I was mocking him, I remembered that vivid ghost vision I’d had, of the wind ru

Was that what he meant? But that wasn’t controlling the weather; that was…X-ray vision. Or something.

“You’re insane,” I declared. Which he found oddly amusing.

“I’m Dji

I bit my lip and thought about giving it a try. What was the worst thing that could happen? No, something told me inside, the same thing that had told me to get up and run, out there in the woods. Don’t do it. You have no idea what you’re risking. What kind of attention you might draw.

“How?” I asked.

David held out his hand. I slowly reached out to take it, and our fingers instinctively intermeshed.

Before I could even think about saying no-not that he was asking-he pulled me up and against him, body to body.

“Hey!” I yelled, panicked, and tried to push him away. Not a chance. “Get off, dammit!”

He put a hand over my mouth, stilling my protest-not demanding, more like a gentle caress. “I’m not going to hurt you,” he murmured. “If you allow yourself to feel for a second, you’ll know that.”

I didn’t. I didn’t know. He terrified me in ways that I couldn’t even begin to understand, starting with the too-bright, backlit color of his eyes. I had pressed my hands flat against his chest, trying to hold him back from an assault he wasn’t even contemplating, so far as I could tell. He took both of my hands in his and interlaced our fingers tightly again.

“Deep breath,” he murmured. He pushed me back to a distance, holding me there as if we were involved in a formal box dance. “Not that deep,” he said, very softly, with a wry twist to his full lips. “Bad for my discipline. Relax.”

Not a chance of that. I stared at his shadowed face, and I felt something begi

“Relax,” he said. “Relax. Relax.”

And the world around me exploded into color. Vivid, breathtaking color, shimmering and trembling with fury and life. My skin glowed. David was a bonfire, glittering and dripping with raw power. Everything was so bright, so beautiful, so complicated-even the fabric of my shirt was composed of tiny pinpoints of light, woven from the fabric of the universe.

I felt David holding my hands, but they weren’t really my hands anymore. I was drifting up, out of my body, and the world was moonstone and shadow and neon, a confusing, bewildering, amazing place.

I soared up, out of my body, and passed through the thin fabric of the tent as if it weren’t even there.

Up, plunging into the sky as if gravity had reversed itself and I was falling up into infinity…

Stars like ice. Cold-shimmering clouds, held together with a crystalline structure that was brighter and more beautiful than diamonds, and oh, God, it was so beautiful…

I reached out and touched the bonds that held part of the cloud together, and made it rain.

Come back, I heard David whisper, and the thing that had unspooled inside of me like a kite string was suddenly reversing, tugging me back away from the wonder of the sky, and it felt as if I’d spilled wind from my wings.

I was falling out of control back toward the forest, the tent, the fire.

I slammed back into my body with a sickening jolt, gasped, and convulsively tightened my grip on David’s hands. I heard the first cold patters of rain on the fabric overhead.

Outside, by the fire, Lewis cursed, and I felt a sudden hot snap of…correction. The rain stopped.

“Oh, my God,” I whispered. My hands were shaking, not with weakness but with sheer joy. “Oh, my God, that was-”