Thin Air

I slapped him. That made his eyelids flutter some more, and when I went to hit him again he clumsily parried. My third attempt was met with a fairly precise interception, and Stan finally focused on me.

“You,” he mumbled. He sounded drugged and loopy. Great. Just what I didn’t need. “Thought you were going to kill us. Dangerous.”

“Yeah, well, you’re right about the dangerous part,” I said. “Hurry.”

I dragged him to his feet, leaving Jamie Rae to whimper in dreamy frustration at the loss of his warm, solid body, and pulled him around the rocks. It had been less than a minute, but the sinkhole was growing. Fast. It was already at least ten feet in diameter, and as I watched, part of the rock wall sagged with a groaning sound.

“Oh, crap,” Stan said. “What did you do?”

“Hell if I know. Do something!”

He tried. I could feel the surges of energy radiating out of him, plunging deep into the earth. Trying to reinforce the erosion. Trying to stop what was spreading like some virulent plague through the beach.

“There’s a guy in there!” I said, and pointed at the center of the depression. “Can you get him out?”

Stan cast me a wordless look of horror.

“Please?” I asked, because even if it was Eamon, there was something far too horrible about choking to death in a pit of talcum powder. Maybe he deserved it. No, I’d been in his head-I knew he deserved it-but I didn’t want to be the one dispensing justice.

“I’ll need your help,” he said. “Just relax. I’ll show you.” He put a hand on the back of my neck, and through the co

The pit of sand rolled, as if a miniature fault line had shifted beneath it, and began to fill in, or rise up-it was hard to identify what was happening. But it was happening quietly. Nobody on the beach, not even the news crews, had paid any attention to us so far.

That changed when Eamon emerged from the sand, a limp body lying curled in on himself and flour white with fine dust. His eyes were tightly shut.

He wasn’t breathing.

I exchanged a quick glance with Stan; he let go of me and nodded, as if he understood what I intended to do. I stepped out onto the treacherous sand. It shifted-more than it should have-more like tiny balls of slick ice than gritty grains. I fought for balance, windmilling my arms like a tightrope walker, and slowly moved forward. My shoes kept sinking-not enough to stop me, but enough to make me sweat. Stan hadn’t fixed things so much as temporarily stopped their disintegration, and I wasn’t at all sure how long he could hold on. A look over my shoulder told me that he was sweating bullets and trembling-not exactly a vote of confidence. “Hurry?” he not quite begged. I took a deep breath and crossed in four quick, sinking steps to Eamon, grabbed him by the shoulders, and started dragging.

One problem. With every backward step my feet went deeper into the sand. “Stan!” I snapped. I took a firmer grip under Eamon’s limp arms and heaved hard, fighting my way through the rapidly softening sand. “Hold it together!”

Which wasn’t really fair. It wasn’t his fault in the first place; he was just trying to clean up my mess. But right at the moment the price of failure would be a little out of my budget.

The news crews were paying attention now, ru

The term media circus doesn’t really do justice to that moment when the clowns start rolling out of the tiny little car, does it?

ELEVEN

Luckily I didn’t have to decide whether or not I had the ethical strength to give Eamon the kiss of life. After the firefighters formed a human chain and pulled us out of the mysteriously formed pit of dry quicksand, the paramedics pounced, did some paramedic-y things, and got him breathing, choking, and swearing again. He looked like he’d taken a bath in flour-dusty white except for his bloodshot, furious eyes and the blood caking his mouth and nose. He started raving, but he shut up quickly enough when he realized our little feud was no longer private.

Stan was sweating bullets. I stood next to him, shaking a little myself, as the cops formed a cordon around the sinkhole and the news crews swarmed in frustration near the barrier, camera lenses and microphones pointed our way.

“Oh, man, this is bad,” Stan whispered.

“You’ve got some kind of system for handling these things, right? Right? This can’t be the first time in the history of the Wardens that people saw something happen…”

“Well, it’s the first time for me!” he shot back. “Jesus, I’m not even allowed out on my own yet. I’m still on probation! I’m not equipped to handle this!”

“And you think I am?”

“Well…you’re the most senior, right?” He looked puppy-dog hopeful.

We didn’t have time to do any more plotting; one of the cops-a detective in civilian clothes with a badge hung on his shirt pocket-came over and herded us away, behind a crime scene van parked a little way down the beach. “Names?” he barked. He looked more stressed than me and Stan put together.

Oh, crap. I was supposed to be out on bail in Nevada, and I was pretty sure it was a violation to be out here in California…and maybe there was more that I didn’t remember that could jump up and bite me when he entered my name in the system. So I gave him my best, shiniest smile and said, “Jo Monaghan.” Where it came from, I have no idea. He wrote it down and pointed a pen at Stan, who said, “Stanley Waterman.”

Waterman? For an Earth Warden? Fu

“ID,” the cop demanded. Man of few words. I was about to fumble around for an excuse when I felt a tug on my sleeve and looked down to see Ve

Kind of Ve

I blinked at her, trying to take it all in, and smiled. “Thank you, honey,” I said, and accepted the purse as naturally as I could, under the circumstances. I glanced at the cop; he was smiling at Ve

A Taser. She’d handed me a purse with a Taser in it.

I shot her a look. She kept smiling at me in su

The wallet was red faux alligator. I opened it, and there was a California driver’s license in the name of Jo Monaghan, with my wide-eyed mug shot picture next to it. Unflatteringly realistic. I passed the plastic-coated card over, and the cop inspected it for a few seconds, noted down the address that appeared on the card-I wondered whose address it was-and then gave it back. Stan had produced his own ID. The cop followed the same process. Not a chatterbox, this guy. He hadn’t even offered his name.

“Okay,” he finally said, and looked at each of us in turn. “Somebody start talking.”

Stan looked at me with mute desperation on his face. I controlled the urge to thwack him on the back of the head, and summoned as much charm as I could. (Not a lot. It had been a long day.) “I don’t know what we can tell you, sir. My daughter and I were just walking on the beach-we saw the lights and sirens, and we thought we’d take a look.”