Thin Air

“News flash: If we don’t slow down I’m going to die, and ruin a perfectly beautiful car!” I shot back. I nearly bit my tongue off as the Camaro hit a patch of ice, tires broke traction, and the whole thing started going sideways with a vengeance. “Shit!” I’d heard somewhere that these days, that was most often a person’s last word. I didn’t want it to be mine, and I fought the skid, begging the car to find some traction.

It did. The tires caught, squealed, bit, and slewed us back in the opposite direction just in time to avoid an oncoming RV. I kept the Camaro off of the steep, narrow shoulder, sprayed gravel, and managed to point it in the right direction.

Another truck barreled past us, buffeting us in its wake. Busy road.

“Ve

The engine seized up again. It was catastrophic, a crunching grind of metal followed by the sound of parts coming off, breaking loose, and ripping apart everything in their path. Steam erupted in a white cloud from beneath the hood, and no amount of magical gas pedal pressing was going to get us moving again. Not unless Ve

The car lurched, clunking metal, and slowed drastically.

We coasted, moving more and more slowly, and I found a slightly wider spot on the shoulder that would double as an emergency breakdown lane, flipped the hazard lights, and hit the brakes-which, finally, worked.

The road, which had been choked with traffic a few seconds ago, seemed quiet now. The last eighteen-wheeler was disappearing over the ridge, grinding gears, and there didn’t seem to be anybody else in view. I was having trouble getting my breath, and I was shaking in reaction to the adrenaline rush.

“Ve

“Get down!” She reached over, grabbed my head, and forced me sideways across the seat, with the safety belt digging into my neck nearly to the choking point.

I forgot to complain about the discomfort of that, though, because I started to feel it, too. A disturbance in the aetheric, one even somebody like me, who was all but a novice, could feel.

There was a sound. I’m not sure what it was like, because there was nothing in my mind I could equate it to; it was a chaos of sharp snapping sounds, thunderous crashes, howls, screams…

Ve

I blacked out when the car slammed into the ground, which was probably lucky. When I woke up I was out of the wreck, lying on the cold gravel shoulder of the road, and there was a smoking heap of metal a dozen feet away that wasn’t immediately recognizable as anything like a motorized vehicle. Certainly not the lovely, gleaming car that I’d been driving. But I saw a glint of unblemished midnight blue paint, and felt a mournful stab of anguish. The poor Camaro wasn’t coming back from that with a little body work, even if there’d been a way to save the engine.

When I focused past the wreckage, I forgot to breathe, because the Camaro hadn’t taken the brunt of the brute-force attack…and it hadn’t exactly been a surgical strike. It was like a bomb made of air had exploded, and the Camaro had been ground zero. The indescribable sound I’d heard had been the howling wind slamming into old-growth trees and snapping them off their bases, or uprooting them completely to crash into their neighbors.

It was a veritable crop circle of downed trees.

I tried to sit up, and something in my back lodged a loud protest. I groaned, told it to shut up, and compromised by rolling over on my side. No sign of Ve

“Ve

Somebody had destroyed almost a quarter mile of forest to try to kill me. Being sore was the least of my problems, and if Ve

I wondered if Ashan was still in the twisted wreckage of the car.

“Ve

A car topped the ridge, heading toward the devastated area. No, a truck, an SUV, and there was another one behind it. It was moving slowly because of the debris, but steadily enough. I didn’t want any Good Samaritans right now; I wasn’t sure I could protect them against whatever had just put the unholy smackdown on me. No, actually I was sure…I was sure I couldn’t. My heart sank as I saw it was a family, and they slowed radically as they got close to the crash scene.

“Keep going!” I yelled as the father rolled down his window. I forced myself to get up to my hands and knees, then to my feet. I managed not to black out doing it. “I’m fine! Don’t stop; it’s not safe!”

He seemed like a nice enough guy, but he had kids in the back of his truck, and a wife who looked hugely pregnant, and I did not want their lives on my conscience. “I’ll call nine-one-one!” he yelled. I waved frantically, trying to shoo them on by sheer force of will, and it seemed to work.

He negotiated his way around the maze of downed trees and got the hell out.

I remembered there’d been a second SUV behind it, and turned to look.

It had stopped about fifty feet away-a large black SUV, tinted windows, very classy. I thought I saw something shimmer on the paint, and blinked, then went into the aetheric and saw a stylized sun symbol on the door not visible to the naked human eye. It was where an official seal would have been for a government vehicle.

Wardens.

I backed up out of the center of the road and looked around for some kind of cover, but of course there wasn’t any. I didn’t feel like cowering in a ditch, especially when they’d undoubtedly already spotted me. Maybe they’re friendly, I thought.

Yeah, and maybe the next Dji

The SUV eased forward very slowly. It crunched to a stop a few dozen feet away and idled its engine. Nobody got out. I couldn’t see inside. I felt an odd sensation, as if every hair on my body were stirring-static electricity, maybe.

“Let’s get this over with,” I muttered. “What’re you going to do, stare me to death?”

The driver’s side of the SUV opened, and David got out. He looked fantastically good to me in that moment, and I let out a sigh of relief and took a step toward him…

And stopped, because there was no welcome in his face. Nothing but blank fury.

“David?”

I felt the energy gathering above me, and flung up a hand to catch it before it could form itself into a deadly strike. I wasn’t sure what he’d intended, but the devastation around me was proof that somebody had removed the safety switches on this game. I let the power bleed harmlessly off in a thousand smaller tendrils that manifested in gusts of wind, blowing my hair across my face, then switching directions and streaming it back like a flag.

“Give up,” David said flatly. “You don’t have a choice.”

“David, you don’t understand-”

This time I wasn’t quick enough to stop him. The aftermath of the lightning strike left me blinking, half-blind, concussed, and with an ache on my right side that felt suspiciously like first-degree burns. I smelled something burning, feared it was me, and rolled, trying to smother the flames.

When I writhed around to try to spot what David was doing, he was just…standing there. Watching me. I couldn’t read his expression, but he wasn’t exactly racing to my rescue.

There were other people climbing out of the SUV. I recognized only one of them: Lewis. My onetime savior looked like he was badly regretting that decision. I stared at him, trying to guess what he was thinking, but like David, he’d closed himself off.