Thin Air

“You have a message.” David looked wary. Worried.

“Through the Air Oracle,” Ashan replied. “We will no longer be one. You may have the New Dji

David’s glow cooled. It was a slow process, but definite, and when it was over he stood there looking at Ashan with an odd, vulnerable intensity I didn’t really understand.

“I see,” he said. “You mean to destroy us.”

“No. I merely mean to protect those of my own kind,” Ashan said. “We will not fight you, nor the humans, unless attacked. If the Mother asks, we will answer. But we will have nothing to do with mortals. If you and yours choose to do so, that’s your affair, but no agreements you make will bind us.”

“You’re leaving,” David said, and frowned.

“Not quite yet,” Ashan said, and looked down at his feet. No, at the ground. And I felt that strange slip-sliding again, the rapid movement of the planet’s magnetic force. I heard a distant hum of metal trembling, and felt the metal parts on my clothing, like zippers, pull just slightly away from me. “The magnetic field is shifting.”

“It can’t be. It’s not time,” David said, but like Ashan he was staring down, and I sensed it was more of a pro forma objection than a real argument. “Jonathan had plans for handling this.”

“Yes,” Ashan said. “And we will need all of our strength to carry them out. Get the New Dji

“Here?” David asked. They were suddenly talking reasonably, two professionals approaching a problem. They’d blown past the personal-that Ashan was a co

Ve

“It should be here. Sacred space.” Ashan said, and tugged on Ve

“Here won’t work unless you release the shields that keep us from touching the aetheric,” I pointed out. “And…unless you’re willing to let us mere mortals enter.”

I got a glare. Ashan was angry at the reminder. Wardens weren’t meant to be here. It was, for him, an offense that one had ever stepped onto the sacred ground.

He wasn’t the only one, I sensed. There was a definite energy coming from the crowd, and it wasn’t good, and most of it was directed toward me. I suspected a lecture on tolerance and the evils of bigotry wasn’t really going to be all that well received, so I kept my mouth shut and let Ashan think about it.

“Yes,” he finally said. “We’ll lower them. Bring them here. Bring everyone here.”

David nodded, took my hand, and walked me through the crowd of Dji

I held my silence until we reached the cemetery gates. Miraculously, the Dji

“What the hell was that?” I asked. He didn’t meet my eyes.

“That was a coup,” he said, “and Ashan has effectively been declared the leader of more than half of the Dji

I wanted to ask him harder questions, but the Wardens weren’t letting us have a moment; everybody was talking at once. Paul had grabbed my arm and was trying to hustle me to the van, Kevin and Cherise were blabbing at us, someone was urgently talking on the cell phone, and David…well, David clearly was willing to let me get dragged off if it meant he didn’t have to undergo twenty questions.

I felt the slippery sensation again, heard Paul saying something about magnetic surges as polarities threatened to shift, and the cell phone that the Warden-I knew him now, his name was Otombo; he was a Fire Warden out of Arkansas-the cell phone suddenly let out an earsplitting shriek and exploded into sparks. Otombo winced and dropped the useless piece of equipment. It let out a thin, whiny sound of electronic distress, and a tiny wisp of smoke curled up from the speaker.

“Cell phones off! Off!” Paul bellowed. He was right; it was the only way to save them. People patted their pockets, a couple of women pawed through purses, and most got their phones shut off before anything happened. I heard the electronic wail from another quarter, and a French-Canadian curse. Oops.

“What the hell is going on around here?” Paul demanded-from me, of course. I looked over my shoulder at David. He was staring back at the cemetery, no particular expression on his face.

I started to repeat the question-there had been a lot of cross talk, with the other Wardens all basically asking each other the same thing-but there was no need. David said, “How much do you know about magnetism?”

“Well, if you bang an iron tie-rod on a metal grate, you can make it a magnet,” I said. “I saw it on MacGyver.” And I was ridiculously pleased to be remembering it.

He spared me a glance. Not a patient one. “The magnetic field surrounding the Earth is moving,” he said. “Breaking into islands of polarity.”

Sam Otombo nodded. “Yes,” he agreed. He had a faint tropical accent, and his long, clever face was very serious. “The field has been concentrated as we know it, at the poles, for perhaps three quarters of a million years. But there is evidence that it has shifted before, completely flipped from north to south, and this begins with islands of magnetic polarity shift.” He nudged the remains of his cell phone with his foot. “There was speculation that it could affect some types of communications, global positioning satellites…”

“Wait a minute,” I said. “You mean north is now south?”

“In some places, yes. I mean that if you looked at a compass needle right now, in this place, you probably wouldn’t see north,” Otombo corrected. “Anything but. The magnetic field is moving, but it may take hundreds, even thousands of years for it to settle again.”

I was completely lost. They hadn’t really covered this in weather school. “Is it dangerous?”

“Long-term, perhaps. We could have increased cosmic radiation. The magnetic field shields us from that at all but the most remote places on Earth.”

David nodded. “You’re right that it has happened before, sometimes as often as every few thousand years. But the Dji

“Until now,” I said. “Because we’re no longer working together to hold it. Right?”

“That’s why you have to bring them here, Jo,” he said. “Bring the Wardens. Bring the Ma’at. And hurry.”