Ill Wind

There was another voice, too. A woman's. I knew it, but… but I couldn't remember. Eventually I felt something soft under my head, felt road vibration quivering in my skin, and knew I was lying down in a car. The hard lump of an unfastened seat belt lay under my left hip.

I opened my eyes on a dull carpeted roof the color of nothing, heard the humming of tires on wet road, and smelled—weirdly enough—blueberry muffins. I moved a hand, carefully, and it hurt—hurt everywhere. It felt like every nerve in my body had been mapped in hot wire. There was an aching sore spot on my right foot, another at the top of my head.

No question about it, I was lucky to be alive. If I hadn't been insulated by Delilah's steel frame…

My hand was still in the air. I stared at it, baffled, and realized I'd forgotten to let it fall down. Before I could do so, somebody reached back and captured it.

David. He looked back over the passenger seat at me. Dressed again in his road-dude disguise, complete with glasses. No sign of the cuts and scrapes he'd had back at the motel. No sign of any damage to him at all, except in the wounded darkness of his eyes.

"You're okay?" I whispered. My throat hurt like hell, and I was so thirsty, I felt like I'd been freeze-dried. And cold. Very cold. His hand radiated warmth into me.

The Demon Mark moved inside me, just a slight stealthy crawl. I closed my eyes and fought it, but I was so tired, so drained.

It kept moving. I felt David trying to stop it, but he was drained, too. Too tired to save me now. I had to save myself.

I reached down and choked the black terrible thing with as much self-control as I had left in me. It writhed and tried to slither around me, but I held it until it stopped its quivering progress.

"I'm okay," David answered me when I opened my eyes again. "Easy, take it easy. Rest."

"She's awake?" The woman's voice, the one I almost recognized. Spanish accented. Slightly slurred. I squinted, but all I could see in the rearview mirror was a flash of dark eyes. "Mira, Jojo's back among the living."

And then I knew who she was, with a burst of happiness that exploded right out of my core. It hurt to smile. I did it anyway. "Star light, star bright, first star I see tonight…"

She laughed that silvery laugh I remembered so well, and glanced back from the driver's seat. Still beautiful, Estrella Almondovar, my good friend. At least on that side of her face.

She joined in with me in a duet. "Say a prayer, say a Mass, keep this fire off my ass." It wasn't the way the children's rhyme went, but it was our variation. And she finished by holding up the middle finger on her right hand in the universal screw-you symbol. A tiny flame danced on its tip.

"Chica, you're still crazy," she said. "But then that's why I love you so much."

After my disastrous Yellowstone getting-back-to-nature camping trip, Estrella and I talked every week. I ran up my mom's phone bill to outrageous levels; like the teenager I was, I could talk about nothing for hours, and Star was more than happy to go along with it. She was lonely, and we were soul mates; somehow, we could find a telephone book fu

Star was the only friend I had who understood.

So. My intake meeting happened, Princeton happened, graduation happened (and wasn't that something, but that's a story for later). Fast-forward to 1999, and my rotation as a Staff Warden on the Help Desk. We call it something more official than that, of course—the Crisis Center Support System—but really, it's a Help Desk, just like ones computer departments all over the world have in place, and for much the same reasons. When things go wrong for the Association, they go wrong in a big way, and communication is everything because the aetheric doesn't carry sound for shit. Everybody gets a turn in the hot seat at the Help Desk, which is run 24/7 with a minimum of twenty staffers, who are empowered to do everything from troubleshooting to calling National Wardens out of bed in the middle of the night.

About six days into my tour, I got a phone call from— who else? — Star. There was a wildfire out of control in Yellowstone, and the Regional Warden was on vacation; Estrella and her boss felt that it was serious enough to escalate it and get specialty teams on the job. A Yellowstone fire is no laughing matter. It's one of the richest natural preserves left in the United States, and it's also a sinkhole of random energy; put the two together, add any kind of instability, and you get disaster.

We laughed, we chatted, we talked. Two friends catching up on time lost. She wasn't really worried.

Except it got worse. I could tell that from the tone of her voice. It changed from light to businesslike to dead serious as she fed me map coordinates, burn rates, wind speeds, all the alchemical elements that went into making up a disaster.

"Got it," I said, typing the last of the data into the system. There was a dull sound in the background, like airplane noise. "Hey, you want to turn the stereo down? It's getting a little loud on this end."

She coughed. Dry coughs at first, but they raised goose bumps on my arms. "No can do, babe. Guess you'll just have to yell."

"Is that the fire?" Close enough to roar like that? Oh, God. I knew that Estrella was calling from a Ranger Station somewhere near the edge of the blaze. As a Fire Warden, she had to be close to work her magic—not like Weather Wardens, who can manage things from miles or even countries distant. Fire was too interactive. It required real risk on the part of those who engaged with it. But I'd never imagined how close, or how much risk.

"That or somebody's throwing one hell of a barbecue." She started coughing. Thick, choking coughs. I was sitting in a Situation Room on the nineteenth floor of the Association offices in Chicago, and I could still hear the crackle of the fire; it wasn't just close, it was right there. All around her. "Aw, shit."

"What?"

More coughing. When it stopped, I heard the sound of things bumping, crashing. "It's blocking the front. Hang on, I'm going for the back door."

"Estrella?" No answer. I could hear her hoarse, heavy breathing, could almost taste the smoke.

"Bastard's cut me off," she said at last. I could tell from the shaking in her voice that she was really scared this time. "Hey, Jojo? This is really getting screwed up. I need out of here. 'Cause I don't look good in black, know what I'm saying?"

I was already typing in alerts, ringing pagers and cell phones with the necessary codes to let people know the situation. Within ten minutes, there'd be a Situation Team convened, with Weather and Fire Wardens, maybe even Earth Wardens to help organize the rescue of trapped animals and energize the forest itself to fight the fire. But that wasn't going to help Estrella.

"Can you make a path through?" I asked. I could hear things popping loudly in the background, like gunshots. "Jesus, what is that? Is somebody shooting?"

"No, it's the trees. Trees exploding. Sap boils—" She coughed again, deep aching coughs that made my chest hurt in sympathy. "Shit! Can't do it. Too hot. Can't get the fire down long enough to get out. Dammit. I'm toast." Her laugh was rich and thick with phlegm. "Burnt toast."

"Hold on," I said. I pulled up the Wardens Map, overlaid Fire Wardens on top of it and got Estrella's location. Once I had it firmly fixed in my mind, I went up into Oversight. My body receded and I flew straight up, arrowing as fast as I could through gray ghostly layers of concrete and steel and wiring, up into hot summer air, up higher where the layers cooled and storms were born. There was disturbance up here, caused by temperature shifts. I oriented myself and moved toward Yellowstone. As I did, I had to buck the currents; force lines were vibrating, bending under the strain. A lot of heat being generated up there. Pushing hard, I flew against the currents until I could see the whole of Yellowstone laid out in front of me.