Undone

Ma

“I’m sorry,” I said. I was. I was also well aware that I should not touch him again, not now. “Did I hurt you?”

“Not—exactly,” he said. He groaned and rolled painfully onto his side, then up to a sitting position. I could see the trembling in his muscles, as if he’d received a violent electric shock. “Let’s not do that again, okay? You’re kind of hard on your friends.”

“I said I was sorry.”

“You can say it again. It won’t offend me.” Ma

I stayed silent. I felt a strange burn of shame, deep down, that wouldn’t be smothered. I hurt him. I hadn’t meant to do so, but that hardly mattered. If I’d killed him, he leaves behind others. The interco

Ma

“I can’t promise,” I said. “I will do my best, but I may not always be able to control this. You must be prepared to defend against me.”

His gaze didn’t waver. “That’s not real comforting.”

“It wasn’t meant to be.” I smiled slightly, but I didn’t imagine that was comforting, either. “I assume the Wardens are keeping track of what I do.”

He had the grace to look a little embarrassed. “I turn in reports, yeah. They want to make sure you’re not—”

“Out of control.”

“Exactly.”

“Am I?”

It was Ma

“Help me up,” he said, and held out his square, muscular hand. I did, careful to keep it only to surface touching, although I could sense the power coursing through him even through so light a contact. “Get your coffee. Let’s go to work.”

Work was a new and interesting concept for me. I understood duty, of course, and using one’s skills and powers for a purpose. But work was a completely different thing, because it seemed so . . . dreary.

Ma

Whatever Ma

“Yeah,” he said, seeing my expression. “Maybe mess doesn’t really cover it. I’ve been meaning to get around to it—it’s just that—”

“You hate such tasks.”

“Filing. You got it.”

“How would you prefer it to be filed?”

He stopped in the act of picking up a handful of fallen papers and turned toward me. “What?”

“How would you prefer it to be filed?” I repeated, exercising patience I had not known was available to me until that moment.

“Listen, if you can file this shit, you can do it any way you want.” He sounded both hopeful and doubtful, as if I might believe that the filing of papers was beneath me. What he did not seem to understand was that when everything humans did was beneath me, a mundane task such as filing made very little difference.

“Very well,” I said. I could have done it in a dozen different ways—from subtle to dramatic—but I chose a Dji

The far wall of his office was a solid block of cabinets with sliding drawers. He hesitated, then opened one at random.

Inside, a neatly ranked system of folders, filed papers.

“I filed them by subject,” I said. “I can change that, if you wish, of course.”

“You’re kidding,” he said blankly. “Dios mio, you’re not kidding. There’s a folder here on boundary disputes. On acid levels in the water. On—what the hell is this?” He pulled a folder out and frowned at it. “Boundary adjustments in Colorado? That’s not supposed to be here. Hell.”

Ma

I shrugged. “Simple enough. It’s only paper and ink, after all.” Except that I had expended far too much power in doing it, though I decided I would not tell him that. I sat in the leather armchair across from him. “What else shall we do?”

He was staring, and suddenly he barked out a sound it took me a moment to identify as laughter. “You do windows too, Cassie?”

“Cassiel.”

“Right, sorry.”

I sensed I might be in danger of becoming too accommodating. “No. I do not do windows.”

“Then we can go right to the Warden stuff, I guess.” He cleared his throat and reached for the computer keyboard off to the side, sliding it in front of himself. The machine was angled toward him from a corner of the desk. “Can’t believe I can actually see the damn screen without moving things around. Let me check e-mail.”

“You have forty-seven messages,” I said. “Six of them have to do with requests for support from other Wardens. Shall we focus first on those?”

“I never had a Dji

I had no idea, but the idea of being compared to one of my kind enslaved to a bottle turned my too-human stomach, and I knew my expression hardened. “I doubt it.”

He knew dangerous ground when he stepped upon it. Ma

“Of course.”

“Which one is most urgent?”

I gave it a second’s thought. “The new instability Warden Garrity identified in Arizona is classified as a strike/slip fault.”

“Garrity, Garrity—” Ma

I nodded, familiar with the concepts. It was different as a Dji

He took his gaze from the screen to glance at me for a second. “Don’t know. Just follow me and see if you’ve got any ideas.”

I was anchored to human flesh. “I—need to touch you. To rise into the aetheric.”

“No biting,” he said, and held out his hand. I reached across the desk to take it. It was his left hand, and the metallic gold of his wedding ring felt an odd contrast to the skin and bones. “Ready?”