Undone

I looked into his face now and saw only a cold, calculating predator.

“No,” I said. “I don’t consent. But you will help us, anyway, Gallan.”

He laughed. “Why would I do that?”

“Because you can. Because it’s right. Because it’s necessary.”

“I’m not a human,” he reminded me almost gently. “Arguments of right and wrong won’t sway me.”

“They should. We—the True Dji

Gallan—who had been a slave once, where I had not—snarled at me with startling fury. His teeth turned sharp as daggers, and the bones beneath his face shifted to sharper angles. “You were cast out, Cassiel. Don’t make it worse.”

Luis pulled the jeep off to the side of the road, killed the engine, and turned in his seat to look at Gallan. If he was afraid—and he had to be; no human could look on the face of an angry Dji

“No. We allow humans to exist. We don’t need them.” Gallan’s eyes turned a muddy shade of red. “But you do need us. Choose, Cassiel. Do you agree to submit yourself to me or not? Because that’s my price. You know I can’t change it.”

I shook my head. “No, Gallan. I can’t.”

The angry glow faded from him, and he became almost human now. Almost, but never. “No?”

“You didn’t think I’d turn you down?”

“You can’t. You need me.”

“Not as much as you believe. Good-bye, my friend. We won’t meet again.”

I turned face forward. My last glimpse of his face showed him startled, round-eyed, and lost.

“The lady said no,” Luis said. “Thanks, anyway. Now, if you don’t mind, we’ve got work to do.”

Gallan misted away without another word.

For a moment, neither of us spoke, and then Luis said, in carefully neutral tones, “That was awkward.”

“That was exceedingly dangerous,” I said. “And unproductive.” My heart was racing, and I struggled to calm it. My palms felt damp. “He could have killed us.”

“He didn’t.”

“I thought Gallan was the best of the True Dji

Luis started the truck. “If he’s the kindest, I’d hate to see the meanest.”

I gave him a look. “You already have.”

“Oh,” he said, puzzled, and then his frown cleared. “Oh. You’re talking about you.”

“Once,” I said, and looked away. “And perhaps still.”

We drove past the hidden entrance to The Ranch and on to LakeCity, which, though small, was still the largest community in the area. Luis left me to fill the jeep with gas as he went inside to buy food at the small store. When he came back, he pointed down the street, toward a building lit with pink and green neon. “There’s a motel,” he said. “We could both use a bath and some rest, and I need to use the phone.”

“The phone?”

“You called for help,” he said. “It’s time for me to do the same.”

The motel was old, but surprisingly well maintained. The clerk sold us two rooms with an adjoining door, which Luis requested instead of only one; I thought that odd, since we had few secrets now. He handed me my key as we walked outside. “Get cleaned up and eat something.” He had gotten a bag of food at the gas station—two sandwiches wrapped in wax paper, some potato chips, some sodas in cans. “I’ll leave the door open to my room. Twenty minutes.”

I nodded.

Twenty minutes seemed a short time. I washed away grime, dried blood, sand, a thousand tiny irritants in the shower, and used the thin motel shampoo on my hair. I had no clean clothing—again—but I wrapped a blanket around me and opened the door to Luis’s room through the co

He was on the phone. Like me, he had showered, and his hair was flat against his head, dripping at the ends with beads of water. He had wadded up the neon yellow paper jumpsuit they had given him at The Ranch, and like me, had wrapped himself in a blanket for clothing.

He held the receiver in the crook of his shoulder as he wrote furiously on a piece of cheap paper with a pen provided by the motel. “Yeah? You’re sure that’s the number? Gracias, man. I owe you big time. Adios.”

He hung up, ripped off the sheet of paper, and pressed the posts of the phone to end the call. The phone was very old, with a rotary dial, and he fumbled with the unfamiliar operation as he entered a string of numbers.

I sat on the bed and ate my sandwich. It was surprisingly good.

When Luis finished his call—which was conducted largely in Spanish—he hung up and dried his hair with the thin cotton towel slung across the back of the chair. “We’ve got a couple of hours,” he said. “I called in some support.”

“Who?”

“Trust me, you don’t need to know. But they’re sneaky little bastards. And they know how to run an infiltration operation better than just about anybody. They’ve done it a hundred times, taking down things the Wardens never even noticed. Never had to notice, because these guys took care of it before it became a problem.”

“The Ma’at,” I said. “Yes?”

He seemed surprised I knew. “Yes. Officially, I’m not supposed to know them.”

“You called one to watch Isabel.”

“Yeah, but he was a friend first, a Ma’at second. These guys aren’t any kind of friend, not to me.”

I chewed a bite of sandwich. “You admire them.”

“Hell, yeah, I admire them. For one thing, they actually learned to work together—Dji

I felt a strange surge of antipathy. “Were you speaking to her just now?”

“Mirabel? No. She’s off in China, last I heard. I haven’t talked to her in years.” He studied me through half-closed eyes. “Why?”

I didn’t wish to explain, so I didn’t, methodically finishing the sandwich and drinking the soda. Luis shrugged and fiddled with the few items on the small desk.

I felt the vibrating disturbance of air a second or two before Luis, and came to my feet, holding the blanket in place, as a shadow thickened and took on form and edges in the corner of the room.

When he stepped from the shadows, Gallan was a changed Dji

Most notably, in the way he looked at me.

I held out a warning hand to freeze Luis in place as he gathered his breath for a challenge. Gallan’s dark eyes had locked on mine.

“I’m a fool,” he said. “Forgive me.”

I had never heard Gallan apologize to anyone, not in all the slow turnings of the world. I blinked.

“I saw it,” he said. “I went to look at this place you spoke of, this Ranch. And I saw it.”

“Saw what?” I could hardly hear my own voice over the thundering of my heart, because there was fear in Gallan’s eyes, and I had never seen that, either.

“I saw the end of the Dji

He swayed. I moved forward as Gallan—a True Dji

“We brought this on ourselves,” he said. “You were right. You were right. I beg your forgiveness.”

Luis muttered something under his breath, and said, “Don’t trust him.”

I didn’t. I knew Gallan, and this was not the Dji