Unknown

“I understand.” I took a deep breath. “How does Pearl know who these children are, if she doesn’t have this list?”

“Pearl has become like me,” Imara said. “Like an Oracle, although she is not one as we understand it. She is . . . damaged, but she has tapped into something else—a power that is alien to this world, but still a part of it. She is much, much more powerful than a Dji

Pearl didn’t need a list. She, like Imara, could sense children as their potential powers began to form. She could strike anywhere, anytime. And we had no way to predict her moves.

Imara met my eyes fully again. I shuddered.

“Ashan might be right. The only way to stop her may be to remove the foundation of her power. Remove humans from the world. Do you understand me? Remove humans, and the world will recover. Mourn, yes. Create more Dji

The intensity behind her words was frightening. Imara came from humanity—from a human mother. A Warden mother. And yet there was a dispassionate regret in her that meant she had, in some way, already accepted the loss of humankind as a species.

Even more than I had, with all my supposed detachment.

I sucked in a deep breath. “I won’t allow that,” I said. “I didn’t before. I won’t now. I will find a way to stop her.”

“Yes, that would certainly be a good idea,” Imara said. “But if you do, you must do it soon. If you don’t, the Oracles will be forced to act in self-defense. The Earth herself will wake, and humanity will not survive what follows. Do you understand what I am saying to you?”

She was threatening the cataclysm that all Wardens had feared since they’d first begun to know the strength and power of nature around them—a deliberate, considered effort by the forces of the planet to kill the human race, root and branch. An extinction event. If I didn’t do it . . . the Oracles were prepared to take that action.

I swallowed. “Will you give me the list?” I asked her. “If I can’t find Pearl, I must try to protect the children she’s abducting, and disrupt her plans that way. I need the list to do that. You have to give me a chance, Imara. Give us a chance. Please.”

I got a quick, warm smile from her. “Us,” she repeated, and laughed lightly. It transformed her into something so beautiful that I had to squeeze my eyes shut and fight back trembles of ecstasy. “Oh, Cass. Listen to you. How far you’ve come already.” Her tone changed, went solemn. “And how far you have yet to go. You and I, we are alike in that. I’ve hardly set my feet on the path.”

But the light faded out of her, leaving her silent and serious again, and I felt a shiver of true fear go through me as she stared into my eyes. “If I do this,” she said, “I am giving you something that wasn’t meant for human hands. Something that is too powerful even for a Dji

I swallowed. “It’s the only way to find these children.”

“Then you must be responsible for it,” she said. “And be careful of it. Using it opens you to attack as well as me.”

“Then how do I use it?”

“The list will give you names and locations,” she said.

“Don’t touch the surface of the scroll unless you must. That links you to the flow of events. Do you understand? Touching the words makes you vulnerable.”

I nodded.

“And on your life, Cassiel, on your life, don’t let anyone else have the list. Destroy it before that happens.”

There was a rustle of sand, a sense of motion. I opened my eyes again, startled, and saw that she was gone from beside me on the pew. It had been a second, maybe less, and save for a few reddish grains of sand on the wood there was no sign she had ever been there.

Except that she now stood in front of the windows at the far end of the chapel. The tourists unconsciously moved away from her, heading back out all in a group. Not afraid, just . . . determined to be elsewhere, suddenly. In seconds, the chapel was empty of everyone but me and Imara, who spread her arms wide.

Sand spiraled out from her body in a thick red smoke, veiling and then revealing the pale, perfect skin beneath. Her long, dark hair flowed out on an invisible wind, and her face turned up toward the rising sun. The glow seemed to soak into her and then reflect from her skin, turning it from pale to golden to a bright, burning fire of energy.

The sand suddenly blew out in a puffball explosion, and I ducked as grit spattered against me. For a second Imara stood there, naked and glowing, and then she slowly folded down to her knees, clasped her hands together, and then moved them apart as if unrolling something.

And a scroll appeared between her hands, a long page of pure white, unspooling. I saw fine black script on it, and then it snapped shut in her left hand, and a case formed around it. There was an airless sense of pressure in the room suddenly, of some massive expenditure of power, and then, with the next breath, it was gone.

Imara knelt with the scroll pressed close to her body. She stayed frozen that way for a moment, then closed her blazing eyes, and the sand rushed in again from all corners of the church, spiraled around her, and settled into moving, shifting folds of silk.

It was as if the entire world took a breath, then.

Imara rose to her feet, but didn’t come to me. I understood that I would have to come to her instead, and rose to walk those few feet down the aisle.

It seemed . . . harder than it should have been, as if I was moving through levels on the aetheric plane, although in my current shape I couldn’t possibly have been doing so. Imara held the scroll out in both hands, and when I finally stood before her, I found myself going to one knee as I reached for it.

Ceremony. It was important to the Dji

The warm weight of the scroll touched my palms, and I felt a flash of almost unbearable heat go through me, a wave of something like a compulsion, but formless in its intensity. My fingers closed around the scroll’s hard casing in a galvanic reaction, and I trembled.

Imara let go, and I heard her give a long, unsteady sigh. I looked up to see that she was staring down, eyes gone dim and almost human.

She touched my face with her fingers, a parting caress, and then . . . dissolved into dust, spiraling away.

Gone.

I was alone in the chapel.

I stayed on one knee, holding the scroll in my shaking hands, and then finally stood up. I opened the case and unrolled it, the first inch or so, and saw that there were dense lines of names written there, along with locations. I touched one. It glowed, and immediately, I understood how to find the child. It wasn’t that I thought about this process; it simply was.

When I took my finger away, the glow died, and the knowledge left me.

She’d warned me, but the reality of it was stu

A shortcut to the world of the Oracles. I wondered, very seriously, if what I had just done was a good thing, or if I had just introduced something new and extremely risky to the balance of the world.