Unknown

He didn’t answer. I saw flares of panic in his aetheric presence, bright hot stars exploding and crackling in his aura. It was weirdly beautiful. I felt Luis watching the man, too. And Turner. All of us, using Oversight to lay the aetheric template over the real world and see the changes.

“Mr. Jensen,” Turner said. “I need a few words with you, please. In private. Mrs. Jensen, maybe you can get those things together for me? We need to hurry. I don’t want to keep you from your daughter.”

Mrs. Jensen clearly knew something was wrong, but she seized the only thing she could from the confusion—the certainty she would see her daughter. Her husband watched her go, looking lost and more than a little afraid.

Turner pointed the way to a small laundry area off to the side of the living room. It was a close fit for the four of us, and it smelled of cleaning products and soothing fragrances. A strange place to accuse someone of collaborating in his daughter’s kidnapping.

“The Ranch,” Turner said, as soon as he’d closed the door to prying ears. “You recognized the name.”

“Maybe I was thinking of something else,” Jensen said. I took my left hand out of my pocket and let it hang at my side, bronze and gleaming, clearly alien. His eyes were drawn to it, puzzled, and he cocked his head while he focused on it. “I was wrong. I don’t know what you were talking about.”

“Don’t you?” I asked, and slowly flexed my metal fingers. There was a phantom sense of muscles moving; that was very odd. “You have been there, Mr. Jensen. You took Gloria there, did you not? For evaluation?”

He was sweating now, fine beads of moisture that glimmered on his forehead in the light of the overhead fixture. The air felt close and heavy around us. “It was a camp,” he said. “A camp for the gifted and talented. But Gloria didn’t like it, so we came back home. That’s all there was to it.”

“Not all,” I corrected. “You saw things, didn’t you? Things you couldn’t understand or explain.”

Mr. Jensen flinched and looked away, and I understood, finally. “She never told him,” I said to Turner and to the silently observing Luis, leaning against the built-in sink with his arms folded. “His wife never told him she could have been a Warden. Or that their daughter might inherit those talents. He didn’t know what he was seeing. What was happening at the Ranch.”

Jensen’s eyes blurred with tears. “Is that who took her? Those people? But that was last year, it was—it was just a camp, for God’s sake, it was one of those kid things. It wasn’t—Why? Why would they do that?”

Luis and Turner looked at me. All I could find to say was, simply, “Because your daughter has the potential for power. And they want it. You’ll have to be on your guard, from now on. Talk with your wife. Tell her you know your daughter has Warden gifts. She has things to tell you in turn.”

I was bound to harm these people, by saying these things; they had existed in a false world, but a happy one, and now I was poisoning it. With truth, yes, but nevertheless, there would be no stopping the changes.

Life is change, I thought but did not say, and slowly curled the cold metal fingers of my left hand. The hand I had lost not for their child, but for Ibby. For the child I . . . loved.

Life is change.

“We’re going to need you to sit with us,” Turner told Mr. Jensen. “Tell us everything, every detail, about how you received the invitation to take your daughter to this camp, where it was located, who you met, what you did. Everything. You understand?”

He nodded, tears streaming down his face now. “I did this,” he said. “I put her in danger. I put my little girl in danger from these freaks. Oh my God.”

“No,” Luis said, speaking up for the first time. “If you didn’t take her to them, they would’ve come into your house and gotten her anyway. It’s what they do.” A spasm of rage passed through him, registering in harder lines in his face and in red waves on the aetheric. “That’s what they did to my niece. Ibby. And they’ve still got her.”

Mr. Jensen wiped at his face with the sleeve of his shirt. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Is she okay?”

Luis and I stared at each other for a moment, and he answered, very quietly, “I’m going to do anything I have to do to make sure she gets that way.”

Turner let Mr. Jensen rejoin his wife then, leaving the three of us standing in silence in the warm, scented confines of the laundry room. There was a basket of neatly folded clothes sitting on top of the dryer. A young girl’s clothes, bright colors, lovingly maintained.

“So,” Turner said. “You guys got some place you need to be?”

“Yes,” I said. “I believe we will go with you to California.”

Turner smiled thinly, unsurprised. “Grab your gear and meet me at the airport.”

I was surprised to find that Turner had requisitioned a Warden plane, unmarked save in the aetheric, where Wardens would be able to identify the hidden stylized sun symbol on the tail section. It was a small private plane, sleek and gleaming, holding only a dozen or so people in moderately comfortable surroundings. Turner saw the Jensens settled, their bags stored, before seeing to me and Luis. Not that we needed assistance; we had a small bag each, easily tucked away, and although I was hungry, I didn’t feel it was time to eat. Luis asked for a beer. When I raised my eyebrows, he shrugged. “Look, I’m an Earth Warden. I’m not getting drunk. Can’t happen unless I let it.” He sounded a little defensive. I nodded, closed my eyes, and let my head fall comfortably against the leather pillow behind it. The flight was short and uneventful, for a change—smooth air, no turbulence, no attackers emerging to duel us out from the sky.

Refreshingly different.

I slipped into dreams, of blood and wriggling dark things that scuttled through shadows and clutched at my throat. When I woke I realized that my metallic left hand had clenched tight as a cinched knot. I felt nothing from the metal, only from that phantom, nonexistent hand that still eerily insisted it could feel pain. When I relaxed the metal hand, the pain eased. Phantom or not, it felt . . . real. Pain was, after all, in the mind; if my mind still received messages from nerves no longer there, it didn’t matter how the messages arrived. Pain was pain.

Luis was just finishing his beer. He watched me flexing my hand and said, “You still feel it? Your hand?”

His guess was accurate, and startling. I nodded.

“Not all that uncommon,” he said. “People who lose limbs in some kind of traumatic accident often talk about still feeling them. Sometimes for years after. Has something to do with the body’s perception of itself on the aetheric, I think.”

I couldn’t see my own body in the aetheric, not in any kind of detail. “How do I look?” I asked him. “In Oversight?” It was a bit of an impolite question, among Wardens; it simply wasn’t done to ask directly. But I needed to understand.

His eyes unfocused a bit, and he tapped the bottle against his lips a few times before upending it to capture the last few drops and setting it aside. “You mean your hand? It’s still there. Your aetheric self still has it.”

“What form do I take?”

Luis smiled, very slightly. “A beautiful one. You glow like a nuclear reactor. The Dji

“Because I’m anchored in flesh,” I said. “Because I’m not a Dji

He tilted his head forward, acknowledging the point. “Not technically, no. But you’re more than just a Warden. Or a human. Don’t kid yourself, Cass.”

“Cassiel.”

“Cass.”

“Stop.”

“Make me.” His voice had gone lower, more intimate. I found myself captured by the shape of his lips on the words he spoke, not the words themselves, and shook myself from a wave of feelings that were difficult to avoid.