Unknown

There was a gate in the back, locked with a padlock. Luis reached out and snapped it off with barely an effort, turning the metal brittle and fragile with a pulse of power, and then we were out into the alley. It was piled with trash—boxes, cans, and plastic bags awaiting pickup by the city. The stench was horrifying, and after the first choking gasp I vowed to stop breathing until I was out of this miasma. A useless vow, of course, but it made me feel better.

Luis was a powerful ru

He was standing about a block away, stock-still, staring upward. As I touched Luis’s arm to alert him, the Warden reached up a commanding hand to the heavens, and lightning leapt from the low, gray clouds in a furious pink-tinted rush, grounded in the Warden’s left palm, and exited from his right . . . straight at us.

“Down!” Luis shouted, and we both dove for the pavement as the energy sizzled toward us. One point was in our favor: The Warden seemed to have little fine control, though an overabundance of power. He was not able to redirect the strike toward us when we fell. Instead, it hit and charred a metal storage shed behind us, melting a wide, smoking hole in the side.

Luis slammed his open palm down on the sidewalk next to his head, eyes focused on the Warden, and a line of force ripped through the ground, rising and falling like an ocean swell, cracking pavement and shoving aside everything in its path. It hit the pavement on which the Warden stood, tossing him off his feet and rolling him onto the thin grass of someone’s yard. The grass was little to work with—thin, brittle, ill-watered—but I poured energy into it, forcing it to grow in long, rubbery ru

Luis softened the ground into mire, sinking the Warden’s legs but leaving his upper body supported to prevent smothering. In seconds, the Warden was mired as his feet and lower legs sank into the soft mud, and were trapped as it hardened.

Luis offered his hand to help me to my feet, and we walked across the street to where the Weather Warden lay panting and helpless, locked into the earth.

He could not have been more than twelve years old.

Luis and I exchanged looks; I do not know what mine said, but his was appalled. Just a boy, it said.

A boy who’d tried twice to kill us. I was less appalled, and more interested in why.

I sank down to a crouch beside the boy, and examined him more closely. He was typical for the age, I supposed: a defiant glare, a childish, undefined face. Black eyes, black hair, coloring much like Luis’s. “Your name,” I said. “Give it.”

He responded in Spanish. It was easy enough to guess the content of it, especially when accompanied by an aggressive hand gesture. I felt him gathering power again from the clouds overhead.

I reached out, thumped a forefinger against his forehead, and disrupted his concentration. The power fell into chaos, and the child blinked at me, startled.

“Name,” I said again.

“Candelario,” he said. “Puta.”

I raised my eyebrows. “Candelario,” I repeated. “I assume that other was not your last name.”

Luis said, from behind me, “Not unless his name translates to whore.”

I thumped the child-Warden’s head again. “Stop. I can kill you if I wish, you know that?”

His concentration faded, and I felt him let the powers he’d been gathering up fade along with it. “So?” he challenged me. “You kill me, it don’t matter. You’re messing with her.”

I knew exactly who he meant. Pearl. My sister Dji

Pearl, insane and predatory, who had wiped an entire race of protohumans from the face of the planet once, in her jealousy and madness. She should by all rights have been destroyed, long gone from this Earth; I had seen to that. But instead she lived on, drawing strength and power in steady, parasitic increments from these hijacked Wardens.

These children.

Candelario was like Pammy—a victim, although it was likely he didn’t know this, and would never accept it. He almost certainly believed that he was chosen, special, a trusted soldier in a war against evil. Pearl had convinced many. It was a signal weakness of the human condition, to be so easily swayed by those who wished them ill. To be rotted from within by their own belief in their virtue.

“Where is she?” I asked the boy. He spat at me. “She is using you. She is not your protector.”

“You don’t know anything!” he shot back. “Let me go or she’ll kill you all!”

“I doubt that,” I said. “Or she’d already have done so.”

Something shifted inside the boy—a change so basic that it seemed that the bones inside of him moved along with it. His face seemed to grow sharper, more adult. More like . . . someone else.

“Do you?” An entirely different voice than the boy’s, although using his vocal cords. “Really, do you doubt it, my sister? I thought you knew me better.”

Pearl. Pearl was speaking through this boy. I caught my breath. I felt Luis’s warm hand grip my shoulder, and I put a palm down flat on the warm ground, taking in power and feeding it through the cycle between us. Preparing for the strike, if it would come.

The boy’s eyes were still black, but now it wasn’t adolescent anger in them, it was something worse. Focused malice. Real evil.

“You send out your troops ill-prepared,” I told her. “His attack was crude, you know.”

“I’m not interested in subtlety,” Pearl said. “You should know that about me, Cassiel.”

Oh, I did. All too well. “Then why not come to me directly? I’m your enemy. Not this one.”

“You’re wrong,” she said, and there was such deep, ancient anger in it that even I shuddered. “I have nothing but enemies. Doubt me not, sister mine. I will destroy this world and everything living on it. You’re a fool if you believe otherwise.”

With that, she was gone. Just . . . gone, leaving no clues, no comfort. She did not explain herself. She never had, and never would; I would have to guess at the dark motives behind her plans. But it would have to do with hatred and jealousy, just as it had before.

We had all felt it, when she had struck in those long-ago mists of time. Almost a million thinking beings killed in an instant, a mass murder on the scale of a god, a million souls screaming in pain and confusion. It had destroyed Pearl’s mind, or what remained of it; in response, she had begun to rip at the universe around us, damaging things that should never have suffered injury. Things that lacked the capacity to heal.

I had destroyed Pearl, or I thought I had. I was the original murderer, among the Dji

Ironic, that some seed of her had survived, had somehow cast down roots among the new species that filled the emptiness she’d left on the planet with her crimes. Humanity was where Pearl hid. Humanity was where her power lay.

And so Ashan, the leader of the True Dji

If I acted, I would become a monster. If I failed to act, Pearl would use the power she sucked from these humans to destroy my people.

Choices.

Candelario resurfaced, still glaring. I could see that he had no idea of what he had said—or what she said, using him as her remote tool. She hid within him, within all of them, like a virus.