Unseen

I had, not long ago, bought a child’s helmet. I had never felt so glad to have made that impulsive purchase. I was prepared to risk my own skull readily enough, but not Ibby’s.

We waved to Luis from the driveway, and I boosted Ibby up on the seat behind me as I straddled the motorcycle and ignited the engine, which caught with a growl and a throb of power. Ibby wrapped her arms around me and squealed in delight. Her helmet, decorated with glittering Disney characters, glowed a shocking shade of hot pink in the sunlight.

Luis was holding two halves of a broken vase, which he juggled in order to wave back. He almost bobbled half of it when I reached out with our shared Earth power and tapped his eardrum, formed vibrations of sound. Stay here, I told him. I have to convince her to do this of her own accord. Pack her things, and ours. Be ready.

He nodded, face shutting down to blankness. That didn’t stop me from feeling his uneasiness, and alarm. Cass—what the hell are you doing?

Trust me, I said in reply, and got a stiff, grudging nod. I had earned that trust, I knew, but this was Isabel, and Luis would not forgive me if I did something that caused her to be hurt.

Then again, I would never forgive myself, either.

I eased the bike out onto the street, and gradually picked up speed, still keeping it well under the posted limits. Isabel wiggled with excitement behind me. “Are you holding on?” I asked her.

“Yes!” she shouted back, and tightened her grip on me to prove it.

“Are you sure you’re holding on?”

“Yes!”

“All right, then.”

We had come to an intersection, and I stopped for the light to change. When it went to green, I pushed the throttle hard over, and the Victory roared out a challenge and shot into the open road. Isabel couldn’t fall off, because I had taken the precaution of using a fair amount of Earth powers to bind her hands tight together around me. Even should we crash—an extremely unlikely event—she would be thrown clear with me, and I would protect her from any injury.

I was taking her somewhere. This was not a joyride, although I could tell that for Isabel it certainly was, as she squealed in delight and turned her face into the wind. For me, it was cold-blooded manipulation. I thought again about the Dji

I wondered how she would feel about it afterward.

The road was indeed lovely, cool winter desert un-spooling on both sides of us once we reached the freeway, a gleaming black line cutting through the ochre wilderness. Overhead, the sky was cloudless and merciless, the way it often seemed in this part of the world. Vultures spun lazy circles in the distance, and I felt the slow pulse of this world around me—animals foraging, hunting, sleeping, mating; plants living their obscure and hidden lives of sun and shade, pollen and seeds. It was a world in which all things consumed, and were in turn consumed.

All things except the Dji

It was the best day I had ever spent with Isabel, a delirious whirl of riding the roads, eating at roadside diners, shopping at odd little dusty stores. We were both filthy from the road’s dirt by the time we got to where I had pla

I released the binding on Isabel and let her climb down; she looked very small and uncertain as she stood there in her handmade jacket and Disney Princess helmet. Even her sneakers sparkled with glitter. “Why are we going here?” she asked. “It looks scary.”

“It is, a little,” I said, and held out my hand. “There’s someone I want you to meet.” When she hesitated, I said, “And they have ice cream inside.”

She brightened immediately and took my hand. In that moment, I felt a surge of something dark and sticky boiling up from my stomach—guilt, and the sick certainty that I was doing the right thing, no matter how unpleasant it would be for either of us.

Luis would be furious when he found out.

There were only a few other vehicles in the parking lot. One was a rusted van with a giant, crude painting of a woman with a cobra’s head, and red letters that screamed SEE THE SNAKE WOMAN! ONLY AT MABEL’S EXOTIC PETS!

Ibby was looking more and more apprehensive. I’d left my helmet with the bike, but she had chosen to keep hers on, and her hand was clammy and sweaty as it gripped mine tightly.

I pushed open the door to the shop. It gave out a rusty sound not unlike a shriek, and Ibby flinched and pulled back. I looked down at her, and she looked up at me, and then she finally nodded and gave me a trembling smile.

That smile almost broke my resolve, but I looked away and walked inside Mabel’s Exotic Pets, bringing the girl in with me.

Inside, the place was no chamber of horrors—it was surprisingly clean and cool, with dim lighting that somehow managed to seem soothing instead of sinister. Ringing the four walls were rows of tanks, lit with bluertinted fluorescent bulbs and the reddish glow of heat lamps. Within each tank was a tiny ecosystem, painstakingly preserved ... a desert for the bearded dragons of Australia, who sat happily in their sand under the heat, watching us pass with curiously cocked heads. In the next tank a Chinese water dragon luxuriated in a jungle of leaves and raindrops, and Ibby stopped to examine the lizard’s bright jewel-green color. At another tank she shrieked in horrified delight as a large blue gecko licked its own eye; it didn’t seem in the least impressed with her, choosing to chase after a cricket in its tank.

I heard a dry rustle of beads, and a warm woman’s voice said, “Can I help you folks?”

Ibby, engrossed in the discovery of a truly huge iguana stretched out, uncaged, across a branch at the back of the shop, didn’t even register the question. The sign next to the iguana read, YES, YOU CAN PET ME AS LONG AS YOU’RE NICE. She tentatively reached out and ran her fingers over the iguana’s giant, jowl-heavy head, and it lazily opened a golden eye and then closed it again. She patted it, and the iguana held up its head for more. I heard the silvery glitter of Ibby’s laughter, and it hurt me—it felt in that moment as if I was on the verge of destroying all the i

I looked at the women who’d spoken to us. She had come out of the back of the shop—middle-aged, dried out by age and the sun, with gray streaks through her shoulder-length dark hair. There was a bearded dragon riding on her shoulder, looking at me with perky interest.

I held out my hand, and the dragon leapt without hesitation from her to me, where it sat in my palm and stared up at me. It was lighter than I had expected, and very warm. Its skin was soft and dry, and it cocked its head quizzically, as if asking a question I could not hear.

“Hello, little brother,” I told him, and touched my finger lightly to his head. He settled down comfortably in my palm, and I handed him back to Mabel. She took him back with raised eyebrows.

“You’re different,” she said. “Dji

“The business” being, of course, the Warden business. Mabel was a former Warden—Earth, of course—who had elected to have her powers blunted and leave the service. I had no doubt she still retained a strong influence over the living creatures in her shop; they were uniformly healthy and happy, from the snakes to the lizards to the arthropods like tarantulas and scorpions, who were surprisingly complacent.