Unseen

“What kind of things?”

“It’s hard to explain. She showed us the future, I guess. And the past. And she showed us how our parents were gone and she was all we had.” A muscle jumped in Gillian’s tensed jaw. “But she wasn’t. We had each other.” She was holding Mike’s hand again, and her knuckles had gone pale. “We always had each other.”

I nodded and stopped the conversation; I could sense that even Gillian, brave and angry as she was, would go no further with it. Mike pulled her away, leaving me alone to consider what she’d said.

As the fire burned down to ashes and the night settled in deep and cold, I murmured, “She comes to the camps. She comes in the flesh.”

If I could get in, if I could get close, I could destroy her while she was in skin, or at least damage her badly. Gillian had given me the clue. She’d said that Pearl’s omniscient presence had ceased when she was inside flesh. That meant Pearl couldn’t maintain both things; she could be energy or she could be flesh.

Flesh was vulnerable. I knew that better than anyone.

I waited until the next day to speak to Luis, at the end of a silent meal. Our guides had left us, no doubt wanting us to process all the information we’d been given so far, although I had no illusions that there weren’t ears listening, both mechanical and actual. “I’m going to say something you may not like.”

He grunted and took a sip of Diet Coke. “Yeah, that’s not really new, you know. You do that a lot.”

I let the silence stretch for a moment, long enough that his smile faded, and I felt him tense in readiness for what I was about to say. “I’m not staying here.”

He stopped, watching my face. I couldn’t tell, in that moment, what he was thinking, but I knew what he was feeling: the same slow, rolling anger he’d been carrying since he’d first realized how damaged Isabel had become. The anger we shared, and the need for action. The difference between us was how we defined actions to be taken. “Why?”

“Because my fight is out there. Can I be of value here? Yes. But I could be of value anywhere, in any hospital, any war zone, any disaster. My duty is to find Pearl and stop her. I can’t do that from here.”

“You think I don’t want to run off and get my revenge on? Damn straight,” he said. “But I can’t leave Ibby to face this alone. And neither can you. I know you better than that.”

I swallowed. “You’re wrong. I can.”

It was black and brutal to say, but I needed to leave no doubt, and I was dreading the violence of his response ... but not for the first time, Luis surprised me.

He looked back down at his plate, picked up a potato chip, and ate it with careful deliberation. Then he said, “You know these kids need our protection,” he said. “And our help. Isabel needs our help.”

“These children are Pearl’s failures. Her castoffs. Her rejects, Luis. She won’t threaten them; it’s to her advantage to have them seeded out here in the world, causing mayhem and absorbing the best efforts of our Wardens. She throws the wounded and dying in our path to slow us down. Don’t you see that?”

“No. I see kids who need help, and who the fuck do you think you are, calling them failures?” Now I’d made him angry—or, more accurately, given him a target for his rage. Me. “It takes more courage for them just to get up every day and face the world than you’re ever going to know your whole life. You calling Ibby a failure? A reject?”

I had, of course. “That isn’t a personal judgment ...”

“The hell it isn’t!” He shoved his plate aside, got up, and paced, glaring at me with sullen fury. “You cold bitch. You can really sit there and say this to me. I always knew you were some kind of alien inside, but damn. I thought you cared.”

“I do. I love Ibby,” I said. “And I love you. But I know my duty, and it isn’t here. It isn’t doing this. This is nothing but bandages on a mortal wound.”

Luis Rocha let out a harsh bark of laughter. “Love. Yeah, I figured you’d be bringing that up sooner or later. You always hurt the ones you love, right? Well, fuck you. That’s not love; that’s selfishness. We don’t need you. Just get your shit and go, if you’re going to cut and run. Ibby’s better off without you dragging it out. So am I.”

I’d been prepared for this to hurt, but not this much. Not as if my intestines were being dragged out and burned. Oddly enough, it wasn’t only the hurt, though—it was anger, too. I was right, and Luis knew it. He just couldn’t bear to hear it.

And that made me see him as weak. As human. It made it perversely easier to say, “If you don’t want me here, there’s no reason for me to stay, is there?”

“None,” he said. His eyes had turned obsidian-hard, and there was no trace of the man I’d kissed just yesterday. The man who had held me and shown me the sweetness of human life in ways I’d never imagined. The one who’d made me lose myself in him.

That man had been an illusion, a ghost, and now he was gone.

I kept my voice steady with an effort. “Then I’ll leave tomorrow,” I said. “I can’t delay any longer.”

“Yeah, I know, you’ve got a destiny and shit,” he said dismissively. “Too important for all us little people to stand in your way. Especially us failures and rejects.”

Hearing the words from his lips, I felt their sting, but they were still true. The longer I stayed here, mired in the hopeless struggle of these children, the more damage Pearl could do. I needed to engage her, and quickly, before she could carry out whatever obscure plan she was pursuing. It involved the children of Wardens, and Dji

The fact that all that was true didn’t make the cruelty of my decision any less biting, and I couldn’t think what to say to make it any easier. Luis would accept nothing short of complete compliance with his wish to stay close to Ibby; I couldn’t give it, though I deeply desired to make them both happy. We were in a war, and there was triage to be done, no matter how much it hurt.

“How are you pla

It was a handicap I didn’t like to remember—and one that gave him unspoken power over me.

I stared steadily at him. “I plan to stay alive the same way I have so far,” I said. “Do you really mean that you will cut me off from your power? That you’ll send me away to die?”

His mouth opened and closed. I knew he wanted to strike at me, but even now he couldn’t do that. Not that. He knew what a risk I was taking, and how much power he really held over me. But he also knew that he couldn’t stop me, not with threats. Not even with action.

Cutting me off from his power would damage me, weaken me, force me to find other sources ... but it wouldn’t change my mind.

“No,” he said. “I wouldn’t do that. I know what’s at stake here. But you’re wrong, Cassiel. You’re wrong to go off after her like this.”

“And you’re wrong to hide,” I said. “Because this fight has to go to her. She’s already brought it to us, and she’ll keep hurting us until we’re unable to fight at all. I have to do it. Please understand.”

He did. He just couldn’t admit it, and it made him unreasonably furious.

“Then you should go right now,” he said. “I can explain to Ibby why you dropped her off like a puppy at the pound, but not if you stay a couple of extra days and then abandon her. I can’t explain that at all.”

“I know you think I’m cruel, but this is—”

“No,” he said, and there was quiet venom in the word that stopped me cold. “No, don’t you try to tell me all the reasons why you’re right. I know you’re right, I damn well know you’re right, but I can’t forgive you for it. Don’t ask me to do that, because if you loved her, you wouldn’t leave us.” The rage was still there, but his voice broke at the last, and I sensed that the anger was a thin crust now over a bottomless well of grief. Like Ibby, he’d never truly come to terms with the loss of Ma