Unseen

“It isn’t,” he said, and I felt him slip away, into the aetheric. Only his voice remained, a whisper on the wind. “I want you to remember what it means to be one of us, not one of them. If you’d chosen to join me, you could have saved him. You could have saved them all.”

And then he was gone, and I was alone, cold and alone, in an unknown forest.

And far away from me, my love was fighting for his life.

I let out a scream that shook leaves from the trees, and began to run.

I had only gone perhaps a mile before I ran into Ashan again, standing in my path, shining like the moon. He looked at me strangely, as if he’d never seen me before.

“You run,” he said. “You have no idea where you are, and yet you run.”

I could feel Luis’s presence, like a compass tugging me onward. I didn’t slow down, only ran around Ashan’s still form and kept going. I didn’t know how far it was; I only knew that I couldn’t risk not trying.

If Luis died, I would die with him, one way or another. And I would wish it to be so.

Ashan, again, standing near the trunk of a massive, shadowed tree. I was remotely thankful for his presence, as he illuminated a hidden branch that stretched across the trail and might have tripped me. I vaulted it and kept ru

He was lying to me. I had to believe he was lying.

And so I ran. I ran until I was breathless, shaking, covered in sweat. I ran until my muscles trembled with exhaustion. Ashan continued to appear like a ghost in the darkness, silently watching me.

I didn’t stop, until with Dji

“Enough,” he said. “If you must destroy yourself, do it in battle, not ... like this. Not uselessly.”

And he whirled me away into a nauseating swirl of color, sound, taste, the rancid scent of death ... and out again, into a blast of cold air, smoke, and the roar of fire.

I tripped over a corpse and fell face forward into bloody, churned ground.

Chapter 13

THE CORPSE I’D TRIPPED over was someone I didn’t recognize—a man, dressed in dark clothing. He had a rifle with him, and a handgun holstered on his belt. I tugged it free, picked up the rifle, and slung it across my shoulder as I rose to my knees.

Ashan had brought me back to the school, but the school was unrecognizable. It was a burning inferno, only vaguely defined by the shapes of walls; the fire was incredibly hot and violent, with the flames in places leaping fifty feet into the night sky. Trees burned from their leafy crowns downward all around me. At first I thought that the school had been in the path of a forest fire, but that made no sense; there were powerful Fire Wardens present who should have been able to turn the flames away, even if they hadn’t been able to extinguish them completely.

No, this was an attack.

And a successful one.

I didn’t hear the sound of the shot fired at me, but I felt the bullet slice across the meat of my upper arm, drawing a bloody slash; it felt like a hot poker applied to my skin, and for a second I didn’t register what had occurred. My instincts saved me; I threw myself flat and crawled to take the only shelter available—behind the corpse that I’d fallen over earlier. I rolled him on his side and curled up, unshipped the rifle, and carefully looked around for my assailant. It was impossible to hear the shots, but I saw a spark of misplaced flame from the trees—a muzzle flash in the darkness—and aimed and fired, using the power of the Earth to guide my shot to its target.

I sensed the shock of the bullet’s impact through bone, brain, and out the other side as my shot found its home, and then I took another moment to study the scene more carefully. He seemed to have been the only remaining gunman, or the one assigned to prevent reinforcements from arriving; no one else fired on me.

But I felt a harsh ripple on the aetheric, and turned toward it just as I saw the trees bending, whipping, and cracking. Something was coming for me, coming fast, and it was big. Very big.

I glimpsed something dark, but it wasn’t an animal; the power driving it felt alien at its core, cold and lifeless. Void. Someone was driving a moving sphere of void through the forest, devouring all it touched, and it was heading straight for me.

I couldn’t fight that, and it was too late to run. I got up to my feet, took three long steps, and prepared myself. There was a dead tree trunk lying at an angle nearby, and I ran for it, up its incline, and on the last step cha

The black sphere charged through the space where I’d been while I hung at the apogee of my jump, fifty feet overhead, and then landed crouched on the branch of a tree above. It hesitated, circling, and then zipped off in a different direction. It had found another target, and I heard someone scream.

It was quickly cut off.

From this vantage, with the treetop aflame above me, I could see the devastation wrought on the Wardens’ stronghold. The attack had shredded the metal fencing around the building, but it was the building itself that had sustained the most damage—concrete walls shattered, wood burned away, and now almost every part of the interior seemed to be burning with a white-hot intensity that was at odds with a normal blaze. It was being fed by a Fire Warden of abnormal power and concentration ... one of Pearl’s, I imagined. I could feel the dark shimmer of her power in the air, though I couldn’t locate her presence.

Evidently her adept that was managing the Void was less well equipped, because after several moments the black sphere faltered, smashed through a few more unlucky trees, then abruptly shrank to a pinpoint and vanished with an implosive pop louder even than the roar of the fire. I jumped down from the tree and began hunting for the rest of Pearl’s attacking force.

Instead, I saw a Warden—one I recognized, though I didn’t know her name—waving at me frantically as she rose from behind the cover of some bushes and dropped what must have been a very, very good veil. I raced to her, keeping low, and as I ducked behind the brush I saw that she wasn’t alone—she had dozens with her, including most of the other Wardens. Almost all of them were injured or exhausted from the fight. “Thank God,” she said. She was holding a bloody bandage to her side, and offered me a real, though tense, smile of welcome. “I’m Gayle.”

I nodded, sca

“I’m sorry,” she said. “We couldn’t reach them. Marion, Janice, Luis, Shasa, Ben—at least five of the kids. We tried, but we were under attack. We had to save those we could reach. I’m so sorry.”

I shouldn’t have blamed them for that, but in that moment I felt a surge of pure hatred nevertheless. You left them to die. Gayle must have known that, must have seen it burning in my eyes, but to her credit, she didn’t back away. Maybe she was simply too tired, and too badly wounded.

I turned away and stared at the burning ruins. Adrenaline and fear made it difficult to sort out my emotions, but I calmed myself and listened, listened for that tiny whisper that always existed—that fragile yet steely-strong co