Firestorm

"Are you working for them?".

"What?"

He surged to his feet and leaned on the table as the other Wardens exploded into babbling argument. "Are you working for them? Is that what this is? You get inside and kill off the rest of us? You bring this Dji

"Paul—"

"Shut up. Just shut your mouth, Jo." He upgraded the shout to a full-out bellow. "Janet! Nathan! Get in here!"

That brought in the two guards, who'd been hovering politely out of sight around the corner. Paul gestured toward me. "Stick this one in a room while we talk this over. Do not let her sweet-talk you, and do not let her leave. If she tries anything, you've got my permission to shoot her. Someplace painful but nonvital. Got me?"

Cherise whirled around, eyes wide. "They're arresting you?"

"Looks like," I said. I was feeling a tight flutter of panic about it, but there was no point in showing that to her. She couldn't help. "It's okay, Cher. You go back to the car and head for home. I'll be all right."

"Oh, hell no. I'm not leaving you like this!"

"You are," Paul said flatly. He nodded the two guards toward Cherise. "Escort the lady out first. Nicely, please."

It was going to be nice until Cherise grabbed Janet's hair and kicked Nathan in the balls, and then it got a little ugly. Cherise fought like a girl, which meant she fought dirty. There was screeching. Nathan finally got her wrists pi

The table full of Wardens looked on, wide-eyed.

Cherise continued to struggle even after they had good hold of her. I went over to her, put my hand on her shoulder.

"Cherise, stop it! I'll be all right," I promised her. "Trust me. Go home. This isn't your fight."

I was right, and I was lying, of course, because it was everybody's fight now. It was just that the regular folks, the ones who were going to be mowed down by the uncounted millions, couldn't do a damn thing about it. You can't fight Mother Nature. Not unless you're a Warden. And even then, it's like a particularly brave anthill taking on the Marine Corps.

She didn't say anything, just stared at me. Hair cascading over her face, half-wild, completely scared. I'd done this to her. Cherise had been a comfortable, self-absorbed little girl when I'd first met her, and I'd dragged her into a world she could neither understand nor control. Another stone on the crushing burden of guilt I was hauling around.

"Go home," I repeated, and stepped back. Janet and Nathan escorted her to the door—carried her, actually, since she was such a tiny little thing. Her feet kicked uselessly for the floor, but they each hoisted her with an arm under hers, and out she went.

"Jo, dammit, don't do this! Let me help! I want to help!" she yelled. I didn't move. Didn't reply. "Hey, you jerk, watch the shirt, that's designer—"

And then she was gone, and it was just me and a room full of Wardens, and it wasn't the time to be picking any fights. Besides, I wasn't fool enough to believe anybody else would jump in on my side.

"You really going to lock me up?" I asked Paul. He gave me a stare worthy of his mafioso relatives. "I could take down a bunch of you, you know," I said. "On my worst day, I could still take at least three of you if I had to. And no offense, but this isn't shaping up to be my worst day. For a change."

"Yeah, go on, you're making me not want to lock you up, with a speech like that," he said. "I know you could take any of us except Lewis; you always could. And when did you figure all that out, incidentally?"

"Started to a couple of months ago," I said, and shrugged. "So. You want to fight, or work together to help people survive this? Because I'm not going to play the traditional who's-on-top and who-can-smooch-the-most-ass game anymore. I'm not letting you stick me in some cell and pretend like this is all my fault and it'll all go away if we hold a tribunal and assign some blame. And most of all, I'm not going to sit back and let people die."

"You'll do what we ask you to do," said Marion, and rolled out from behind the table. Rolled, because she was in a wheelchair. I made a sound of distress, because I didn't realize how badly she'd been hurt—worse than Paul. There was something terribly misshapen about her legs. Marion was middle-aged, but she looked older than that now; lines grooved around her eyes and at the corners of her mouth, lines of pain. Even her normally glossy black hair looked dull and tangled, but I supposed that personal grooming probably wasn't on anyone's top ten to-do list at the moment. "This isn't the moment for personal heroics, and you know it. The Wardens need to pull together. That means someone has to lead, and the rest of us have to follow. Including you."

"Following's never been her strong suit," Paul said morosely. "In case you haven't noticed. And she can probably kick your ass, too, these days."

"Paul," Marion said with strained patience, "perhaps we should stop discussing whose asses would be hypothetically kicked, and talk about what we're going to do to stop the bloodshed."

"Somebody needs to contact the Ma'at," I said. "I'm not their favorite person ever, but at least I know some names. How's that for cooperation?"

"Hand them over to Marion," Paul said. "You're done here until we can check you out and find out who these people are. Marion?"

Marion, always practical, reached into her plaid-blanketed lap, and pulled out a pad of paper and a pen. I recited the ones I could remember. Charles Spencer Ashworth. Myron Lazlo. Told the Wardens about their lair in the lap of the Sphinx out in Las Vegas.

She exchanged a look with Paul, and he shrugged. "Check it out," he said. "You, Jo. You're going to spend a little time contemplating how bad an idea it was to keep that from me."

"Oh, come on, Paul. We don't have time for this bullshit."

"Sorry," Marion said, and pulled something else out from under that plaid lap blanket. An automatic pistol. It looked like one of the same police-issue models that Janet and Nathan had been sporting. "But he's right. First, we establish contact with the Ma'at, and then we decide what to do with you. Don't worry. It probably won't take all that long, and you look as if you could use the rest."

I felt a cold chill at how close she'd probably come to putting a bullet in me, just on general principles. I'd been shot in the back before, in this very building, as it happened. Not an experience I was looking to repeat, especially since David wasn't likely to show up again to help me out.

I slowly put up my hands.

She shook her head. "I'm not going to shoot you," she said, and put the gun back in her lap, though on top of the blanket. "For one thing, the recoil is murder on a broken arm."

"Glad your priorities are straight."

"Up," she said. "I'll show you someplace you can wait in comfort."

I looked over my shoulder when I reached the splintered doorway, and saw something that I'd never really seen before in a group of Wardens: fear. And they were right to be afraid. In all the history of the Wardens, stretching through the ages, nobody had ever faced what we were facing: a planet that was about to wake up and kill us, and Dji