Текст книги "Cape Storm"

Автор книги: Rachel Caine

Соавторы: Rachel Caine
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“No,” I said slowly. “They did strike already. They killed the Djinn we found in the hallway outside my old cabin. We just don’t know why, because we can’t figure out who she was or what she was doing at the time.”

It was the perfect dead end, and it was wasted on David and Lyle, who looked at each other as if silently thinking that I’d gone just slightly nuts. Humans,Lyle’s shrug said. Who knows what goes on in their tiny heads?

“We need to backtrack and figure out why they felt threatened by that Djinn,” I said. “Or why they had to stop what she was doing. David—” He was still giving me that blank look. “Never mind. I’ll figure it out. Anyway, one good thing about it—they’re probably worried about how we managed to kill their strongest monster already.” I swallowed. “Please tell me that it was the strongest one.”

“It was,” David said. I heaved a deep sigh of relief.

“We should kill them now,” Lyle said.

“How? Just one of them was capable of nearly killing me, fighting David to a standstill, and halfway destroying Venna,” I said. “So I’m not feeling real good about our chances with taking on two of them at once. Any other options?”

Lyle cocked one thin eyebrow. “Swim back to shore.”

“Just run away.”

“Unless you want to wait for them to strike first.”

“You weren’t serious about the running away, right?”

“Oh, he was,” David said.

Lyle nodded. Lyle was turning out to be the least confrontational supernatural being I’d ever met. Under normal circumstances, that would have been a refreshing change, but considering that I wanted a bunch of fire-eating, hard-charging badasses to back me up right now . . . not so much.

We both looked at David, who seemed to be half a world away. He dragged himself back with an effort. “We bide our time,” he said. “It’s too dangerous to go after them right now. Venna can’t be used against them again, and we need to know more than we know now. Joanne—”

“Yeah, got it. Find out the right frequencies to do damage, and get everybody up to speed on the info, quietly. Oh, you probably should tell me just who I’m avoiding, here. Not Wardens?” Because I’d hate to have missed that in my initial checks.

“No,” Lyle said, relieving me of screwups. “One is crew, an engineering mate below passenger decks. The other is hiding as a stowaway in the ship’s hold. He will be difficult to reach, and harder to trap.”

“Let them hide for now,” David said. “Watch them. Any change, any indication something’s happening, report it as soon as you can. If they try to sabotage the ship—” I hadn’t even thought of that, and the idea twisted me deep in the gut. “Could they?”

“Of course. But not easily, and probably not fatally. With the Wardens and Djinn aboard, most damage can be repaired immediately.” David sounded a lot more confident than I felt at the moment. I guess I was glad somebody was. “If you need help—”

Lyle gave a very human-sounding snort. “Why would I?”

“Because Joanne’s right,” David said. “One of these things nearly won against two Djinn and a powerful Warden. Don’t let your confidence blind you to the possibility of losing spectacularly.” At that moment, I thought he sounded a whole lot like his predecessor, Jonathan—calm, acidic, absolutely in control. And Lyle must have thought so too, because he inclined his head a bit and looked contrite.

“Their names,” I said.

“What?” Both Djinn looked at me.

“The people. I’d like to know their names.”

“Why does it matter?” Lyle asked. “They’re skins. I told you, they’re empty.”

“You also told me the skins used to be real people. Real histories. Families. Friends.” I held his gaze. Good thing I’d had practice with that, because Lyle had the eerie Djinn thing down pat. “I want to know because it’s the only way we can honor their memories.”

He seemed to understand that. “The engineer’s mate is Jason Ng. He joined the crew twelve years ago. He had a wife and three children in New Orleans, and a mistress in Brazil. The other was once named Angelo Marconi, from Naples. His sister owns a restaurant there. His family thinks he’s still away at school.”

“School,” I murmured. “How old—”

“He is dead, Warden.”

“How old?”

“The skin is sixteen,” Lyle said. “I’m sorry. But you can’t let what they’re wearing fool you into hesitating. You know that, don’t you?”

I knew. I also knew that if push came to shove, if I had to stand there and sling fire at a sixteen-year-old boy, I wasn’t going to be very good at it.

But I knew someone who would be.

I found Kevin Prentiss on the ship’s main promenade deck, standing at the railing. He was watching the thick gray foaming clouds and the iron-colored water with its lacings of white, and he looked—as always—like a punk streetwise kid who needed to learn the concept of personal hygiene.

The difference these days was that Kevin had pulled himself together, to a greater extent than I’d ever thought possible. He’d earned himself some respect from his fellow Fire Wardens. He’d learned something from his apprenticeship to Lewis. He still looked greasy, but it was mostly hair product and deliberately baggy clothing. He had at least a handshake acquaintance with regular bathing.

However, Kevin stillhated me. The look he sent me as I approached was a shot across my own personal bow, warning me to steer clear. I ignored it and took up a post at the rail beside him, leaning on the wood and bracing myself against the rise and fall of the deck with my feet well spread.

“You look like shit,” Kevin said, and flipped half a lit cigarette into the air. Before it hit the water, it had burst into flame. Nothing but ash to litter the ocean. “Congratulations on the improvement.”

“Well, you know me, I’m all about the cutting-edge fashion trends.”

“What, beat to shit is the new black?” Kevin abandoned the ocean to turn and face me. He still needed a haircut, but his pimples were mostly gone now, and he’d filled out while I wasn’t looking, turning from a skinny beanpole to something closer to lean and hungry. I supposed some girls went for that.

Like Cherise, now that I thought about it. The kid was legal age. I knew she’d originally been attracted to him because he was needy, broken, and bad; I also knew that she’d been the perfect foil for him, to remind him that he had better things inside.

Kevin liked to put on the badass hat, though. And always would.

He studied me out of the corner of his eye. “You want something,” he said.

“Why would you say that?”

“Because you never talk to me unless you want something.”

“So not true,” I said. I held my breath for a second, then let it out. “Okay, I want something.”

He didn’t even have to waste his breath on an I told you so.“Big or small?”

“Pretty big.”

“And I’d do it for you because . . . ?”

“Because you’re a good man, somewhere deep underneath all that greasy stupid kid disguise,” I said. “Because you want to be, or you wouldn’t be out here on this insanely stupid trip. And because you don’t want anything to happen to Cherise.”

He straightened up. He was getting taller all the time, and now his body language reminded me less of skate parks and more of Lewis in a really foul mood. “You should never have dragged her off with us.”

“I didn’t. Cher goes everywhere with her eyes wide open, you know that. I’m just saying that of all of us, she’s the least able to defend herself if something bad happens, so she’s a good reminder note, because we both care about her.”

Kevin muttered something impolite under his breath that I pretended not to hear, and turned back to glare at the ocean. Steam rose from a couple of waves before he got himself back under control. I was impressed. A few months ago, he’d have vaporized a few metric tons of ocean in a fit of pique.

Of course, not havinga fit of pique would be better still, but baby steps.

“What do you want?” he asked, in a different kind of tone than before. Actually asking for information instead of confronting. Good for him. And good for me, of course.

“I want you to make friends with a Djinn named Lyle,” I said. “Pick a team and stay alert. You may have to react quickly.”

“Lyle?” Kevin let out a braying laugh that got whipped away by the fiercely driven wind. I licked my lips, and tasted salt and metal. “You’re shitting me. Okay, never mind, I won’t even ask. React quickly to what?”

“He’s going to be keeping watch on a couple of people who aren’t supposed to be here.” I reached out and grabbed Kevin’s shoulder, turning him toward me. “Kevin. Pay attention. This isn’t a joke. These two are very, very dangerous, even to the Djinn. Even to you. So don’t get cocky.”

“Me?” He gave me a look so ironic it was practically tipped over into sincerity. “You’re not telling me something. Or, like, anything.”

“I told you they’re dangerous.”

“How, toxic body odor? Really sour attitudes? Can they kill me with their brains?”

I gave up, and held on to the rail as the ship took a particularly hard dip into the water, almost a bounce. The waves were getting thicker and deeper, and the storm behind us was finding gangs of friends to our port and up ahead. It was going to hit us sooner rather than later.

“They’re not human,” I said. “They’re fast, they’re deadly. Think Alien,made out of indestructible crystal, only with human skin.”

“Wouldn’t that be Terminatoror something?”

“Enough of the movies. This isn’t funny, Kevin, it’s serious. The one in the ship’s hold is wearing the body of a sixteen-year-old boy.” There, I’d said it.

And he understood it. “And that’s easier for me, right? Because I won’t see him as just a kid. I see him as more of an equal.”

I nodded unwillingly. “I’m not putting you out there alone,” I said. “But I know you. I know you won’t hesitate if—”

“If I have to kill somebody who looks like he just got passed up for his junior prom? Yeah, I’m definitely that guy.”

I didn’t answer that, because there was a new note in his voice: self-loathing. Kevin hadn’t lived an easy life. He was more pragmatic than most kids I’d ever met, and tougher, too. But that didn’t mean he wanted to be, even though he wore his damage like a badge of honor.

“I’m sorry,” I said, finally. “I wish I didn’t have to ask you.”

“I wish I wasn’t the go-to guy to kill monsters dressed as teens, but there you go.” He shrugged. “At least I’ve got experience.”

And that was the heart of it, at last. I’d come to Kevin because I’d seen him kill without hesitation, and without remorse. Granted, he’d had plenty of personal hatred built up, but it took a special kind of detachment to do what he’d done and never suffer much guilt about it. He mostly resented the fact that we all knew about it—not that he’d been forced to do it.

“I’m not your pet psycho.” I flinched, because Kevin could have been reading my mind. “But yeah, I’ll find Lyle and do this. Just don’t put me on speed dial the next time you have to push a school bus off a cliff or something. So. What’s our approved monster-killing technique?”

I pulled the tissue-wrapped crystal tooth out of my pocket. “Let’s find out.” The thing glittered like a diamond in the dull light.

We took the fragment with us, found a crew member to open up the gym for us, and moved equipment to get clear floor space for our experiments. Kevin took to the scientific method with enthusiasm, because there’s nothing a teenage kid likes better than trying to destroy something that’s indestructible. Kevin tried so many kinds of fire that even I was impressed with the variety and breadth of control he had over it, especially since he didn’t kill us in the process.

Except that nothing worked, and eventually Kevin tried stomping on the thing in frustration. That didn’t work so well, either.

“Let me,” I said, and crouched down across from where the glittering crystal shard lay between us. Kevin mimicked me from about four feet away.

“No fair using Earth powers,” he said. “I’ll call bullshit.”

“You’ll be working with an Earth warden, idiot,” I said. “Watch and learn. I’m going to start with super-low frequencies and work my way up. You watch the structure with me. If you see any response at all, tell me.”

“If I’d known this favor of yours would mean sitting around watching you use a vibrator, I would’ve said hell yeah earlier—”

“Bite me,” I said. He flipped me off. I ignored him—mostly—and paid attention to the structure of the crystal.

It took the better part of an hour, but we pinpointed the frequency range that had the greatest effect on the thing. I couldn’t get to Venna’s epic pulverizing effect, but I figured that anything that cracked and shattered the bone would do. At the very least, it would distract the holy living hell out of the enemy.

“Yeah, that’s great,” Kevin said, as I wrote down the numbers. “Big problem. I can’t do that, genius. It takes a tree hugger.”

“And I’ll get one for you,” I said. “But I wouldn’t call her a tree hugger if I was you. She’ll make your face grow backwards if you piss her off.” I wrote down the name—Maida Manning. Three hundred pounds of extremely sarcastic Earth Warden who wouldn’t take any of Kevin’s bullshit. Maida also had a vicious sense of humor. I could see a beautiful friendship developing, unless of course they managed to kill each other first.

I’m so public-spirited.

“Give her this,” I said, and handed him the written instructions. “Tell her I’ll give her a raise if she manages to not kill you before you kill the bad guys. But whatever you do, wait for Lyle to give a signal to move. Got it?”

“Of course I’ve got it. I’ve got an IQ above your dress size.” He paused. “Then again, it might be the other way around. I mean, do they even makedress sizes in the hundred and fifties?”

Cherise was having a terrible influence on the kid. I decided that one of us really needed to stay focused on professional dignity, and so I settled for a rude gesture instead of a comeback.

“Score,” he said. He walked away, just another bad-attitude teen from his messy, uncombed hair to his dragging, world-weary sneakers.

It takes a special kind of courage to know your own darkness,I thought. I wished he didn’t have to be such an expert, but as long as he was, I had no choice but to take advantage of his skills.

Lewis was going to take my head off for it, too.

Chapter Six

Passengers—even me—weren’t allowed on the bridge. Apparently, that only happens in the movies, or to Cherise. I helped Lewis get through the rest of the passenger and crew interviews in neutral, nonsecure locations. No real surprises: a couple of drug smugglers, some embezzlers, and a few people who had raided the cabin steward’s closet for illegally obtained soaps and pillow mints. Other than that, we were clear of evil influences . . . except for the two we already knew about.

And me, of course. I was acutely aware that the tingles from the numb area on my back were coming with more and more frequency.

By late evening, I was feeling exhausted and even more sore than I’d anticipated. Cherise forced sandwiches on me, and then a glass of scotch, and I dozed off curled up in the corner of a sofa in the first-class-lounge area, listening to half a dozen Wardens debate the logistics of creating a clear course for us to follow. I was wishing that David would drop in, but I knew all too well that Lewis had other plans in motion—plans that specifically excluded me, thanks to the Bad Bob mark on my back. Need to know, and all that.

So I napped.

Lightning flared, startling me, and when I opened my eyes, I was somewhere else.

No . . . I realized that I wasn’tsomewhere else. My body was still huddled on the sofa, still watched over by Wardens and Djinn alike. Protected.

But I was alsostanding in a small concrete room with bare, dusty floors and a few battered old chairs held together with wire and tape, and it was nowhere near the ship that still held my physical form.

It’s not real,I thought, but it felt damned convincing.

The door opened on howling darkness, and I could feel the blast of sea-salted air that rolled through the room to stir up debris.

When the door closed, a bandy-legged old white– haired man moved into the pallid circle of overhead light.

Bad Bob, in the flesh. At least, I presumed it was flesh. I was starting to wonder how real the real world actually was, in relation to what my former boss could accomplish these days.

“Look who dropped in for a visit,” Bob said, and pulled up a rickety chair. He flopped into it—risking total collapse of the ancient wood—and sat there smiling at me as if I were a favorite niece come for the holidays. Honestly, that was the worst thing about him. You couldn’t really tell how crazy he was at a glance.

Or how vile.

I could hear the wind howling and it grated on me, and I wanted to lift my hands to cover my ears—only my ears weren’t physical. Iwasn’t physical. I was a spirit in the aetheric, and there was simply no way that Bad Bob could see me, or that my spirit could walk around like this in the real world. Surely this was a dream. No, a nightmare. Except it felt real, from the gritty concrete floor under my feet to the demented shrieking of the storm winds outside.

“I thought I’d give you guys a chance to surrender,” I said. My voice sounded distant and disembodied, and I wasn’t sure he could hear it until his smile widened. He was an evil old man, but he still had a charming smile. It went well with his apple red cheeks and blunt little nose. “I’d hate to skip the niceties. Courtesy is so important.”

“You’re playing my song, sugar,” he said. “You’re also playing my game. I wonder why?”

I smiled to match him. “Guess.”

“If I have to. Well, you found my little friend on board your ship—I felt him shuffle off this mortal coil. Good for you. Bet you can’t do that again, though.” He studied me with those fluorescent eyes—almost Djinn eyes, these days, brighter and more intense than they’d been in the old days when he’d been my boss, a genuine Warden hero. “I have to hand it to you, I figured you guys would argue until doomsday about what to do about me,” he continued. “Seriously now, a cruise ship? I didn’t see that coming. Beautiful. I thought maybe a yacht, or a freighter. But putting all those people in the line of fire? You’re growing a pair, sweetness. I like that.”

I waited. Bad Bob always had liked to hear his own voice more than anyone else’s.

“But you know what I think?” he continued, right on cue. “I think it’s so showy that it’s desperate. Like dressing up in neon and waving look-at-me flags while blaring Tchaikovsky’s Fifth. You really should study magicians. Misdirection, that’s the key to a good trick.”

“You think I’m tricking you?”

“You’re not that subtle,” he said, which stung because it was true, mostly. “But there’s somebody else on board that ship who is.”

We both knew that he was talking about Lewis. “You’ve still got a chance to end this peacefully,” I said. “Let Rahel go. Give up. It doesn’t have to be Armageddon: Atlantic Edition. We can find a way to make this work, Bob. Or whatever you are.”

“I’m still Bob,” he said, and winked at me, just the way Bad Bob would have back in the old days. “I’m just Bob plus. And I don’t think we’re going to come to any nice, peaceful settlement, princess. This isn’t about dividing up territory or setting boundaries. This is about me, wiping all of you off the face of the earth, and then my friends coming in to take everything else. It’s nature’s way, you know. The strong eat the weak. The many eat the few. And I am about to eat you.”

He smiled, opened his mouth, and his jaws gaped hideously wide, like a snake’s. If this was a nightmare, it was a first-class effort out of my very darkest subconscious.

I stepped back from him.

His jaws re-formed and closed. The Cheshire Cat smile remained. “Don’t look so scared,” he said. “You wouldn’t believe the stuff I can do with my tongue. Bet I could make you forget all about that wimpy little Djinn boy you’re so taken with. Give me a chance—No? All right, then. I guess I’ll just have to settle for something else. Thanks for being so accommodating and wandering on over here, by the way. I figured you might, sooner or later. The torch has that effect on people. It just draws people to me, whether they like it or not.”

He took two steps forward, thrust out his hand, and put it all the way through my ghostly, insubstantial chest. Unsettling, and a little uncomfortable, but I actually felt a little spurt of triumph. Not as easy as you thought it would be,I was about to say, when I realized that he’d reached to a very specific place.

To the ghostly mark on my back. The black torch. His fingertips brushed against it beneath my translucent skin—I could feel it, even if I couldn’t see it happening.

All of a sudden the room was far too small, like a trap, and I wanted to leave this place, now,before something happened.

Too late.

I felt my physical body, still far away on board the ship, writhing in its sleep. I felt the hot tingle of the black torch begin to spread across my shoulder blade.

I’d lost David’s containment, and because I was asleep, he might not know it.

Bad Bob removed his hand from my chest, shook it as if he was flicking something nasty off his fingers, gave me a feral grin, and walked away. I struggled to figure out what was holding me here, in this place, pinned like a bug to a board. The mark.He was right. Until I figured out how to turn it off—if I could—he could keep me here, out of my body. I knew that the longer I stayed out, the worse it was going to be when I got back.

I remembered the Wardens, lost in the storm. If my spirit was shredded, my body would just . . . stop. And they would never know why.

Outside, a truly ferocious storm raged. I felt the hot, damp blast of hair burst into the room, stirring grit and pushing the rickety sticks of furniture in random fury. Lightning flashed like strobes, turning Bad Bob’s pale hair and face into a fright mask.

He reached outside, and when his hand came back through the doorway, it was holding a spear. I recognized the thing—it was thick, and it sparkled with bursts of something that wasn’t color, wasn’t darkness, wasn’t anything human senses could identify or codify. He’d refined his weapons, I saw. This spear had started out life as a small chunk, grown in the dying body of a Djinn, and Bad Bob had given it enough care and feeding to make it a seven-foot-long, wickedly pointed expression of his own appetite for destruction.

The Djinn called it the Unmaking. It was, as best I understood the physics of it, stable antimatter, capable of destroying anything he wanted to destroy.

Including removing Djinn from the fabric of the universe.

“Oh, Bob, that’s just sad,” I said. His grin broadened. “Seriously, why can’t your type ever grow a discus for a weapon, or the world’s largest potato? How come it’s always so—phallic?”

Bob ignored the opportunity to banter, and stepped out into the storm. He looked up at it, into the heart of it. I knew what he was seeing—the raging engine of destruction, the primitive mind forming behind it. This was a living thing, this storm—a predator, yes, but a natural one, like a tiger or a puma.

He ground the butt of his spear against the dirt, and a blinding pulse of something that wasn’t light, wasn’t heat, wasn’t rightwent up from the pointed end of the spear into the storm.

Again.

Again.

With every thump of that weapon against the earth, I felt the world itself shudder. On the aetheric, muddy red waves spread like blood from a mortal wound.

The force emitted from the spear had a sickening feel to it, and the color—if you could call it a color—was a poisonous, pallid thing, like the glow given off by decay.

The storm’s lightning suddenly flashed, but it wasn’t light.

It was dark.Photonegative energy, but here on the real world. He’d infected the storm itself, made it a force for destruction far different from any natural predator.

And then it flashed that unearthly emerald green.

“Almost ready,” Bad Bob said, and reversed his grip on the spear. Handling that much anti-energy couldn’t have been pleasant, even for him; I could see the skin blackening and flaking away where his hand touched the surface. “Ready for the cherry on top?”

He pointed the spear down at the ground, and drove it in. It went deep, even though he didn’t use any real force—as if it tunneled greedily on its own.

I felt the earth shriek in real pain beneath my ghostly feet, and the whole building shook. Grit filtered down in feathery whispers, and then the reallurch came.

The building exploded as force traveled up through the ground, pulverizing layers of granite into dust. The cinder blocks of the walls buckled, ground themselves into powder against each other, and the ceiling crashed in a twisting, tearing mass of wood and metal that was snatched away by the wind.

Nothing touched me.

I stood exactly where I had as the building disintegrated around me, ripped away by the howling Category 5 winds. The ground lurched like pounding surf underneath me.

Bad Bob rose up into the air, holding to the end of his spear. He kept rising.

The spear grew, and grew, like some poisonous tree with its roots sunk deep.

He broke it off at ground level. It shattered at the stress point with a musical, glassy sound I heard even above the shriek of the storm.

A palm tree toppled and rolled toward me. Through me. Bad Bob landed on the rippling earth in front of me, appallingly normal in this terribly destroyed setting, and used the remaining part of his spear as a walking stick. Thump. Thump. Thump.It echoed through me like the beating of Poe’s telltale heart.

Around us formed a little circle of clear air, stable ground, like the eye of the hurricane. It expanded, and other people appeared out of the chaos. Wardens, once upon a time. I recognized many of them, at least by face if not by name. His pets, his converts to his righteous war against the Djinn—not that Bad Bob cared a bean about killing the Djinn to benefit humanity. Oh no. Bad Bob cared only, and always, about his own ends, and whatever these pathetic, deluded people thought they were getting out of fighting on his side, they were bound to be disillusioned.

I assessed numbers. Might as well, since I was stuck here. It did occur to me that Bad Bob was showing me only what he wantedto show me, of course, but for all that, the guy who keeps showing off will eventually show you something he doesn’t intend to.

Bad Bob was one hell of a chatterbox.

Sixty of them.My spirits sank, which was no doubt what he’d counted on. He had numbers. Of course, we had more, but add to that Bad Bob’s Demon-derived powers and the neat trick of handheld antimatter that the Djinn could neither recognize nor defend against, and we were well on the train to Screwsville.

“You still think you can win?” he asked me. I didn’t answer, because I wasn’t sure I dared tell a lie right now, and a lie was all I really had. “Scared little Jo. It was always going to end like this, you know. You against me, and you never could take me.”

“I did take you,” I said. “You sadistic old bastard.”

He lost his smile and pointed the spear at me. “Wonder what happens if I give it a taste of you in your aetheric form?” he said. “Bet it’ll hurt like fuck.”

“Bet you don’t want to be around when I survive it and come to kick your sorry ass off the face of the planet.”

He laughed and grounded the butt of the spear again. “I always did like that about you. You got sand, I’ll give you that.” He leaned forward, eyes avid and wet. “Fight me, Jo. I love it when you fight me. It won’t matter in the end, but it’ll be damn fun. You thought by dragging the Wardens away from all those innocent people on shore you’d save lives, but I think you just made my job a whole lot easier. See? You were already working for me. And now you’re going to reallydraw your paycheck, peach.”

“Like hell,” I said.

He blew me a kiss. Back on the ship’s sofa, my body continued to twitch and writhe. Cherise sat down next to me, putting a hand on my forehead, then calling for help.

The sensation of her hand against my skin was just enough to form a link—a way back. I pulled. The black mark felt like Velcro, sticking me here to this spot, but I ripped and tore at it, struggling, and with a hissing snap I came free.

I called lightning.

A white blast of energy erupted out of the clouds overhead—clean, pale energy, not the poisoned kind he’d poured into the storm—and struck me squarely in the top of my insubstantial head, flooding through my form in a splintered glowing ladderwork, then blasting out into the ground.

It shattered the remaining connection that held me at Bad Bob’s command, and I flew backward through the screaming darkness, whipping past pitch-black writhing ocean, over half-seen bits of island, into calmer seas.

Into the massive, smugly sailing bulk of the Grand Paradise.

Into my body, with a lurch like a slap.

I came awake with a gasp that felt like a shriek. My back was burning, on fire, and I tried to lunge to my feet. It felt like my entire nervous system cut out, faulty wiring shorting and sparking.

I pitched off the sofa to the carpet and got a taste of rug.

Cherise was instantly on her knees beside me, trying to cradle me in her arms. I couldn’t let her touch me. Everything felt wrong, strange, bad, vile . . . and I wasn’t sure that it wasn’t contagious.

“No,” I panted, and crab-crawled back to jam myself against the bottom of the sofa. “No, leave me alone!”

“Help!” Cherise shouted. That got the attention of some passing crew members. A passing steward—I still didn’t know his name, but he was the one who’d been trying to manage the First-Class rebellion before we’d set sail—shoved aside the coffee table and reached down for me. “Miss, are you all right? Should I get medical help?”

I wrapped my hand convulsively around the white lapel of his jacket, and where my fingers gripped the fabric, it started to smoke and hiss.

He exclaimed and tried to claw his way free. I couldn’t let go. My hand didn’t seem to be mine,exactly; it was moving, and I could feel what it was doing, but it was holding him in place.