Текст книги "Unknown"

Автор книги: Rachel Caine

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I had no idea what we would be coming into in the promised seconds, but the seconds counted down to zero.

Rashid hit the brakes with a violence that threw me forward, then back, and before I could open my passenger door he was out and pulling it open to drag me out. As he did, the ambulance disappeared.No, it was still there, but he had successfully hidden it, shifted it between times and realities. It was a rare Djinn skill, one I had never mastered; I hadn’t known Rashid was capable of such things.

It was good that he was. In another second, as he pulled me at a run away from the spot where the ambulance had been, a white– hot comet of fire hurtled out of the darkness, growing in size as it went, and detonated on the empty grass where the ambulance had been. It would have been utterly wrecked, and us with it. As it was, I felt the pressure wave and heat on my back, and smelled a faint scorch as the ends of my hair blackened. I stumbled against Rashid, who held me upright and pulled me onward, in a crashing run through underbrush, whipped by branches and slashed by thorns, pursued by something that I sensed coursing darkly through the trees like a bounding black pack of dogs. Our pursuers were silent. I tried to turn to face them, but Rashid wouldn’t allow it. Wouldn’t let me so much as slow to look.

“Let go!” I hissed at him. He sent me a burning look out of lambent eyes and ignored me. When I stumbled and almost fell, my feet twisted in tangled roots, he hissed, grabbed me, and threw me over one shoulder with his hand gripping the backs of my thighs. It was a ridiculous, helpless posture, but I dared not struggle. He was moving too fast, and with too much purpose. I tried lifting my head to see what was behind us, but between the veil of my blowing hair and the darkness, I could make out nothing.

And then, quite suddenly, Rashid’s body tensed, exactly as a human’s would have for a great effort, and I felt a tremendous force flow from him to hammer against the ground as he leapt. We rose into the air in a parabolic arc, and below . . . below . . .

Below was a chasm, a deep one, full of sharp rocks and killing drops. Too wide for a human to attempt to jump, no matter how foolhardy. Had I been running on my own, I would have stopped.

Looking down, I saw our pursuers burst out of the scrub into the small clearance between the brush and the cliff. Black as the shadows, vaguely dog-shaped, but with the physiques of bears and the speed of panthers. Nothing natural. Chimeras, forced together by the twisted but powerful skills of an Earth Warden of exceptional talent and madness. Two of them, moving faster than the others, toppled over the edge of the cliff and fell in a shower of stones and dirt to the rocks below—a drama that I watched as the arc of our jump began to decline again, and the far side rushed up at us with frightening speed.

Rashid landed, legs tensed, and barely paused before breaking into a run, again.

He only got a few steps before he stopped and bent to lower me back to the ground. I backed a step away from him, caught between a furious snarl and gratitude, and realized why he’d put me down.

“Well?” He cocked an eyebrow at me. “I’m yours to command, mortal. Temporarily.”

From all around us came the metallic clinks of weapons being made ready.

Chapter 9

LIGHTS BLAZED ON,brilliant as morning, illuminating us from two sides, and I saw human shapes stepping out of the trees—dressed in dark trousers, with bulky black vests and dark blue all-weather jackets. Most were armed with assault rifles. Those who weren’t were armed with handguns.

All weapons were pointed at the two of us. This didn’t pose much of a challenge for Rashid, but for me . . .

Agent Ben Turner stepped out of the shadows. His gun was in his holster. He looked exhausted, hollow-eyed, and angry.“You,” he said. “Down on the ground, hands behind your heads. Both of you. Do it now!” He speared Rashid with a glare. “I know you probably aren’t worried about us, but if you don’t comply, she gets shot. Understand?”

Rashid nodded, and without a flicker of his oddly amused smile, lowered himself with Djinn grace to his knees and laced his fingers behind his head.

Then he looked up at me, eyebrows raised.

“Unless you’d prefer to try martyrdom,” he said. “Entirely your choice, of course.”

I dropped to my knees, turning my glare instead to Agent Turner.

Who had tried to kill me.

I slowly laced my fingers together behind my head—one set flesh, one set metal—and watched as he nodded to his FBI team of agents, who swarmed forward to shove both Rashid and me forward and snap cold steel around our wrists before hauling us both to our feet again.

There was something odd about the handcuffs, and I tested them with a frown.

As I reached for power, a sharp, painful shock went out from the cuffs. “New thing,” Agent Turner told me, reading the surprise in my face with eerie accuracy. “We’ve been developing a few tricks the last few years. Some of us weren’t convinced the Wardens were a great thing for this country, what with all the egos and the corruption and unpredictability. We developed some countermeasures. That’s one. You try to use your powers, and you get shocked. The bigger the draw, the bigger the shock in reaction. So don’t try it. Trust me.”

“We,” I repeated. “So your loyalty is not with the Wardens.”

He shrugged. “Double agent,” he said. “I’m spying on the FBI for the Wardens. On the Wardens for the FBI. But only one of those is for real, and that’s the FBI side. As far as I’m concerned, if every Warden on Earth disappeared tomorrow, we’d be a hell of a lot better off. Speaking of that—” He reached out, flipped back the leather of my jacket, and found the scroll.

No!

I tried to fight him, but bound as I was, there was nothing I could do. I subsided, panting, as he pulled the case from my pocket. He smiled, and searched for the catch to open it.

There wasn’t one. It had sealed itself into a perfect hard shell, like hardened ivory. After a moment of fruitless poking at the thing, Turner put it in an inside pocket of his own jacket. “Something for the techs,” he said. “They’ll figure out how to crack into it. Once we have the list, we can start to manage this effectively.”

“To stop the abductions?”

“For a start,” he said. “More than that, we can start managing the Wardens, instead of letting them have an unlimited supply of governmental support and cash.”

His problems with the Wardens were, frankly, not my concern. Let Lewis Orwell and Joanne Baldwin deal with the political aspects of their organization; my concerns were much more basic. More personal. “You sent the man after me.”

“Him? Oh, Glenn, the guy with the car? Yeah. He was only supposed to tail you, and grab the scroll if he could. I assume, since you still have it, that it didn’t work out. Did you kill him?”

“Would you care if I had?”

Turner smiled thinly. “Oddly enough? Yes. I’d like to keep the funeral costs down on this operation if I can. And he was acting on my orders. That means I’m ethically responsible for him.”

I shrugged, which wasn’t particularly easy with my hands bound so closely behind me. “He shouldn’t have tried to threaten me with a knife. Or underestimated me. And your ethics are hardly what I would consider to be spotless.” I hardened my gaze and focused in on his face. “Where is Luis?”

“Not here,” Turner said. “So don’t go nuclear on me. It wasn’t my idea to take him anyway.” I didn’t blink. “He’s safe.”

“No,” I said. “He’s not.” I had not heard from him since Rashid and I had been taken prisoner, and although the connection remained, like a hiss of static between us, I thought Luis was unconscious. “He was being hurt.”

Turner frowned and said, “No, that’s impossible. I know—” He stopped himself, but it was too late; he’d already admitted to me that he knew far too much. I felt a primal growl building in the back of my throat, and I knew that my eyes were growing brighter, creating their own light stronger even than the brilliant halogen spotlights being directed on me. “He’s safe. That’s all you need to know. The Wardens aren’t in charge of this anymore. This is a government matter, and we’re taking control.”

I barked out a laugh of pure disbelief. “Really.”

A hand fell on Turner’s shoulder, and another man stepped up, eclipsing him immediately. Not for size; Turner was broader, taller, more physically imposing. This man, however—he was unquestionably in charge. He was small in stature, expensively dressed under his government-issue bulletproof vest and Windbreaker. It was hard to tell his age; anywhere between thirty and fifty, I guessed, but there was no trace of gray in the dark, neatly trimmed hair. Expressive dark eyes that somehow conveyed his regret and command without a word being said. He wore a wedding ring, a pale gold band on his left hand, and a silver ring with a red stone on his right. Like all the agents, he had a communications device curling around his ear.

Unlike most, he had no gun in evidence.

“Ms. Raine,” he said. “Or should I call you Cassiel?”

I stared at him without blinking, and didn’t answer.

“My name is Adrian Sanders. I’m the special agent in charge of this operation, in cooperation with Home-land Security, the ATF, and several other government agencies. So I’ve got a lot on my plate right now, not the least of which is that I have to worry about magicinstead of just good old– fashioned people wanting to blow things up.” He sounded faintly disgusted with the idea. “Luis Rocha is in custody at an undisclosed location. He tried to interfere when we took some people in for questioning.”

“Children,” I said. “You took childrenin for questioning.”

Agent Sanders cocked an eyebrow. “Ms. Raine, the way I understand it, our whole problem here is children. So absolutely, I need to question anyone who can help us get to the bottom of things. Including people below voting age.”

He seemed so reasonable, but there had been nothing at all reasonable about the pain Luis had been feeling. “I will see Luis Rocha,” I said. “Now.”

“No,” Sanders said in reply, flatly. “You won’t. Now sit your ass down on the ground, legs crossed, and don’t get up until we tell you. I’ve got bigger problems than you.”

I really doubted that.

Sanders turned away, pulling Turner with him; the two men conferred, backs to me, and Turner set off at a run through the trees with an escort of three others.

“Are you still standing up?” Sanders asked, without looking over his shoulder at me. “Because one way or another, you’re going to be on the ground in about ten seconds.”

Impossible to manage all the impulses to violence that erupted inside me; he was angering both my human andmy Djinn instincts, to deadly effect. I wanted nothing so much as to rip my hands free of these confining restraints and pour power through the man until he was a smoking hole in the ground. The rage was, in fact, frightening in its intensity, all the more so because it was entirely impotent at the moment.

“I’d do as he says,” Rashid murmured, and when I looked over, the Djinn was seated calmly on the ground, legs crossed, looking as if he’d chosen the posture for meditation instead of by intimidation. “They’ll kill you. They have orders to shoot until you’re no longer moving.”

The agents around me were aiming their guns, and Rashid was correct; none of them looked in the least like they would hesitate to fire if they felt it necessary.

I sat down next to Rashid, concentrating on regulating my breathing and the impulse to try to use my powers. The handcuffs were delivering stronger and stronger jolts, sensing the energy rising inside me, and my hands and forearms felt burned and tender from the repeated stabs of pain. I stayed perfectly still, eyes closed. Beside me Rashid was as immobile as the mountains.

Waiting.

Luis.

Nothing came back to me, save that wordless static. He was still alive, but incapable of conscious thought. Drugs, most likely. Or they’d hurt him so badly that his body had, in self-defense, taken away his awareness of the damage. Either way, it was not good news.

Turner had betrayed us, and now there were much greater concerns. Not just Pearl; the government. I had no doubts that Agent Sanders thought he was in control of the situation, and the day; he had no idea just how out of his depth he—and all his merely human colleagues—really were.

“This isn’t useful,” Rashid observed, after at least fifteen minutes of total silence. I pulled myself back from the contemplation of my own, maddening lack of control. “I agreed to help you fight, not help you surrender.”

I bit back my first response, which came with another jolt of pain from the controlling handcuffs. “Can you leave?”

“If I wish.” He let a beat go by. “It wouldn’t negate our agreement. We made a bargain. The fact that it didn’t turn out well for you—”

“Is beside the point, I know.I wasn’t born human.” I tried to moderate the snarl in my voice. “Could you take me with you?”

“Of course,” Rashid said placidly. “The question would be whether or not you’d survive. The odds are not good on that point. I’m not one of those Djinn who can safely convey humans through the aetheric and bring them out alive, and no matter how fast I am, they do have countermeasures.”

“Such as?”

“Ma’at,” he said. “One or two, not powerful enough to be Wardens, but powerful enough to interfere with you, slow you down. That would be enough to allow bullets to reach you. I believe if I try to take you with me, you’ll be dead.”

I considered that. My shoulders ached from the restraints, and I was thirsty. Exhausted. I needed sleep. But more than anything else, I needed to know that Luis was all right.

“I know we can’t alter the agreement,” I said, very carefully. “So I am not attempting to do so. I only say that should you wish to leave this place, no one will be able to stop you. And should you take the scroll from our friend Mr. Turner, I don’t suppose anyone can stop you from doing that, either.”

“Or destroying him like a small bug,” Rashid noted.

“Or that, of course.”

He didn’t move. I had supposed that a mere mention of the fact that he might lay his hands on the scroll would cause him to flicker out of existence and into Mr. Turner’s very nightmares, but instead Rashid sat, patient and silent.

I asked, “Are you waiting for something?”

“No,” he said. “But there’s no great hurry. I can take the scroll from him anytime I please. He is not the rightful owner. Therefore, it’s fair game to take it, so long as I return it to you.”

Was it? I didn’t know that; I supposed it made sense, by Djinn logic. I was specifically given the list—officially granted it by an Oracle. That meant it was my possession, exclusively, until such time as I voluntarily gave it up. Humans didn’t have those types of rules of ownership, which reflected the transfer of power on the aetheric; hence, Turner hadn’t thought twice about taking it from me.

But, I realized, the scroll itself wasn’t just some mere piece of paper locked in a case. It was living.

It was capable of reacting, as it had when it sealed its case shut.

I smiled slowly. “And if you take it into your hands without me granting it to you, it won’t open for you, will it?” I asked him. “That’s why you wanted to bargain for it, not simply take it from me. I have to give it.”

Rashid didn’t bother to deny it. “So in liberating it from your friend Mr. Turner, I am only its temporary custodian. Not a thief.”

“Not a thief at all,” I agreed. “Well then.” I felt my smile fading. “While you have it, you’ll be a target. Whatever you do, you must not let it be taken by Pearl or those she commands.”

“And now you’re putting conditions on me,” Rashid said, and shook his head. “Cassiel. I’ll do as I please, when I please, and you will have to trust that these things will also please you.” He looked up at me, and his eyes were bright and direct, entirely inhuman. “Time to go.”

He’d sensed something, but I didn’t know what. I nodded. That was all the goodbye we said, or needed; Rashid simply melted away, a whisper on the wind, and his empty handcuffs thumped to the ground where he’d been.

That got a reaction from the agents watching us—quick steps in to tighten the cordon, and one small red-haired woman with a pretty, no– nonsense face snapped, “Where is he?”

For all that they’d been briefed on the nature of the Wardens, the nature of the Djinn, the primal terror of a human confronted with the unknown was still there, showing in the tense lines of her body and the flash of disbelief in her blue eyes. She repeated her question, more loudly, pointing her weapon straight at me in unmistakable threat.

I ignored her as I tried to locate what had triggered Rashid’s sudden decision to depart. Nothing obvious; the government agents had control of this side of the chasm, separated from Pearl’s area by a harsh divide that would be difficult to cross without attracting notice. Likewise, Pearl couldsend her child-soldiers here, but even Pearl had her limits. I didn’t imagine she would stage an all-out assault against an armed camp of the FBI. Her followers weren’t Djinn; they couldn’t travel the aetheric at will. So their approaches would be human in nature—extra-human, possibly, but not Djinn.

I sensed no power stirring in the aetheric toward us. When I directed my attention toward Pearl’s camp across the divide I got a sense of shielded, harnessed, focus energy, like the potential of a bomb, tightly contained. Was Pearl there? I wasn’t sure she was. I wasn’t sure she was anywhere,in a purely physical sense. Her followers, yes, but Pearl could manifest herself in ways I didn’t fully understand, and that meant she couldn’t be tied down to a single focus.

Not yet.

I was still searching for a sign as to what had driven Rashid on his way when Agent Sanders, looking harassed and angry, strode back into the clearing. He looked at the spot where Rashid had been sitting, glared at the agents, then at me. I shrugged.

“Djinn,” I said. “He can leave when he wishes. There’s really not much you—or I—can do about it.”

“Your friend really doesn’t value yourlife too highly, does he?” Sanders said.

“He isn’t my friend,” I said. “We had an agreement, not a relationship, and my life is my own to worry about.”

“Yeah, you got that right. Come on. Up and at ’em.”

I had been sitting cross-legged for a while, and since my hands were still cuffed behind me, it was difficult to rise. Sanders assisted me with a hand on my arm, and kept the hand there as he directed me away from the clearing, past the watching agents, and down a game trail that cut through the brush.

We emerged into an open area where tents had been erected—camouflage canvas, sturdy government issue that had probably been used for everything from disaster relief to combat. They were large structures. One held cots and a meal area; the other, where Sanders directed me, had long folding tables covered with paper, maps, computers, and equipment whose purpose I couldn’t guess. Communications, perhaps. There were at least ten other people in the tent as we arrived.

Agent Turner was not among them.

There were also folding chairs, and Sanders sat me down in one for a moment to look down into my eyes. “Must be uncomfortable,” he said. “Hands behind you like that. Tell you what, I’ll cuff you in front, but I need your promise not to try anything stupid. I’m not your enemy. Your enemy’s out there, other side of that gully.”

I didn’t like making any kind of deal with Sanders, but he was right; my shoulders were aching, my arms trembling from the strain of trying to relieve the constant pressure. Sitting was awkward, at best.

I nodded.

“I’m going to loosen one cuff,” he said, “and you move both arms in front. No other stunts. You try anything woo-woo and my friend Agent Klein there will put a bullet right in you, are we clear?”

Agent Klein certainly was. He was a young man with curly brown hair and a semiautomatic pistol, which he held unwaveringly pointed at the center of my chest.

“I understand,” I said, and looked straight at Agent Sanders. “I will cooperate.” For now.

He did exactly what he said, stepping behind me to unlock one side of the manacles. I moved both hands forward, sighing a little in relief, and held them out, wrists together. Sanders reattached the cuff with a snap, and I felt a spark go through me—not enough to hurt, just enough to verify that the cuffs were still live. I lowered my hands to my lap.

“Better?” he asked. It was a rhetorical question, and that was very likely the only consideration I would get from him, so I did not respond at all. Sanders likewise didn’t wait for an answer. “So here’s what we know. We know that this camp over there is run by an organization of fringers. On their recruiting materials they like to call themselves the Church of the New World. They’ve got a Web site, bulletin boards, social networks, and a YouTube channel where they post all kinds of crazy, earnest crap about how we need to remake the world. Standard stuff, really; my team’s been tracking these guys for years. But in the last twelve months, something changed with them. They were talking a good game before, but all of a sudden they’ve got money, they’ve got recruitment, they’ve got real physical facilities set up in at least four states that we know about. You following?”

He paused to take a drink of bottled water. When I nodded, he walked over to a laminated map of the United States, with locations circled in red marker. La Jolla, California, where we were now. An Xmark was over a circle in Colorado, where the original version of the Ranch we’d found had been located. There were two more places circled. Both, to my eyes, looked remote, far from the nearest large city.

Sanders tapped the crossed-out circle in Colorado with the closed cap of a marker. “We were just setting up the surveillance for this place when you and your friend Luis busted the door and raised hell. Great job, by the way. Lots of dead people, missing kids, one hell of a mess left for us to try to make sense of. Thanks for that.”

“I was not aware I had to clear my plans for rescuing a stolen child with you.”

“Well, you do now.”

“For how long?”

“How does forever work for you?”

“Better than it does for you,” I assured him, and smiled, very briefly and sharply. “I don’t care about your problems, Agent Sanders. I want Luis Rocha. I want to rescue the children. I leave you to deal with the rest, if you can.”

Sanders dragged a chair over across the uneven ground, thumped it down in front of me, and sat with his elbows on his knees, leaning forward. He held my gaze as he said, “That’s not good enough. Far as I can tell, this is a Warden mess of some kind. A Djinn mess. And we’re in it now, because you people can’t take care of your own shit. So read me in, Cassiel. Right now.”

“ Read you in?”

“Tell me everything I need to know.”

“Simple enough. Nothing. Withdraw your people. Shut down your operation. Leave.”

Sanders sighed and sat back, folding his arms across his chest. The folding metal chair creaked in complaint. He looked over at Agent Klein, who was still aiming his gun straight at me, and said, “Greg, why don’t you get me and my guest a couple of cups of coffee? You drink coffee, right?” That last was directed at me. I said nothing. “Two. Thanks. This is going to take a while.”

Klein looked startled, and he looked over at his boss for a moment. “Sir? You sure?”

“I’m sure. We have an understanding, right, Cassiel? You try anything with me, and I will bury you and your friend Rocha so deep that the president and the Joint Chiefs wouldn’t have high enough clearance to even know you ever existed. You think Guantánamo was bad? You ain’t seen nothing yet.”

I blinked. “Are you trying to intimidate me?” I was honestly curious, because I had been cowed before—rarely—but it was not very likely to come from this man, with all his rules and limits. “Because for all your posturing, I don’t think you are a bad man. I think you are afraid of me. You shouldn’t be. As long as you don’t interfere with me—”

He gave a short, hard bark of laughter. “Interfere with you?Lady, you’ve done nothing but fuck up our lives around here since you landed on Earth. Now, you tell me what I need to know about how the Wardens and the Djinn are involved in this.”

“Or?”

“Or you’re not going to like me very much,” he said.

I didn’t like him now. I didn’t see how that would be much of a change.

He didn’t push me. Agent Klein returned with two disposable cups filled with thick black coffee. I accepted one and held it in both hands, breathing in the fragrant steam. Agent Sanders guzzled his.

“Where is Turner?” I asked.

“Sent him out,” Sanders said. “Figured that with the bad blood of him selling you out like that, you might want a piece of him. So you can consider him off the case, as far as you’re concerned. All right?”

“Turner worked with you on countermeasures for Wardens,” I said. “For how long?”

“How about I don’t discuss classified government programs?”

“Oh, I assure you, you will discuss it. Whether you discuss it with me, with Lewis Orwell, with Joanne Baldwin, with David or Ashan or some of the others—well, that is your choice. But that will be a much more . . . energetic conversation. One Mr. Turner won’t enjoy, I would think.”

“Turner’s our asset. We’ll protect him.”

I didn’t like the direction this was going. Inevitably, it would end one place—with a civil war between the normal human world and the human Wardens. The Djinn would not have to take sides, but some would. Destruction and wrath would follow.

It was, as Luis would have phrased it, a cluster fuck.

Which brought my mind back to the subject I was most interested in. “I want to see Luis,” I said. “Now.”

Sanders and I engaged in another staring contest. He finally broke it and looked at Agent Klein, who was standing at rest, with his hand not very far at all from his gun. “Get him,” he said.

“Sir—”

“Just get him.”

We waited in silence while Klein was gone. I sipped my coffee. Klein had disappeared around the edge of the tent, and I’d heard a vehicle start and pull away. They weren’t keeping him here, at their forward base; there was a secondary encampment, one where they would probably take me, eventually. There was no virtue in acting too soon. And the coffee wasn’t bad.

Agent Sanders had sense enough to know I wouldn’t speak again until my request had been fulfilled, so he stood up, drank his coffee, and conferred with other agents in the room. When he was done with that, he came and stood over me.

“You made it inside,” he said. “Actually inside the compound.” He sounded impressed.

“In,” I said. “But just getting in is not the problem. There are safeguards. Alarms. Guards.” I thought of the bear-panthers, coursing in packs in the trees, more effective than any human force that could be deployed. “If you think to raid that compound, you’ll be destroyed.”

“Oh, I’m not trying to raid it,” he said. “Not yet. But I’m veryinterested in exactly what you saw while you were there.”

“Nothing,” I said. “Manicured grounds. A gravel road. A large curved building that glowed from within. That’s all I had time to see.”

He tried asking me more questions, but I had already given him as much as he was going to get from me, and eventually he recognized that fact and fell silent.

Fifteen minutes later, I heard the growl of an engine, the crunch of tires, and then the silence as the driver shut down the vehicle. Slamming doors.

I stood up. That brought a change in posture from all the agents in the room—straightening, bracing, hands moving to weapons. “Sit,” Sanders snapped. I ignored him, and he pulled his sidearm, although he didn’t aim it. “Sit down, Cassiel. I’m not playing.”

Shadows at the opening of the tent. Agent Klein . . . and Luis Rocha.

My breath went out of me, because he was being carried on a stretcher by two other men. Unconscious. The men settled the stretcher on top of one of the folding tables and, at a nod from Sanders, withdrew to wait. Klein took up his post again only a few feet away, gun drawn.

I looked from Luis’s slack, blank face to Sanders. Everything seemed to have a red tinge to it, and I was having difficulty breathing.

“He’s alive,” Sanders said, as if that was even a question. “Whoa, Cassiel. Take it down a notch. He’s going to be okay. He put up a hell of a fight. They had to go hard on him, and then they had to put him out to treat him. He’ll wake up in a couple of hours.”

I saw blood on Luis’s shirt. I lifted the hem of it and saw a bandage as large as my hand beneath it, on his right side. Beneath it I sensed a cut, a long and deep one, that had perforated organs and nicked a bowel. The human physicians had repaired the damage with stitches, cleaned out wounds, and left him to heal.

“Take these off me,” I said, and held my cuffed hands out to Sanders without looking away from Luis.

“Can’t do that.”

I wanted to issue the sort of threat I would have in Djinn form: Refuse me, and I’ll destroy you, your colleagues, every trace you were ever alive.But, in human form, that would not only be extremely difficult to accomplish, it would also get me imprisoned, or shot out of hand.

“I can heal him,” I said, and put a note of pleading in my voice. It was not precisely acting. “Please. Let me help him. Otherwise it will take weeks for him to get back to full strength, and he risks infection.” I left unspoken the obvious: If Luis Rocha died of his wounds, or even complications of them, then he would be held responsible. Not just by me. By his superiors. By the Wardens. Possibly even by one or two Djinn with a random interest.

Sanders obviously recognized the risk.

He fixed me with a long, steady look. I tried my best to convey a lack of threat, although that was hardly my strong suit.

He sighed. “Fine. But you do anythingI don’t like, and Agent Klein here will shoot you a whole lot. Okay?”

He wasn’t waiting for my agreement. He unlocked the cuffs, both wrists, and removed them. They lookedlike regular handcuffs, which was curious; I had expected some small technological addition, but I saw nothing of interest.