He didn’t want to sleep. When I stretched him out on the bed and placed my hand on his forehead, he still fought against the descending darkness. Something in him was too weary to go on—I could sense it—but some other part refused to let go. He’d spent a massive amount of energy in the past twenty-four hours, and I didn’t understand his resistance.

  His fingers wrapped around my wrist, but he didn’t pull my hand away from his forehead. Even at close range, in the dimness, his dark eyes looked like pools of shadow.

  “Promise me,” he said. “You promise me that you’ll get her back even if something happens to me. Promise. ”

  “I will,” I said.

  “Again.”

  “I will.”

  His fingers tightened. “Again.”

  “I will,” I said. I bent forward to brush my fingers on his parted lips. “Sleep.”

  His eyes drifted closed, and his grip loosened on my wrist, falling away.

  I had meant to give him only the slightest contact, but his lips felt warm and soft beneath my fingers, and I lingered.

  I stayed where I was until I was certain he was asleep, and then I moved to the small, stained armchair near the window. I watched the parking lot. There was little activity, and no one seemed to take an interest in our room.

  A thief approached my motorcycle once, looking around to see if anyone was watching; when he tried to roll it away, I softened the asphalt beneath his feet, trapping him, and opened the door. He stared at me, struggling to free himself from what must have seemed to him a nightmare.

  “Leave,” I told him, and restored the ground beneath his feet. “Don’t come back.” It seemed I should say something more constructive, perhaps. “And don’t steal.”

  He looked down at his oil-stained athletic shoes and ran.

  I went back to the chair, and before dawn came, I slid into a light, dreaming sleep.

  I woke up to the smell of brewing coffee and running water. The shower. Luis was bathing. I felt stiff and uncomfortable, but warm enough; I looked down and saw that he had given me a blanket sometime during my rest. I rose, folded the cover, and walked to the coffeepot. I poured two cups and carried them into the bathroom.

  Luis was a shadowy form behind the plastic curtain. I set the cup on the countertop.

  “Cassiel?” The curtain moved aside, revealing only his face. “What the hell are you doing?”

  “Bringing you coffee,” I said.

  “Yeah, okay, thanks, but—” He sighed. “Privacy’s not really a concept for you, is it?”

  I gave him a slow, thin smile. “Do you imagine I long to see you naked?”

  Put that way, he had no answer. He let the curtain drop back in place.

  I leaned against the counter and sipped my coffee, watching the shadowy form move, and when the water shut off, I went back into the bedroom.

  Luis dressed quickly. While he was doing so, I washed myself in the overheated bathroom. The cooler air of the bedroom felt good on my damp skin when I walked out, my clothing over my arm.

  Naked.

  Luis looked, a kind of involuntary inspection, but then he turned his back. I made no comment as I dragged on my underwear and clothing, layer by layer, with the leather on the topmost. “I am not shy,” I assured him. “It’s not a Djinn trait.”

  “Yeah,” he agreed. “I get that, actually.” He sounded very odd. He glanced over his shoulder, saw that I had clothed myself, and faced me again. “We’ve lost a lot of time.”

  “No more than we would have if we’d gone as we were, faced our enemies, and lost,” I said. “I have her trace now, on the aetheric. I won’t lose them again.”

  Not unless they realized the trick I had used to form the link, and found a way to break it.

  I had to hope that they had taken the child for a reason, because the easiest possible way to sever the link was by killing her.

  Luis drained the last of his coffee. “Let’s roll.”

  A quick stop to outfit us both with helmets, and we were on the trail. It was a short enough drive into the Jicarilla reservation. Outside of Albuquerque, the New Mexico landscape edged away into dusty sages, ochers, and reds. There was vegetation, but it was the hardy kind, living on little and surviving much.

  I felt an odd kind of kinship with it.

  As we traveled, I assessed Luis’s condition. He was stronger today, and his reservoir of power had replenished itself. That reservoir, in human Wardens, seeped in from the world around them, a kind of osmosis that I seemed incapable of copying. It would be easier to absorb some of that power through the contact of skin, but I found that if I concentrated and was cautious, I could siphon small amounts even through the shielded contact where his hands held my waist.

  I trembled with relief as his warm energy sank through my starved tissues, but I did not think he could feel it. The sensation was likely lost in the road vibration of the Victory as we sped through long, empty miles.

  The map had shown us the route that Isabel had followed, but our analysis of alternatives showed us better-paved highways where I could open the throttle on the motorcycle and rocket us along at much higher speeds. Illegal, and therefore a risk, but like Luis, I felt desperate to make better time.

  Ibby’s captors might be the same who’d launched such vicious attacks against Manny, against me, against Luis. If so, they’d shown little mercy or regard for innocents, and I could not be sure that Isabel’s tender age would make any difference to them.

  In two hours, we crossed the border into the Jicarilla reservation. There was little to mark it—faded signs and the same harsh country. State Highway 537 led through the heart of it.

  I pulled over to the side of the dusty road, into soft sand, to go up into the aetheric. Isabel’s position had moved on, but it was not far ahead . . . another two hours at most.

  I wondered why our enemies were moving so slowly. Surely a five-year-old child couldn’t hold back their progress so drastically.

  Unless . . . they meant us to follow. Why attack us, wasting their own energy, when they could force us to waste ours in pursuit, and trap us in the end?

  I didn’t speak of it to Luis, but I knew his thoughts would have led him to the same conclusions. The technique we had used to track the girl was rare, but not unknown among Earth Wardens; we had perhaps used a less common tactic, but if our opponents were as determined as I expected, they could have planned against it.

  And the Jicarilla reservation stretched across the border, from New Mexico into Colorado.

  “What are you doing? We need to get moving!” Luis said. He’d taken care of his call of nature, and mine could wait. “Something wrong?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “How many Wardens between here and the Colorado border?”

  “Zero. We’re stretched a little thin, you know, and besides, far as I know, there’s only one or two left in the entire state. Most of the top rank went to answer Lewis’s call on the coast. They’re gone now, out of the country.”

  I turned my head slightly. “Were you asked to go?”

  “Yeah.” His tone didn’t invite further conversation on the subject. “Why are you worried about Wardens all of a sudden?”

  I fixed my eyes on the far, shimmering horizon, where the black ribbon of the road rose up to meet the sky in a vanishing point, and I held out my hand to him. After a hesitation, he took it, and this time, I was the leader rising into the aetheric. We did not go far. We didn’t have to.

  When we dropped down again, Luis shuddered as he entered his flesh again, and said, “Damn. I was hoping they wouldn’t know we were coming.”

  “So was I,” I said. “Helmets.”

  “Helmets won’t help visibility,” he pointed out. “You’ll be driving blind.”

  “Put your hand on my back,” I said. “On my skin. I can use Oversight if you don’t let go.”

  “You think you can drive like that?”

  Blind? Using only the confusing information available on the aetheric to see? Possibly. What choice did I have?

  I watched the vanishing point on the horizon grow hazy, then disappear as dirty red smudged the clear blue sky in an uneven, growing line.

  What I was showing him in the aetheric was a sandstorm coming. A bad one.

  I donned my helmet. It wouldn’t keep out everything, but it would do enough to allow me to breathe—unless the plastic broke. I didn’t want to consider that possibility. Behind me, I felt Luis adjusting his own helmet, and then his hands slid up under my jacket, tugged my shirt from my trousers, and settled in a warm span on either side of my waist, skin on skin.

  The connection snapped tight between us, stronger for the touch, and I took in a deep breath.

  “Keep your head down,” I told him. “I don’t know what else might come out of the dark.”

  I pressed the throttle and threw sand on the still air, achieved the solid surface of the road, and the Victory dug into the asphalt, growling its challenge. I edged the speed faster and faster. It reminded me of old days, of horses thundering toward the enemy lines, of knights jousting, of a pure, clean purpose. Kill or die.

  The red line on the horizon boiled up and out, like ink dropped in water. I felt the forces driving it—not Earth but Weather, the interaction of cold and warm air creating this deadly and explosive windstorm. In wetter climates, it would have brought thunder and rain, but here it only lashed the land, picked up abrasive grit and rubbed it together, building its own energy within the sandstorm.

  The first gust of wind danced across the prairie, heading for us at a right angle. Tornado, my mind named it at first, but I knew that was not right. Gustnado. It didn’t matter what it was called, only that it hit us broadside in a stinging, powerful rush, and I felt the back tire of the Victory skid a bit, then grab traction again. The oncoming wall of sand grew darker as it came on—still red, but shading now toward brown as more and more light was blocked. It would blot out the sun altogether.

  “We can’t do it!” Luis yelled behind me. I didn’t have the time to answer. It was true: we couldn’t possibly affect the entire sandstorm, but I wasn’t trying to. All I wanted was a tunnel through it, a lessening of the intensity. We could do that. I was certain we could.

  I was certain until the moment I realized how huge the storm truly was. It had looked large from a distance, but it was monstrous now, and still growing larger. It covered the horizon in red-brown waves, rippling like silk, stretching to the heavens.

  A dusty, rattling pickup truck roared up from a side road, took the turn, and sped past us going the other direction. I heard the driver shout a warning to us. He was running.

  That was sensible. But on the other side of that wall lay the child we’d come to find, and I wasn’t willing to admit defeat. Not yet.

  “Stop!” Luis yelled. I barely heard him through the contact of our two helmets, as if we were in the vacuum of outer space instead of safe on the ground. “We can’t do it!”

  “Hold!” I ordered him. I bent my head, firmed my grip on the Victory, and kept rocketing forward.

  We hit the sand, or the sand hit us, with the force of a net stretched across the road. If I had not clung viciously to the motorcycle, we’d have been thrown headlong, likely killed. The Victory skidded, and I tried to right her, but the darkness and screaming sand had no direction, no dimensions. Which way was forward? Even my instincts flailed helplessly. The storm had reached an intensity that crackled with its own energy and power, a half-sentient monster whose only mission was to expand, consume, grow. Life, at its most basic.

  Oversight helped a little. I drew power through the grip of Luis’s hands on my waist and poured it in a laser-straight line through the darkness in the direction I thought was north. Even with his power and my ability to amplify and control, I achieved no more than a narrow window in which the sand was merely thick instead of smothering.

  I accelerated again, following the line. Around us, the walls of darkness swirled and lashed. The faceplate on my helmet was scratched first, then scoured into fog by the unrelenting blast. I felt a sharp pain in my leg, then another in my shoulder. Rocks. There would be more debris mixed in as the sandstorm’s power grew. It could pick up metal, barbwire, wooden posts.

  A strand of barbwire could decapitate me as easily as a sword, and for a moment, my courage wavered. I am going to kill us both. What would happen to Isabel then?

  Ahead, something flickered in the gloom. Oversight was a confusing boil of color, half-recognized patterns, nothing I could identify. . . .

  And then, with shocking suddenness, the patterns resolved into gray lines, snapping into angles.

  It was a car, and it was heading straight for us.

  Chapter 12

  I DIDN’T HAVE time to warn Luis, but from the strength with which he was holding on, he was in no danger of slipping from the bike.

  I veered sharply, out of our small tunnel of clearer air, into the heart of the storm. I had no choice, and even so it almost made no difference, as I felt the sucking rush of the car’s passage, and felt a hiss along the side of my boot where it bumped a passing tire.

  I couldn’t see it, because here in this lightless hell, there was nothing but screaming wind, burning sand, and false midnight. I had lost directions again, though there was still road beneath my wheels. I had to slow down, uncertain of where the road might end, and I coughed as sand began to filter in around my faceplate, coating my face in acrid dust. Choking me.

  Luis was right. We would not survive this.

  You’re afraid, the Djinn ghost of me whispered. Like a human.

  And once, I might have found that ridiculous or a matter for contempt. Now I found it a matter of survival. Every nerve in my body screamed in anguish. I wanted to hide, to curl up in a protective ball and wait for this terrible thing to pass me by.

  That’s your flesh thinking, the Djinn ghost of me said. That’s what they want you to do. And she was right about that. If this was a Warden-driven storm, it could hover in place, flaying the leather from my back, the skin from my body, like being caught in a sandblaster.

  I picked a direction based purely on instinct, and hit the throttle full speed. If I ran off the road into the sand, we’d crash and die in the storm. I won’t, I told the screaming panic inside me. I am in control.

  The tires chewed loose gravel in the dark. I took in a gasp, choked, coughed. My mouth was coated with dust.

  The handlebars of the Victory danced with hot blue sparks.

  I veered left again, off of the shoulder, found the edge by trial and error, and concentrated on short, shallow breaths as we sped into the boiling, punishing darkness.

  Something hard and hot slammed into my thigh and dragged loose. Metal, I thought. Wire, most likely.

  Faster.

  The storm could not last forever. Not even the most powerful Warden, the greatest Djinn, could keep this focus for long. Weather was the most unstable of forces, spinning apart under its own weight.

  Oversight showed me nothing, a chaos, an unending sea of flashes and smoke and fog.

  And then, dimly, a light.

  My scoured, abraded faceplate cracked with a sound like thunder, and the drift of dust behind it became a rushing torrent into my face. I squeezed my aching eyes shut. I was driving blind in any case.

  There was no way to draw breath, so I held it, struggling against the impulse to cough.

  Almost there. Almost . . .

  We burst out of the back side of the sandstorm, into stillness and drifting, smokelike dust. Overhead, the sky was a dull orange, the sun a shriveled dot.

  There was no road, only a flatter area of sand.

  I skidded the motorcycle to a stop and clawed at my helmet. The buckles seemed frozen in place, but it finally popped free, and as I removed it, the faceplate fell off in two pieces. The plastic was as gray and foggy as the eyes of a corpse.

  My helmet, on the front side, had been stripped of paint, reduced to dull gray. A fountain of dirt cascaded out as I dropped it to the road. More dust spilled as I bent my head. I coughed uncontrollably, spitting up dirty mouthfuls, and I finally felt Luis’s hands let go of me. I’d have bruises where he’d gripped, I thought, with every finger clearly imprinted.

  Luis got off the motorcycle and staggered a few steps as he tried to wrestle off his own helmet. He’d been protected by my body, but even so, when he turned, his face was a muddy mask of sweat and dirt. He coughed and spat, bracing himself with both hands on his knees, and shook his head.

  “Can’t believe we made it,” he croaked. I couldn’t speak at all, I discovered. My throat wouldn’t cooperate. “You okay?”

  I gave him a thumbs-up gesture. Running through my abused body was a rush of warmth, of ecstatic satisfaction.

  I had survived. I had forced myself through, and I had survived.

  As a Djinn, I had never understood how it felt to win against such odds. It’s only adrenaline, that old part of me scoffed. Illusion and hormones.

  Behind us, the sandstorm rolled on, howling, black as night. There was nothing we could do to stop its progress, nor was I inclined to try.

  I set my face forward, toward Colorado, where Isabel’s track still led.

  Neither of us could go on for long without some kind of relief. It appeared in the form of a dilapidated, barely operating roadside motel just shy of the state line. If it had a name, I didn’t see it, only the rusting, flapping sign that said MOTEL, and below that COLOR TV AND AIR-CONDITIONING.

  The Victory was coughing as much as I was, and I hoped that it had not been badly damaged by the sandstorm. It had blasted edges, pitted and smoothed, but seemed to have come through relatively unscathed. The same could not be said for me.

  I rented a room using gestures and the Warden credit card that bore the name of Leslie Raine. The attendant behind the ancient, cracked counter looked young and far too excited to see a customer. “Y’all were in that sandstorm?” he asked as he hand-cranked a machine to get an imprint of the card. I nodded. “Y’all are lucky to be alive,” he said. “Here ya go. Sign here.”

  I signed where he told me, using the name on the card. The boy was fascinated with my pink hair—still visible, though coated with dirt. “Not from around here,” he decided. “Dallas? LA? Las Vegas?”