Cape Storm Page 0,27

Fifteen."

"Then where did this one come from?"

He couldn't answer that. It was like his brain locked up and refused to produce an answer.

Instead, he shook his head, stubbornly unable to get past the paradox.

"Maybe Ashan sent another Djinn," I said. "A new one."

"You're sure this isn't one of his four?" Lewis asked.

"I'm sure." I'd seen the four of them, and Venna had been the only one representing herself as female. While the Djinn could change sexes, in my experience they rarely did it without a damn good reason. "This is insane. Can you get Ashan on the line and ask him?" David's attention went elsewhere, but only for a moment, and then he shook his head in the negative. "Venna's coming," he said. Before he finished the sentence, I caught sight of Venna's sparkly pink shirt at the end of the hall. She didn't seem to be in a hurry, but in the next breath she was there, standing at David's side.

"What's this?" she asked, staring down at the dead Djinn with academic interest. It was creepy.

"We were hoping you could tell us," Lewis said. "Anything?" She studied the body intently, then shook her head. "No. I don't know what it is." I cleared my throat. "Radiation?"

"Nothing dangerous left on the body," Lewis said. "It looks as if she died the same way the other Djinn did, from antimatter poisoning - but there's no residual energy. She's just - dust."

There wasn't any way to resolve this, not through the Djinn, in any case. "Thanks," I said to Venna. "Don't worry about it."

She didn't give it a second thought. She skipped off down the corridor as if stepping around dead, dust-and-ash bodies was an everyday occurrence.

"I'll be back," David said abruptly, and misted out before Lewis or I could protest. He was deeply bothered; I could see that, but there was no way I could help him. He'd have to come to terms with this, or not, in his own time.

"So what do we do?" Cherise asked. I'd almost forgotten about her. She was standing a few feet away, arms wrapped around her chest as if she was fighting off a chill. "We can't just leave the poor thing out here. God. I can't believe this is happening. This is just awful."

Lewis and I looked at each other, and I knew he was thinking the same thing I was: the way the body had disintegrated into dust and ash, I wasn't sure moving her was much of an option.

But it seemed like the only decent thing to do was to try.

"We'll save a sample," Lewis said. "Maybe we'll find some kind of clue if we analyze it in detail. But Cherise is right - we can't leave her here. And there doesn't seem much reason to store the body."

No, because we both knew the body was going to disintegrate as soon as we started trying to move it.

We retrieved a shower curtain and repurposed it as a body bag. There was something very disturbing about having pieces of the dead Djinn break off and float away as we went about it, but we managed to get her scraped onto the makeshift bier and carried her away.

Cherise didn't follow. She stood there, staring at the flecks and smears that littered the carpet. It looked like a spilled ashtray.

"Nobody even knows her name," she said. "That is just so - sad." Burial at sea was the best we could give our nameless victim. As Lewis and I tipped the crumbling remains over the railing, I felt we ought to say something, anything, but nothing came to my mind.

It did to Lewis's, though. "You may be forgotten," he said, "but you won't go unavenged. I promise you that. We'll find out what happened to you." Her corpse disintegrated almost instantly in the pounding waves, returning to the embrace of nature. I hoped that the vast intelligence that made up this world remembered her, named her, gathered her close.

I hoped that her life had mattered to some human, somewhere, who still had fond thoughts of her.

White spray was soaking my thin shirt and leaving my skin cold and stiff. Lewis's warm hand touched my back. "Inside," he said. "There's nothing we can do here."

"I'm tired of hearing that," I said. "I'm really tired of being helpless. Aren't you?" Turning, I caught the flash of outright rage in his eyes. "Yes," he said. "And we're not going to be helpless much longer, I promise you that.