my mind, each worse than the last - poison gas drifting through the sealed corridors of the ship, killing everyone it touched. Or maybe I'd just blow a gigantic hole through the bottom, sending this beautiful floating coffin down to join other famous wrecks. I could almost see that one - the foaming rush of the sea through the shattered hull, the rooms filling up, all these people trapped and dying...
God,I wanted to do it.
I couldn't let this happen. I couldn't be the cause of so much death.
Bad Bob had done one thing for me, thanks to this little exercise in hellish torment; he'd shown me how to break loose. I wasn't trapped in my body; my body existed separately from my spirit, connected only by random impulses and autonomic functions. I pulled away and stretched to the limit. I arrowed up into the aetheric, feeling the bond stretch and pull, thinner and thinner. At the top of the aetheric, there was a flickering white milky light - the boundary of another world above that one. Another plane of existence. The Djinn could pass through it. Humans couldn't, not even Wardens.
I touched it, trailed ethereal fingers against the barrier, and looked down. Distances and heights didn't mean the same things up on the higher planes, but in this sense they did -
there was a form of gravity, and momentum, and forces that translated from the aetheric back to the physical.
I let go, turned, and put all my power into an accelerated dive back to my physical body.
Instead of letting myself fall , I raced , gathering as much force along the way as I could.
Pulling it directly from the aetheric, like the wake from a speedboat. I'd never tried this; I knew that there were Earth Wardens who had, who'd managed to get a power boost through this technique. It wouldn't last, and it came at a heavy cost, but it was at least something to try.
They never told me how bad it would hurt, though .
Hitting the physical form of my body had a psychic shock wave, like slamming head-on into a bank vault at eighty miles per hour. Then the aetheric wake slammed in behind me, temporarily compressing me inside.
I blew it out through the mark on my back, channeling it through the black lines. It overloaded within an instant, shocking the mark into silence, sending it back into its containment state.
I raised my head and looked David in the eye and mouthed Help . I didn't know if he'd believe me or not - I almost hoped he wouldn't - but without him, I knew that sooner or later this was going to end in my death.
My whole body was trembling, anoxic, on the edge of unconsciousness. I couldn't create oxygen from the toxic soup of molecules left inside this bubble; I'd have to break the shell, get some kind of feed from the outside.
Or maybe I'd die. That wasn't a bad solution, all things considered. Not my fave, admittedly, but it would save innocent lives, and -
David's outstretched palm pushed through the hard shell of air. Stress fractures formed as white cracks around his fingers, and then he broke through, and a rush of delicious air fanned my hair back from my face. The bubble disintegrated. I dropped facedown to the floor.
A weight settled on top of me - David, straddling me. Slamming his hand down on top of the black mark, and if I'd thought that sucker was painful already, this was a thousand times worse, so bad that I couldn't stop screaming, writhing, trying to claw my way out of the pain.
"I'll kill you!" I was screaming. And worse. And I meant it.
Lewis took my wrists and held me still. Somebody else grabbed my flailing legs and anchored them. It was like old-style surgery without the benefit of anesthesia, this feeling of something vital being cut out of me, bloody and dripping...
And then it stopped.
I collapsed, sobbing helplessly. I couldn't feel David's hand on my back. I couldn't feel anything from the nape of my neck to my waistline; it had all gone icily numb.
"Mother of God," someone among the onlookers murmured, and the tone was so appalled that I wondered just what he was seeing. I didn't care. It was enough that it didn't hurt, just for a few precious breaths.
"Get the medical team," Lewis said. His voice sounded strangely rough, low in his throat.
When I turned my head and focused