in the air and funneled it away. As smoky as this room was, I realized it could have been much worse. Five men, each puffing away on cigarettes or twenty-dollar cigars for hours on end... made me gag nicotine to think of it.
I didn't see any signal, but a sigh went through the four remaining players, and three folded and one raked in chips. Lazlo gathered the cards and neatly shuffled them back together before handing them off to a Luxor-uniformed factotum. The dealer put the cards into an envelope, pulled a self-seal, and labeled the outside of the envelope with the date, time, and some kind of code number. So there could be analysis done later, I assumed, in case of an allegation of cheating. Nice.
He put a fresh, unbroken deck on the table and stepped away to stand like a statue in the corner, near the bartender.
"Now," Myron said, and gave me that parsimonious smile again, "let's talk about you, Ms. Baldwin. What brings you to Las Vegas?"
If he could ante up that fake a smile, I could see it and raise him on wattage. "Sun, fun, shopping..."
"Could it be that you're here to make a deal with Mr. Prentiss on behalf of the Wardens?"
I looked at Quinn. He was leaning up against the wall, arms folded, watching me with bright, uninformative eyes.
"Could be," I said. "Could be I'm here to kill him. Could be I'm just in the wrong place at the wrong time. That happens more than you'd think."
Myron laughed. "My dear lady, I can also see into the aetheric, you know. And while you are intemperate and occasionally unwise, you lack the necessary ruthless detachment to be able to execute young boys. Even in pursuit of the greater good. And besides that, the Djinn would stop you, you know. However, I think you actually believe you might do it, so I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and not consider it a lie." The laughter faded out of his eyes and left them chilled and scary. "You do not want to lie to me, my dear. Really, you do not."
"Chill Factor"
Okay, now I had a creepy bad feeling. They knew about the Wardens. They knew about Kevin. They knew about Jonathan. Was there anything these guys didn't know?
"Your attempt to stop him is foolish," one of the others continued. He was a short, gnarly-looking little man, approaching middle age but not yet arrived: slicked-back black hair, rimless glasses, eyes of no immediate impact behind them. "The Wardens need to stay out of this. They caused this mess, just as they've caused hundreds more in the past thousand years."
"Oh, okay. We'll just pick up our toys and go home." I smiled at Gnarly Guy, saw a faint flush spark high in his cheeks. "You do know about the temperature rise, don't you? Global warming? Impending ice age? Earthquakes? You do think we should do something to stop that, right?"
Silence. They all looked at me, and then Myron Lazlo said gently, "Actually, my dear, no. We don't. And that is our difficulty. The Wardens long ago exceeded their authority when they began to enslave the Djinn and force the world to their own uses. The system has long been out of balance, which is why you have to work so hard to keep it going. What you're speaking of is simply the logical result of so many mistakes. It can't be corrected by working even harder to control it."
"Then how can it be corrected?" I asked.
"By letting go," he said. "By giving up the illusion of control and allowing the world to right itself. That is the only way we can find our balance again."
"And how many millions is that brilliant strategy going to kill?"
"As many as it takes, my dear. If the Wardens had followed the right course a thousand years ago, we'd not be facing this kind of apocalypse now, but they refused to believe. More power, they said. More power will fix what's broken. But it won't, and you know that on some level, don't you?"
Things started to fall into place. "You've been fighting us."
"No," Myron said. "We've been correcting you. We stand on the side of the Mother. On the side of balance. We are Ma'at."
I stared at them, blank. They stared back. After a long moment, Myron smiled beautifully and nodded at the bartender.
"I believe our guest might require a drink," he said. "You favor whiskey, I believe? Although I find