Gale Force Page 0,20

block of metal, dented and rusted, with inert panels of darkened indicators. I summoned the floating light closer as I walked around it.

"Should be close," Silverton said. In the dark, his voice sounded like the whisper of a ghost. And there were ghosts down here; I could feel their presence on the aetheric. People had definitely died hard in this place. Enough of them could have spawned a New Djinn. Nobody knew where the Old Djinn, the ones from the dawn of time, had come from, but the newer ones were born out of enough energy being set free at the same time. Disasters and mass killings were particularly prone to it.

I kept looking into Oversight and templated it across the real world as I eased around the generator. Whatever this thing was, it ought to be right there . . . and it was.

It was a severed head.

I screamed and recoiled - reflex - and slammed into Silverton's hard chest. He steadied me, moved me out of the way, and crouched down to stare at the dead, still face.

"That's a Djinn," he said softly.

"Can't be." I was getting control of myself again, willing myself back to some kind of mental balance. My heart was still thumping like a speed-metal drummer, but my hands were only shaking a little. "Djinn don't die. Not like that. And they don't leave corpses when they do."

"This one did," Silverton said. "Recognize him?"

I didn't. I didn't want to, either. "How can you cut the head off a Djinn?"

"You can't." Silverton reached out and touched the head. It wobbled backward a little, but didn't roll. "He's buried in the concrete up to the neck."

Okay, that was - if possible - even creepier. "What about the black thing? Is it him?"

"No," Silverton said. "It's inside him. We have to get him out."

He put both hands flat on the floor, on either side of the Djinn's head, and the concrete began to liquefy. Silverton reached into the wet concrete and gave me a glance. "Grab his other arm."

Last thing I wanted to do, but I did it. I reached down into the cool, wet cement and found something that felt more like flesh than liquid, and pulled. Silverton matched me, and we stood and walked backward, still pulling.

The Djinn's body slipped free, covered from the neck down in a gray, dripping mass. He was naked, and he looked very, very . . . human. The only way I could tell that he wasn't entirely human was the gauzy signature on the aetheric, barely perceptible now that we had him free of the ground.

Silverton was right. The black knife was inside him, driven in like a spike. This close on the aetheric it looked even deadlier than before. Glittering, sharp, lethal.

Silverton took a deep breath. "We're going to have to open him up."

I ran through all the reflexive denials and arguments in my head, and finally said, "You tell me what to do."

Silverton reached in his backpack and pulled out two pairs of thick, black rubberized gloves. He handed me one and donned the other pair, then took out a long, wicked-looking knife.

"You going to be okay?" he asked me. I must have looked pale. I nodded, poured on the power to the light drifting overhead, and swooped it closer to give Silverton as much visibility as possible. "Quick and dirty. We're not doing an appendectomy here. This is an autopsy."

I had no idea what a Djinn looked like beneath the skin. Human, I supposed - full of organs and blood and nerves and all the things that sustained us.

I was wrong about that. Maybe this Djinn had only assumed a human shape, or maybe the black thing inside him had corrupted him from within.

In any case, as soon as Silverton's knife pierced the graying skin, what poured out wasn't blood. . . . It was a toxic black liquid, like oil. It didn't leak; it pumped - as if some part of him was still alive. God, I hoped that wasn't true.

Silverton didn't pause, but his face went tense and still. He ripped the knife from neck to groin in one fast motion, put it aside, and yanked the cavity open. "Hold it," he snapped at me. Before I could come up with the very good reasons why I didn't want to do that, my gloved hands moved, grabbed the slick edges, and braced it open for him.

Silverton reached inside the Djinn, got both hands around