Gale Force Page 0,47

Lewis said.

Sasha folded his arms and sat back with a cocky smile. "Already done."

Lewis turned his attention to another Earth Warden, young but sharp. Heather something or other; I'd heard good things. "What about the package itself?" Lewis asked her.

Heather ducked her head shyly and studied her interlaced fingers. "Still analyzing," she said, so softly I could hardly hear her. "But there is definitely a high decay rate to what's inside. It's dangerous, most certainly."

"But not a bomb."

She looked up at him, then at us, wide-eyed. "Oh yes," she said. "It had a delivery system and a trigger. If you'd opened the package, it would have gone off and spread the contents."

"And the contents are . . . ?" David asked, in that cool, controlled voice so at odds with the look in his eyes.

"Antimatter," Heather said. "Antimatter colliding with any kind of matter will produce a violently energetic reaction. The by-products are - "

"There was a trigger?" I asked. "What kind of trigger?"

Her gaze slid away from mine, toward Lewis, and then back, as if she'd been seeking approval. "It looked as if it was adapted from a more traditional bomb-making approach. Timer and a small charge designed to crack the shell holding in the antimatter, spilling it out into the world."

"Not a skill you pick up at your local community college," Paul grunted.

"Unfortunately, it's not exactly rare, either. And with the Internet so helpfully offering tutorials for this kind of thing, it will be hard to track."

"The paper?" Lewis got us back on track. "The wrapping, the card?"

Heather brightened immediately. "That's a possibility, " she said. "If the Djinn can help us, we may be able to trace the card's history back and find out who came in contact with it."

But that experiment failed. I could have told them it would. When they brought in the card - in a heavily shielded container, since it was saturated with radiation - and presented it to Rahel, she just shook her head. "Nothing," she said. "I see nothing at all."

It was the same with David, and I could see his frustration and growing alarm. He'd dismissed all this at first, but there were too many of us now, and we were too credible. The Djinn had to believe us - but believing us meant accepting half a dozen impossible things. Heather, disheartened, reclaimed the thing and began to have it carted back to the lab for more tests.

I stopped her. "Can I see it?" I asked. She looked surprised. "Well, it was addressed to me. It stands to reason that I might see something others don't."

I doubted she bought that theory, but I really did want to see it. It had been meant for me. So had the bomb - for me and David. I supposed the first explosion would have killed me, and the antimatter would have done the job for David. . . .

Heather handed me a pair of protective gloves, draped a heavy shielding vest around my chest, and put a protective hood on me before she allowed me to reach into the container and pull out the card. It was, as Lewis had told me, a greeting card - a fairly nice one, actually, with a graphic of a wedding cake, a bride, a groom. Inside, cursive preprinted script read, Congratulations to the happy couple!

But when I saw what was underneath, I felt cold, clammy, and sick. It said, in plain block letters pressed deep into the paper, Sleep with the enemy, pay the price.

Beneath it was sketched a symbol, kind of a torch. The kind that peasants carry to attack the monster-dwelling castle.

I cleared my throat and turned the card over. "Was there anything else?" My voice was muffled by the helmet, but clear enough. I distinctly saw Heather shoot another of those looks toward Lewis. "Well?"

"Give it to her," Lewis said. He sounded grim and calm. "No point in hiding anything."

Heather brought out another container. This one had several sheets of paper that had been folded in half - probably to fit inside the card or its envelope.

Plain white paper, no watermarking. Cheap quality. On it was printed in very small type a - I hesitated to call it a letter, because there was no hint of communication to it. A manifesto, maybe.

The Sentinels were declaring war on the Wardens, and they'd felt compelled to give us all their reasons. It was quite a list, starting with a detailed analysis of why the Wardens