Gale Force Page 0,69

He had whatever was in him, and no more.

Just as I did. Why was she on the side of the Sentinels? Or maybe it was simpler than that: Maybe she didn't want the Djinn interfering in our internal struggles anymore.

I could understand that. It did seem a massive waste of resources.

"Watch our backs," I told him, and focused on the glittering, complex, deadly snake of the tornado that was dropping toward us with the speed of a freight train.

It wasn't the classic rope-style tornado; this one was a brutal wedge of power. That was not necessarily a bad thing; the intensity of a tornado doesn't depend on its width. But if it was an F4 or F5, being a wedge tornado would make things that much worse.

Luckily, it wasn't quite that bad. An F2 at most, with wind speeds of about a hundred miles per hour - not bad, and not nearly as bad as it could have been. The Sentinels know how to make it look nasty, but that wasn't the same thing as truly building it right in the first place. I needed to reduce the core temperatures inside of the vortex, and I needed to do it fast. But as I reached out for it, the Sentinels sprang the trap.

A second tornado - this one a slender rope, and definitely built to the most exacting specifications - shot down out of the cloud beside the wedge I was focused on, and this one packed deadly, razor-edged debris. Metal, all kinds of metal junk and scraps. It was also spinning at a rate of more than two hundred miles per hour: F4.

One of them was going to hit. I could handle only one at a time, and I had no choice but to go for the worst. I abandoned the wedge and went for the rope, ripping into it with desperate force, drawing heat out of it as quickly as I could.

Not fast enough. I heard it hit the roof, which shuddered and groaned, and then heard the rising roar of the wind as it drilled through steel and wood and concrete.

People were screaming, running, looking for cover. They wouldn't find it, not in the store. "Outside!" I grabbed my salesclerk, who'd thrown my dress to one side, and pushed her to the door. David was grabbing everyone else he could find and shoving them that way as well. "Run! Get to cover! Go now!"

I'd succeeded in weakening the vortex down to an F2, but just then, the slower-moving wedge slammed down like a clenched fist, and the whole building shivered and began to come apart.

The two tornadoes, too close together for even the Sentinels to fully control, began to merge and feed off each other. The metal inside the smaller vortex spread out wider, slashing and cutting like the edges of knives as it whirled. Nobody had been hit yet, but they would be.

This had to stop. Now.

"David!" I screamed his name over the roar of the wind as the roof ripped off, disintegrated into a million tiny fragments of blowing chaos, and I felt the eye of the storm focus directly on me.

David put his arms around me from behind, anchoring me, and we faced it together. The power that flowed out of him was rich and strong, golden. It was easy to direct, capable of the finest touch and control.

Nobody did tornadoes better than me. I knew that without conceit; it was a gift, and one I'd had since childhood. For all their fury and force, they were fragile constructs, held together by finite forces. Like everything else, they had keystones. Change that one point, you could change everything.

This tornado's keystone was hard to find, hard to get my hands around, but once I found the specific area I needed to affect, I poured David's power into it, added my own, and the weight of oxygen and nitrogen cooled, slowing the tornado's spin, shattering the forces that held it in form.

It blew apart in a confusion of winds, pelting down debris like deadly, sharp rain. I yelped and ducked, and David formed a shield above us. Good thing he did. The Sentinels took one last, spiteful swipe at me, arrowing a metal girder directly for me, but it met the shield and bounced off . . . and slammed into the bag that held my dress, shredding plastic and fabric as the girder was driven a foot into the concrete below.

I stayed where