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him to knock him back a step.
Ortega was dead. His eyes had gone black, burned and lifeless, and his skin was a dull, dusty gray, as if he'd turned to stone. David joined me, standing close but not touching.
"It's not your fault," I told David. I could only imagine that he was thinking about ordering Ortega to come here, because he'd known there was a chance. . . .
But that wasn't what he was thinking at all. David cocked his head slowly to one side, staring at the dead Djinn, and asked, very quietly, "Who is he?"
Chapter Twelve
None of the Djinn knew him, not even Venna, when I insisted that she be summoned from whatever beach resort Ashan had decided to take his people to for the duration of the crisis. I wasn't sure that Venna would come, but she'd always been her own master, and that hadn't changed just because Ashan thought it had. He might be her Conduit, but he'd never own her.
Venna, dressed in her vintage Alice outfit, paced slowly in front of the wall and Ortega's body, studying him closely. It was eerie, seeing that kind of detachment packaged in the body of a little girl who almost radiated innocence.
She and David were the only ones allowed near the body at all. The entire room had been cordoned off in space-age-looking shielding, and all of the rest of us were being thoroughly checked out by a radiation team. Not surprisingly, we'd all gotten a dose. "Not that it's as unusual as people think it is," said the Chatty Cathy in the hazmat suit who was drawing my blood. "The average American gets about three hundred fifty millirems a year, just from the environment. Hey, want to know the weird part? Forty millirems of that comes out of our own bodies. We're little fusion reactors, you know. Potassium-40 in the brain, Carbon-14 in the liver." She was chatty because she was scared, though her hands were steady enough. She must have realized it, because she sent me an apologetic glance through the plastic visor of her space suit. "Sorry. I jabber when I'm nervous. This is just - well. They don't exactly train you for this at NEST school."
I wondered what the government had been told, or was telling them; the whole thing was founded on need-to-know, and I doubted even this woman had a clue. There were some FBI agents stalking the scene in their trademark dark windbreakers, talking into cell phones. Lots of cops. Fire department.
And reporters. Lots of reporters, a cresting wave of them held back by a sandbar of uniformed police around the perimeter. I could hear the dull thud of news helicopters overhead. No doubt we were in heavy rotation on all the news channels.
In the shielded room, Alice finished her inspection of Ortega and came out. The NEST doctor working on me muttered something under her breath, but she kept her eyes down and focused on what she was doing. Keep on living in denial, I thought. Safer that way, lady.
Venna came up to my side and stared at the needle in my arm. "What is she doing?"
"Taking blood."
"Is she going to give it back?"
"Venna, what did you sense in there?"
"He is not a Djinn," she said. There was no doubt in her voice at all. "I don't know what he is. Or was."
"He was a Djinn," I said. Venna slowly shook her head. "Venna, that was Ortega. You know Ortega; you remember him - "
Another slow shake of her head. It was exactly the same response I'd gotten from David, and from two other Djinn he'd summoned. None of them recognized Ortega at all. They didn't classify him as human; they didn't classify him as anything. Certainly, not anyone.
I thought with a sudden hot pang of the Miami estate, all that fascinating, rich chaos that Ortega had surrounded himself with. I'd barely met him, but I was the only one who could mourn him.
"Never mind. Thanks for the help," I sighed to Venna, who cut her eyes sharply toward the doctor, who was withdrawing the needle and applying a bandage to the bend of my arm. "You know about Rahel?"
"That your enemies have her? Yes." Venna continued to stare at the doctor, to the extent that the poor woman fumbled the tube she was holding, but caught it on the way to the floor. "I do care, you know. But this is a mess humans made, and humans must