even let on? Had he even known?
Of course he knew. It occurred to me, late and cruelly, that the reason Jonathan had kept him here had been to try to find a way to close the rift without killing him, or me. I'd thought it was a punishment, but it had been Jonathan's way of trying save us both. He and David had been working on a way to stop it.
Oh, God. I'd misunderstood so much.
Something changed in the room, a kind of stillness. Jonathan waved people away from the center space, turned, and glanced at me. Apparently, I was the only one who didn't get it. "Incoming," he said.
Rahel materialized in the space left open.
She was covered in roiling blue specks. Djinn shouted and stampeded backwards as the sparks began to fly up and out, looking for other hosts; Jonathan moved forward.
Before he got there, Rahel's yellow eyes went blank, and she collapsed in slow motion down to the rug. She was closest to me; I didn't think, I just reached down for her.
My hands sank into her, wrist deep. Not that she was misted-that would have been better, oh God, far better. No, what I sunk into was flesh the consistency of warm butter, bathed in blood and melting muscle. I hit the relative hardness of bone but it was melting, too, dissolving like wax in the sun.
She was trying to say something to me. Her lips were whispering, anyway. I yanked my hands back, trembling, and stared at the smeared warm mess clinging to my skin. Her open eyes flared from a violent storm-black to a pallid blue, shifting colors like a wildly spinning prism.
"Joanne!" Jonathan snapped. He dropped to his knees next to her, extended one hand over her body, and reached out to me with the other. "Get your ass back. She's contaminated."
I could see the energy spilling out of his outstretched hand, golden white and so intense that it seemed to warp space around it. Pure life energy, keyed to the magic of the earth. Healing energy. David had said that Jonathan was the strongest of the Djinn; I hadn't quite believed it, until now. He was doing this even here, cut off from everything . . . That was the legacy of his birth, his connection to the Mother. Of all the Djinn, he was the only one with power of his own.
And it didn't matter. The damage just kept getting worse-flesh slipping from muscle, muscle dissolving to mush. The soft-focus gleam of bone beneath.
She cried out, once, and I felt her agony vibrating through the aetheric. I forced myself to look at her in Oversight; she was crawling with those blue specks, and they were alive, moving, eating.
She was being devoured. But they'd been all over me, all over David, they hadn't hurt us, God, what the hell . . .
"Stop it," Ashan said. His voice was raw, colorless. "It's done. You can't save her."
Jonathan ignored him, ignored everything. He was focused on Rahel, fiercely intense, and the power flowing out of him just kept increasing. I felt it like a pressure against my skin, saw others shying away from it.
Rahel's skin continued to slough away, revealing soft wet masses of tissue. The skin misted as it fell away. Slowly, layer by layer, the muscle began to peel back as well. Jonathan kept trying, uselessly and furiously, to keep her together.
"Stop," I said, feeling the words turn in my throat like razors. "Please. He's right, you're just making it worse. Let go."
His face was pallid and damp with strain, and his eyes were glittering with frustration, but he released the energy and dropped his hand back to his side. He didn't move, though. I don't even know if he could move, by then. I felt the energy flow shut down and watched as Rahel's body melted away into a fetid, oily mist.
Gone.
She was still screaming when she vanished.
"Is she dead?" I blurted. Nobody answered. I don't think they could. I had a cold flash of certainty that it was worse than that, far worse, out there on the aetheric. It was a horrible way to go. No wonder Jonathan had shut Ashan down so hard on the very idea of just letting Djinn stay trapped there. It was unforgivable.
What about David? I closed my eyes and reached for that silver