djinn wars 02 - taken (24 page)

“I can practically hear the gears turning from over here,” she remarked, picking up her glass of wine.

“That bad?”

“Basically.” She sipped some chardonnay, then set down the wine glass and gave me a very direct look. “I can’t promise you anything, Jessica. I was watching the two of them today because of a fluke, but I don’t get guard duty very often.”

The two of them.
I’d been wondering if I should ask if the missing Chosen were being held along with Jace and Natila, but Julia’s comment seemed to indicate that she’d only been guarding the two djinn and no one else. Instead, I inquired, “Margolis doesn’t trust you?”

“I’m not sure it’s a matter of trust, more that he’s got plenty of people willing to play soldier, and my talents are better utilized elsewhere. Or at least I’m pretty sure that’s what he would say if I asked to babysit the djinn on a regular basis.”

Captain Margolis’ purported views on the subject didn’t surprise me, but the tone of Julia’s remark did. I hadn’t even needed to ask the question — she knew what I wanted. Unfortunately, it didn’t seem as if she was in a position to give it to me.

“And there’s probably no use in appealing to Dan,” I said, half to myself, but Julia picked up on the comment immediately.

“Um, no. In general, asking a guy who has a thing for you to assist in a jail break for your current lover isn’t recommended.”

“Dan doesn’t have a thing for me.”

She cocked an eyebrow. “Have you spent five minutes around him? He’s always staring in your direction with this moony expression on his face, but trying oh, so desperately to look casual. We might has well all be back in high school.”

Right then, I kind of wished I was back in high school. All the angst of those years felt like a cakewalk compared to where I was now. Voice steady, I said, “I think you’re exaggerating just a bit.”

“Mm-hmm.” But maybe she could tell I was starting to get annoyed by her pursuit of the topic, because she abandoned the subject, saying, “All I know is that if you’re going to try something, it shouldn’t wait too long. Miles isn’t going to stop building those devices, and the more he has, the harder it will be. Luckily for you, they’re not something he can just whip out in a few days, or even a week. But he is getting faster at it. Practice makes perfect, I suppose.”

“Great,” I muttered. I had a sudden vision of one of those damn things being handed out to everyone in Los Alamos, creating a field so vast that no djinn could ever hope to escape it. All right, that was probably exaggerating the situation just a bit, but I would take Julia’s words to heart all the same.

Whatever move I made, I would have to do it soon.

But even though I promised myself I wouldn’t let the matter lie, I wasn’t given much of a chance to formulate any kind of plan. The day after that, while I was off trying to teach a group of kids who looked as if they’d rather be building snow forts or going snowboarding the importance of subject/verb agreement and why plants are green, apparently a large group of guards, directed by Captain Margolis, showed up at the justice center and hustled Jace and Natila away. They weren’t going far, but they might as well have been spirited off to Alcatraz for all I could do to save them.

They had been taken to the lab facility.

“Why?” I whispered to Julia, feeling the cold clench of despair in my gut after she told me what had happened. The whispering wasn’t strictly necessary, as the commander was still up at the labs, but for some reason, I couldn’t help myself. The timing had to have been a coincidence, although I couldn’t help wondering whether someone had overheard our conversation at Pajarito’s and ratted us out. No, that couldn’t be it. Otherwise, I probably would have been locked up in Jace’s former cell, and Julia would have at least been questioned, if not held as well. But here we both were, collating reports for Margolis as if this was just another afternoon at the office.

“I don’t know why,” Julia responded, also in hushed tones. “I didn’t have any advance notice. Around ten this morning, I saw a white van pull up out front, along with a couple of trucks and that yellow Hummer they use whenever they want to look intimidating. There were about ten people in uniforms, and they all came inside and went straight to the detention area, then came back out again a few minutes later. Or at least I assume they went to the jail, because when they came out, they had two people with bags over their heads with them.”

Shit.
Shit
. The only two people in Los Alamos who could possibly be on the receiving end of that kind of treatment were Jace and Natila.

“And then they drove off. It looked to me as if they were heading toward the labs, as there isn’t anything else in that direction.” Julia paused then and gave me a sorrowful look. “I’m so sorry, Jessica. Here, maybe you would’ve had a chance. But at the labs?” Her shoulders lifted, and she reached out and gave me an entirely unexpected squeeze on the hand. Yes, we’d been friendly, but this was the first time she’d ever touched me, and I was moved by the gesture. Because of her past, it probably wasn’t easy for her to reach out to another person. “You’ve been there. That facility is huge. They could be keeping your friends almost anywhere.”

“Do you know it well?” I made sure to keep my tone as calm as I could. Now was not the time for me to lose it, even though inwardly I was fuming in a mixture of frustration and rage, and mostly just wanted to scream at the injustice of it all.

“The lab?” she asked, then shook her head. “No. I mean, I went up there once or twice with the commander so I could take notes during his conversations with Miles, but he stopped taking me a while back.”

“Did he say why he didn’t have you go with him anymore?”

“No.” A brief pause then, as if she were stopping to puzzle it out. “In the beginning, when we were still communicating with other groups, Miles was trying to get the word out about the devices he’d created, and Margolis wanted me there to keep a record of those conversations.”

That explanation made another question pop into my head. “Could other people make the boxes as well? They look sort of…complicated.”

“Most people, no. But the group in L.A. had someone with them who’d worked at JPL — you know, the place where all the rocket scientists hang out in Pasadena?”

I nodded. Left to my own devices, I probably wouldn’t have paid JPL or rocket scientists any particular attention, but my father had loved all that stuff, and if there was a launch or coverage on the news of the Mars Rover landing or whatever, he’d stop to watch it if he had the time. Remembering that about him made a little pang go through me, and right then I missed him so much that the longing might as well have been a physical pain. It was different from my need for Jace, although no less strong. I had to believe that my father would have understood why I had to rescue the man I loved, even though he was not precisely a man at all. Love was love, in whatever form it might take.

Julia went on, “Well, the guy from JPL seemed to understand what Miles was talking about, and it sounded as if the Los Angeles group was in the process of constructing their own device. That was what Miles had been dreaming of — getting every survivor group equipped with one so they could protect themselves.”

If I hadn’t had a vested interest in making sure one particular djinn got as far away as possible from those goddamn boxes, I would’ve agreed that was a great plan. The only hope for the Immune was to have the ability to defend themselves, and, as far as I knew, Miles’s device was the only thing that seemed to work effectively.

Maybe too effectively.

“What’s his deal, anyway?” I inquired. “That is, I understand being angry about what happened and wanting to do something about it, but this obsession of his feels almost too personal.”

“For him, it is. He lost his wife and baby daughter to the Heat.”

That was about the last thing I’d been expecting Julia to say. Miles Odekirk was one of those people you had a hard time imagining having sex at all, let alone procreating. But it seemed his losses had been just as profound as anyone else’s.

I only managed to get one word out in response. “Damn.”

She let out a tiny breath, barely enough to be called a sigh. “I know. I can’t imagine what it must be like to lose a child. That is, all of us have suffered losses, but there’s something particularly horrible about that. Anyway, losing his family is what’s driving him. I don’t think he’ll ever let it go. And now that he’s got two captive djinn?”

“He’s never going to let
them
go,” I whispered. Although the office was heated well enough, ice seemed to be filling my veins, killing all hope. I remembered too well what the lab facility had looked like — building after building, all with what had seemed like miles of corridors. Jace and Natila could be anywhere in there. Anywhere.

And if I couldn’t find them, how in the world could I possibly save them?

Chapter Thirteen

As I’d anticipated, Evony didn’t take the news at all well.

“Goddamn sons of bitches!” she growled as she stood at the kitchen sink, rinsing away the last of the day’s grime from her hands. For someone who took as much care in her appearance as she did, she didn’t seem to worry too much about her fingernails, only that they were clean. She kept them clipped short and didn’t bother with polish.

“I know,” I said. I was leaning up against the counter, Dutchie at my feet. It wasn’t quite suppertime yet, and the dog knew better than to beg, but she kept looking up at me wistfully, hoping I’d relent and get dinner for her a few minutes early.

After she plucked a dishtowel from where it was hanging on the handle of the refrigerator door, Evony dried off her hands, then tossed the towel on the countertop. By then, I’d given up protesting every time she did that. Instead, I picked up the dishtowel and put it back where she’d gotten it. At another time, she might have smiled at my anal-retentive behavior. Right then, though, she was scowling, and didn’t even seem to notice.

“So,” she said at last, “what’re you going to do?”

Great. Not exactly the response I was hoping for. “Actually, Evony, I kind of thought this was going to be a ‘what are
we
going to do?’ kind of conversation.”

Still frowning, she went over to the refrigerator and got out a beer. It was the last one of the six-pack, since we wouldn’t get a new allotment until the following week, and, judging by the way she tossed the empty box in the trash, I could tell the realization only made her that much more angry. True, she could buy herself drinks at Pajarito’s or at one of the other bars in town in the interim, but that meant using up more of her work vouchers.

She popped the cap and took a long pull at the beer, then said, “I don’t know what the hell we should do. That place is huge. Or at least, it looks huge. I’ve never been inside. You would know better than I do.”

“I was in
one
building,” I protested. “There’s at least ten of them, I think. So I have no idea what they’re all like.”

“Probably crawling with guards.”

“I don’t think we have enough survivors here in Los Alamos to make the lab or anywhere else ‘crawl’ with guards, but yeah, I’m sure there are enough to make things difficult.” I wondered then if Dan was among them. He was on the perimeter guard rotation, and I thought he’d put in a few shifts at the jail at the justice center, but of course he would never mention such a thing to me, and not just because the djinns’ presence in the holding cells was supposed to be a secret. Julia’s teasing aside, I knew he was interested in me, and admitting that he’d been playing prison guard to my captured djinn lover was not something he’d probably find too appealing.

But because I knew I wasn’t brave enough to ask him openly, the question of whether or not Dan was now being stationed as a guard at the lab was sort of moot. About all I could hope was that any plan I did come up with wouldn’t involve him directly. I’d hate to see him get blamed in case Evony and I somehow did manage to free our two djinn.