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“I hear you,” I said distantly.

Luis’s face was set and hard, but his eyes were so worried. So vulnerable. “Not going to lie to you, this is going to hurt like hell, so I’m going to turn off your nerves for a second. Hang on, okay?”

I nodded placidly.

Then I was sitting on the floor. I don’t know how; it seemed like life had jumped its tracks for a moment, as if a few vital seconds of my life had been erased, crudely and utterly destroyed.

Whatever trauma I had felt, those seconds were gone, utterly vanished. Sometimes the human brain protects itself, creates a fail-safe circuit. That was what Luis had done—triggered that final protection, a kind of static during which the brain resets itself.

I had no memory, because no memory of those moments existed for me. Nor ever would.

There was a towel tied tightly around the end of my arm, which ended abruptly in an empty space. I raised it and stared at it, wondering where my hand had gone. I could still feel it, still feel the phantom muscles flexing.
What happened . . . ?
I knew, but I didn’t know. Not really.

My head felt light and vague. I pulled in deep, trembling breaths and felt an arm bracing me across my shoulders. “Easy,” Luis said. His voice was wrong, shaking and too high. “Breathe. Come on, breathe.”

I
was
breathing, I thought, with a hot flash of annoyance. Even Rashid was watching me with a frown of concentration. Turner and Luis seemed shocked and horrified.

Ah, yes, of course. I had chopped off my hand.

Their reactions made perfect sense, then.

“I’m all right,” I said. Indeed, I was. My pain had receded, and the light- headed feeling was going away. The absence of the invading darkness left me feeling unreasonably strong. “Were you able to stop the bleeding?” As if I was inquiring politely about the health of a distant relative, or the weather. Something that had no bearing on my own ability to survive the night.

Luis swallowed. His skin looked cream- pale beneath its burnish of bronze. “It’s stopped,” he said. “I deadened the nerves and sealed the blood vessels. But it’s not good, Cass. Christ,
why?
”

“Pearl,” I said. “If I hadn’t acted, she’d have destroyed me. It had to be done.”

“I could have stopped it,” Rashid said. I gave him a long look. “Perhaps.”

“It wouldn’t matter,” I said. “You wanted the list. I can’t give it to you. I couldn’t depend on your goodwill, Rashid. Or would you say that you would have acted to save me, regardless?”

He didn’t answer. He didn’t have to. I’d felt it from him, felt that avarice and pure, selfish desire. I knew him.

I had once been Rashid, or very like him.

“It was the only way,” I said, and for some reason it came out almost kind. I deliberately hardened my tone. “If you want to make amends, Rashid, you may. The girl, Gloria. Go and get her. There will be no bargain. You will do it because I
tell
you to do it.”

Rashid’s eyes widened. He looked at the table, where my blackened, severed hand still lay pinned by the knife. Not dead. Quiescent.

“If I save her now,” he said, “you will lose your way to the one you seek. I can follow instead, and retrieve the girl before more harm is done.”

“She’s alone,” I said. “She’s in pain. She’s a child.

More harm is done every second. Do this, Rashid. You owe this to me.”

He thought about that, and unwillingly inclined his head.

Then he vanished.

In the silent aftermath of his departure, Ben Turner said, “You cut your hand off. Jesus Christ, you cut. Your hand.
Off
.”

“It wasn’t my hand,” I said. “Not anymore. And it couldn’t be saved.”

Turner looked a little queasy, and stared hard at the unmoving black thing that sat crouched and nailed to the tabletop. It still didn’t look dead. It looked like it was simply waiting for an opening, for a careless moment. I was not entirely certain the knife could hold it, if it truly exerted itself, although Rashid had certainly buried the metal deeply into the wood.

“Yeah,” Turner said softly. “I see your point. So . . . what the hell do we do with that now?”

“You are a Fire Warden, aren’t you?” I asked. “Burn it. Please.”

He sent me a narrow, disbelieving look, then silently asked Luis if he agreed. Luis did, with a bare, silent nod. Turner took in a deep breath, focused his energy, and the wood on the table, for a respectable distance around the severed hand, burst completely into flame.

The hand began to struggle against the knife, jerking, slicing itself blindly as it tried to escape. Luis and I opened the floodgates of power to pour it into the wood the hand was touching. What wasn’t yet burning warped, folding over the fingers, trapping it. Fire, metal, earth—it was bound by all the powers, save air, which in this case fed the fire. The hand flopped wildly, trying to pull itself free, and finally, with a crackle of baking bones and sizzling flesh, went completely, utterly limp.

Dead.

A black, viscous liquid flowed from the severed stump of the wrist, turning wood to powdery, rotted ash where it touched, and smothering the flames. But it didn’t live long beyond its flesh host, and vanished into black, greasy smoke that faded into nothing on the air.

Turner kept the fire burning hot until my hand was a lacework of bones, bright white and crumbling, and then he let the flames die.

He promptly stumbled to the bathroom and slammed the door. I watched him go without comment. Luis, moving like a man who’d taken a gut wound, let go of me and walked to the kitchen, opened the refrigerator, and took out a beer. He popped the cap from it, still staring into a distance full of horror, then upended the bottle and drank until all that was left was foam. Then he leaned forward and rested the cold empty glass against his forehead.

I stood up, swaying a little from the loss of blood and lingering shock, and retrieved the bronze hatchet from where it lay in a pool of crimson on the floor. I cleaned it carefully against the towel wrapped around my left wrist, then sat down on the sofa and worked the tight knots of cotton twine that bound the towel in place.

“What the hell are you doing?” Luis asked wearily, and tried to stop me. I shoved him away with my good hand and held him there, pulling at the frayed cord with my teeth until it loosened enough for me to slip the towel away.

I had enough control of my body to keep the blood vessels clamped, and the nerves deadened. I wrapped the twine tight again, then contemplated the bronze weapon in my right hand.

“Cass.” His voice broke a little. “Cass, what the hell are you doing?” He was afraid, I realized, that I had gone entirely mad. That I was about to start mutilating myself again, to no real purpose.

“Shhhhh,” I said, and reached out with power. The metal of the weapon softened, melted, formed itself into a complex and delicate structure. I built it with a Djinn’s instinctive understanding of the world, of my own lovely, finely engineered body, the interconnectedness of all things. I think in a way Luis was right—I was quietly, oddly mad. It had seemed completely rational to me to do these things, from the moment I had recognized that I had a choice none of the others—not even Pearl—had foreseen. Sever my hand. Burn the remains.

Now the same ruthless, cold Djinn instinct was telling me to make myself a new hand, out of the weapon that had been my salvation.

I began by building hard metal bones, then overlaying them with fine, strong cables in patterns that mirrored the muscles and tendons of my right hand. Then, over all of that, a light, flexible bronze skin. Fingers. Even delicately etched fingernails, each slightly and sharply pointed, like finely manicured claws.

Then I slipped the complex mechanism over the open stump of my arm and joined up the parts, with little regard to what was metal and what was flesh. It fused together with a hiss and a smell of burning flesh, and I began to move my fingers slowly, one after another, before Luis’s wide, disbelieving eyes.

Then I made a fist, with my new bronze hand, and uncurled it to lay it flat in my lap. It was an exact mirror of my right hand, perfect in every visible detail. Even the shine of the metal mimicked living flesh. It was as if I’d dipped my living hand into metal.

I heard the water running in the bathroom, and then the door opened and Turner came out, wiping his mouth with a towel. “We need to get you an ambulance and—what the
hell
is that?” He sounded like a man who’d gone beyond surprise, into weary resignation.

I held up my metal hand and said, “No ambulance. No hospital.” I wiggled the fingers to show him that it worked, then lowered it and closed my eyes. “I will sleep now.”

I don’t know, but I imagined that Turner and Luis exchanged long looks. I simply drifted off into a half-drugged distance of shock, artificial calm, and true, genuine exhaustion.

It felt like I slept only a few minutes before coming awake again, shaking. The calm and shock had left me, the cold Djinn certainty had left me, and there was only the knowledge of what I had done to my fragile human flesh.

Luis was sitting beside me on the couch. I looked mutely at him, my eyes blurring with cold, lost tears, and he put his arm around me, pressed his lips to my temple, and whispered, “Thank God. Thank God you’re back.”

I was. The person who had been inhabiting my body, from the moment I had realized what my only choice had been, was gone. That Cassiel had once again been banished to the hidden recesses where she lurked.

“That was her, wasn’t it?” he asked. “The Cassiel you used to be. The Djinn. The badass you keep telling me about.” The one who would make the choice to destroy humanity, if it was necessary.

I nodded, burying my face against his shirt. I couldn’t stop shaking. Couldn’t stem the tears. His hand stroked my hair over and over, an animal comfort and connection, and I wanted . . . oblivion. Just for a while.

“You were right,” he told me. “She’s terrifying.”

To me, as well.

 

The next few minutes were long ones, silent ones, filled with the sound of Turner drinking down a glass of water, refilling it, then emptying it again, as if he hoped to wash himself clean from the inside out. I wondered if I should ask for something, but I didn’t need to do so; Luis, unasked, brought me a glass and very gently encouraged me to drink.

I hadn’t realized how thirsty I was until the water touched my lips, and then I sucked it down gulp after greedy gulp, barely pausing for air until the tumbler was dry. He refilled it, then sat beside me as I drank at a slower pace, stroking my hair with restless fingers.

“It’s the power,” he said. “It takes a lot out of you, physically. And you—” He glanced down at the metal hand, lying still in my lap. “Yeah. I’m not even sure how you did what you did.”

“Which part?” I asked.

“Hell, any of it. I’ve never seen anything like that before, outside of some big-budget sci-fi movie.” He kept watching the hand with guarded fascination. “Are you sure that’s not some evil hand or something?”

“Evil?” I raised it in surprise, flexing the metal fingers. “Why would this be evil?”

“You’re kidding. I mean, it’s a
metal hand.
”

“My flesh hand was much worse, I think.” I touched my fingers together. The control was very good, but there was an odd clink as the metal connected.

Luis continued to stare. “Can you feel anything with that?”

“Yes.”

“How?”

I raised my eyebrows involuntarily, because it was a question that hadn’t rightly occurred to me. I ran the metal fingertips over texture—the sofa, the smooth leather of my jacket, then lightly over Luis’s skin.

All different sensations. All exactly as experience had taught me they should feel.

“The metal,” I said, surprised. “It’s a part of the living Earth. Your powers control metal, so I can interpret the sensations.”

“Does it hurt?”

“No,” I said, and put my metal palm against his warm cheek. “Does it feel odd?”

He seemed startled, raising his hand to lay it over my bronze one. Before he could answer me, my cell phone began to ring, buzzing against my skin like a trapped insect. I slid it free, flipped it open, and held it to my ear. The screen displayed nothing at all except a random pattern of light.

I put it to my ear.

“Human technology.” It was Rashid. He sounded disgusted, and a little smug. “So wasteful, yet so interesting.”

“We can’t all be you,” I said. “Did you get the child?”

“Of course. And before you ask, the man driving the car doesn’t yet know that she’s gone. I retrieved her when he stopped for a traffic signal.”

“Did he see you?”

“Of course not. To all appearances she is still locked in his trunk.” Rashid’s voice took on a slight edge. “Before you ask, yes, I am following him.”

“What about the girl? You’re sure she’s all right?”

“Did I not say—”

“Yes.” I closed my eyes and tried to focus. At Luis’s urgent gesture, I put the phone on speaker so the others could hear. “What did you do with her?”

“I am not insensitive; I didn’t just abandon her at the side of the road. I found a policeman. I handed her over safely enough.”

That eased a weight within me that was staggering once lifted. “Where are you now?”

“In the trunk of his car,” Rashid said. “I thought it would be impolite to take one thing from him and leave nothing in return.”

“No,” Turner snapped. “You need to get out of there. Just get out. If you got the girl, the job’s over. Leave it.”

“Don’t,” I said, overriding him. “Stay with him, Rashid. But understand, if he
is
heading toward Pearl, you must know when to let go. You can’t allow yourself to get too close. You saw what she can do.” He’d knifed the blackened evidence of it on the kitchen table.