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"Back!" so cluster of onlookers, and a hardened bubble of air for out of utter and fail as its fuel ran out

I felt nothing, except that all-consu fro worse, not better, as if someone had injected me with acid If I’d had control offor it to stop

The cold, blackened part of me inside still had control, but it allowedheap inside the air bubble I struggled to breathe, but there was nothing left to fill s that wasn’t toxic

Someone stepped up on the other side of the bubble

Lewis

The darkness in ly clever way

I liftedforshade of blue I must have looked completely pathetic and weak

I wasn’t Not at all

There was so at randmother used to say Tombstone eyes

Lewis’s head snapped around, not fast enough, and soht that froze into the form of David, on the other side of my invisible prison

I watched Lewis’s lipshim not to be a fool, not to fall for it He knew

He needn’t have worried David ht be passionate, but he was no kind of a fool He crouched down and put his hand flat against mine, separated by five inches of thickened, impenetrable, interlocked molecules His face was ato hide his fury - atus here

I sood

The talisman burned into my back hit a white-hot peak, and I feltat the prison holding est Warden who’d ever lived, but I was damn close on this front I hadn’t always been, or at least I hadn’t always known it, but I was afraid that very strength was going to beaway at the force he’d set up to keepwhat I’d do What I could do

Possibilities raced through h the sealed corridors of the ship, killing everyone it touched Or h the botto coffin down to join other fa rush of the sea through the shattered hull, the roo

God,I wanted to do it

I couldn’t let this happen I couldn’t be the cause of sofor me, thanks to this little exercise in hellish torment; he’d shown me how to break loose I wasn’t trapped in my body; my body existed separately from my spirit, connected only by random impulses and autonomic functions I pulled away and stretched to the li the bond stretch and pull, thinner and thinner At the top of the aetheric, there was a flickering white ht - the boundary of another world above that one Another plane of existence The Djinn could pass through it Humans couldn’t, not even Wardens

I touched it, trailed ethereal fingers against the barrier, and looked down Distances and heights didn’t her planes, but in this sense they did -

there was a forravity, and momentum, and forces that translated froo, turned, and put all my power into an accelerated dive back tothe way as I could

Pulling it directly from the aetheric, like the wake from a speedboat I’d never tried this; I knew that there were Earth Wardens who had, who’d h this technique It wouldn’t last, and it ca to try

They never toldthe physical for head-on into a bank vault at eighty miles per hour Then the aetheric wake sla h the h the black lines It overloaded within an instant, shocking theit back into its containment state

I raised my head and looked David in the eye and mouthed HelpI didn’t know if he’d believe me or not - I almost hoped he wouldn’t - but without hi to end in , anoxic, on the edge of unconsciousness I couldn’t create oxygen from the toxic soup of molecules left inside this bubble; I’d have to break the shell, get some kind of feed from the outside

Or s considered Not my fave, admittedly, but it would save innocent lives, and -

David’s outstretched palh the hard shell of air Stress fractures forers, and then he broke through, and a rush of delicious air fanned rated I dropped facedown to the floor

A weight settled on top ofhis hand down on top of the black ht that sucker was painful already, this was a thousand ti, trying to claay out of the pain

"I’ll kill you!" I was screa And worse And I meant it

Lewis tooklegs and anchored theery without the benefit of anesthesia, this feeling of so

And then it stopped

I collapsed, sobbing helplessly I couldn’t feel David’s hand onfroone icily nu the onlookers murmured, and the tone was so appalled that I wondered just what he was seeing I didn’t care It was enough that it didn’t hurt, just for a few precious breaths

"Get the h, low in his throat