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He sla vibration rippled out froth - the same frequency I’d used before, but a thousand times more powerful Every crystalline skeleton exploded into powder
Another glass ball fell, but it exploded well before contact with the ground when he slaain and woke that awful sound
I’d clapped my hands over ht you’d welco that she’d be able to somehow break out of her paralysis, but she was as still as the rocks around me, and just about as lifeless My only ally was completely out of commission "Since it looks like it’s just the two of us"
"What would they be good for? You can kill them I’ve seen you do it" He shook his head
"We’re on to bigger things You feel the lines of force under us? This is a nexus point, Jo
It’s the thinnest space between the planes, and between the worlds" The island hadn’t co power underneath my feet, and in the air around me He’d been very careful about his choice of location for this A born manipulator
Like Lewis Where are you, Lewis?
"Basic principles of ic, Jo," he said softly "Like calls to like And sacrifices have special weight here"
He threw the Un to me - not at ed it easily, but it didn’t fall; it turned and hovered inat ht I backed up, carefully, not taking ht for my chest It was too fast, and I had no room to maneuver
My body reacted instinctively, and wrongly
I put out rabbed it to hold it back frocold
The pool of Djinn power inside of me turned toxic and black, poisoned at its source, and I felt h Djinn to be vulnerable, and just enough human to be corruptible
He’d counted on that And on my survival instincts
The spear felt hot and heavy in my hands It had burned me, before, but now its touch felt different - al whisper of noise that had nothing in common with the music of our world, any of our worlds
It ed and tried to throw up the darkness inside, but it wasn’t the kind that sat heavy in the stomach This darkness filled me to the brim
It took ain, I saw things differently Literally Holding the Un made colors shift and burn, the whole structure of ht twist around me It was beautifully destructive
"We needdarkness in front of me, alien and somehow not alien at all "You kno to make more of it, Joanne" I knew I’d seen the process at work The anti the power into its raw, black opposite, stabilized into a form we could handle and use
Rahel knew it, too I saw the fatal acceptance in her face, and the haughty courage, even though she was trapped in place by the bottle that Bad Bob held in his hand Co If you can
If I’d been myself, any version of myself, I wouldn’t have done it Couldn’t have
But holding the Un had taken all that away from me, just as Bad Bob had intended
I heard myself screa as it crawled through my nerves
I lifted the spear in both hands and plunged it toward Rahel’s chest
It never got there
A pulse of pure hot Earth power rolled up through the rocks and blasted the in one direction, Rahel in another
The attack caht by surprise He staggered, leaped for stable ground, but it dissolved underneath his sandals He fell The Ancestor Scriptures skittered across stone, and the bottle dropped toward a fatal iot to Rahel before the bottle hit stone I felt the fir her flesh, and then - then she was gone, and the spear was broken off at the tip, vibrating like a tuning fork in my hands
Rahel’s bottle had shattered into pieces, and she was gone
Rahel was free
The Un cheated
"Son of a bitch !" Bad Bob clawed his way out of the hole in the island, and juh it froeysered into the air between us I held the spear in both hands and cast my oareness out, too
It was an i to do, but Lewis had taken the Grand Horizon down, like the world’s listening bubble right below the island, and as I looked down into one of the holes, I could see people on the decks looking up athitforce, and I toppled into the water The spear was as heavy as an iron bar, and it dragged me doard the ship below
Rahel wrapped her arms around ile surface of Lewis’s protective shield that kept everyone on the ship alive beneath the waves I fought to get free, and when that didn’t work, I tried to move the spear around to stab her froedlike a dolphin at attack speed
The protective do Lots of thelow of Djinn, and it was all bright, and weirdly beautiful, and I realized that I was running out of air The screa in
Rahel wouldn’t letto throw her off, and for a moment it seemed like I’d succeeded
I seized the opportunity and shotup I blasted a path through the rocks and ca and shuddering I grabbed the husk of a dead palm tree and pulled myself from the water just a second before the hole sealed itself over beneathto lever myself to my feet Where it touched, the rocks blackened and dissolved as if I’d doused them with acid
My hands were black now, and ray of dead flesh, but I didn’t hurt at all
Bad Bob slid down a small mountain of rubble, and it exploded into flame and shrapnel behind him He thumped down next tooverhead had taken on a thick darkness, pregnant with ative ih the sky, breaking in all directions
"Time," Bad Bob said "Take that up, Jo Take it to the other side" Now I knehat he wanted fro hadhad ever been clear before None of thisan illusion all this tihtmare of a life that started nowhere and ended in darkness
Beyond that portal lay the real world The only world
This was just a fiction, and it needed to end so that we could all go to a better place
I took a firrip on the spear, and rose up into the aetheric, into the heart of the storm
Chapter Twelve
At the center of the slowly rotating y was the portal to the other world The real world
It was like a drop of pure darkness, maybe a dozen feet across - spacefro so siry and endlessly patient, and I realized that it was like the slow, vast intelligence of the planet below me like, but so much moreThe Earth was a virus, a microbe What lay on the other side of the portal was God Not ours, though A jealous, angry, hungry God