No. “Not happening, Lewis,” I said. “If I get killed anyway, fine, all bets are off. But I’m fighting all the way down. Get me?”

Yes. You understand that I had to ask.

Not really. But I was starting to think that in some ways David was right—I never would truly know Lewis. Not at his core.

“I’m signing off, Lewis,” I said, and spit salt water as a wave slapped me. “Hey. Thanks.”

For what?

“Letting me say no.”

I got a dry, tinny chuckle in my ear. How could I ever stop you?

“See you on the other side, then.”

Yes.

That was it. Our big good-bye. As romantic scenes went, it lacked, but that was all right. We were past all that now.

After a good half hour of chasing down the floating island, my flailing hand finally slapped a boulder on the island’s rocky shore—whatever sand there once was had long ago been scoured away, so there was nothing left to this beast but slick, water-smoothed stone. I grabbed at the rock, but my hand slid off. I kicked, gritted my teeth, and lunged up out of the water as far as I could.

My rib cage thumped down painfully on the smooth surface, and I started to slip back, but more kicking and clawing paid off. I found a handhold, at the cost of the last memory of my French manicure, and hauled myself out of the pounding surf to lie exhausted and dripping, draped like Josue’s proverbial drowned mermaid over extremely uncomfortable terrain.

“Damn,” I whispered. “Why am I doing this again?” Oh yeah—because I was probably the only one who could, with anything like certainty.

And because sometimes I just had to face my own demons—and Demons—head-on.

I spent several moments just letting my muscles shake and cry out in relief, and then rolled up to a sitting position to take a look around. It wasn’t much of a garden spot—lots of black basalt and granite. This place wasn’t more than a few dozen millennia away from the lava flows that had built it in the first place. It still had most of its sharp edges.

That wasn’t great for me, of course. I’d worn heavy boots, but my battered shorts probably weren’t going to protect me from gathering some new and interesting scars as I scrambled across the edgy landscape.

I climbed up on the tallest boulder I could find and did a quick survey. The island was bigger than I’d expected—maybe a solid mile across—and toward the middle there was an unlikely small collection of jagged palms, all dying now. Whatever fresh water had nourished them was long gone.

This island was a rotting hulk, and I wondered uneasily how Bad Bob had kept sixty Sentinels—that I knew about—alive on such a bare span of rock. I supposed he’d laid in supplies, but he didn’t seem to be a logistical kind of guy.

Maybe they were eating each other. It wouldn’t surprise me, given the level of devotion he inspired in people.

This was not the place I’d have picked as my home away from home if I had to choose a portable island paradise, that was for damn sure. No beaches, no living trees, no water, no shade. Just razor-edged rock and the odd crab scuttling by. The surface of Mars, only at least fifty percent less hospitable.

If I hadn’t been doing such a careful survey of the island, I might have missed the first attack that came at me. There was nothing to give it away but a faint shimmer against the rocks, like a reflection of waves—but it didn’t move with the waves.

It was bending light, and it was moving fast, heading my direction.

I’d never seen one in full daylight before. That was a crystalline skeleton, barely visible without the human disguise its kind had adopted back on the Grand Paradise. I knew now why it had gone for the skins; the creature made a vibration on the aetheric as it moved, a kind of ringing like a finger tapping an ice-cold crystal glass.

The skins had muted the vibrations, hidden them in the natural noise of human existence.

The crystal shimmer disappeared, lost in the glare of the sun for a second, and then I saw the blur of it against the piles of rocks only about three feet away from me.

I didn’t have time for fancy moves, just dived out of the way. It was fast, but the rocks were just as hazardous to its footing as to mine, and I saw it stumble and try to catch its balance as it checked its momentum. Instead, it tumbled off into the water.

It sank below the surface in seconds, pulled down by the density of its bones.

Well, that was great news, but as I looked up, I counted three more shimmers against the rocks, heading in my direction. I calculated frequencies. I didn’t have time to try very many, but the good news was that I’d already killed one of these things on my own. Well, with help, but close enough. I knew the theory, and even without the direct access to the aetheric that I’d have had with David free, I wasn’t starved for power. I was almost shining with what had spilled into me at our wedding ceremony.

The next creature lunged for me, and I opened my mouth and picked a note. Nerves forced the amplitude of the sound too high, and the creature just kept coming. I adjusted the range of the note, holding it steady, and fine-tuned it as the beast came closer, and closer, and—

—and then it burst into a powder-fine shower of disrupted crystal. Instant sand.

Gotcha.

Two more on the way, bounding over the rocks. I dug deep into my diaphragm and half-remembered old singing lessons. I kept the note going, and amplified it a thousand times, sending it in a shock wave out across the island from end to end. The intensity of the sound swept out like a bomb blast. I was immune to it, but across the island, a dozen crystal ghosts exploded into dust and shards as the wave of sound rolled over them.

The note did more than take care of them; it also brought Bad Bob’s other allies out of hiding. Farther inland, near the stunted, mummified trees, Bad Bob’s former Wardens were coming out of camouflaged tents and starting to get organized. The shock wave rolled over them, and dozens more went down—not dead, but stunned and probably deafened. I’d caught them by surprise.

They returned the favor.

As I took a step forward, stone softened under my boot, and I sank in to my ankles. A rival Earth power was trying to harden the matrix again around my body, which would have not just trapped me but pulverized flesh and bone, if I was lucky—or amputated both feet at the ankles, if I wasn’t.

I held her off, and found some weedy grass struggling to survive between the rocks near my opponent. I added a giant shot of power to send it growing and weaving between the stones. It slithered out of a crevice and wrapped around her ankles, yanking her flat on the ground, then dragged her out into the open where I could see her.

I knew the woman. She was a thin little thing, older than many of my peers in power—a veteran, someone who’d ruled with an iron hand in the old days. A contemporary of Bad Bob’s. Her name was Deborah Kirke. She’d been wounded in the Djinn rebellion, I remembered, and she’d lost most of her family when her Djinn had destroyed her house around her. She had cause to believe Bad Bob’s anti-Djinn agenda, but that didn’t mean I could give her a pass. She’d taken up arms against me and the other Wardens.

That meant she had to be stopped.

“Deborah,” I yelled. “Just stay down, dammit. I don’t want to hurt you!”

She didn’t. I suppose, from her perspective, she really couldn’t.

I trapped her under a clump of boulders and reinforced it by melting the top layer into a concrete cage. She could breathe, and in time she’d probably dig her way out of it. I was heartsick doing this to an old lady, but I had a war to fight, and mercy wasn’t going to win me any consideration from their side in return.

Another former Warden had emerged from cover as well. I knew this one, too—Lars Petrie, a Fire Warden. He liked to form whips out of living flame, and sure enough, one hissed through the air and cut a burning path down my right arm. It wrapped around my wrist and yanked me off balance. I wasn’t prepared, and the burn bit deep, charring skin and muscle. That was bad; burns created distractions, made it harder to concentrate, channel, control the forces I needed to balance.