I, on the other hand, did not look delicious. I looked like a wedding cake that hadn't quite risen

properly. And white really wasn't my color.

''You're a true friend,'' I said, and unzipped my dress to let it slide into a confusion of frippery

on the dressing room floor. The waiting dress wrangler rescued it, fussily dusted it, and put it

back on a hanger and in a garment bag, the better to protect its doubtful charms. ''Right.

Something in off-white? With less-'' I made a vague, poofy gesture with my hands. The

salesclerk, who must have seen brides make a thousand terrible decisions, looked relieved. She

nodded and turned to Cherise.

''Ma'am?'' she asked. ''Can I bring you some more selections?''

Cherise turned, hands on hips. ''You're kidding, right? Look, I gave her fair warning. I am not

giving up this dress. I'll be maid of honor, but not matronly of honor.''

''Keep the dress,'' I said hastily. ''It really does look great on you. So you're done. It's just me

we're still working on.''

Cherise, mollified, unzipped and shimmied out of the dress. She was the one who fussed with it,

getting it hung just so, and zipped it into the garment bag before handing it to the salesclerk. ''Be

sure nothing happens to it,'' she said. ''Put my name on it in giant letters: Cherise. In fact, if

you've got a vault-''

''Cher,'' I said, ''leave the poor lady alone. She's dealing with enough as it is. Your dress is

safe.''

''Maybe I should take it with me.''

''Maybe you should put your clothes on. I'm feeling kind of outclassed, here.''

Cherise grinned, undermining her Playboy Bunny appeal but making herself real in a way most

pretty women weren't. She looked after herself with care, but she also didn't put too much

emphasis on it. Cherise liked to do things that the Genetically Chosen Few generally didn't, like

read, geek out on TV shows, indulge in online gaming. Her most prominent body decoration,

which showed plainly as she turned to gather up her jeans and tank top from the bench, was a

Gray-a little gray alien tattoo waving hello from the small of her back, where most beautiful

women would have put a rose as a tramp stamp.

That was Cherise, cheerfully mowing down the barriers.

I sat down on the other bench, legs crossed, feeling exposed and vulnerable in my lacy

underthings. I had a huge list of things still to do for the wedding, and I was running out of time,

and the last thing I needed to be doing was obsessing about the dress. I mean, I had good taste in

clothes, right? I could usually walk into a store, grab something right off the rack, and get it

right.

Today, I'd gone through more dresses than I'd worn in the last year. Maybe I ought to try the

designer line again. Or get married in a garbage bag. Add a couple of frills, a nice bow-

couldn't be worse than what I'd just seen myself in today. There was a fashion hell. I'd been

there.

''You okay?'' Cherise finished buttoning up her jeans, skimmed her top down to street-legal

levels, flipped her hair, and voila, she was fantastic. She stepped out of the Jimmy Choo pumps

and boxed them up with the care usually reserved for crown jewels or religious relics, and slid

her perfectly pedicured toes into a pair of hot-pink flip-flops. ''Because you look a little bit-''

''Spooked,'' I supplied sourly. ''Worried. Scared. Nuts. Insane. Completely, utterly-''

''I was going to say hungry. It's already two hours after we should have had lunch.''

Low blood sugar probably was impairing my impressive dress-choosing skills, and even though

this was a full-service bridal store, I doubted that they catered. ''Oh,'' I said. ''Right. Lunch.''

Now that she mentioned it, my stomach growled impatiently, as if it had been trying to get my

attention for a while and was ready to cannibalize another body part. I reached for my own jeans

and top and began tugging them on. I wasn't as perfectly body-balanced as Cherise, but I had

legs for days, and even in flats I topped her by several inches.

The hardworking clerk came back, sweating under a forklift's worth of alternate dress choices. I

froze in the act of zipping up my pants. ''Um-''

Cherise, rightly identifying a moment when a maid of honor could take one for the bridal team,

smiled winningly at the clerk and said, ''Sorry, but I've got a nail appointment. We'll have to

come back later. Could you keep those out? I swear, it'll be an hour, tops.'' She caught my look.

''Two, at the most.''

The clerk looked around the dressing room, which had far fewer hooks than she had dresses,

sighed, and nodded.

I had just finished fastening the top button on my pants when I felt the whole store distinctly

shake, as if a giant hand had grabbed the place and yanked. I froze, bracing myself on the wall,

and saw Cherise do the same. The clerk froze under her load of thousand-dollar frocks.

And then all hell broke loose. The floor bucked, walls undulated, cracks ripped through plaster,

and the air exploded with the sounds of glass crashing, things falling, and timbers snapping. The

salesclerk screamed, dropped the gowns, and flung herself into the doorway, bracing herself with

both hands.

I should have taken cover-Cherise sensibly did, curling instantly into a ball under the nearest

cover, which was the bench on her side.

What did I do? I stood there. And I launched myself hard into the aetheric, rising out of the

physical world and into a plane of existence where the lines of force were more clearly visible.

Not good. The entire area of Fort Lauderdale was a boiling confusion of forces, most erupting

out of a fault line running directly under the store in which I stood. It looked as if somebody had

dropped a bucket of red and black dye into a washing machine and set it on full churn.

We were so screwed.

I sensed other Wardens rising into the aetheric, responding to the crisis; there were two or three

of them relatively close whose signatures I recognized-two were Weather, which wasn't much

help, but one was an Earth Warden, and a powerful one.

I flung my still-new Earth Warden powers deep into the foundations of the building in which my

physical form was still trapped, and began shoring up the structure. It was taking a beating, but

the wood responded to me, healing itself and binding into an at least temporarily unbreakable

frame. The metal was tougher, but it also fell within my powers, so I braced it up as I went,

creating a lightning-fast shell of stability in a world that wouldn't hold together for long.

I reached out, in the aetheric, and connected with the other Earth Warden; together, we were able

to blanket part of the rift with power, like pouring superglue on an open wound. Not a miracle, it

was just a bandage, but enough. I didn't know enough about how to balance the forces of the

Earth; it was different from the flashing, volatile energy of Fire or the massive, ponderous fury

of Weather. It had all kinds of slow, unstoppable momentum, and I felt very fragile standing in

its way.

Help, I said to the other Earth Warden-not that talking was really talking on the aetheric. It was

crude communication, at best, but he got the message. I watched as he spread himself thin, and

his aura settled deep into the heart of the boiling red of the disturbance.

Oh, hell no. No way was I going there.

Then again, if I didn't, I was leaving him alone to do the dirty work-the potentially fatal dirty

work.

I took a deep metaphorical breath, steadied myself, and stepped off the cliff.