djinn wars 03 - fallen (15 page)

I didn’t have a lot of sympathy.
Well, now you know how it feels, asshole,
I thought as I approached the door to the lab. After all, he’d done the same thing to Jace and Natila, only he’d been given a nice hotel room instead of a jail cell, and gourmet meals from our resident chef rather than whatever odds and ends the Los Alamos people deemed worthy of passing on to their captive djinn. And let’s not even get started on the effects of those goddamn devices of his….

As I entered the lab, I noticed immediately that Lindsay and Miles were on opposite sides of the space. She was typing away on a laptop, and he sat at one of the worktables, the pieces of the half-assembled device laid out neatly in front of him.

“How’s it going?” I asked, my tone probably too hearty. I’d decided that, no matter what my personal feelings about Miles Odekirk might be, I should do my best to get an accurate report to take back to Zahrias. If that meant playing nice, so be it.

The scientist didn’t bother to look up, but Lindsay did stop typing so she could smile at me. Her expression was tentative, though, as if she wasn’t quite sure how to act around me so soon after Evony’s death.

That was all right. I wasn’t entirely sure how to act around me, either.

“I guess…it’s going,” she said, gaze darting toward Miles and back to me. I was no mind reader, but it wasn’t too difficult to figure out that she had roughly a thousand other things she’d rather be doing than being stuck in a basement with Miles Odekirk.

“Any supplies you need?” I inquired, directing the question at him.

So far he’d been ignoring me, but apparently even he thought it would be rude to ignore my query. After setting down a piece of complicated-looking circuit board, he replied, “I highly doubt that this town would have anything I require.”

I kind of had my doubts, too. Taos wasn’t exactly what you’d call a hub for electronics supply stores. But I decided there was no point in my being rude to him in return. To be fair, he might not have even realized he was being tactless. His social eptness was right up there with Sheldon from
The Big Bang Theory
.

“Well,” I said sweetly, “why don’t you make a list, and we’ll see what we can do. Zahrias wants to make sure there isn’t anything holding you back.”

At that comment, he pushed himself off the stool where he’d been sitting and stood. Right then, I noticed that he was actually quite tall. Not as tall as the djinn, of course, but tall enough that he made me feel short, which I certainly wasn’t. “What’s holding me back,” he gritted, “is being hauled away from my proper research, stuck in a basement with a hopelessly unqualified graduate student, and being told to produce something from nothing.”

I heard Lindsay suck in a breath, but I didn’t dare look over at her. No, I needed to keep my attention focused on Miles Odekirk. If I let him intimidate me now, I’d never be able to negotiate with him from a position of strength.

“Lindsay,” I said evenly, still holding Odekirk’s icy gray stare and thinking he’d been damn lucky that his glasses hadn’t gotten broken during the confrontation with the djinn on Highway 68, “would you mind giving Dr. Odekirk and me a few minutes?”

“With pleasure,” she replied, then slammed her laptop shut and got up. Her footsteps clanged up the metal stairs.

“All right,” I said, after I heard her close the door with a bang, “now that you’re done insulting the person who managed to keep the lights on and the freezers running, maybe we can get down to business.”

“And what business is that?” I could see one eyebrow arch up above the edge of his rimless glasses, but that was the only alteration in his expression.

I crossed my arms. “Miles, I’m pretty sure you have at least a couple of Ph.D.s. And I know Lindsay and Zahrias were very explicit in what they told you we need you to do for us. So do you really need me to explain it to you all over again?”

No response at first. But after a longish pause, he turned away from me and stared down at the assembled components on the worktable. “No,” he said. “But I think none of you understand what you’re asking of me.”

“Probably not,” I told him. “I’ll admit that my grasp of quantum mechanics is pretty shaky. If that’s even what we’re talking about here.”

“It is…and it isn’t. Your graduate student was correct in one of her assumptions about the device I invented. It does detect the wave signature peculiar to the djinn and disrupt it. My work at the labs already involved that sort of thing, so I — ”

“You were looking for djinn?”

At the interruption, his expression turned waspish. “Of course I was not looking for
djinn
. They were a fairytale, a myth. But my work — my classified work, which I will not discuss further — required research into various sorts of wave signatures. Both during and immediately after the Heat struck, my instruments picked up a signal I’d never seen before, and I began tracking it.” He hesitated then before turning away from me completely. His back to me, he went on, “I was…preoccupied for a few days there. But the instruments I’d left running continued to take measurements, and after a while, I returned to analyze the data that had been collected.”

As he stood there, fiddling with the components on the work table, long clever fingers sorting through the wires and circuit boards, I realized why he didn’t want to look at me. Because during those “few days” he’d just mentioned, his wife and child had died. He’d lost everything, and still found it within himself to return to the labs, to the work that took up so much of his life.

Did I dare tell him that I was sorry? Or would he see that as a ploy, my way of trying to show him that I empathized with his losses? Because I did feel sorry for him then, seeing the slump of his shoulders, hearing the slightest tremor in his voice, the one I could tell he was trying so hard to conceal. I’d lost my whole family, true…but I’d never lost a child.

However, I guessed he wouldn’t want to hear words of condolences from me. Bad enough that he should be taken captive. Admitting to grief now, in the face of someone he considered an enemy?

I knew he would never do that.

Ignoring the awkward pause, I cleared my throat and said, “So how did you make the leap from finding an energy pattern you didn’t recognize to figuring out it was being generated by a race of people who weren’t supposed to exist?”

Oddly, my question seemed to have steadied him. He shifted back around then, a circuit board held between thumb and forefinger. Over and over he turned the board, as if he’d never seen such a thing before. Without really looking at me, he replied, “It was, as you say, a leap. But all things of this earth share a certain commonality, and I saw nothing of this wave form in the patterns I was detecting. The way it coincided with the Heat…as a scientist, I can tell you that I don’t believe in coincidence. There’s a meaning in all patterns, if we only know where to look for it.”

“So you figured out it was the djinn?”

“At first, I didn’t know what name I should give them. In my mind, I always referred to them as ‘the others’ — because they certainly were other, whatever else they might be. And that was what I called them when Richard Margolis and his group of survivors came to Los Alamos. It wasn’t until I saw one for myself that I realized which name truly belonged to them.”

His words puzzled me. I frowned, trying to piece together the chronology. So he hadn’t actually known what sort of being Natila was until he saw her in person? But how would he have even known who — or what — he was hunting when he ventured forth, device in hand, to see what it would do?

I asked him as much, and Miles shook his head.

“No. That’s not who I mean. I saw one not too long after the Dying, a few days after the commander came to town. This was before I’d perfected the device. I’d already been working on something similar, although it was intended for an entirely different purpose. So I shifted my focus to something that would disrupt the energy signature I’d detected.”

“So…where did you see this djinn?” I supposed it was possible one had come poking around Los Alamos before Miles had his device functional; in my mind, I imagined it as a place utterly off-limits to djinn from the beginning, as soon as the Heat had struck, but of course that wasn’t true.

“Partway down Pajarito Road,” he replied. After setting down the circuit board he’d been fiddling with, he leaned up against the worktable and crossed his arms. Even his glasses couldn’t entirely conceal the dark smudges under his eyes. Had he been sleeping much since coming to Taos? It was such a personal question that I didn’t dare ask. I could imagine why he wouldn’t, but he needed to understand that we meant him no harm. We only needed his help.

Still with his eyes not quite meeting mine, he went on, “I used to walk a good bit…after. It was the only way I could find my focus, and the weather was still good enough then. So I was walking out on Pajarito, getting some fresh air, and I saw a woman. She was a good fifty yards or so away from me, and I began to call out to her — until I realized she was not actually standing on the road, but floating above it.”

“So that’s why you didn’t seem too surprised when I told you that I’d seen Jace and Zahrias doing the same thing.” At the time, I’d thought Miles had looked pleased by that particular tidbit just because it was evidence of their djinn natures, but now I realized it was probably more because it had only reinforced something he’d already seen.

“Precisely.” He straightened up then and made a minute adjustment to the glasses on his nose. “And although it can be quite windy around here, that day the weather was relatively calm…which was why I couldn’t understand why her hair was whipping around as if in a strong breeze.”

“Air elemental,” I said, and he nodded.

“Apparently. Also, you’ve lived among them. You know how they look human…but not entirely.”

“They’re too perfect.” By then, I was used to the djinn, to their almost unearthly beauty, but I could only imagine what Miles Odekirk must have thought, seeing that strange woman and her wind-tousled hair, and knowing no human could float off the ground like that, let alone be so uncannily lovely.

“Yes.” He was silent then, brows drawn together. When he spoke, he sounded more tired than anything else. “She saw me — I could feel her eyes on me. At that distance, I couldn’t tell for certain, but I think she smiled. And then she disappeared.”

“Now you see her,” I remarked. If that had been me, taking a solitary walk in an attempt to shake off my grief, and I had seen something like that…what would I have done? At least I’d had the opportunity to get to know Jace before discovering what he was. If I’d simply witnessed some strange being floating off the ground and then winking out of existence, I probably would have freaked out.

Miles, however, didn’t seem to be the freaking-out type.

“I went back to the lab, noted that another of those strange energy signatures had appeared, this time in extremely close proximity, and realized the woman and the energy pattern had to be connected. Then I went to the library and did some research, trying to match what I had seen with accounts in some of the books there on the supernatural and the occult. And I realized the strange woman must have been a djinn.”

“What did she look like?” I asked, curious. She couldn’t have been one of the Taos group — Miles Odekirk wasn’t exactly Chosen material. Anyway, they were all paired up.

“Beautiful, I suppose. As I said, she was some distance away. Her hair was red, coppery. She wore blue, if I recall correctly, but I don’t remember any details, except that the fabric seemed to be filmy and floated easily on the air.”

The description could have fit any one of a number of djinn women, but again, she couldn’t have been from the Taos group. One of the others, wanting to see the Immune close up? It didn’t sound as if she’d made any threatening gestures, or had attempted to harm Miles. So maybe she simply had been curious. I had to remind myself that there were many, many djinn out there — the majority, actually — who weren’t part of the One Thousand or one of those opposed to them. Neutral parties. Possibly this djinn woman had been one of them.

Miles shrugged, and went back to sorting the bits and pieces on the worktable. “After that, I finished my first prototype for the device. I’d actually intended it solely as a barrier, something to protect the people in Los Alamos from these beings, these djinn, as we now knew them.”

With a lot of people, I would have suspected they were telling me that sort of thing because they thought it was what I would want to hear.
What? I never meant any harm…I just wanted to protect the survivors. The pain and suffering my device causes was only an unfortunate side effect.

But I didn’t think that was the case with Miles. He was brilliant, no doubt about that, but he also didn’t seem the type to lie to make himself look better.

“So how did you discover that you were hurting them?” I asked.

His jaw tensed, and I could see the muscles working in his throat. Now that he was in Taos and his own clothes had been left behind, he was dressed like most of the guys here — fleece pullover worn over a T-shirt, jeans, sturdy hiking-style shoes. To me, he looked a lot less intimidating. Funny how a lab coat and a tie could get your hackles up.

“When we captured Natila,” he said. Once again, his gaze shifted away from me. “It was Margolis’ idea to get her, and Jasreel. He said it was too dangerous to have them in such close proximity to us, away from the rest of their kind. Rogues, he called them. I’ll admit I was intrigued by the opportunity to see one of these creatures close at hand.”

“They’re not creatures,” I broke in. “They’re people. Different from us, but….”

“I know that now,” he said. “I didn’t then.” Right then, he did look up, and I could see the lines of guilt etched on his face. Voice tight, he went on, “I wasn’t expecting Natila to react to my device the way she did. Margolis was…pleased by that. He said it was our new weapon. And when we came to your home to collect Jasreel, he made sure that I kept increasing the intensity. It didn’t matter if the size of the field shrank when I did so, as we were only concerned with one djinn at that particular moment.” A long pause. “I am sorry about that. And about Natila. At the time, she was only a test subject to me. And now….”