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were only human now, and our daughter, our child who’d been born half Djinn and raised to become an Oracle . . . she was beyond our grasp now. David normally would have been able to reach out to her, over any distance, but now he was just as trapped in flesh and as clueless as I felt.
    We both turned immediately to Lewis.
    “I don’t know about the Oracles. I haven’t heard anything,” he said. He knew immediately what we were thinking about, and the frown on his face said that he was worried about it, too. “I’ll get somebody on it. David, do you know why she summoned the Djinn?”
    “Pain,” David said softly. “You heard the scream. That was her pain.”
    It rolled over me in a fresh, overwhelming wave of memory, and I had to concentrate hard to keep myself from shaking with the intensity of the experience. “The black corner,” I said. “She’s been hurt. That’s why she’s waking up. We did this.”
    David visibly swallowed, then nodded. Our hands tightened together, the only real comfort we could offer each other. It had been bad enough when we’d been responsible for the pain and death of Djinn. Now we might be responsible for a whole lot more.
    “We’ll find a way to get back to ourselves,” he said. “We have to find a way.”
    I wished I could believe him. Lewis wasn’t looking at me, and I could tell that he was trying not to reveal his own doubts. He pushed away from the bulkhead wall and said, “You asked what we were going to do. I don’t see that there’s any reason to change the plan. We hit land, the Wardens scatter to handle crisis events. I’d like you two at Warden HQ for the time being. It’ll be easier to work with you there, and you can help us with coordination.”
    Coordination.
    If the Earth was really waking up, really angry, really hurt—we’d be coordinating firefighting during a nuclear war. And it was a waste. He was sidelining us, and I didn’t like it.
    “We have something more important to do, Lewis. I know you’re trying to keep us out of the way, but we have to try to find a way to get our powers back,” I said. “David can’t live like this. You know that. We have to see the Oracles. If anybody knows, they do.”
    “I can’t give you help.”
    “We don’t need any,” David said. “This will work, or it won’t. But isn’t it worth a shot?”
    Lewis thought about it for a moment, then nodded. “Yes,” he said. “It’s worth a shot. But if it doesn’t work, I need you at Warden HQ. Understand?”
    “Understood,” I said.
    No way in hell.
     
    I got used to feeling sealed inside myself over the next two days; if David didn’t, he hid it well. We didn’t need confinement in hospital beds, so we checked ourselves out while Lewis wasn’t looking. It wasn’t really our fault, though. Cherise instigated it.
    “No way am I sleeping in this horrible bed the rest of the trip,” she declared within a couple of hours of waking up. For Cherise, she looked ragged. For anyone else, she looked magazine-cover ready, but I could spot the subtleties—a smudge under her eyes, a slight pallor under her tan, hair that wasn’t quite as bouncy as usual. “And the shower in here sucks . What is this shampoo stuff, anyway? Medical soap? Ugh. No. I am not doing without product. There’s a limit.”
    With that, and without anybody giving her permission to vacate the bed, she was up and moving, wrapped in a sheet and searching for her clothes. David helped—more afraid that she’d end up dropping the sheet and he’d see more of Cherise than he intended, I think—and once she’d laid her hands on her shorts, shirt, and shoes, there was no stopping her.
    Which was all fine with me, actually. I was heartily sick of this room. I dressed quickly. David was hilariously slow; I wondered how often he’d actually had to pull on his own pants in the last few thousand years. Probably zero times.
    “Sunshine,” Cherise declared as we followed her out of the