‘There’s not a lot of choices to this, Paul. Either we leave him alone, or we go after him. But either way, it’s not going to be good news, and I thought we agreed—’
‘We did,’ Paul interrupted. ‘We agreed that you should come out here and stop him, but Jo, you haven’t stopped him. You haven’t even got close. Your Djinn doesn’t have the power to go up against this punk nose-to-nose, and all that can come out of this is disaster if you cowboy around out here any more.’
The Canadian, West, put in, ‘Your boy Kevin is destabilising more than the weather. We’re reading a huge pressure build-up along the Cascadia Subduction Zone. If we can’t stop it, your problems out here will seem very small indeed.’
Oh. Right. He wasn’t Weather; he was Earth. ‘How bad?’
‘At current levels, we think we can expect a mega-thrust earthquake along the Cascadia line. That’s offshore, around Vancouver and Oregon. It could potentially be as small as a nine-point quake, but we think it’s probably going to be worse. A lot worse.’
As small as a nine-point quake? The one that had just killed 25,000 in Iran had been a 6.5. ‘How much worse?’
‘The amount of energy increases by a multiplierof forty times for every point on the Richter scale. This is probably going to register higher than the scale counts. Hypothetically, perhaps an eleven. Using the Mercalli intensity scale, it’s a twelve, total damage, buildings thrown into the air—’
Big enough to scare the holy shit out of the Wardens, in other words. ‘I don’t mean to tell you your business, but what about using smaller quakes to—’
‘Bleed off energy? Useless. That amount of energy can’t be bled away, not without spreading the devastation farther.’ His eyes were chilly. ‘And you’re right. You shouldn’t tell me my business.’
The Brazilian weighed in. His English was excellent, spiced with a slight musical intonation. ‘Also, we estimate that the temperature all over this region has been raised by a mean of five degrees since this boy began his attacks; he has no conception of how to bleed off energy and balance the system. If it continues to rise, we won’t be able to hold the network. Things will shift. And with the equations already so far off scale…’
Paul stopped pacing and looked directly at me. ‘We’re talking about melting ice-caps, Jo. Floods. Climatic devastation. Earthquakes worse than we can possibly control, even with Djinn. Which we have too few of, by the way. I don’t know if you’re aware of it, but things are getting critical on that front. We lost Djinn we couldn’t afford to lose,back there in the vaults. We barely have enough to keep things together as it is, and we keep on losing them. Wish to God I knew where they were going…’
Marion shot him a look, a clear we-don’t-talk- about-that message. I covered a flash of surprise. The Wardens were losing Djinn? I knew they were in short supply – they always had been – but I’d been under the clear impression that they knew exactly where their Djinn were, all the time. Of course, it made sense that there would be attrition. Once a Djinn’s bottle was shattered, it disappeared. For all the Wardens had ever known, they left our plane of existence for someplace more exotic and safe…they’d never known what I knew, that many of them stuck around as free-range, unclaimed Djinn. Hiding in plain sight.
I wasn’t about to tell them.
‘All this could be followed by another ice age,’ Farias continued sombrely. ‘One which we may no longer have enough trained personnel to stop. We’ve lost too many, both human and Djinn.’
It sounded wacky. A teenage kid raised the temperature in Las Vegas by a few degrees, and boom, ice age. But weather’s funny like that. The point wasn’t the amount the temperature was raised; it was that it caused chain reactions. Altered rainfall. Shifted wind patterns.
El Niño on a global scale.
The last time
‘We did,’ Paul interrupted. ‘We agreed that you should come out here and stop him, but Jo, you haven’t stopped him. You haven’t even got close. Your Djinn doesn’t have the power to go up against this punk nose-to-nose, and all that can come out of this is disaster if you cowboy around out here any more.’
The Canadian, West, put in, ‘Your boy Kevin is destabilising more than the weather. We’re reading a huge pressure build-up along the Cascadia Subduction Zone. If we can’t stop it, your problems out here will seem very small indeed.’
Oh. Right. He wasn’t Weather; he was Earth. ‘How bad?’
‘At current levels, we think we can expect a mega-thrust earthquake along the Cascadia line. That’s offshore, around Vancouver and Oregon. It could potentially be as small as a nine-point quake, but we think it’s probably going to be worse. A lot worse.’
As small as a nine-point quake? The one that had just killed 25,000 in Iran had been a 6.5. ‘How much worse?’
‘The amount of energy increases by a multiplierof forty times for every point on the Richter scale. This is probably going to register higher than the scale counts. Hypothetically, perhaps an eleven. Using the Mercalli intensity scale, it’s a twelve, total damage, buildings thrown into the air—’
Big enough to scare the holy shit out of the Wardens, in other words. ‘I don’t mean to tell you your business, but what about using smaller quakes to—’
‘Bleed off energy? Useless. That amount of energy can’t be bled away, not without spreading the devastation farther.’ His eyes were chilly. ‘And you’re right. You shouldn’t tell me my business.’
The Brazilian weighed in. His English was excellent, spiced with a slight musical intonation. ‘Also, we estimate that the temperature all over this region has been raised by a mean of five degrees since this boy began his attacks; he has no conception of how to bleed off energy and balance the system. If it continues to rise, we won’t be able to hold the network. Things will shift. And with the equations already so far off scale…’
Paul stopped pacing and looked directly at me. ‘We’re talking about melting ice-caps, Jo. Floods. Climatic devastation. Earthquakes worse than we can possibly control, even with Djinn. Which we have too few of, by the way. I don’t know if you’re aware of it, but things are getting critical on that front. We lost Djinn we couldn’t afford to lose,back there in the vaults. We barely have enough to keep things together as it is, and we keep on losing them. Wish to God I knew where they were going…’
Marion shot him a look, a clear we-don’t-talk- about-that message. I covered a flash of surprise. The Wardens were losing Djinn? I knew they were in short supply – they always had been – but I’d been under the clear impression that they knew exactly where their Djinn were, all the time. Of course, it made sense that there would be attrition. Once a Djinn’s bottle was shattered, it disappeared. For all the Wardens had ever known, they left our plane of existence for someplace more exotic and safe…they’d never known what I knew, that many of them stuck around as free-range, unclaimed Djinn. Hiding in plain sight.
I wasn’t about to tell them.
‘All this could be followed by another ice age,’ Farias continued sombrely. ‘One which we may no longer have enough trained personnel to stop. We’ve lost too many, both human and Djinn.’
It sounded wacky. A teenage kid raised the temperature in Las Vegas by a few degrees, and boom, ice age. But weather’s funny like that. The point wasn’t the amount the temperature was raised; it was that it caused chain reactions. Altered rainfall. Shifted wind patterns.
El Niño on a global scale.
The last time
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