Rollick shakes his head from where he’s sitting on the front passenger seat, turned sideways to face us in the back. “They’ll just call more planes in. We can’t keep sabotaging them forever.”
Riva sighs and swipes her hand over her pale face. “It’d buy us time, at least.”
Dominic nods. “More time for public pressure to change the army’s mind?”
I exchange an optimistic glance with Gracie. “That could help!”
“If it works.” Rollick pauses, his silence grim. “The army might get on with things before we have the chance to find out. I don’t normally advocate for coming in with a bang, but… it could be better if Sorsha and I simply burn the whole place down.”
As Gracie winces, my whole body balks at the suggestion. “No! If we blowthemup, they’ll only want to blow us up more.”
Vim emerges into physical form next to me, aiming a typical scowl my way. “You’re still such a wimp.”
Jonah frowns at her. “Peri’s put herself in danger dozens of times in the past few months to help the rest of us. And she’s not wrong.”
He turns to Rollick. “Human opinions on the shadowkind are pretty mixed at the moment. Peri leaking the bomb plan actually seems to have swayed more of them to our side. If it comes out that we were responsible for burning down a whole military base—we’re not going to have time to evacuate the soldiers…”
Sorsha sighs. She snaps her fingers, making a spark dance above them. “I don’t like it either. But if it’s that or blow this rift and its muck all over the place so millions of people could die… They can’t blame us if they don’t know itwasus.”
Riva raises her eyebrows. “You don’t think they’d figure it out? They know we’re against the plan. Entire military bases don’t tend to burn down randomly. I think they’ll put the pieces together no matter how subtle we are. Not that infernos are remotely subtle.”
“We might set off the bombs too,” I point out. “It’d look like we want to bombthem. That’ll only make people like Colonel Hueber more determined to get back at us. Revenge makeshumans do even crazier things than usual.” At least, if their TV shows are anything to go by.
Gracie lets out a strained chuckle. “I can confirm that from personal experience.”
Vim folds her arms over her chest, her attention fixed on me. “What do you think we should do then, if you’re so smart?”
I open my mouth and close it again. I don’t have a definite alternate plan. I just know this one feels wrong, all the way down to my bones.
Taking a deep breath, I focus on what I’m sure of. “For their plan to work, they need the planes, and they need the soldiers who’ll fly those planes to think bombing is a good idea. The people in this base haven’t been dealing with shadowkind directly—they shouldn’t be wearing the badges. I can calm their fears and make them care about the horrible consequences. Mirage can distract them with illusions. You all have powers that could block them and challenge them rather than hurting them, don’t you?”
“Risky,” Rollick says with a tsk of his tongue.
“Do you really think it’s more risky than getting into a bomb war with the humans? What if they bring out bigger ones next time? What if they convince the other countries with these weird rifts to bomb those too, and the shadows spread all over the whole world, and?—”
My throat chokes up with the enormity of what I’m picturing. Just a big mess of toxic shadows, ones no kind of being can happily survive in. A big bath of misery without any warm towels to step out into.
Rollick’s expression turns even more somber. I think he’s picturing misery bathtubs too.
“We might not have a choice,” he says finally. “We’ll give the more peaceful approach our best shot, but if those planes take off with the bombs, all bets are off.”
I nod, understanding his reasoning but unable to dislodge the lump from my throat.
A heavy fencesurrounds the military base, but that only means Sorsha and the shadowbloods will hang back in the van for now. The rest of us can rush through the shadows into the compound unobstructed. Crag and Thorn carry Jonah and Gracie over the wall, with Mirage hiding them in an illusion until they’re ready to make their human appeals.
I spot a row of jets beyond the low beige building with a flurry of activity going on around them. Panic flashes through my essence.
Without a second to lose, I sprint toward them.
My anxiety twists through me, straining with the need to spill out the darkness of my fears. I clamp those uncomfortable feelings down as well as I can and reach for my sense of light.
I have the support of my mates around me, their faith in me. I have the trust of all the humans who believed in my warning and have tried to stop this worse catastrophe from happening. Even these soldiers—they only want to protect their people and end the disaster. They just don’t know how.
I leap out by the jets with a wash of warm light, bright enough to be noticed but not to burn. Heads all around the yard jerk toward me.
Alongside the glow, I project all the soothing, hopeful feelings I can toward the uniformed humans. “Let’s not make a mistake. We can find a better way to protect Jackson City. Blowing it up definitely won’t work. It’d be so sad to destroy all those pretty buildings, wouldn’t it? You don’t actually like theidea of ruining something beautiful. You want to make the worldmorebeautiful.”
I suspect the soldiers have never thought of their goals quite that way before, but my supernatural influence sinks in. The tension fades from some of the faces. A few do look abruptly sad.
