He checked her vital signs again — pulse steady, breathing regular, but no response to stimuli. Her brain activity was normal on the monitors Agent Morse had set up, but there was something else showing on his electromagnetic sensors. A feedback loop between Sidney and the phoenix, growing stronger and more synchronized with each passing minute.
They weren’t just entangled. They were merging.
“Damn it, Sidney.” He squeezed her hand gently. “What did you do?”
The phoenix answered with another pulse of corrupted fire, and this time Ben felt it, a wave of heat and pain and desperate need that crashed into him like a breaker on the shore. The creature was suffering, had been suffering for weeks while DAPI’s interference equipment slowly poisoned its rebirth.
And Sidney, in her compassion and power and stubborn refusal to let something die on her watch, had connected herself to its pain.
If he couldn’t wake her up soon, if he couldn’t help her complete what she’d started, the corruption would spread to her, too. If that happened, it would destroy her from the inside out.
The phoenix’s fire guttered lower.
Sidney’s hand twitched in his, and her eyes moved again under their closed lids, faster now. The trembling in her hands had spread to her whole body, and the electromagnetic readings from his sensors were spiking erratically.
“Come on,” Ben whispered. “Come back. Please.”
The phoenix lifted its head and looked at him with those ancient, knowing eyes. And he understood what it was trying to tell him.
Sidney wasn’t unconscious. She was elsewhere, following the connection between her consciousness and the phoenix’s fire, diving deeper into magic that no human was meant to touch.
He couldn’t wake her up.
He could only wait and hope that when she finally surfaced, there was still enough of Sidney left to come back to.
Chapter Three
I woke to the smell of disinfectant and the steady beep of medical equipment, and for a confused moment, I thought I was in a hospital. Then memory came flooding back — the phoenix, the contamination, the way I’d tried to cleanse its fire and felt my entire nervous system overload in response.
“Sidney.” Ben’s voice, rough with exhaustion and relief. “Thank God.”
I opened my eyes. Harsh fluorescent lights made me squint, and when I tried to sit up, every muscle in my body screamed at me to stay put. Ben’s hand was warm on my shoulder, steadying me.
“Easy,” he said. “You’ve been unconscious for more than six hours.”
Six hours. I looked around the sterile room, taking in the equipment that surrounded me — both medical and scientific, which I guessed must be monitoring the active electromagnetism all around — and a wrapped bundle on another table across from me that could only be the phoenix.
“Where are we?”
“An old research facility that used to be run by a scientist named Daniel Jessop. Rebecca Morse brought us here.” Ben pulled his chair closer. His hair was so mussed that it looked as if he’d stuck his head inside a wind tunnel, and dark circles shadowed his eyes. “How do you feel?”
A very good question. As much as I would have preferred to avoid doing so, I made myself take inventory. My head throbbed, and my nose seemed oddly sore, although I noticed that the blood had been wiped away. When I lifted them from the exam table where I lay, my hands trembled, and I could still sense the phoenix’s electromagnetic signature like a second heartbeat underneath my own.
“Like I got hit by a truck,” I said. “A very big truck. How’s the phoenix?”
For a second, Ben didn’t say anything. But then he took a breath and replied, “The corruption won’t stop spreading. It’s passed seventy-five percent. It seems stable for now, but….”
He didn’t finish the sentence.
He didn’t have to.
I closed my eyes and, shaky as I knew I was, did my best to reach out with those strange abilities that had awakened over the past month, following the connection between my consciousness and the phoenix’s fire. The corruption was worse than I’d feared — it had gone past the physical into something at its very core, eating away at whatever magic made the creature what it was. And underneath the contamination, I could feel the phoenix’s pain and exhaustion and desperate need to complete its rebirth cycle before it was too late.
“Sidney.” Ben wrapped his fingers around my nearest hand. It felt so good to have him hold me like that, his skin warm against my icy flesh. “I have something I need to tell you. It’s about DAPI and why all this is happening.”
The way he said those words made me feel shakier than ever, but I knew I had to ask anyway. “What about DAPI?”
“The electromagnetic interference that’s been killing the phoenix? DAPI did it deliberately. They’ve had surveillance equipment all over the forest for the past six months, and it’s not just recording data. It’s actively generating interference to destabilize the portal.”
