“Ben, stop the car,” I said.
He hit the brakes without question, and we sat there in the darkness while I stretched my senses outward. Three miles northeast, I picked up vehicle signatures — what I thought were military transport trucks, maybe four or five of them. Two miles east, I found concentrated electromagnetic activity that matched the signature of tactical communications equipment.
DAPI had found us.
“They’re surrounding the facility,” I said in an undertone, even though the encroaching forces certainly weren’t close enough to hear us. “At least twenty people, probably more. They must have tracked us from the tower.”
Ben began to pull out his phone, then made a sound of disgust as he seemed to remember it was useless. The EMP from the phoenix’s distress call had fried every civilian electronic device in a five-mile radius. Only military-grade, hardened equipment and the specialized DAPI sensors Ben and I had pilfered from the forest had survived.
“Rebecca,” he said. “We need to warn her.”
I reached deeper with my abilities, searching for her electromagnetic signature. Doing so took longer than it should have; my depleted state made everything harder, like trying to see through fog. But I found her eventually. To my surprise, she was actually inside the facility, moving with stealth and haste through the lower levels.
“She knows,” I said. “She’s already evacuating. Ben, we can’t go back there. If we get any closer, they’ll find us.”
“The phoenix — ”
“I know.” The creature’s weakening heartbeat pulsed through our connection, and I felt its confusion and fear. It didn’t understand why I’d left, why the anchor had broken. “But if DAPI captures me, the phoenix will die no matter what. At least this way, we have a chance.”
Ben stared at the dark road ahead, his hands tight on the steering wheel. I could sense his frustration, the helpless rage of someone who’d spent his whole life solving problems through research and logic, and who was now facing a situation where neither would help.
“What do we do?” he asked.
Before I could answer, my senses flared, warning me of a new threat. Different signatures this time, approaching from the south.
Two vehicles moving at high speed.
“We’ve got company,” I said. “I think it’s a tactical team. They must have been waiting for us to come back.”
Ben threw the SUV into reverse and hit the gas. We shot backward down the access road, tires squealing as he whipped us around in a tight turn. The headlights swept across the forest, and for a moment I caught a glimpse of what was coming — black SUVs with tinted windows, the kind of vehicles that practically screamed “federal agency.”
“They’re going to cut us off,” I said. That weird electromagnetic sense of mine seemed able to track the vehicles’ approach vectors, which would have been freaky if I’d had more time to analyze it. “We need to go off-road.”
“This thing isn’t built for off-road.”
I grinned. “Neither am I right now, but we’re doing it anyway.”
In answer, Ben yanked the wheel to the right and sent us careening into the forest. Branches scraped against the sides of the SUV, and the suspension protested with creaks and groans as we bounced over roots and rocks. Behind us, I could sense the tactical teams reaching the access road, their vehicles stopping where we’d turned off.
They’d come after us on foot. They had the terrain advantage, the numbers advantage, and significantly better training than an exhausted cryptozoologist and a burned-out pet shop owner and almost-DVM.
“Ben,” I said. Maybe it was stupid to warn him, but I needed him to know what I planned to do. “I have to use my abilities.”
That statement earned me an emphatic shake of his head. Hands tight on the steering wheel, he said, “You’re already drained. You said yourself that you shouldn’t be channeling any more power.”
Well, that was true enough.
“I shouldn’t be doing a lot of things.” I pressed my hand against the dashboard, feeling the SUV’s electrical systems through my fingertips. “But I can give us an advantage and hopefully buy us some time.”
“Sidney — ”
“Trust me.”
I reached outward with my electromagnetic senses, finding the tactical teams’ radio communications, their GPS units, their night vision equipment. All of it ran on electricity. All of it was vulnerable to someone who could manipulate electromagnetic fields.
Yes, I’d done this before, during the shadow stalker crisis a month earlier. I’d overloaded electronics, created interference, and jammed signals. But that had been when I was fresh, when my nervous system wasn’t already screaming from overuse.
This was going to hurt.
