Sacrifice.
“Sidney.” Ben put his hand on my shoulder, gentle but urgent. “We have maybe three minutes.”
I stared at the phoenix, this magnificent creature that was dying because DAPI had deliberately corrupted its rebirth cycle. This being that had existed for centuries, maybe millennia, guarding the portal and maintaining the balance between worlds. Leaving it felt like abandoning family.
But staying meant we’d all be captured. And if Rosenthal got her hands on me, she’d have everything she needed to replicate my abilities and weaponize them.
“We’ll come back,” I told the phoenix, my voice fierce with resolve. “I swear we’ll come back for you.”
It trilled again, more softly this time. Again, it seemed to send concepts rather than words.
Agreement. Hope. Trust.
Ben took my hand, and we ran, moving through underbrush and between trees as quickly and carefully as we could. Ben walked slightly ahead of me and used his tablet to track the electromagnetic signatures I’d mapped. The gap in their perimeter was closing, but if we were fast enough —
A high-pitched whine cut through the morning air.
I stumbled, and my hands flew to my ears as the sound drilled into my skull. After a second or two of searing pain, I realized it wasn’t a sound at all. It was an electromagnetic pulse targeted directly at me. It bypassed normal hearing entirely and spoke directly to the electrical signals in my nervous system.
“Sidney!” Ben caught me as my knees buckled and barely saved me from face-planting into a clump of ferns. “What is it?”
“Sonic weapon,” I gasped. “No — not sonic. Electromagnetic. They’re using my own sensitivity against me.”
Through streaming eyes, I saw that the perimeter had shifted. They’d anticipated our break for the gap. Tactical teams emerged from concealment, moving surely and swiftly. At least fifteen operators that I could see, probably more behind them. All wore tactical gear that bristled with technology I couldn’t properly sense through the combination of hardening and the electromagnetic assault on my nervous system.
And there, in the center of the formation, stood Dr. Sonya Rosenthal.
She looked almost exactly the same as she had when I’d first met her — neat skirt suit, severe gray pixie cut with not a hair out of place, calm expression. She might have been attending a board meeting rather than orchestrating a paramilitary operation in a forest at dawn.
“Ms. Lowell, Mr. Sanders.” Her cool, sharp voice with its trace of a New York accent carried clearly across the space between us. “I’d ask you to come quietly, but I suspect we’re past that point.”
Ben’s arm tightened around my waist. Even as he supported most of my weight, I could sense the way he was calculating our situation, measuring distances and odds. We were fifty yards from the perimeter, twenty yards from any adequate cover. With me functioning at maybe a third of my usual strength, our chances of fighting through were essentially zero.
But Ben Sanders had never been good at accepting impossible odds.
“The gap southwest,” I murmured, making sure my lips barely moved so Rosenthal and her goons wouldn’t be able to tell what I was saying. “Feint northeast, actually go southwest.”
I felt him nod once. Then his hand moved to one of the pieces of equipment he had clipped to his belt. It wasn’t a weapon, but something better — the electromagnetic pulse generator we’d salvaged from Jessop’s facility.
“On three,” he whispered. “One — ”
I gathered what little power I had left and prepared to shield us from the sonic weapon long enough to run.
“Two — ”
Ben’s muscles tensed. The agents moved closer, their weapons raised but not pointed directly at us.
Of course. They wanted us alive. And that was our advantage.
“Three.”
Ben triggered the pulse generator toward the northeast quadrant. It was nothing compared to what I could do at full strength, but in the forest gloom, it created a bright flash and crackle of energy, and was exactly the kind of diversion we needed.
Half the tactical team turned toward the flash, and we ran southwest.
I pushed power into my legs and used electromagnetic pulses to stimulate my muscles far past their exhausted limits. Pain surged through my nervous system at once, and my nose began to bleed again even as the forest blurred around me. But my legs moved faster and carried me forward even as my body screamed in protest.
And then a Faraday cage activated when we were ten yards from breaking through the perimeter. I didn’t see it deploy — there was no visible marker, no warning. But I got cut off from the electromagnetic spectrum as completely as if someone had severed a limb.
