“Drink this.” Rebecca thrust a bottle of water into my hands as soon as we were inside. “You’re dehydrated on top of everything else.”
I took it automatically but didn’t drink. My hands were shaking too hard to unscrew the cap.
She took it back from me, opened it, and then handed it over again. “Drink. Now, before you collapse.”
This time, I obeyed. The water was cold enough to hurt going down, but it helped clear some of the fog from my brain. Not all of it, of course. But enough that I could try to focus.
The cabin was sparse — one main room with a kitchenette, a bathroom, and a loft that probably served as a sleeping area. Emergency supplies were stacked in one corner, and communications equipment sat on a battered pine table.
“How long have you been tracking their movements?” I asked. My voice was hoarse, scraped raw by exhaustion.
“Since I went ‘on leave.’” She moved to the communications equipment and checked the displays, then gave a slight nod, as if satisfied that the DAPI team had no idea where we’d gone to ground. “My superiors think I’m just taking a break, but I was worried that Rosenthal wasn’t really done, was only regrouping.”
I stared at her, still not sure I could believe everything she was saying, despite the way she’d just saved me from certain capture. “You’re still FBI.”
“Yes, and I’m an agent who believes the Bureau should protect American citizens, not experiment on them.” Her eyes narrowed slightly. “Which apparently makes me a minority in my own organization these days.”
I slumped into a chair that had seen better decades and let my head fall forward. Everything hurt — my head, my body, my powers, my heart.
Especially my heart.
“They have him,” I said. Stating the obvious, of course, but I needed to say it out loud. “Rosenthal has Ben.”
“Yes.”
“She’ll use enhanced interrogation.”
“Probably not immediately.” Rebecca pulled up a chair and sat across from me, her frank, dark gaze fixed on my face. “Rosenthal’s smart. She’ll try to recruit him first. She knows he’s valuable — his research, his network, his expertise. She’ll offer him a position, resources, a chance to study all these phenomena without restriction.”
“Ben would never — ”
She cut me off, but gently. “I know. But she’ll try anyway. That buys us maybe twelve hours before she escalates to more aggressive methods.”
Twelve hours. Half a day to figure out how to infiltrate a heavily guarded DAPI facility, rescue Ben, and escape before Rosenthal weaponized everything she’d learned from us.
Impossible.
But then, we’d been doing impossible things all week.
“The phoenix,” I said. “Did it escape?”
“For now,” she replied. “The containment teams are still searching for it, but the forest is large, and the phoenix knows it better than they do.” She paused. “How much longer does it have?”
I closed my eyes and reached for the faint thread of connection that still existed between me and the phoenix. The corruption had spread further during its attack on the tactical teams. It had hours left, not days. Maybe less.
“Not long enough,” I said quietly. “Not long enough for any of this.”
A heavy silence settled between us. Ben was captured. The phoenix was dying. I was completely drained…and Rosenthal was winning.
“I need to recover,” I said at last. “At least enough for minor power use. How long before they trace us here?”
Now Rebecca smiled faintly. “This location is off the books. It’s my personal property, purchased under a shell company. They won’t find it in twelve hours.” She rose from her chair and went over to the kitchenette. “But you need more than twelve hours to recover from major power depletion. You need days.”
“We don’t have days.”
She’d set a pair of mugs on the counter, as if she planned to make tea or maybe some coffee. Now she turned toward me, her jaw set. “Sidney — ”
“Ben doesn’t have days.” I pushed myself to my feet, swaying slightly but managing to stay upright. “He has maybe twelve hours before Rosenthal decides he’s not cooperative enough and moves to forced interrogation. Which means I have less than that to figure out how to get him out.”
