Rebecca had been in the kitchenette making tea, but she turned as soon as she heard me stir. “You’re awake.” She came over with a mug in each hand and gave one to me. “How do you feel?”
“Like I got hit by a tactical team.” As I’d thought, that was tea in the mug, not coffee. Probably better that way. Strong coffee would have been too much of a shock to my system. I drank some of the tea. Darjeeling, warm and welcoming in my throat. “How long was I out?”
“Almost twelve hours. It’s nearly seven.” She settled onto a chair near the couch where I’d slept, her expression grim in the phoenix’s firelight. “We need to talk about the situation.”
I nodded, bracing myself for the worst. The “situation,” as she called it, was that Ben was captured, the phoenix was dying, and I was too exhausted and wrung out to do anything meaningful about either problem.
“I have a contact inside DAPI,” Rebecca said. Her tone was as clipped and cool as if she was delivering a report at FBI headquarters, but I thought maybe it was better that way. If she’d been worried and overwrought rather than dispassionate, I might have been freaking out even more than I already was. “He reached out two hours ago with some intel.”
“Contact?” This sounded like the first positive news I’d heard in a long while. “Who is it?”
She lifted her mug of tea to her lips and took a sip. “That’s not important. What’s important is that the artificial portal is already active.”
My stomach began to churn, and I wondered if drinking tea with nothing to buffer it had been such a good idea after all. “Active? As in, actually functioning?”
“As in siphoning energy from the global portal network. Every supernatural site on Earth is being affected.”
She leaned down and set her mug on the floor, then got up and crossed the room to her makeshift communications setup. After retrieving the tablet she’d left there, she came back and sat down again, then tilted its screen toward me. The charts I saw on the display were complex, and I could barely process them through the fog of exhaustion that still clung to me.
“My contact says the portal has about six hours of stable operation with the phoenix essence they’ve already harvested,” she went on. “After that, they have to shut down and let the natural network compensate.”
Six hours. Not a very long span of time, but certainly long enough to prove the technology worked.
And long enough to kill every natural portal on the planet if they kept pushing.
I had to know, even if it was news I wouldn’t like very much. “What about Ben?”
“He’s alive and being held in comfortable quarters while Rosenthal tries to recruit him.” Her expression softened slightly. “She’s giving him until tomorrow morning to decide. After that….”
She didn’t need to finish the sentence, but I did it for her anyway.
“Enhanced interrogation.” I closed my eyes and fought the surge of rage and fear that rose within me. I wanted to hit something, wanted to scream, but I forced myself to breathe through it, to push the emotion down where it couldn’t cloud my thinking. Ben would be subjected to DAPI’s methods because I’d been too weak to protect him, because I’d pushed my powers too hard and left myself useless when it mattered the most.
The phoenix trilled softly, a sound I’d come to recognize as concern. Through our bond, it sent me an image — Ben and me together, our electromagnetic signatures creating that soft golden glow they did when we were close.
Strength in partnership.
“Your contact,” I said as I opened my eyes. “Can he help us get Ben out?”
“He’s working on it. He told me he’ll create a system malfunction at two in the morning. That will give us eight minutes of security blackout.” She laid the tablet on the floor next to her half-drunk mug of tea and leaned forward. “Sidney, I know what you’re thinking. But in your current state — ”
“I can manage minor use of my abilities,” I broke in. “It’ll be enough to jam any emergency alerts and maybe disable a few cameras.” I met her worried gaze and tried to project more confidence than I was currently feeling. “But what I can’t do is leave Ben there.”
Her eyes were dark with worry. “Even if rescuing him means you won’t have enough power left for the phoenix cleansing?”
The question hung between us, heavy as stone. Because that was the real choice, wasn’t it? Use what little power I had left to rescue Ben, or conserve it for the final phoenix rebirth.
Choose the man I loved…or the duty the women of my family had shouldered for generations.
“There has to be another way,” I told her.
She responded at once, a sort of weary certainty in her voice. “There isn’t.” A pause, and then she added, “You’re drained, Sidney. Even with six more hours of rest, you’ll maybe recover enough for moderate use. That’s not sufficient for both a rescue operation and a phoenix cleansing. You have to choose.”
I looked at the phoenix, the magnificent creature that was dying because DAPI had deliberately contaminated its rebirth cycle. Its corruption had spread even further and was now probably past eighty percent or worse. I could sense it through our connection, the shadow-taint eating away at its essence like cancer. Only hours left now, not days.
My grandmother had sent herself to the hospital trying to assist a creature like this, and my great-great-grandmother had allowed herself to be permanently scarred. Was I really going to let this phoenix die because I couldn’t bear to lose Ben?
But Ben had sacrificed himself to save me, had deliberately drawn DAPI’s attention so I could escape. How could I honor that sacrifice by abandoning him to Rosenthal’s custody?
