“Ben.” Her voice was stronger now, although still hoarse. “I can walk. Save your strength.”
He set her down reluctantly and kept one arm around her waist for support. She swayed badly but managed to stay upright, one hand braced against a nearby pine trunk.
“How bad is the drain?” he asked quietly.
Sidney was silent for a moment, her expression distant in a way that meant she was assessing her internal state. When she met his eyes again, her face was pale even in the darkness.
“Down to twenty percent capacity. Maybe less.” She wiped blood from her upper lip with her sleeve. “I can sense nearby electronics, nothing more. The burns” — she gestured at her arms — “those happened when I forced the facility’s entire power grid offline at once. Dimensional backlash. They’ll scar.”
“Sidney — ”
“We need to keep moving.” She pushed away from the tree and stumbled slightly as she forced herself forward. “Rosenthal will have tactical teams sweeping the area within minutes.”
Rebecca Morse had moved ahead to scout, but she returned now, looking satisfied. “My vehicle’s just ahead. No pursuit yet — they’re still organizing.”
They covered the remaining distance with Ben supporting most of Sidney’s weight. The Suburban was exactly where Morse had promised, hidden in a clump of trees off an access road that looked abandoned. She backtracked to double-check they were still alone while Ben settled Sidney in the back seat. She tried to sit upright, failed, and ended up lying across the seat with her head in Ben’s lap.
Rebecca came back, climbed into the Suburban, and started the engine. With the headlights off, she pulled onto the access road and navigated by the faint starlight that filtered through breaks in the cloud cover and the forest canopy. Behind them, the facility’s perimeter lit up with searchlights.
They’d finally realized he was gone.
“How far?” Ben asked, one hand gently brushing blood-matted hair away from Sidney’s face. He didn’t know where they were going, but he assumed it must be a safe house of some sort.
“Forty minutes if we’re not intercepted.” Rebecca took a corner faster than was probably safe, but Ben wasn’t about to complain. “They don’t know about my safe house. It’s completely off the books. We should be secure there for at least twenty-four hours.”
“We don’t have twenty-four hours.” Ben looked down at Sidney, at the dimensional burns on her arms and the dried blood on her face. “The artificial portal — Rosenthal told me it’s already operational.”
“We know. My contact inside confirmed it.”
“Dr. Hargrove, right?” Rebecca’s shoulders tensed slightly, and she gave a brief nod. “He visited me earlier,” Ben went on. “He gave me the security badge and the timeline for the system failure.”
“Did he tell you anything else?” Her voice was carefully neutral.
“The artificial portal is siphoning energy from the global portal network. Every supernatural site on Earth is being affected.” Ben managed to keep his voice steady despite all the implications of the current situation. “Hargrove said the extraction rate isn’t sustainable. If they keep the portal active, it’ll cause cascade failure across the entire system.”
Sidney stirred in his lap, her eyes opening slowly, wide and unfocused. “How long?”
“Hargrove said the portal has a six-hour operational window. After that, they have to shut down and let the natural network compensate.” Ben gazed down at her, noting the pallor of her skin, the shadows under her eyes. “But if they try to extend that window, push for longer operational periods — ”
“It’ll fail,” Sidney said, barely above a whisper. “Everything will collapse at once.”
“How long?” Rebecca asked from the driver’s seat. Her eyes were fixed on the dark path they bumped along, but she’d clearly been listening to every word. “If they keep pushing, how long before the cascade?”
Ben did his best to remember the data he’d seen in Hargrove’s lab, the sustainability calculations that didn’t account for network degradation. This was far beyond his field of expertise, but at least he had good recall. “From what I saw, maybe ten hours. Less if they try to force the portal to stay active beyond the six-hour window.”
Ten hours. Not a lot of time to save the world’s interdimensional portals — and maybe the world itself.
“The phoenix is getting more and more corrupted,” Sidney said, the words still not much more than a whisper, as though she knew she needed to save her energy any way she could. “I can feel it through our connection. It has hours left, not days. And I’ve got….” She paused there, obviously trying to assess just how much she had left. “Maybe fifteen percent capacity. That’s not enough for the final cleansing, even if we had the time.”
“What do you need?” Ben asked. He refused to give up hope, no matter how dire things looked. Sidney and Rebecca had managed to rescue him, and that had to count for something. “To recover enough, I mean. What would it take?”
A bitter chuckle drifted from Sidney’s pale lips. “Days of complete rest with no power use whatsoever. Maybe some kind of medical help for the depletion and the dimensional burns — if we could even find someone who has any experience with these kinds of injuries.” She lifted one arm and studied the iridescent marks there with an almost clinical detachment. “These happened because I forced a power surge that should have killed me. The dimensional energy backlash scarred me. Every time I use my abilities now, they burn. The pain will get worse the more I push.”
Ben took her hand carefully, avoiding the worst of the burns. “Then we’ll find another way. I won’t let you destroy yourself trying to save the phoenix.”
“There isn’t another way.” Sidney’s voice had a weary certainty that made him ache for her, for what she was going through. “The phoenix has to have an anchor for the final cleansing, someone who can hold the pattern of clean fire while its physical form dissolves. That’s me. And I need you there to stabilize my abilities, or I won’t survive the merge.”
“Then we’ll both die trying,” Ben said simply. “Because I’m not leaving you to face this alone.”
