“You’ll die,” I said again, willing them to understand. “Both of you. DAPI will kill you and capture me anyway. This accomplishes nothing.”
“It accomplishes everything.” Ben moved closer and took my hand. “If we run, the phoenix dies for certain. That’s not acceptable.” His voice softened. “Sidney, you pushed past every safe limit to get me out of Rosenthal’s facility. You gave yourself dimensional burns because you refused to leave me behind. Do you really think I’m going to do any less for you?”
“That was different,” I protested, even as I realized we were wasting precious minutes.
“How?”
“Because you’re — ” The words caught in my throat. Because you’re more important. Because you’re worth saving. Because losing you would destroy me in ways that losing myself wouldn’t.
But I couldn’t say any of that. Not when his electromagnetic signature was pulsing with love so fierce I could barely breathe around it.
“I’m what?” Ben asked.
“Everything,” I whispered. “You’re everything to me. And I can’t stand the thought of you dying because I wasn’t strong enough to find another way.”
“There is no other way. You know that.” He cupped my face with his free hand, his touch gentle despite its urgency. “And you’re everything to me, too. Which is why I’m staying. We stand together, even when the odds are impossible.”
This was too much. And yet he needed to know.
“Whatever happens,” I said, the words pouring out in a desperate rush, “whatever I become when I separate from the merge, I need you to know that I love you. That even if I lose myself in the fire, even if I emerge as something that doesn’t remember being Sidney, these months with you have been the best of my life.”
“They were the best of my life, too.” He smiled. “And you’re going to tell me again in a few hours when this is over and we’re both alive.” He kissed me then, quick and fierce. “Now start the merge before I lose my nerve and drag you out of here.”
Rebecca had moved back to the tree line and was watching the forest with her pistol ready. “I’m signaling Eric. The diversion starts in three minutes. That’s how long you have before DAPI realizes we’re here and closes in.”
Three minutes.
I knelt beside the phoenix and pressed both hands to its chest. The creature’s skin was hot under my palms, feverish with corruption. Despite that, I could feel its awareness sharpening. It knew what was about to happen. It knew I was scared, and that I might lose myself completely when we merged.
Trust, it sent to me. Remember fire.
Remember fire. Remember that underneath the corruption, the phoenix’s essence was clean and pure and beautiful. Remember that I was human, that I had an identity worth holding on to. Remember Ben’s electromagnetic signature, the way his presence grounded me, the way loving him made me more myself rather than less.
I could do this. I had to.
I closed my eyes and let my defenses drop completely, let my consciousness reach toward the phoenix’s fire. No barriers, no protection — just complete openness to the way our selves would run together.
The creature’s awareness rushed into mine.
I gasped as phoenix fire exploded through my consciousness. This wasn’t metaphorical fire, but actual flames burning through my thoughts, my memories, my sense of self. The corruption came with it, shadow veins that tasted of ash and endings, pulling at my identity like hands trying to drag me under dark water where I would drown.
This was so much worse than the partial cleansing I’d attempted less than a week ago. That first cleansing had been like dipping my toe in a hot bath. Sure, it had been uncomfortable, but it had also been manageable, with clear boundaries between my consciousness and the phoenix’s.
This was like being thrown into a furnace. My awareness was immolated immediately, consumed by fire that was both creative and destructive, both healing and agonizing. The phoenix’s consciousness wrapped around mine, through mine, became mine, until I couldn’t tell where I ended and the creature began.
My body was still kneeling beside the phoenix with my hands pressed to its chest, but my awareness was elsewhere. Diving into the creature’s consciousness. Merging with something vast and ancient and completely different from human thought. The phoenix’s mind didn’t work in words or linear progression. It worked in images, sensations, patterns of fire that shifted and changed and re-formed with each passing second.
I tried to hold on to who I was. Sidney Lowell. Guardian. Pet shop owner. Woman who loved Ben Sanders. But the fire was consuming those definitions, burning away the boundaries that separated me from the phoenix.
From somewhere impossibly far away, I heard Ben’s voice. “Sidney? Can you hear me?”
I tried to respond, but my mouth wouldn’t work. My body was still there, still breathing, but I couldn’t control it anymore. I couldn’t make it do anything except kneel and maintain contact with the phoenix.
Because I wasn’t in my body anymore. Not really. I was in the fire.
The corruption was excruciating. Shadow veins pulsed through the phoenix’s essence, each one sending spikes of pain through what used to be my nervous system but was now something else entirely. I could feel the wrongness of it, the way the contamination twisted natural patterns into something diseased and malformed.
I had to burn it away. I had to find the clean fire underneath and hold that pattern while the infected parts dissolved.
