“And I keep thinking of what you said: ‘Do we have principles, or don’t we?’” He looked away. “I was almost certain you would have wanted me to tell him no, and I couldn’t do it.”
“I would have done just as you did,” she said quietly. “If he was going to torture you, I mean.” She slipped onto his lap and laid her head on his shoulder. “How are we here, Peter? How is this possible?”
He put his arms around her, letting out a long breath. “I don’t know.” He’d thought in the final days of his coma that the Vow-created connection between them was like a train barreling through a tunnel—take away the train, and you could still walk through the tunnel if you chose to do it. But he assumed he was wrong when he recovered and couldn’t get back.
“If your store of magic or whatever we’re calling it wasn’t quite gone in your coma and you had to burn it up to get out,thatmight be why we’ve been shut out of dreamside,” Beatrix said. “What if—what if you’re now getting your magic back?”
His snort was bitter. “I tried about fifty times to cast a spell a few days ago. I really don’t think so.”
“What were you doing before you fell asleep?”
“Just sitting with you.”
“Oh.” He could feel her brow furrowing against his chest.
“You’re on my cot and I’m in a chair next to it. Holding your hand.” He paused, struck by the irony that four months earlier, their roles had been reversed. Then—like a flash of lightning—he remembered what she said she’d been trying to do as she held his hand in the hospital day after day. “Beatrix—is there anything you did before you fell asleep that could be pumping magic into me?”
“I don’t—” She pulled back to look at him, eyes wide. “Wait, I was trying to overcome the sleeping draft. I was attempting to send a flood of magic through every inch of my body. If you’re holding my hand, maybe itisgoing to you.”
His mind raced. “Maybe I could teleport us all out.”
She nodded.
“Better Martinelli than me, though,” he added. “I might have enough magic to burn up the red but not to make the spell fully take.”
“What about the transmitter?” Her eyes welled. “Is thereanyway to stop them?”
“I don’t know where it is. You can set it off from anywhere.” He sighed. “It’ll be hard enough to get out of the room—I don’t see how we’re going to get the transmitter, too.”
They sat for a moment in silence, Beatrix’s arms around him, her expression somber.
“I think they’re going to set it off in Canada,” she said. “They’ve been telling reporters that we fled there. They’re probably trying to start a war.”
He frowned. Even if Draden could convince the world that Canada knowingly let two fugitives in, he surely couldn’t use that as justification for bombing the country—wreaking destruction unmatched in human history.
“Tell me again what Whitaker said to Morse when he thought the weapon wouldn’t be ready,” he said.
“Something like, ‘We’ll have other chances. We can try a later event.’”
“Event.What ‘event’ is happening tomorrow at noon?”
“I don’t know.”
He rested his head on hers. Draden’s men were going to set off the weapon at an event, or during an event, and they wanted it to utterly destroy everything within five miles of the payload stone. That was all they knew. Even if they got out of the complex altogether—even if Martinelli could quickly connect with someone in a position of authority who would listen to him—their chances of stopping this massacre seemed awfully close to zero.
Beatrix pulled back and looked him in the eye. “I love you, Peter Blackwell. Whatever happens, Iloveyou.”
He swallowed over a lump in his throat.I love you tooseemed completely inadequate. He took her hand in both of his. “It is an ever-fixed mark,” he croaked.
“That looks on tempests”—her voice wavered—“and… and is never shaken.”
“Love alters not,” he whispered, “but bears it out even to the edge of doom.”
A tear rolled down her cheek. Heart breaking, he reached out to wipe it away—and sat up with a jerk, booted dayside, gasping and bereft. Next to him, Beatrix lay deeply asleep on the cot. Her hand hung limply off the side. He must have let go.
Well—as little as he wanted to be here, he knew what he had to do.
He kept his head down, trying to survey the room without looking like that was his aim. Martinelli lay on the other cot, turned away from him. Red Coat sat in his chair, eyelidsheavy. A new sheen on the walls, including the spot where the chute let out, showed a shield spell was now in place to block teleportation.
