Nothing.
I ran to the kitchen. The table was shoved against the wall. A chair was splintered.
On the floor, his mobile phone sat in a pool of cold tea from a knocked-over mug. I stared at it. He never left the house without it. Never.
He was gone.
A sudden gasp trapped a sob in my throat. Varessia. It had to be.
Yesterday at the station. The way she had looked at him. She sensed the power. She thought it was him.
The air in the hallway cracked. A picture frame on the wall shattered, glass raining down onto the floorboards.
I ignored it.
Stupid. We were so stupid. We let him walk out of that station, let him go home, thinking he was safe because he was just Eamon.
But to her, he was the source. And now she had him.
I recalled Jack Preston’s report of the active operation at Blackwood Mill and Riven’s warning that the site served as a disposal ground for Highspire’s problems. Varessia had marked Eamon at the station yesterday, and the mill was the specific location of the dead zone she used for extractions. That was where she took him. I felt the certainty of it.
I spun around, running for the door. I threw myself into the driver’s seat, jamming the key in. The engine roared to life. And I just drove.
The city blurredpast in a grey smudge of rain-slickedconcrete and iron as Eamon’s disappearance drained the colour from the world.
Don’t be dead. Don’t be dead.
The words screamed inside my head, a mantra beating back the rising panic.
I hit the Industrial Crescent doing sixty. The car skidded on the wet cobbles, tyres screeching as I slammed the brakes near the old Blackwood Mill.
I scrambled out, leaving the door open, my hand diving into my pocket. I needed backup. I needed Riven.
I tapped out the message with shaking thumbs:Industrial Crescent. She has Eamon.
I hit send.
The screen fractured into pixelated blocks, tearing and bleeding colour before stabilising into a greyscale smear. The signal bar vanished into the vacuum. The dead zone was back, swallowing the physics of the device.
“Damn it!” I hissed, shoving the useless brick back into my pocket.
Then the pain hit.
It slammed into my left shoulder—an immediate, agonising strike. It was the same searing heat I’d felt beside Talia Merrin’s body, the visceral reaction of my own magic screaming against the proximity of the Silverite alloy. I faced the old brick structure of the Mill, where the side entrance opened like a gaping maw ready to swallow the remaining light.
If the metal was here, Eamon was here. The site felt predatory, the derelict walls closing in as the screaming ache in my scar told me he was in danger of being drained. The air usually tasted of rust and rot here. Today, it tasted of ash and burnt copper.
“Dad!” The shout tore from my throat.
Then it slammed into me—a broken scream.
The energy struck the centre of my chest in a blast of pure agony, bypassing language entirely: a burning, draining sensation of a soulbeing scraped hollow. I doubled over, gasping and clutching my ribs as the depth of his torment became a crushing weight.
I forced myself upright, following the pull east towards the hulking, windowless shell of the old pneumatic exchange station.
And I ran.
I movedtowards the side of the building, skidding on the wet concrete, aiming for the external freight lift where Riven had saved me a few days ago. The twisted metal cage still hung partway down the shaft, a rusted reminder of the fight and the augmented guard.
