“The woman who’s currently the only person in that camp who understands the danger.” Ben lowered his binoculars and looked over at Finn. “You said it yourself — she’s frightened. That means she knows Gregory is making a mistake. If we can convince her that working with us is better than watching him destroy everything….”
“It’s risky,” Rebecca said. She looked calm enough, but a certain tightness around her eyes told him she was much more worried than she let on. “Rosenthal doesn’t trust anyone. And she definitely doesn’t trust us.”
Well, that was true enough. But….
“She doesn’t have to trust us. She just has to fear what Gregory is doing more than she fears what we might do.” Ben turned back to the camp and watched the drilling apparatus pulse with that sickening subsonic hum. “Right now, I think that fear is winning.”
They watched for another hour, taking notes on the camp’s layout, counting personnel, tracking the patterns of the security patrols. The drilling apparatus ran continuously, its hum growing louder and more discordant as the afternoon wore on. Twice, alarms sounded, and workers rushed to make adjustments, and both times, Ben saw Rosenthal emerge from her building to oversee the response, her face tight with barely controlled panic. She shouted orders, checked readings, and made adjustments with her own hands when the technicians weren’t moving fast enough.
Gregory, by contrast, seemed utterly unconcerned. He wandered the camp like a host at a cocktail party, chatting with workers and checking his phone, occasionally pausing to admire the drilling apparatus with that proprietary smile. At one point, he posed for what looked like a selfie with the derrick in the background, probably for some investor update or social media post about “pushing the boundaries of sustainable energy.”
“We’ve seen enough,” Finn said at last. “We need to report back before Sidney sends out a search party.”
They withdrew carefully, retracing their steps through the scarred forest until they reached the hidden car. Ben slid into the back seat and closed his eyes, trying to process everything they’d seen.
Julian Gregory wanted to harvest the Dragon’s power, to tap into an ancient force of nature and turn it into profit. He didn’t understand — or didn’t care — that what he was drilling into wasn’t just an energy source but a living creature, vast and ancient and very, very angry.
But Sonya Rosenthal understood. She’d spent her entire career studying dimensional phenomena, and she knew exactly what kind of fire Gregory was playing with. But she was trapped — bound to Aetheris by whatever deal she’d made when she fled the country, unable to stop Gregory’s recklessness without destroying herself in the process.
The friction between them was real. And if their little group of warriors played it right, it might be the leverage they needed.
The car bumped along the logging road, and Ben opened his eyes to find Finn watching him in the rearview mirror.
“You’re thinking about approaching Rosenthal,” the older man said.
“I’m thinking it might be our only option.” Ben met Finn’s gaze steadily. “Julian Gregory isn’t going to stop. He’s too invested, too convinced he’s on the verge of something revolutionary. But Rosenthal knows what’s at stake. If we can get her to work with us — ”
“She tried to kill Sidney,” Finn said flatly. “She built a weapon specifically designed to destroy her.”
“I know.” Ben’s jaw tightened at the recollection, at the echoes of pain it awoke in his body. “I was there. I took the blast meant for her.” He touched his chest unconsciously, feeling the dimensional scars hidden beneath his shirt. The memory of that moment was still vivid — the flash of light, the sensation of his bioelectric field shattering and re-forming, the strange peace he’d felt when he thought he was dying. “But right now, Rosenthal might be the only person who can help us stop Gregory before he wakes up something none of us can control.”
Finn was quiet for a long while. The car emerged from the forest onto a paved road, and the ride smoothed out as Rebecca accelerated toward town.
“Sidney won’t like it,” he said at length.
“No,” Ben agreed. “She won’t.”
Rebecca glanced at him in the rearview mirror. “For what it’s worth, I think you might be right. Rosenthal may be a lot of things, but she’s not stupid. She knows what Gregory is doing is dangerous. The question is whether she’s desperate enough to accept help from the people she tried to destroy.”
“I guess we’ll just have to find out,” Ben replied.
They drove the rest of the way in silence, each of them lost in their own thoughts. But they were running out of time. Ben could feel it in his scars, in the wrongness of the air, in the way the forest itself seemed to be holding its breath as the Dragon stirred.
Whatever they were going to do, they needed to do it soon.
Chapter Five
They returned just after four o’clock, Rebecca’s gray sedan that practically screamed “rental” pulling into the driveway while I stood at the kitchen window and watched the sky convulse with that sickly green lightning. I’d spent the hours since they left trying to distract myself with work — sorting through the inventory spreadsheets for the pet shop, reviewing the notes Hope Hayakawa had sent me about a diabetic cat I’d been monitoring — but nothing had stuck. Every few minutes, my attention had drifted back to the window, to the forest beyond the town, to the wrongness that pulsed beneath my feet like a second heartbeat.
Ben came through the door first, and something in his expression made my stomach clench in dread before he even said a word.
“What did you find?”
He crossed the kitchen and took my hands, and the familiar warmth of our bioelectric fields synchronizing did nothing to ease the cold dread that seemed to settle deep inside me. Behind him, Rebecca and my father filed in, their faces grim.
“Aetheris Dynamics,” Ben said quietly. “They’ve set up a drilling operation in Welling Glen. They’re tapping directly into the ley line.”
I listened as they explained what they’d seen — the drilling apparatus, the prefab buildings, the workers in their white coveralls. Julian Gregory and his TED Talk smile, treating the destruction of something ancient and sacred like just another disruptive startup. And Rosenthal, haggard and frightened, trying to warn a man who didn’t want to hear what she had to say.