Finn nodded, but he didn’t move from his chair. “I’ll stay up a while longer. There are still some approaches I want to map out.”
“I’ll keep him company,” Rebecca added. “Eric’s supposed to send more data in a few hours. I might as well be awake to receive it.”
Ben rose from the table, then paused at the doorway to look back at them — two people who’d spent years operating alone, now working side by side in the warm light of the dining room. It wasn’t exactly trust, but it was something. A foundation they could build on.
“For what it’s worth,” he said quietly, “I’m glad you’re both here. Sidney won’t say it — she’s still too angry, and she has every right to be. But she needs people in her corner right now. People who understand what’s at stake.”
Finn’s dark eyes met his, and for a moment, the careful neutrality dropped away, revealing a flash of raw pain underneath. “Take care of her,” he said. “Whatever happens with the rest of this — take care of my daughter.”
“I will,” Ben promised. “I always will.”
He climbed the stairs slowly, skipping the third step, and slipped back into the bedroom where Sidney still slept. The blue-gold light had faded to a soft glimmer that pulsed gently in rhythm with her breathing. He undressed quietly and slid under the covers beside her, and she turned instinctively toward him, her hand finding his chest, her fingers coming to rest over the scar where Rosenthal’s weapon had struck.
Even in sleep, she was reaching for him. Even in sleep, they were connected.
Ben closed his eyes and let the steady pulse of their shared light carry him down into darkness, where dreams of fire and impossible choices waited.
Chapter Seven
The five days that led up to Halloween went by so quickly that I barely noticed the time passing. I was too preoccupied with preparation, with doing everything I could to make sure everything went right.
After all, we wouldn’t get any second chances.
We gathered around the dining room table each morning so we could pore over Finn’s maps and Rebecca’s tactical assessments while Eric fed us data from Oregon. The electromagnetic readings grew more chaotic with each passing day, the spikes and valleys on his charts looking less like scientific measurements and more like the fever dreams of a dying system. The Dragon’s disruption of the lunar cycle was accelerating, and somewhere in that chaos lay our opportunity.
Assuming we didn’t screw it up completely, of course.
Ben and I spent hours practicing our synchronization, pushing our bioelectric fields to merge more deeply than we ever had before. The intimacy of it was almost overwhelming, not just the physical closeness, but the way I could feel his thoughts brushing against the edges of mine when we were fully connected…his fears, his hopes, his absolute certainty that we would find a way through this. Sometimes I wasn’t sure where I ended and he began, and that should have scared the crap out of me.
Oddly, though, it felt like coming home.
My father kept his distance during these sessions, watching from doorways or through windows but never interrupting. I caught him staring at me sometimes with an expression I couldn’t quite read, a jumble of pride and regret. We hadn’t talked about the seventeen years he’d been gone, not really. There hadn’t been time, and I wasn’t sure I was ready to pull the scab off that particular wound. But I noticed the way he threw himself into the planning, the meticulous attention he paid to every detail of our approach. Whatever else he might be, Finn Lowell was not a man who did things halfway.
Rebecca, for her part, had become our tactical coordinator. She’d spent two days scouting the forest between the house and the portal site, identifying sight lines and choke points and places where Gregory’s drones might be watching. Eric had hacked into Aetheris’s surveillance network — something he assured us was “technically legal, given the circumstances,” although I had my doubts — and now we knew their patrol patterns, their sensor ranges, their blind spots.
We also knew that Julian Gregory had increased security around the drilling site. Whatever he was trying to accomplish, he was pushing hard toward some kind of deadline of his own.
On the morning of October thirty-first, I woke to find Ben already gone from our bed. The space next to me was still warm, and I could feel the faint echo of his bioelectric field lingering in the sheets. I lay there for a moment and stared at the ceiling, trying to quiet the fear that had taken up permanent residence inside me.
Tonight. We were doing this tonight.
I found him downstairs in the kitchen, standing at the window with a cup of coffee in his hands. The sky outside was gray and heavy again, the ever-present blanket of unnatural clouds pressing down on Silver Hollow like a weight. The green lightning had faded over the past few days, replaced by something that felt almost like anticipation — the world holding its breath, waiting to see what would happen when the veil grew thin.
“Couldn’t sleep?” I asked as I came over so I could stand next to him.
“Bad dreams.” He took a sip of his coffee but didn’t look away from the window. “I kept seeing the corruption spreading. The other portals going dark, one by one. And then….” Rather than finish the sentence, he went quiet, his jaw tightening.
“And then?” I prompted.
“And then I woke up.” He turned to face me, and I saw the shadows under his eyes, the tension in his shoulders. “Sidney, are you sure about this? We could wait, maybe try to find another way — ”
“There is no other way.” I took his free hand and sensed how our bioelectric fields synced automatically, the familiar pulse of gold and blue-white steadying us both. “The Dragon gave us a deadline, and the portal will be accessible tonight. If we don’t try now, we might not get another chance.”
He studied my face for the space of a few breaths, searching for something there. Whatever he found seemed to satisfy him, because he nodded slowly and squeezed my fingers.
“Then we’ll do this together,” he said. “Just like always.”
I managed a smile. “Just like always.”