Something came and went behind Rosenthal’s eyes. Fear? Resignation? I couldn’t say for sure, because even in her diminished state, she didn’t reveal much.
“You think I don’t know that?” she returned.
“I think you know it, but you’re still working with him anyway.” I leaned forward, keeping my voice low. “I’ve seen what his drill is doing to the ley lines. The corruption is spreading faster every day. If he doesn’t stop — ”
“If he doesn’t stop, the Dragon will do it for him.” Sonya Rosenthal chuckled, the sound harsh and humorless. “Yes, I’m aware. I’ve been trying to explain that to Julian for weeks. He doesn’t listen. He thinks the readings are just interference patterns, natural fluctuations that his equipment can compensate for.” She took a sip of her coffee, and I watched her hands shake. Probably the caffeine wasn’t going to help with that, but I knew better than to comment. “He thinks he’s Thomas Edison, about to light up the world. He doesn’t understand that what he’s actually doing is drilling into the spine of something that could burn us all to ash.”
“Then help us stop him.”
The words sort of floated there, simple and impossible at the same time. Rosenthal stared at me across the table, and I tried to read the calculations happening behind her eyes. She was weighing options, I knew. Assessing risks and benefits the same way she’d assessed them for her entire career.
“You tried to kill me,” I said, when the silence had stretched too long. “You built a weapon and pointed it at my head, and if Ben hadn’t stepped in front of it — ”
“You’d be dead.” Rosenthal’s voice was flat. “Yes, I know what I did.”
“Why?”
The question surprised her. I could see it in the slight widening of her eyes, the way her grip tightened on her coffee mug.
“Why did I try to kill you?” She gave a small shake of her head. “Because you were a chaotic variable, an unknown quantity that couldn’t be controlled or predicted. My entire career has been built on identifying threats and neutralizing them before they can cause harm. You were a threat.”
I raised an eyebrow. “I was a twenty-something woman running a pet shop.”
“You were a twenty-something woman who could generate electromagnetic pulses strong enough to knock military equipment offline. A woman who could communicate with creatures from other dimensions and who had the potential to become something unprecedented and uncontrollable.” Rosenthal’s gaze met mine, and for just a second or two, I saw something raw and painful beneath the exhaustion. “You were everything I’d spent my life trying to prevent.”
I wanted to be angry. Part of me was angry, the part that remembered the weapon’s charge building in the air and Ben’s body jerking as the blast hit him. But beneath the anger was something else, something I hadn’t expected.
Curiosity.
“What happened to you?” I asked. “What made you so afraid of things you couldn’t control?”
Rosenthal was quiet for so long that I had a feeling she didn’t plan to reply. She stared down at her coffee, and I watched the steam rise in lazy spirals, evaporating into the diner’s stale air. When she finally spoke, her voice was different — lower-pitched, stripped of its usual clinical detachment.
“September eleventh, 2001.” The words were flat, recited like facts from a file. “I was in Washington that day. Pentagon liaison, coordinating intelligence sharing between agencies.” She paused and took another sip of coffee, her dark eyes fixed on a point somewhere over my shoulder, as though she couldn’t bear to look at me while she spoke those words. “My husband worked in the North Tower. Ninety-third floor, Marsh and McLennan. He was an actuary. He spent his whole career calculating risks, figuring out the probability of unlikely events.” A muscle jumped in her jaw, and her mouth thinned as she appeared to consider the irony of his career choice. “My daughter was with him that morning — Take Your Child to Work Day. She was seven years old. Her name was Sarah.”
The diner seemed to go very still around us. I could hear the clink of silverware from the elderly man’s table, the low murmur of the radio behind the counter playing some oldies station, but all of it felt distant, muffled by the impossible burden of what Rosenthal was telling me.
“I’m sorry,” I said, and meant it. Whether she could hear the sympathy in my voice was an entirely different matter.
“I watched the towers fall on television.” Rosenthal’s voice was still flat, the affectless tone people used when they were describing something too painful to fully inhabit. “I was in a room full of intelligence professionals — CIA, NSA, DIA, people whose entire job was to see threats coming and stop them — and we watched those buildings come down and couldn’t do a damn thing. Couldn’t help, couldn’t intervene, couldn’t even make a phone call to find out if our families were alive, because the networks were overloaded with everyone else trying to do the same thing.” Her hand tightened around her coffee cup until her knuckles went white. “I didn’t know for certain that Michael and Sarah were dead until three days later, when the casualty lists started coming out. Three days of hoping, of checking every news update, of telling myself that maybe they got out, maybe they made it to the stairwell in time. Three days.”
She lifted her coffee cup and took a long swallow, and I noticed that the tremor in her hands had gotten worse. When she set the cup down again, some of the coffee sloshed over the rim and pooled on the Formica table, looking like muddy water.
“After that,” she went on, “I made a decision. I would never again be in a position where I couldn’t see a threat coming. I would never again stand by helplessly while chaos consumed the people I was supposed to protect.” Her dark eyes met mine, and there was something almost pleading in them now. “That’s why I joined DAPI when they recruited me. That’s why I spent fifteen years building systems to detect and neutralize anomalous threats. And that’s why I tried to kill you, Sidney. Because you represented exactly the kind of unpredictable, uncontrollable force that destroyed my family.”
I sat with that for a moment, turning it over in my mind. The woman across from me wasn’t a monster, as much as I’d once wanted to believe that. No, she was a broken human being who had taken her grief and her fear and channeled them into something that had become monstrous. The distinction mattered, even if the end result was the same.
“I understand,” I said at last. “I understand why you did what you did. But that doesn’t make it right, and it doesn’t change what’s happening now.”
Rosenthal set down her coffee cup. “No, it doesn’t.”
“Julian Gregory isn’t like you,” I continued, pressing the opening I could sense in her defenses. “He’s not trying to protect anyone. He doesn’t care about controlling chaos or preventing threats. He cares about power and profit and proving that he’s smarter than everyone else. The Dragon isn’t a threat to him — it’s just something else he can exploit.”
“I know what Julian is.” There was bitterness in her voice now, old and deep. “I’ve spent the last two months watching him ignore every warning I’ve given him. He thinks I’m being paranoid. He thinks my ‘trauma response’ is making me see dangers that don’t exist.” She laughed once more, that same harsh, humorless sound. “A billionaire tech bro explaining my own psychology to me. The absolute arrogance of it.”
“Then help us,” I said again, my tone now pleading. “You know his operation better than anyone. You know the drill’s specifications, the security protocols, the weak points in his system. If you gave us that information — ”
“If I gave you that information,” she cut in, “Julian would know within hours. He has monitoring software on every device in the facility, tracking every communication, every file transfer. The moment I tried to send anything to you, I’d be locked out of the system and probably arrested.” She shook her head, and a cold little smile curled her lips. “Or worse. Julian’s security team isn’t exactly known for following due process.”