I wasn’t about to give up that easily, though. “There has to be a way.”
“There isn’t.” Her voice was firm, final. “Not without risking everything. And despite what you might think of me, Sidney, I’m not ready to die. Not yet. Not while there’s still a chance I can find another way to stop this.”
I studied her face, trying to read past the exhaustion and the fear to whatever might lie underneath. She was telling the truth, I thought — or at least, her version of it. She wasn’t ready to defect, wasn’t ready to burn every bridge she had left. But something seemed to have changed in her during this conversation. I could see it in the way she held herself, the way her gaze kept darting toward the window, as though she expected Julian’s security team to come crashing through at any moment.
She was scared. More scared than she’d been two months ago, when she’d pointed that weapon at my head with absolute certainty that she was doing the right thing. Whatever she’d seen in the weeks since she’d joined Aetheris, it had shaken her faith in her own judgment.
“The winter solstice,” I said quietly. “That’s our deadline. After that, the Dragon will proceed with the cauterization, and nothing either of us does will matter.”
“I know.”
Part of me wondered how she knew that, but all else aside, she was a brilliant woman. She would have looked at the data and drawn her own conclusions. “If you change your mind before then — if you can find a way to get us information without getting yourself killed — Rebecca Morse can be contacted through the FBI’s Portland field office. Ask for the Hargrove inquiry. That will get a message to her.”
Rosenthal nodded slowly, and I could see her filing that information away, adding it to whatever internal calculus she was constantly running.
“I’m not going to apologize for what I did,” she said. “For the weapon, or for trying to stop you. I believed I was protecting people. I still believe that my intentions were good, even if my methods were wrong.”
“I’m not asking for an apology.” I slid out of the booth and stood, then paused for a moment as I gazed down at the woman who had nearly killed me and the man I loved. “I’m asking you to make a choice. The same choice we all have to make eventually — whether to keep serving the system that’s destroying everything, or to take a risk and try to save what’s left.”
I left a ten-dollar bill on the table to cover both our coffees and walked toward the door without looking back. The bell chimed as I pushed my way past it, and the bitter, damp air hit my face at once, sharp and bracing after the diner’s stale warmth.
Rebecca’s car was parked three spaces down from mine, that same nondescript gray rental that could have belonged to anyone. As I approached my mother’s old Subaru, I saw Rebecca’s window roll down.
“Well?” Her voice was neutral, professional.
“She’s not ready.” I unlocked my door and paused with my hand on the frame. “But she’s close. Gregory’s pushing her toward the edge, and sooner or later, she’s going to fall.”
“And if she falls the wrong way?”
I thought about Rosenthal’s trembling hands, the grief that still lived in her eyes twenty-five years after she’d lost her family. “Then we’ll deal with it. But I don’t think she will. Whatever else she is, she’s not stupid. She knows what Gregory’s doing, and she knows what it’s going to cost.”
Rebecca nodded and rolled her window back up. I climbed into my car and sat for a moment, hands resting on the steering wheel, processing everything that had just happened.
Sonya Rosenthal had tried to kill me. She’d built a weapon specifically designed to destroy the abilities that made me who I was, and she’d fired it without hesitation. I should have hated her. Part of me still did, the part that remembered Ben’s screams, that remembered the smell of burning flesh and the sight of silver circuits searing themselves into his skin.
But I also understood her now in a way I hadn’t before — the loss that had shaped her, the fear that drove her, the desperate need to impose order on a universe that had proven itself capable of unimaginable cruelty. She wasn’t evil. She was damaged, and her damage had caused her to do terrible things.
I wondered if she saw the same thing when she looked at me — a damaged woman whose damage manifested in different ways, fire instead of control, chaos instead of order. Two broken people on opposite sides of a conflict that neither of them had chosen, both of them trying to protect a world that didn’t even know it needed protecting.
The drive back to Silver Hollow took longer than the drive down, or maybe it just felt that way. I navigated the mountain roads slowly, letting my mind wander through the conversation, picking apart Rosenthal’s words and silences for anything I might have missed. By the time I pulled into the driveway of the house with its multiple chimneys and stained glass in the dining room window, the sun was well past its peak, and shadows were starting to lengthen across the yard.
Ben was waiting on the porch.
He stood as I slowed to a stop and came down the steps before I’d even gotten out of the old Outback, and I could see the worry written across his features, the tension in his shoulders that he’d been carrying all day. He’d known where I was going this morning — I hadn’t been able to keep it from him, not with the way our bioelectric fields tangled together, broadcasting emotions whether we wanted them to or not. When I’d slipped out of bed before dawn, I’d felt his awareness stir, felt him choose not to stop me even though every instinct was probably screaming at him to do exactly that.
“How did it go?” he asked as I climbed out of the truck.
“About as well as could be expected.” I let him fold me into his arms, felt the familiar warmth of his body against mine and the gentle pulse of our scars responding to each other’s presence. He smelled like coffee and woodsmoke and warm skin that was just him, and I let myself sink into the comfort of it for a moment before I continued. “She’s not ready to help us. Not yet. But she’s scared, Ben. Really scared. Gregory’s pushing too hard, too fast, and she knows it’s going to end badly.”
“Do you think she’ll come around?”
I thought about the way Rosenthal’s hands had shaken, the grief that still lived in her voice when she talked about her husband and daughter. Twenty-five years, and the wound was still raw, still bleeding. Some losses never healed, I supposed. You just learned to carry them differently.
“I think she’s going to have to,” I said at last. “When the moment comes, when Gregory finally goes too far and she has to choose between helping him destroy the world or helping us try to save it….” I pulled back slightly so I could look up at Ben’s face, at the hazel eyes that had become my anchor over these past few months. “I think she’ll make the right choice. She’s not a monster. She’s just someone who lost everything and never figured out how to live with it.”
Ben’s arms tightened around me. “That’s more generous than she deserves.”
“Maybe.” I rested my head against his chest, listening to the steady beat of his heart. “But holding onto anger takes energy I don’t have right now. We’ve got less than seven weeks to stop Gregory and convince the Dragon that humanity is worth saving. I can’t afford to waste any of it on hating someone who might end up being the key to our survival.”