Sidney stepped forward at once, her expression sharp. “What happened?”
“From what Eric can piece together, Rosenthal tried to slow down the drilling operation. She filed a formal safety report flagging concerns about the equipment’s stability — stress fractures in the main bore assembly, anomalous readings from the depth sensors, that kind of thing. She recommended a forty-eight-hour pause to recalibrate and run diagnostics.” Rebecca’s mouth twisted into something that wasn’t quite a smile. “Julian Gregory rejected the report within an hour and accused her of sabotage. He’s convinced she’s been feeding information to outside parties — competitors, government agencies, maybe even to us.”
“Has she?” Brigid asked, her Irish accent sharpening the question into something that sounded almost like an accusation.
“Not as far as we know. But Gregory’s paranoid, and Rosenthal’s been pushing back against his timeline for weeks. She’s been the voice of caution in a room full of people telling him whatever he wants to hear.” A small shake of her head, and Rebecca added, “He was looking for an excuse to sideline her, and she gave him one.”
Ben thought about Sidney’s account of her meeting with Rosenthal — the trembling hands, the haunted eyes, the woman who had tried to kill them now trapped in an operation she couldn’t control. Whatever sins Rosenthal had committed, this felt like a kind of justice he couldn’t take any real pleasure in.
“Eric flagged something else,” Rebecca added. “Before Gregory locked her out, Rosenthal had requisitioned components for what Eric thinks was some kind of dimensional-frequency disruptor. He’s guessing she was building a failsafe — something to shut the drill down if Gregory wouldn’t listen. She didn’t get to finish it before he cut her access.”
That would have been promising…if Rosenthal wasn’t currently locked up.
“What does Rosenthal’s absence mean for the drilling?” Kenji’s voice was calm, but Ben heard the concern beneath it.
Rebecca’s expression darkened further, the professional mask slipping just enough for Ben to see the genuine alarm underneath. “That’s the bad news. Gregory’s decided that the ‘scientific approach’ is too slow. He’s moving to Phase Two.”
“Phase Two?” Sidney asked sharply. “What the hell is Phase Two?”
“Eric’s still pulling data from their servers, but from what he can tell, it’s something called Project Prometheus.” Rebecca went over to the coffee table where her tablet lay and tapped the screen, pulling up a schematic that made Ben’s head hurt just looking at it — engineering diagrams covered in symbols he didn’t recognize, energy flow charts with arrows pointing in directions that seemed to defy physics, numbers in columns that might as well have been written in Sanskrit. “The original drill was designed to tap into the ley line and extract dimensional energy in controlled increments. Small amounts, carefully regulated, with safety systems at every stage. Prometheus is different.”
She swiped to another image, this one showing what looked like a massive industrial apparatus, all pipes and pressure gauges and things that glowed ominously in the rendering.
“It’s a high-powered extraction system,” she continued, “designed to crack the ley line wide open and siphon energy directly from the source. No filters, no regulators, no safety systems. Just raw extraction at maximum capacity.”
“From the Dragon,” Emily Thompson said quietly. Her face had gone the color of old paper, and Ben saw her grip the arm of her chair, as though she needed it to stay upright.
“From the Dragon,” Rebecca replied. “Gregory thinks he can harvest the creature’s power the way you’d harvest natural gas from a shale formation. Punch through the rock, release the pressure, capture what comes out.” She set down the tablet with a sharp smack that showed how rattled she was. “He doesn’t understand — or doesn’t care — that what he’s punching through isn’t rock. It’s the barrier between our world and something that’s been sleeping since before humans learned to make fire.”
“That’s insane.” Finn’s voice sounded calm enough, but Ben could see the fear in his dark eyes. “The Dragon isn’t a gas deposit. It’s a living being with intelligence and power beyond anything Gregory can comprehend. If he tries to crack it open like a piggy bank — ”
Sidney’s voice cut across her father’s. “Then we’re all dead.” She was staring at the schematic on Rebecca’s tablet, her clear gray eyes tracking the lines and numbers with an intensity that made Ben’s scars prickle. “How long until he activates Prometheus?”
“Eric thinks he’s already started the initialization sequence. The readings from the ley line have been surging all morning.” Rebecca’s jaw tightened. “We might have hours. We might have less.”
The room erupted into overlapping voices — guardians arguing in English and Spanish and languages Ben didn’t recognize, Brigid’s Irish lilt cutting through the chaos as she demanded more information, Kenji trying to restore order with his measured tone. Ben watched Sidney standing at the center of it all, her expression distant, her attention focused inward on something the rest of them couldn’t perceive.
He moved to her side and took her hand. The contact sent a familiar pulse through his scars, and he felt her bioelectric field reach out to meet his, chaotic and agitated.
“What are you sensing?” he asked quietly.
“The ley line,” she replied in a tense undertone. “It’s screaming, Ben. I can feel it from here. Whatever Gregory’s doing, it’s already hurting the network.”
“Can you tell how bad?”
She shook her head. “Not from this distance. I’d need to get closer to the portal site, to where the damage is concentrated.” Her eyes met his, and he saw the fear she was trying to hide. “But it’s bad. Worse than anything I’ve felt since the phoenix.”
Rebecca’s phone rang again, cutting through the noise in the room. She answered immediately, and Ben watched her face go even paler than before, if that was possible.
“Eric, slow down. Say that again.” A pause, her free hand gripping the edge of the table hard enough to whiten her knuckles. “How long?” Another pause, shorter this time. “Understood. Keep monitoring and call me if anything changes.”
She ended the call and looked up at the assembled group. The room had gone silent, every face turned toward her.
“The readings just went off the charts,” she said. She sounded steady enough, but Ben could hear the strain beneath her tone despite that. “Eric says they aren’t drilling anymore. They’re fracking the ley line. The feedback loop from the extraction is building faster than their systems can compensate.” She paused, and when she spoke again, her voice shook slightly. “He estimates the feedback is going to hit Silver Hollow in ten minutes. Maybe less.”
For a terrible few seconds, nobody moved. Then Sidney pulled her hand free from Ben’s grip and strode toward the door.
“Sidney — ” Josie began, but her daughter was already gone, the front door slamming behind her.