He couldn’t stop. If he released the resonance now, it would slam back into the others with redoubled force. He was the lightning rod, the ground wire, the thing that stood between the weapon and its targets. All he could do was hold on and hope it was enough.
The scars on his chest were blazing now, silver-white light pouring through his shirt, bright enough to cast shadows in the pre-dawn darkness. He could feel something changing deep inside him, the dimensional burns that had marked him since the phoenix incident deepening their hold on his biology. This was more than pain — this was transformation, the kind of violent restructuring that either killed you or made you into something new.
Rebecca’s voice cut through the haze. “Contact! Twenty meters, northwest!”
Gunfire erupted — not the mercenaries’ weapons, but Rebecca’s, sharp controlled bursts that sent their pursuers diving for cover. Through the agony, Ben heard the distinctive pop of a flashbang, saw the strobe of light even past his closed eyelids.
“Move!” Rebecca was shouting. “Everyone who can walk, move now! Head for the ravine!”
Bodies pushed past him. Ben felt hands grabbing his arms, dragging him forward — Sidney on one side, someone else on the other, both of them hauling him through the forest while he struggled to maintain his grip on the electromagnetic resonance. Every step was torture, every breath a battle, but he didn’t let go.
He couldn’t let go.
The forest blurred around him in a smear of darkness and muzzle flashes. Rebecca was laying down suppression fire behind them, controlled bursts that kept the mercenaries pinned while the guardians fled. Another flashbang went off, closer this time, and Ben heard someone cry out — one of the mercenaries, caught in the blast radius.
“Ravine’s ahead!” Finn’s voice, strained but steady. “Fifty meters!”
Ben forced his eyes open. Through the haze of pain, he could make out a dark gash in the forest floor ahead of them — the ravine that cut through this section of woods, fifteen feet deep with walls of exposed stone and a seasonal creek at the bottom. In summer, it was barely a trickle. In November, after weeks of off and on rain, it would be running fast and cold.
They half-ran, half-fell down the slope, sliding on wet leaves and loose earth until they hit the creek bed with a splash that soaked Ben to the knees. The cold was a shock, but it was also clarifying, cutting through some of the fog that the electromagnetic weapon had wrapped around his brain.
“Keep moving!” Rebecca was at the rear now, her weapon up as she watched the rim of the ravine for pursuit. “The walls will block some of the electromagnetic resonance. Get as far downstream as you can.”
She was right. Ben could feel the pressure easing slightly, the stone walls of the ravine providing some shielding against the weapon’s effects. He was still absorbing most of it, still burning with that terrible vibration, but it was less overwhelming now, more manageable.
Sidney pulled him forward, splashing through the knee-deep water, her grip on his arm the only thing keeping him upright. Her face was pale in the darkness, her eyes wide with fear, but she didn’t slow down. Behind them, he could hear the others following — gasping breaths and splashing footsteps and the occasional muttered prayer in languages he didn’t understand.
The ravine twisted and turned, following the path the water had carved over millennia. Ben lost track of how far they’d gone — a hundred yards, two hundred, more. The electromagnetic weapon’s effects continued to fade as they put distance between themselves and its source, and gradually, the fire in his scars began to cool from white-hot to merely agonizing.
They rounded a bend and found themselves in a wider section of the ravine, a place where the walls sloped more gently and a cluster of boulders provided some cover. Rebecca called a halt, and Ben let himself collapse against one of the rocks, his legs finally giving out beneath him.
“Ben.” Sidney knelt beside him, her hands on his face, her bioelectric field reaching out to merge with his. “Ben, look at me. Are you okay?”
He wanted to laugh at the absurdity of the question, but all that came out was a groan. “Define ‘okay.’”
“You’re alive. You’re conscious.” Her hands were shaking as they traced the lines of his scars through his soaked shirt. “The burns — they’re different. Deeper.”
He knew. He could feel it, the way the dimensional marks had changed, had expanded their hold on his nervous system. The phoenix fire had rewritten his bioelectric field once; the electromagnetic weapon had just done it again, burning new pathways into his flesh as it tried to use him as a ground wire.
“Still works, though.” He managed a weak smile. “The conduit thing. I can still feel you.”
“You idiot.” She said it like an endearment. “You absolute idiot. You could have died.”
“Didn’t, though.”
She made a sound that was half sob, half laugh, and pressed her forehead against his. For a moment, they just stayed there, breathing together, their bioelectric fields pulsing in shared rhythm while the rest of the world faded to background noise.
Rebecca’s voice broke the spell. “We can’t stay here long. They’ll figure out where we went and follow.”
Ben opened his eyes to find the former agent crouched at the edge of the boulder cluster, reloading her weapon with quick, practiced movements. Her face was bruised where she’d fallen earlier, and there was blood on her sleeve, but she moved with the same controlled grace she always did.
“How many did you get?” Finn asked. He was sitting against the opposite wall of the ravine, his tablet somehow still clutched in his hands, the screen cracked but apparently functional. Water dripped from his gray-streaked dark hair into his eyes, but he didn’t seem to notice.
“Three, maybe four. Enough to slow them down, not enough to stop them.” Rebecca finished reloading and looked up at the rim of the ravine, scanning for movement. “They’re professionals — they’ll regroup and come at us from multiple angles. We’ve got maybe ten minutes before they figure out our route and cut off our escape.”
“So we’ll keep moving.” Sidney pushed herself to her feet, swaying slightly before she found her balance. She reached down to help Ben up as well, and he took her hand gratefully, letting her pull him upright even though every muscle in his body screamed in protest. “The portal site is half a mile downstream. If we can reach it before they catch up — ”
“The portal site is exactly where they’ll expect us to go,” Rebecca cut in. “Gregory’s not stupid, and neither is whoever’s commanding these mercenaries. They’ll have people waiting there, probably more than the ones chasing us now.”