Chapter 4 #2
“Cameras on the main access points, motion sensors along the tree line. There will probably be a few guards, but Gregory seems to prefer technology over manpower.” Finn paused there, clearly weighing all the possibilities.
“The real danger is the electromagnetic detection grid. If they’ve calibrated it to pick up anomalous signatures, then we’ll need to stay at least fifty yards away from the perimeter. ”
“Fifty yards isn’t close enough to see anything useful,” Ben pointed out.
“It is if you have these.” Finn reached into his jacket and pulled out a pair of compact binoculars. “They’re military grade, with thermal imaging. I can also access the camera feeds if we can get close enough to tap into their network.”
Ben raised an eyebrow. “You just happen to have military-grade surveillance equipment in your jacket?”
“I’ve had seventeen years to prepare for this,” Finn replied, sounding matter-of-fact. “Did you really think I spent all that time just watching from a distance?”
It was a fair point. Ben was starting to realize that Sidney’s father was considerably more capable — and more dangerous — than he’d initially assumed.
They left the car hidden behind a stand of young redwoods, where the logging road had become so overgrown that it was barely visible.
The forest closed around them as they walked, dense and damp, the air heavy with the smell of wet pine and decaying leaves.
The green lightning flickered overhead, casting strange shadows through the canopy, and somewhere in the distance, a raven called once and then fell silent.
Ben had forgotten how much he loved this forest, even with everything that had happened here.
The old-growth sections were cathedrals of living wood, towering sequoias and Douglas firs that had been standing since before the Gold Rush.
Walking among them felt like walking through history, through a landscape that had seen empires rise and fall while it simply endured.
But as they approached Welling Glen, the character of the forest changed.
The trees grew younger and more sparse, the undergrowth thicker and more tangled.
This was where Maplehurst’s crew had cut, where the ancient guardians of the ley line had been felled for lumber.
The stumps still dotted the landscape, raw and weathered, monuments to destruction.
Some of them were six feet across, the rings of their growth visible like the pages of a book no one would ever read again.
And beyond them, through a gap in the remaining trees, Ben caught his first glimpse of the Aetheris camp.
It was larger than the satellite images had suggested.
The prefab buildings had multiplied, forming a small compound around a central structure that looked like a cross between an oil derrick and something out of a science fiction movie.
Metal scaffolding rose thirty feet into the air, supporting an array of sensors and what appeared to be some kind of focusing apparatus pointed directly at the ground.
Cables snaked across the muddy earth, connecting the drilling apparatus to a bank of generators that hummed with barely contained power.
“What the hell is that?” Rebecca murmured.
“That,” Finn said grimly, “is how you drill into a ley line.”
They settled into position behind a fallen log, close enough to observe but far enough from the perimeter to avoid the detection grid.
The log was damp and covered in moss, and Ben could feel the moisture seeping through his jeans almost immediately, but he ignored the discomfort and focused on the task at hand.
Finn handed him the binoculars, and he pointed them at the central structure.
Workers in white coveralls moved around the base of the derrick, checking equipment and consulting tablets.
The drilling apparatus itself hummed with a low, subsonic vibration that Ben could feel in his bones even from this distance.
It was deeply unpleasant, like nails on a chalkboard translated into pure sensation, and his dimensional scars prickled in response.
“There.” Rebecca pointed toward one of the prefab buildings. “Movement near the main office.”
Ben swung the binoculars toward the spot she’d indicated and found himself looking at Julian Gregory in the flesh.
The tech billionaire looked exactly like his headshot — expensive haircut, expensive leather jacket, an easy confidence that seemed to scream that the man had probably never been told “no” in his life.
He was talking to someone, gesturing expansively, and even without audio, Ben could tell he was selling something.
The man practically radiated charisma, the kind that would make people want to believe whatever he was saying.
He’d probably been the kid in school who could talk his way out of any detention, who could convince teachers that late assignments were actually innovative experiments in deadline flexibility.
But the person he was talking to wasn’t buying it.
Dr. Sonya Rosenthal stood in front of him with her arms crossed, her posture rigid, her face set in an expression that Ben recognized all too well.
He’d seen it in the moments before she’d ordered her agents to fire on Sidney, a kind of cold calculation that signaled she believed the ends justified any means.
Except now, something was different.
The woman looked haggard. Her gray hair, which had always been short and immaculately styled, was now longer, messy and limp.
Dark circles shadowed her eyes, visible even through the binoculars, and she’d lost weight she couldn’t afford to lose.
Her clothes — a white lab coat over dark slacks and a sweater — hung on her frame like they belonged to someone else.
She looked like a woman who hadn’t slept in weeks.
And she looked afraid.
“Interesting,” Finn murmured. He’d produced his own pair of binoculars and was studying the same scene. “Gregory is pushing for something. Rosenthal is pushing back.”
“What, you can read lips?” Ben asked. At this point, he was ready to believe almost anything.
“Enough to get the gist.” Finn was quiet for a moment, watching.
“Gregory wants to increase the extraction rate. He’s talking about ‘breakthrough potential’ and ‘revolutionary applications.’ Classic tech bro bullshit.
” He paused. “Rosenthal is warning him about destabilization. She’s saying something about…
cascading failures. And containment protocols. ”
Rebecca swore under her breath. “She knows what they’re waking up.”
“She knows,” Finn agreed. “And she’s scared. But Gregory isn’t listening.”
Ben watched as the argument continued, Gregory’s gestures becoming more emphatic while Rosenthal grew more agitated.
At one point, she grabbed his arm, her face urgent, and Gregory actually laughed — the kind of indulgent laugh you might give a child who was worried about monsters under the bed.
He patted her shoulder in a way that was clearly meant to be reassuring but came across as dismissive, and Ben saw Rosenthal’s expression harden into something between fury and despair.
Finally, she threw up her hands and stalked away, disappearing into one of the other buildings.
Gregory watched her go with an expression of mild annoyance, like a man whose assistant had just told him his lunch reservation was delayed.
He checked his phone, typed something with his thumbs, and smiled at whatever response he received.
Then he turned back toward the drilling apparatus, and his smile transformed into something approaching reverence. He looked up at the structure with naked hunger, the way a prospector might look at a mountain of gold.
“He has no idea what he’s doing,” Ben said, anger surging again in the face of the man’s obliviousness. “He thinks he’s just tapping into an energy source. He doesn’t understand what’s actually down there.”
“Or he doesn’t care.” Finn lowered his binoculars, his face now bleak. “Men like Gregory don’t believe in consequences. They believe in disruption, in moving fast and breaking things. The idea that some things shouldn’t be broken doesn’t compute for them.”
“But Rosenthal knows better.” Rebecca’s voice was thoughtful. “She’s seen what dimensional energy can do. She knows the risks.”
“Which means she’s the weak point,” Ben said slowly. “Gregory won’t listen to warnings, but Rosenthal might be willing to talk if she thinks we can help her contain this.”
“You want to approach Sonya Rosenthal?” Finn asked, his tone clearly skeptical. “The woman who tried to kill my daughter?”
“The woman who’s currently the only person in that camp who understands the danger.
” Ben lowered his binoculars and looked over at Finn.
“You said it yourself — she’s frightened.
That means she knows Gregory is making a mistake.
If we can convince her that working with us is better than watching him destroy everything… .”
“It’s risky,” Rebecca said. She looked calm enough, but a certain tightness around her eyes told him she was much more worried than she let on. “Rosenthal doesn’t trust anyone. And she definitely doesn’t trust us.”
Well, that was true enough. But….
“She doesn’t have to trust us. She just has to fear what Gregory is doing more than she fears what we might do.” Ben turned back to the camp and watched the drilling apparatus pulse with that sickening subsonic hum. “Right now, I think that fear is winning.”
They watched for another hour, taking notes on the camp’s layout, counting personnel, tracking the patterns of the security patrols.
The drilling apparatus ran continuously, its hum growing louder and more discordant as the afternoon wore on.
Twice, alarms sounded, and workers rushed to make adjustments, and both times, Ben saw Rosenthal emerge from her building to oversee the response, her face tight with barely controlled panic.
She shouted orders, checked readings, and made adjustments with her own hands when the technicians weren’t moving fast enough.
Gregory, by contrast, seemed utterly unconcerned.
He wandered the camp like a host at a cocktail party, chatting with workers and checking his phone, occasionally pausing to admire the drilling apparatus with that proprietary smile.
At one point, he posed for what looked like a selfie with the derrick in the background, probably for some investor update or social media post about “pushing the boundaries of sustainable energy.”
“We’ve seen enough,” Finn said at last. “We need to report back before Sidney sends out a search party.”
They withdrew carefully, retracing their steps through the scarred forest until they reached the hidden car. Ben slid into the back seat and closed his eyes, trying to process everything they’d seen.
Julian Gregory wanted to harvest the Dragon’s power, to tap into an ancient force of nature and turn it into profit. He didn’t understand — or didn’t care — that what he was drilling into wasn’t just an energy source but a living creature, vast and ancient and very, very angry.
But Sonya Rosenthal understood. She’d spent her entire career studying dimensional phenomena, and she knew exactly what kind of fire Gregory was playing with.
But she was trapped — bound to Aetheris by whatever deal she’d made when she fled the country, unable to stop Gregory’s recklessness without destroying herself in the process.
The friction between them was real. And if their little group of warriors played it right, it might be the leverage they needed.
The car bumped along the logging road, and Ben opened his eyes to find Finn watching him in the rearview mirror.
“You’re thinking about approaching Rosenthal,” the older man said.
“I’m thinking it might be our only option.” Ben met Finn’s gaze steadily. “Julian Gregory isn’t going to stop. He’s too invested, too convinced he’s on the verge of something revolutionary. But Rosenthal knows what’s at stake. If we can get her to work with us — ”
“She tried to kill Sidney,” Finn said flatly. “She built a weapon specifically designed to destroy her.”
“I know.” Ben’s jaw tightened at the recollection, at the echoes of pain it awoke in his body.
“I was there. I took the blast meant for her.” He touched his chest unconsciously, feeling the dimensional scars hidden beneath his shirt.
The memory of that moment was still vivid — the flash of light, the sensation of his bioelectric field shattering and re-forming, the strange peace he’d felt when he thought he was dying.
“But right now, Rosenthal might be the only person who can help us stop Gregory before he wakes up something none of us can control.”
Finn was quiet for a long while. The car emerged from the forest onto a paved road, and the ride smoothed out as Rebecca accelerated toward town.
“Sidney won’t like it,” he said at length.
“No,” Ben agreed. “She won’t.”
Rebecca glanced at him in the rearview mirror. “For what it’s worth, I think you might be right. Rosenthal may be a lot of things, but she’s not stupid. She knows what Gregory is doing is dangerous. The question is whether she’s desperate enough to accept help from the people she tried to destroy.”
“I guess we’ll just have to find out,” Ben replied.
They drove the rest of the way in silence, each of them lost in their own thoughts. But they were running out of time. Ben could feel it in his scars, in the wrongness of the air, in the way the forest itself seemed to be holding its breath as the Dragon stirred.
Whatever they were going to do, they needed to do it soon.