Chapter 12
Chapter Twelve
Ben was in the kitchen, helping Josie wash the breakfast dishes while the guardians filtered through in twos and threes to refill their coffee cups.
The old Craftsman had adapted to its strange new occupants with surprising grace over the past seventy-two hours — extra sleeping bags had been dragged out of the attic, the downstairs bathroom had developed a schedule posted on the door, and someone had organized a rotating kitchen duty that kept the sink from overflowing with dirty mugs.
The house creaked and groaned under the weight of nearly twenty additional people, but it held together, the way old houses always did when they had to.
Oddly, Ben had started to feel almost comfortable with the chaos.
He’d learned to navigate around Brigid Callahan’s meditation sessions in the living room, to give Kenji Tanaka a wide berth during his morning exercises, to interpret the rapid-fire Spanish that the Quispe family used when they didn’t want outsiders following their conversations.
It wasn’t normal — nothing about his life had been normal since he’d walked into Sidney’s pet shop back in May — but it was manageable.
That sense of manageability evaporated when Rebecca’s phone rang.
She was standing by the window and reviewing something on her tablet, a cup of coffee cooling forgotten at her elbow.
Ben watched her expression shift as she glanced at the caller ID — a tightening around her eyes, a subtle tension in her jaw that he’d learned to recognize as her combat-alert face.
She stepped out onto the back porch before answering and pulled the door shut behind her with a bang.
“That doesn’t look good,” Josie said quietly. Her hands were still submerged in the soapy water, but she’d stopped scrubbing the pot she’d been working on.
“No,” Ben agreed. “It doesn’t.”
Through the window, he could see Rebecca pacing, her free hand gesturing sharply as she spoke.
Her face had gone pale beneath her usual light tan, and even from this distance, he could read the tension in her shoulders.
Whatever Eric was telling her, it wasn’t the routine update they’d been expecting.
The back door swung open, and Rebecca stepped inside. Her dark gaze found Ben immediately.
“Get Sidney,” she said. “Now. And tell the others to gather in the living room.”
Ben didn’t ask questions. Instead, he quickly dried his hands on a dish towel and headed for the stairs, taking them two at a time.
Sidney was in her grandmother’s room, going over Emily’s journals with Brigid Callahan, their heads bent close together as they traced something on a hand-drawn map of the ley line network.
“Rebecca needs us downstairs,” he said from the doorway. “Something’s happened.”
Sidney looked up, and he saw her register the urgency in his voice. She was on her feet instantly, the journal forgotten on the bed.
“What is it?”
“I don’t know yet. But it looks bad.”
They gathered in the living room within minutes — Sidney and Ben, Emily and Josie, Finn hovering near the doorway, and as many guardians as could fit into the crowded space.
Brigid claimed her usual position near the fireplace, Kenji stood by the window with his arms folded, and the Quispe family arranged themselves on the floor in their customary tight cluster.
Rebecca waited until the last of them had settled before she spoke.
“Eric just called from Oregon. Aetheris made a move this morning.” She paused, and Ben saw a flash of something in her expression — anger or fear, or some combination of the two that she was working hard to suppress.
“Julian Gregory has locked Sonya Rosenthal out of the system. She’s been removed from all active projects and confined to quarters pending a ‘security review.’”
A murmur rippled through the assembled guardians. The Scandinavian twins exchanged a look that needed no translation. Kofi Asante leaned forward in his chair, his weathered face creasing with concern.
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?”