Chapter 19
Chapter Nineteen
Ben had grown accustomed to noise over the past months — the constant hum of Sidney’s bioelectric field against his own and the crackle of dimensional energy that seemed to follow her everywhere, the subtle wrongness in the air that had become so familiar he’d stopped noticing it.
Even the apocalyptic weather had provided its own soundtrack, the rumble of unnatural thunder, the hiss of green lightning crawling across the sky, the deep subsonic vibration of the Dragon stirring beneath the earth.
Now all of that was gone. The morning was quiet in a way that felt almost holy, the kind of stillness that came after a great storm had finally passed.
Birds sang in the trees, and a light breeze rustled the branches overhead.
Somewhere in the distance, a car engine started — someone in Silver Hollow beginning their ordinary day, completely unaware of how close they’d come to never having another one.
Ben sat on the edge of Sidney’s bed, watching her sleep.
They’d made it back to the house just as the sun cleared the eastern ridge, the ragged procession of guardians and family members stumbling through the back door like survivors of some terrible battle.
Which, he supposed, they were. Emily had taken charge of settling everyone, while Josie had disappeared into the kitchen to make coffee, her hands shaking so badly that Priya Sharma had gently taken over the task.
Finn had collapsed on the living room couch and fallen asleep almost immediately, his body finally surrendering to the exhaustion and blood loss he’d been fighting since the bullet tore through his back.
And Sidney…Sidney had let Ben guide her up the stairs to their bedroom, where he’d helped her out of her mud-caked clothes and into clean pajamas. She’d curled up under the covers without a word and closed her eyes, losing herself to the sleep she so desperately needed.
That had been four hours ago, and she hadn’t stirred since.
Ben reached out and brushed a strand of hair from her face, his fingers gentle against her cheek.
Her skin was warm — a good sign, he told himself, evidence that her body was recovering from the trauma it had endured.
But the scars on her arms were dark and dull, with no trace of the shimmering golden light that had once pulsed through them.
They looked like ordinary scars now, the kind you might get from a bad burn, or maybe some kind of industrial accident.
There was absolutely nothing special about them… nothing magical.
He tried very hard not to think about what that meant.
The bedroom door creaked open, and he turned to find Rebecca Morse standing in the hallway.
She’d changed out of her tactical gear at some point, trading it for what he thought of as her civilian uniform of jeans and a dark sweater, but she still carried herself with the coiled readiness that seemed to be her default state.
Her blonde hair was loose around her shoulders, and even though there were shadows under her eyes, something about her seemed calm and almost lovely now that the fear and worry were gone.
She spoke in an undertone, obviously being careful not to wake the sleeping woman. “How is she?”
“Asleep.” Ben looked back at Sidney’s still form, at the slow, steady rise and fall of her chest beneath the blankets. “She hasn’t woken up since we got back.”
“Her body needs time to recover. What she did out there….” Rebecca paused, and Ben thought he saw a kind of wonder in her expression.
“I’ve seen a lot of things in my career.
Classified operations, supernatural phenomena, people doing impossible things under impossible circumstances.
But I’ve never seen anything like that.”
“Neither have I.”
Rebecca moved into the room and stopped a few feet away from the bed. Her gaze swept over Sidney with the kind of professional assessment that Ben had grown used to during the time they’d gotten to know one another.
“Eric’s been monitoring the ley line readings from Oregon,” she said.
“The corruption is clearing faster than he expected. Whatever Sidney did when she grounded that energy seems to have actually accelerated the healing process. He thinks the damage Gregory caused could be fully repaired within a few weeks.”
“That’s good.” Ben’s voice sounded flat even to his own ears. “That’s really good.”
“But?”
He was quiet for a moment, trying to find the words for the fear that had been gnawing at him ever since Sidney had opened her eyes in the forest and told him their connection was gone.
“She lost everything,” he said at last. “Her abilities, her connection to the network, the…the bond between us.” He looked up at Rebecca, and he knew his expression was completely open, unguarded in a way he rarely allowed himself to be.
“What if she can’t live with that? What if losing all of it is worse than… .”
He couldn’t finish the sentence, couldn’t bring himself to voice the fear that Sidney might wake up and decide an ordinary life wasn’t worth living. What if she looked at him and saw only a reminder of everything she’d lost?
Rebecca was quiet for a few beats, her expression calm and still. Then she pulled the desk chair over and sat down, her posture relaxing slightly as she leaned against its back.
“When I joined DAPI,” she said, “I thought I was doing something important — protecting people from threats they didn’t know existed and making the world safer.
” She paused for a second or two, her dark eyes distant, as if they were focused on something very far away.
“Then I watched Rosenthal build that weapon. I watched her point it at a woman whose only crime was being born with abilities she didn’t ask for.
And I realized that everything I thought I was protecting had been twisted into something I couldn’t recognize anymore. ”
Ben waited, sensing that she was building toward something.
“I lost my career,” she went on. “My security clearance, my reputation, my sense of purpose. Everything I’d spent the past ten years building, gone in a single decision.
” She met his gaze. “But I gained something, too. I got the chance to do work that actually mattered, to protect people who needed protecting, instead of hunting them down because they made my superiors uncomfortable.”
Ben frowned. “You’re saying Sidney might find something like that? Some new purpose?”
“I’m saying that losing what you thought defined you isn’t always the end.
Sometimes it’s the beginning of something different.
” Rebecca rose from the chair and brushed some imaginary dust from her jeans.
“She’s going to need time. And she’s going to need you to be patient with her while she figures out who she is now. ”
“I can do that.”
“I know you can.” Rebecca stopped at the door and looked back over her shoulder.
“There’s something else you should know.
The mercenaries who survived the Dragon’s emergence — Eric tracked their communications.
Most of them scattered when Julian Gregory’s compound went up, but a few regrouped at a secondary location about ten miles north. ”
Ben’s jaw tightened. “What are you going to do about them?”
“What I should have done from the beginning.” Her expression hardened.
“I’m going to arrest them. Eric’s already compiled enough evidence to bury them — illegal weapons trafficking, assault on federal land, conspiracy to commit environmental terrorism.
I’ve got contacts at the FBI field office in San Francisco who owe me favors.
By this time tomorrow, those men will be in custody, and Aetheris Dynamics will be under investigation by every regulatory agency in the country. ”
“And Rosenthal?”
Rebecca’s mouth twisted. “That’s a lot more complicated.
She’s technically a fugitive from justice, but she also has information that could be valuable.
” She paused. “I’m going to offer her a deal — full cooperation in exchange for reduced charges, again in coordination with the field office in San Francisco.
It’s not exactly justice, but it’s the best option we have. ”
Again, Ben found himself frowning. “Sidney’s not going to like that.”
“Sidney doesn’t have to like it. She just has to accept that sometimes the world doesn’t give us the clean endings we want.
” Rebecca’s expression softened slightly as she continued.
“But for what it’s worth, I think Rosenthal is done.
Whatever fire was driving her, whatever obsession kept her going all these years — I saw it go out when her device failed.
She’s broken, Ben. She’s not a threat anymore. ”
Ben thought about the woman he’d seen stumble out of that burning SUV, clutching her failed device like a lifeline, how her face had crumpled when she realized it wasn’t going to work, how her voice had sounded small and childlike when she asked what they could possibly do.
“Maybe that’s its own kind of justice,” he said quietly.
“Maybe.” Once again, Rebecca looked as if she was about to leave, and then paused.
“I’ll be downstairs if you need anything.
Eric’s flying down from Oregon this afternoon — he wants to run some tests on the portal site and make sure the stabilization is holding.
And the other guardians are starting to talk about heading back to their own thresholds.
The crisis is over. It’s time for everyone to go home. ”
She left, her footsteps quiet on the hardwood floor, and Ben turned back to Sidney.