Chapter 3
Chapter Three
I woke to the smell of disinfectant and the steady beep of medical equipment, and for a confused moment, I thought I was in a hospital. Then memory came flooding back — the phoenix, the contamination, the way I’d tried to cleanse its fire and felt my entire nervous system overload in response.
“Sidney.” Ben’s voice, rough with exhaustion and relief. “Thank God.”
I opened my eyes. Harsh fluorescent lights made me squint, and when I tried to sit up, every muscle in my body screamed at me to stay put. Ben’s hand was warm on my shoulder, steadying me.
“Easy,” he said. “You’ve been unconscious for more than six hours.”
Six hours. I looked around the sterile room, taking in the equipment that surrounded me — both medical and scientific, which I guessed must be monitoring the active electromagnetism all around — and a wrapped bundle on another table across from me that could only be the phoenix.
“Where are we?”
“An old research facility that used to be run by a scientist named Daniel Jessop. Rebecca Morse brought us here.” Ben pulled his chair closer. His hair was so mussed that it looked as if he’d stuck his head inside a wind tunnel, and dark circles shadowed his eyes. “How do you feel?”
A very good question. As much as I would have preferred to avoid doing so, I made myself take inventory.
My head throbbed, and my nose seemed oddly sore, although I noticed that the blood had been wiped away.
When I lifted them from the exam table where I lay, my hands trembled, and I could still sense the phoenix’s electromagnetic signature like a second heartbeat underneath my own.
“Like I got hit by a truck,” I said. “A very big truck. How’s the phoenix?”
For a second, Ben didn’t say anything. But then he took a breath and replied, “The corruption won’t stop spreading. It’s passed seventy-five percent. It seems stable for now, but….”
He didn’t finish the sentence.
He didn’t have to.
I closed my eyes and, shaky as I knew I was, did my best to reach out with those strange abilities that had awakened over the past month, following the connection between my consciousness and the phoenix’s fire.
The corruption was worse than I’d feared — it had gone past the physical into something at its very core, eating away at whatever magic made the creature what it was.
And underneath the contamination, I could feel the phoenix’s pain and exhaustion and desperate need to complete its rebirth cycle before it was too late.
“Sidney.” Ben wrapped his fingers around my nearest hand. It felt so good to have him hold me like that, his skin warm against my icy flesh. “I have something I need to tell you. It’s about DAPI and why all this is happening.”
The way he said those words made me feel shakier than ever, but I knew I had to ask anyway. “What about DAPI?”
“The electromagnetic interference that’s been killing the phoenix? DAPI did it deliberately. They’ve had surveillance equipment all over the forest for the past six months, and it’s not just recording data. It’s actively generating interference to destabilize the portal.”
I stared up at him, at the dark stubble on his chin, at the shadows under his eyes. “They did all this on purpose?”
A single nod. “Rosenthal wanted a crisis, something that would force you to use your abilities at maximum power so she could study what happened.” His jaw tightened with anger as he added, “The phoenix has been suffering for weeks because of DAPI’s equipment.”
While I’d been trying to get on with my life, running the family pet shop and attempting to come to terms with my abilities — and falling for Ben at the same time — this ancient creature had been slowly dying.
It had been tortured by artificial interference designed to push me into exactly this situation.
“That’s not all,” Ben continued, as though he knew he needed to get everything out before he lost his nerve.
One finger moved over the back of my hand, and I realized he was trying to comfort himself as much as me.
“The reason I came to Silver Hollow in the first place — the unicorn sighting — DAPI fabricated it. And then they carved those letters in the trees to further destabilize you.”
The room tilted even though I was still lying down, and I gripped the edge of the examination table to try to steady myself. “What?”
“Rosenthal recruited me specifically. She knew about my research, my background, and….” The words trailed away there, and he drew in a breath, seeming to gather himself.
“And my electromagnetic signature. Apparently, I resonate with your abilities in a way that amplifies them by ten to twenty percent. That’s why they wanted me in Silver Hollow.
That’s why they engineered our meeting.”
I thought about every moment Ben and I had shared since he’d arrived in town, how we’d worked together to save Silver Hollow from the shadow stalkers. The way my abilities had grown stronger after we’d spent time together.
And I thought of how I’d started to trust him, to care about him, to let myself feel things I hadn’t felt since losing my mother and grandmother to the portal and the world beyond it.
Everything orchestrated. They’d manipulated us.
“So none of it was real,” I said.
“No.” Ben’s hand tightened on mine, and he leaned in a little closer, his eyes imploring me to believe him.
“Sidney, no. What DAPI did — bringing me here, setting up the circumstances — that really did happen. But what we built? That’s ours.
They can’t engineer feelings. They can’t manipulate the kind of connection we share. ”
I wanted to believe him. But how could I trust my own emotions when everything that led to them had been a lie?
“They’ve been watching me for months, ever since I came back here after my mother and grandmother disappeared,” I said, knowing how bitter I sounded. “Recording everything. Studying me like a lab rat.”
He didn’t bother to deny it. “Yes,” he replied.
“And it gets worse. From what Rebecca Morse told me, DAPI is tracking forty-seven different sites that have some kind of electromagnetic anomalies occurring there. Silver Hollow is just one of them. Rosenthal has a massive surveillance network tracking every dimensional anomaly in the Pacific Northwest.”
Jesus. How many times had I used my abilities over the past couple of months? DAPI had been there the whole time, recording and analyzing and using me as an experimental subject without my knowledge or consent.
The thought of that violation made me glad I hadn’t eaten anything recently. Otherwise, I was pretty sure I would have leaned over the side of the exam table and thrown it all up.
“I’m going to kill her,” I whispered, a rage utterly unlike me taking hold, burning and fierce as phoenix fire. “I’m going to find her, and I’m going to make her — ”
“Sidney.” Ben cut me off there, his voice gentle but firm. “I know you’re angry. I’m angry, too. But right now, we need to focus on the phoenix. If it dies while you’re still connected to it, the psychic backlash could shatter your mind.”
I looked at the wrapped bundle across the room.
Even through the electromagnetic shielding of the metallic blanket that surrounded it, I could feel the phoenix’s pain.
It had become part of me during that brief moment of connection in the forest, and now I couldn’t separate my consciousness from its suffering.
“How long does it have?” I asked.
His mouth thinned for a second, but his tone was even enough as he replied, “Maybe thirty hours. Less if the interference continues.”
It could have been worse. On the other hand, it could have been a lot better, too. “Then we have to shut down the interference.”
He shook his head at once. “According to Rebecca Morse, there are more than fifty units scattered across the entire forest. Even if we managed to locate them all, we’d still need days or weeks to disable them.”
Well, that was just great. “So what are we supposed to do?”
He didn’t hesitate, only said, “We let the rebirth happen. Here, where the interference can’t reach. Rebecca thinks if you can guide the phoenix through its cycle cleanly, then the corruption will burn away during the transformation.”
I thought about how I’d felt when I’d tried to cleanse just five percent of the corruption surging inside the phoenix. My nervous system had overloaded, and I guessed I must have come close to death, or they wouldn’t have brought me here to recover, would have instead just taken me home.
“There’s so much left,” I said. Tears of frustration burned my eyes, and I angrily blinked them away. “I can’t — ”
“You won’t be doing it alone.” Ben’s fingers tightened on mine again.
“My electromagnetic field stabilizes yours. When I’m close, your abilities become more focused and efficient.
That amplification effect Rosenthal wanted to study?
It works both ways. You make me stronger, and I make you more controlled. ”
I looked at our joined hands and sensed the subtle resonance between our bioelectric fields. He was right. When Ben was near, my abilities didn’t merely get stronger — they also got clearer. The constant electromagnetic noise that usually plagued me faded into something manageable.
“They engineered this, too,” I told him. “You and me working together. That’s what Rosenthal wanted all along.”
His shoulders lifted slightly. “Maybe. But that doesn’t make it any less real.
” Gaze focused on my face, he went on, “Sidney, I came to Silver Hollow because I wanted to study cryptids, to understand the intersection between magic and science. But finding you? Learning about your abilities? Falling for you? That wasn’t in any of Rosenthal’s plans. ”
No, probably not. All she wanted was data. I had a hard time believing that she’d ever been in love, had ever felt this sort of connection to another person. She wouldn’t have been counting on any of that.