Chapter 5
Chapter Five
The headlights cut through the gathering dark as Ben drove us back toward the Jessop facility and I tried to pretend I wasn’t seeing double.
One road, not two. One dashboard, not a ghostly overlay.
My vision had been deteriorating since I’d knocked that drone out of the sky, and no amount of blinking seemed to fix the problem.
“How’s your head?” Ben asked, his voice carefully neutral in a way that I knew meant he was actually very worried.
“Fine,” I lied.
His hand found mine on the seat between us, and I felt the familiar resonance of our electromagnetic fields synchronizing. It helped — not enough to clear my vision, but enough to push back the nausea that had been building ever since we’d left the fire tower.
“Sidney.”
Something in his tone told me he’d lost patience with convenient misrepresentations.
“I’m seeing double,” I said, relenting. “My pupils are still uneven, I probably have a concussion, and I definitely shouldn’t be channeling any more power for at least forty-eight hours.
” I squeezed his hand and tried to summon a lopsided smile. “Is that better?”
“Marginally.” He took a corner too fast, and I had to swallow hard against the surge of dizziness that followed. “How bad is the phoenix?”
I’d been trying not to think about that. Ever since I’d woken up in the medical facility with our consciousnesses entangled, I’d been able to sense the phoenix like a second heartbeat underneath my own. Right now, that heartbeat was weakening.
“Worse,” I said. “The corruption’s spreading faster than we thought. I think it knows we’re running out of time.”
Ben set his jaw, but he didn’t reply. What was there to say, after all? We had maybe twenty-four hours at most before the corruption became irreversible, and I was already so depleted that jamming a single surveillance drone had nearly knocked me unconscious.
The odds weren’t looking very good.
We pulled onto the access road that led to the facility, and I immediately sensed something wrong about our surroundings. The electromagnetic signatures in the area had changed — there were more artificial signals, more concentrated patterns of electronic activity.
“Ben, stop the car,” I said.
He hit the brakes without question, and we sat there in the darkness while I stretched my senses outward.
Three miles northeast, I picked up vehicle signatures — what I thought were military transport trucks, maybe four or five of them.
Two miles east, I found concentrated electromagnetic activity that matched the signature of tactical communications equipment.
DAPI had found us.
“They’re surrounding the facility,” I said in an undertone, even though the encroaching forces certainly weren’t close enough to hear us. “At least twenty people, probably more. They must have tracked us from the tower.”
Ben began to pull out his phone, then made a sound of disgust as he seemed to remember it was useless.
The EMP from the phoenix’s distress call had fried every civilian electronic device in a five-mile radius.
Only military-grade, hardened equipment and the specialized DAPI sensors Ben and I had pilfered from the forest had survived.
“Rebecca,” he said. “We need to warn her.”
I reached deeper with my abilities, searching for her electromagnetic signature.
Doing so took longer than it should have; my depleted state made everything harder, like trying to see through fog.
But I found her eventually. To my surprise, she was actually inside the facility, moving with stealth and haste through the lower levels.
“She knows,” I said. “She’s already evacuating. Ben, we can’t go back there. If we get any closer, they’ll find us.”
“The phoenix — ”
“I know.” The creature’s weakening heartbeat pulsed through our connection, and I felt its confusion and fear. It didn’t understand why I’d left, why the anchor had broken. “But if DAPI captures me, the phoenix will die no matter what. At least this way, we have a chance.”
Ben stared at the dark road ahead, his hands tight on the steering wheel. I could sense his frustration, the helpless rage of someone who’d spent his whole life solving problems through research and logic, and who was now facing a situation where neither would help.
“What do we do?” he asked.
Before I could answer, my senses flared, warning me of a new threat. Different signatures this time, approaching from the south.
Two vehicles moving at high speed.
“We’ve got company,” I said. “I think it’s a tactical team. They must have been waiting for us to come back.”
Ben threw the SUV into reverse and hit the gas.
We shot backward down the access road, tires squealing as he whipped us around in a tight turn.
The headlights swept across the forest, and for a moment I caught a glimpse of what was coming — black SUVs with tinted windows, the kind of vehicles that practically screamed “federal agency.”
“They’re going to cut us off,” I said. That weird electromagnetic sense of mine seemed able to track the vehicles’ approach vectors, which would have been freaky if I’d had more time to analyze it. “We need to go off-road.”
“This thing isn’t built for off-road.”
I grinned. “Neither am I right now, but we’re doing it anyway.”
In answer, Ben yanked the wheel to the right and sent us careening into the forest. Branches scraped against the sides of the SUV, and the suspension protested with creaks and groans as we bounced over roots and rocks.
Behind us, I could sense the tactical teams reaching the access road, their vehicles stopping where we’d turned off.
They’d come after us on foot. They had the terrain advantage, the numbers advantage, and significantly better training than an exhausted cryptozoologist and a burned-out pet shop owner and almost-DVM.
“Ben,” I said. Maybe it was stupid to warn him, but I needed him to know what I planned to do. “I have to use my abilities.”
That statement earned me an emphatic shake of his head. Hands tight on the steering wheel, he said, “You’re already drained. You said yourself that you shouldn’t be channeling any more power.”
Well, that was true enough.
“I shouldn’t be doing a lot of things.” I pressed my hand against the dashboard, feeling the SUV’s electrical systems through my fingertips. “But I can give us an advantage and hopefully buy us some time.”
“Sidney — ”
“Trust me.”
I reached outward with my electromagnetic senses, finding the tactical teams’ radio communications, their GPS units, their night vision equipment. All of it ran on electricity. All of it was vulnerable to someone who could manipulate electromagnetic fields.
Yes, I’d done this before, during the shadow stalker crisis a month earlier. I’d overloaded electronics, created interference, and jammed signals. But that had been when I was fresh, when my nervous system wasn’t already screaming from overuse.
This was going to hurt.
A lot.
I gathered my abilities and pushed.
Behind us, I could feel their tactical radios squeal with feedback, even as their GPS units flickered and died and their night vision goggles went dark. For about thirty seconds, DAPI’s teams would be operating blind, their technological advantages stripped away.
But those thirty seconds cost me everything.
My vision went completely dark. Not double anymore, but just gone, as if someone had thrown a switch in my brain.
Blood poured from my nose in a hot rush, and I tasted copper at the back of my throat.
My hands started trembling so violently that I had to clench them into fists to keep them from flailing.
“Sidney!” Ben’s voice seemed to come from very far away. “Talk to me. Are you — ”
“Blind,” I managed. “It’s temporary…I hope. Keep driving.”
The SUV lurched over something large, and I felt my stomach drop as we went briefly airborne. When we landed, the impact sent white-hot pain shooting through my skull, and I bit down so hard that I tasted blood again.
“There’s a creek bed ahead,” Ben said. “I’m going to follow it north. The water should hide our trail.”
I nodded, or at least, I tried to. My head might as well have weighed a thousand pounds, and the simple act of moving it sent waves of nausea rolling through me.
Through our connection, I could feel Ben’s terror mixing with utter determination to get us out of there.
He was more scared than I’d ever sensed him before, but he kept driving anyway.
It wasn’t as if we had any other options.
My vision started to return in patches — gray shapes that might have been trees, the green glow of the dashboard, Ben’s sharply etched profile illuminated by the instrument lights. Not great, but still better than total darkness.
“How long?” I asked.
“Before your vision fully returns? No idea. How long before DAPI gets their equipment working again?” He glanced over at me, his jaw tight. “Also, no idea, but I’m guessing not long.”
I reached out with my senses, trying to track the tactical teams. The effort made my head pound and my vision gray out again, but I managed to locate them. Still behind us, but spreading out, forming a search pattern.
“They’re adapting,” I said. “Going analog. We bought ourselves maybe five minutes.”
“Then we need to use those five minutes wisely.”
Ben guided the SUV through the creek bed, the water splashing up against the undercarriage. The sound was too loud, would attract attention if anyone was close enough to hear. But we didn’t have any better options.
My connection to the phoenix pulsed weakly, and I could feel its distress surge. Something was happening at the facility.
Something bad.
“The phoenix,” I said. “It knows DAPI is close. It’s panicking.”