Chapter 7 #3
When he pulled back, his face wore an expression I’d never seen before. It wasn’t just determination or love or fear. It was all of that and something more.
Something final.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
And then he pushed me.
Hard.
I stumbled backward, off-balance and weak, falling away from him toward the gap in the perimeter, falling toward escape.
And Ben turned and ran toward the containment team, toward the phoenix.
“Ben, no!” I tried to push myself forward so I could follow him, but Rebecca Morse materialized from the trees right then, her strong hands grasping me by the shoulders.
Where the hell had she come from? Had she been there the whole time, hidden, waiting for the right moment when she could intervene?
“Let me go!” I struggled against her grip, but I had no strength left. None that mattered, anyway. “Ben!”
He reached the containment team, and his hand moved to the electromagnetic pulse generator on his belt.
A bright flash exploded in the clearing, a surge of energy that disrupted their equipment for a few precious seconds.
The phoenix took advantage of the interruption and wheeled away toward the deeper forest, buying itself some distance.
And the tactical teams closed in on Ben from three directions.
He didn’t fight them. He just let them take him down, pin him, and secure his hands behind his back with swift efficiency.
He’d given himself up deliberately to give me time to escape.
To save me.
Rebecca Morse’s voice came to my ear, urgent and commanding. “Sidney, we have to move. Now.”
I gave a ferocious shake of my head. “He’s captured. I can’t leave him!”
“You can’t help him if you’re captured, too.” She was already pulling me backward, into the cover of the forest. “You’re drained, blocked, and useless in a fight. We’ll regroup and plan. We’ll get him back. But right now, we have to run.”
I could feel the phoenix retreat deeper into the forest, Rosenthal’s containment teams in hot pursuit. Thanks to that damn Faraday cage’s interference, I could barely sense Ben’s electromagnetic signature as they dragged him toward the DAPI agents’ waiting vehicles.
Still struggling against Rebecca Morse’s grip, I watched them take him, watched my worst fear realized in real-time. Ben had been captured by DAPI and was now in Rosenthal’s custody. He would be subject to enhanced interrogation protocols and used as leverage against me.
He was a prisoner because I’d been too weak and too useless to stop it.
“Sidney.” Rebecca’s voice ground against my ear, harder now, as if she was losing patience with me. “I can’t carry you and your equipment. You need to move.”
In despair, I let her pull me into the forest. My last glimpse of Ben showed him being loaded into a black SUV, surrounded by agents, bound and captured, but alive.
We were supposed to face this problem with the phoenix together.
But our together had just been ripped apart, and I had no idea how to put it back.
The safe house was a hunting cabin forty minutes north of Silver Hollow, so isolated that the nearest neighbor was three miles away.
Rebecca Morse had driven with ruthless efficiency, taking back roads and fire trails I didn’t even know existed, since we were now far beyond the woods that surrounded my hometown.
I’d spent the entire trip slumped against the passenger door of her Suburban, fighting nausea and despair in equal measure.
The Faraday cage’s effect on me ended once we’d gotten a few miles away from the clearing, and the return of my electromagnetic senses should have been a relief.
Instead, it just emphasized Ben’s absence.
His signature, which had become such a constant presence in my awareness over the past few weeks, was gone.
Now there was only static and emptiness where he should have been.
“Drink this.” Rebecca thrust a bottle of water into my hands as soon as we were inside. “You’re dehydrated on top of everything else.”
I took it automatically but didn’t drink. My hands were shaking too hard to unscrew the cap.
She took it back from me, opened it, and then handed it over again. “Drink. Now, before you collapse.”
This time, I obeyed. The water was cold enough to hurt going down, but it helped clear some of the fog from my brain. Not all of it, of course. But enough that I could try to focus.
The cabin was sparse — one main room with a kitchenette, a bathroom, and a loft that probably served as a sleeping area. Emergency supplies were stacked in one corner, and communications equipment sat on a battered pine table.
“How long have you been tracking their movements?” I asked. My voice was hoarse, scraped raw by exhaustion.
“Since I went ‘on leave.’” She moved to the communications equipment and checked the displays, then gave a slight nod, as if satisfied that the DAPI team had no idea where we’d gone to ground.
“My superiors think I’m just taking a break, but I was worried that Rosenthal wasn’t really done, was only regrouping. ”
I stared at her, still not sure I could believe everything she was saying, despite the way she’d just saved me from certain capture. “You’re still FBI.”
“Yes, and I’m an agent who believes the Bureau should protect American citizens, not experiment on them.” Her eyes narrowed slightly. “Which apparently makes me a minority in my own organization these days.”
I slumped into a chair that had seen better decades and let my head fall forward. Everything hurt — my head, my body, my powers, my heart.
Especially my heart.
“They have him,” I said. Stating the obvious, of course, but I needed to say it out loud. “Rosenthal has Ben.”
“Yes.”
“She’ll use enhanced interrogation.”
“Probably not immediately.” Rebecca pulled up a chair and sat across from me, her frank, dark gaze fixed on my face.
“Rosenthal’s smart. She’ll try to recruit him first. She knows he’s valuable — his research, his network, his expertise.
She’ll offer him a position, resources, a chance to study all these phenomena without restriction. ”
“Ben would never — ”
She cut me off, but gently. “I know. But she’ll try anyway. That buys us maybe twelve hours before she escalates to more aggressive methods.”
Twelve hours. Half a day to figure out how to infiltrate a heavily guarded DAPI facility, rescue Ben, and escape before Rosenthal weaponized everything she’d learned from us.
Impossible.
But then, we’d been doing impossible things all week.
“The phoenix,” I said. “Did it escape?”
“For now,” she replied. “The containment teams are still searching for it, but the forest is large, and the phoenix knows it better than they do.” She paused. “How much longer does it have?”
I closed my eyes and reached for the faint thread of connection that still existed between me and the phoenix. The corruption had spread further during its attack on the tactical teams. It had hours left, not days. Maybe less.
“Not long enough,” I said quietly. “Not long enough for any of this.”
A heavy silence settled between us. Ben was captured. The phoenix was dying. I was completely drained…and Rosenthal was winning.
“I need to recover,” I said at last. “At least enough for minor power use. How long before they trace us here?”
Now Rebecca smiled faintly. “This location is off the books. It’s my personal property, purchased under a shell company.
They won’t find it in twelve hours.” She rose from her chair and went over to the kitchenette.
“But you need more than twelve hours to recover from major power depletion. You need days.”
“We don’t have days.”
She’d set a pair of mugs on the counter, as if she planned to make tea or maybe some coffee. Now she turned toward me, her jaw set. “Sidney — ”
“Ben doesn’t have days.” I pushed myself to my feet, swaying slightly but managing to stay upright. “He has maybe twelve hours before Rosenthal decides he’s not cooperative enough and moves to forced interrogation. Which means I have less than that to figure out how to get him out.”
Rebecca crossed her arms and sent me a very direct look. “In your current state, you’d be lucky to jam a cell phone. Going up against a fortified facility with hardened equipment and trained operators? That’s suicide.”
“Then I’ll die trying,” I said without hesitation. “I’m not leaving him there.”
I watched her process my words, saw her weigh options and outcomes with the cold efficiency of someone trained to make hard choices. She could try to stop me, could physically restrain me if necessary. I was barely functional, so she could absolutely prevent me from leaving.
But we both knew she wouldn’t.
“All right,” she said after a long pause.
“Then we need a plan. A real one, not a suicide run.” Ignoring the mugs she’d just set out, she moved back to her communications equipment on its rickety little table.
“I have a contact inside DAPI. Let me reach out and see what intel I can gather. In the meantime, you need to rest. Four hours minimum.”
I shook my head. No way was I going to allow myself to be out of commission for that much time. “Four hours is — ”
“Non-negotiable.” Her voice turned hard as she continued. “If you go in depleted like this, you’ll get yourself killed, and Ben will stay captured. Four hours of rest will at least give you some minor power capability. That’s the difference between a rescue operation and a murder-suicide.”
She was right, even though every instinct screamed at me that I needed to move now, act now, save Ben now.
But tactics required thinking, and planning required energy. Any kind of effective rescue would require me to be functional enough to actually pull it off.
“Four hours,” I agreed. “Then we’ll plan the rescue.”
Rebecca nodded. “Get some rest. I’ll wake you when I have some intel.”
I made it to the couch before my legs gave out. The exhaustion was bone-deep, spirit-deep, dragging me down despite the adrenaline that still surged through my system.
My last conscious thought was of Ben — captured, alone, in Rosenthal’s custody.
I’m coming, I promised him silently, hoping somehow that he could sense the commitment even through the distance and walls between us.
Four hours where I wouldn’t have to face the nightmare my life had become.
Then darkness took me.