Everything is white. I have been here before. This is where it started. Or ended. I don’t remember which. Everything around me is white. I stared into a nothingness of white. I am here again. Around me, I see shadows of light flickering in the depths of the white. They spin and whirl, roll and stop, taunting me with patterns that disintegrate as they take shape.
Bursts of color flare in my vision, fireworks against the white, fading to darkness. More, then more, the darkness is closing on me, like the slow closing of my eyes. My mind, like my eyes, is closing, like my eyes are blinking. Like my mind is blinking.
My mind blinks.
The air begins to haze with white ambient essence, like a fog. Vize has taken out the security and is making his way toward the area where the spent fuel rods are stored. Emergency lights flash bright yellow as I follow him down a long corridor. People in hazmat suits stand frozen along the walls, like statues randomly arranged. They’re not dead, but suspended, caught in an elven binding spell.
The corridor ends at a locked door, a sign flashes the evacuation order and warns of radiation. A keypad beside the door has lights that glow steady red. I don’t have a code. I backtrack to the nearest person in a hazmat suit. The binding spell is not as sophisticated as I assumed. It will degrade within an hour if Vize doesn’t kill us all. I hesitate, expecting a trap, but see none. I hold my breath and call up some essence, hoping it will not trigger something and kill us. I hit the binding spell with a counterspell. The man sways, startled to be aware and alert again.
I steady him and point to the door. “I need to get through. I need you to open that door.”
His glasses behind the mask are crooked on his face. He looks like a family man, maybe fifty years old, not someone who expected to find himself in the middle of a terrorist attack. He straightens his shoulders. “No.”
I wish his family could see him at that moment. The world is crashing down around him, he’s got powerful fey throwing spells around, and he says “no” to me. The defiant glint in his eye is admirable but not convenient. “Look, I’m one of the good guys. Honest. I need to get in there and stop the guy who’s doing this.”
“You don’t have a suit,” he said.
“I’m a druid. I have a body shield that should work the same way,” I said. I’m not sure how long my body shield will work on the other side of the door. It doesn’t matter. Vize matters. Killing him matters more.
He shakes his head, the large hood moving from side to side. “I’m not worried about you. I’m worried that a guy with no suit is on a suicide mission.”
I grin. I like this guy. I wish we were meeting under different circumstances, and I want to hit him for slowing me down. But I like him. “Sir, I can destroy that door with my abilities. If I wanted to hurt anyone but myself, we wouldn’t be talking. You would be waking up to find a gaping hole in the wall. I’m trying to reduce risk, but if I have to sacrifice myself and everyone in this hall to try and stop Vize, I will. Please open the door.”
I can’t see his face as he looks down the hall at the other people bound in the spell. “Can you wake them up?”
I raise my arm and shoot a stream of essence down the center of the hall, tuning its resonance so that it disrupts the binding spells. One by one, people shift and sway on their feet. A few fall. “Satisfied?”
He walks to the door and punches in an access code. The system cycles. “You’re gonna die in the there, you know that, right?”
I pat him on the shoulder. “Not if I can help it. Make sure the door closes behind me and get everyone out.”
The door opens, and I don’t wait for a response from the guy. I’m in the containment area. The air is thick with essence, a cloud I can’t see through. An elven signature runs through, so it’s Vize, but there’s also a high-level resonance I’ve never seen. Vize is tapping into the reactor at a pure essence level. That’s bad.
Uncertain in the fog, my body shield shudders around me like nothing I’ve ever experienced. It’s a response to the radiation, a bombardment of neutrinos or some such I had no clear conception of. The air is humid, and beneath the sound of the emergency sirens and the hum of machinery, I hear a low rumble, like water boiling. My sensing ability registers multiple essence signatures and a fierce white light in front of me. It’s the spent–fuel rod pool.
I reach a metal railing and watch rising essence warp and twist around it. It’s water, a fine mist rising in the air. The surface of the containment is low—too low according to warning signs painted on the inner surface of the pool. I jog along the edge, sifting through the signatures for Vize. My senses are all screwed up, and I slam into a wall of solid air. Beyond it, powerful essence shimmers evergreen. It moves closer, resolving into the shape of a man. Vize appears in the mist.
“We need to talk,” he says.
“You can do all your talking in a jail cell,” I say.
He shifts his attention to the pool. “We don’t have much time. You need to speak to Nigel Martin. Maeve is going to try to kill us. We have to stop her.”
Ignoring him, I test the barrier with essence-infused hands, searching for weak points. There are always weak spots, no matter how good you are. “Looks like you’re the one that’s going to kill us if you expose those fuel rods,” I say.
“I need the radiation. No matter what I say, you aren’t going to believe me because you’ve been lied to. I am not going to let Maeve kill me this time.”
Of course, I don’t believe him. The man has killed people in his war against the Seelie Court. I have no idea what he’s saying about Maeve’s killing him. I decide to keep him talking to distract him while I break the barrier. “Maeve isn’t going to kill you. I might, though. Reverse the spell and cover the rods.”
“There’s no one like us in the world, Grey. Only we can stop her if we join together,” he said.
Okay, now he is getting loony. Die-hard anarchists never make sense. “Sure, Vize. Come closer so we can talk.”
He stands before me, a look of fevered hope on his face. His youth surprises me, his almost black hair worn long for an elf, fanning out as though filled with static. I had thought him older. He holds his hands about a foot apart in front of him. A gold ring hovers between them, pulsing with essence, revolving around a shaft of light. “This is how we do it,” he said.
“Do what?” I ask. I find a thin spot in the barrier, a space where radiation from the pool rubs against it, wearing it down.
“Stop Convergence. I need you to drop your body shield,” he says.
I chuckle and return my attention to the weak spot. A few well-placed bursts of essence should propagate through the barrier and destabilize the shield spell. “And why would I do that?”
“Because this will be more painful otherwise,” he says.
I debate whether to humor him and drop the shield. I’d have plenty of time to reengage my shield if he dropped the barrier to attack. I decide against it. I probably wouldn’t like being bombarded with radiation from the pool just to play with his mind. “I guess we’ll have to go the pain route.”
I hit the weak spot with a blast of essence. Vize curses under his breath as he redirects his spell to deflect the hit. It doesn’t work. His ring falls to the floor at his feet. The barrier crumbles, and I leap at him. His eyes lock with mine, and he smiles. “One door opens; another closes,” he says.
I reach for the ring. He anticipates my attack. Even as my feet leave the floor, he is down on one knee, arm raised, and lets fly a bolt of elf-shot. It pierces my shield and slams into my head. Something tears inside me as I fall to the floor. I have never experienced such pain, never imagined it.
Vize grabs the ring and puts it on a finger of his left hand. He holds it up. The essence in my head refuses to dissipate, ricocheting against the inside of my skull. Vize clenches his fist and withdraws the elf-shot from my head. I twist in pain, watching in horror as the green essence jumps free with a brilliant shard of gold essence—my essence. He’s pulled a piece of my body signature, my living essence, my utter soul. Vize grabs the mote of my essence in his ringed hand and fuses his essence into mine.