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“Maybe he wants the city wiped out so he can have a clear shot to get into Spirit Terra?” Lace guessed.

“Sounds like it,” Darien agreed. “If he actually believed for one second that these anima mundi missiles would seal the portal, he wouldn’t have given the military the okay to do it.” No, he certainly wouldn’t have. Cutting a doorway into the Veil to get to the Well was his plan all along, and was precisely the reason why he went to Yveswich and planted the replica in the first place. Which answered their question.

He did not believe the same as the military at all. Heknewthe missiles wouldn’t do anything other than destroy what was left of Yveswich and kill the last of the survivors. Hewantedthe city destroyed.

The group broke out into conversation.

Loren met Roark’s gaze across the table. “Do you know where Dallas is?” she asked him above the din. The others quieted down. “We haven’t heard from her since we left Angelthene.”

“I sent a helicopter for Dallas,” Roark replied. “But I was discharged before the pilots reported back.”

Loren’s head spun faster. Her breathing thinned.

Darien stepped closer, his fingers smoothing her hair.

“What about Max and Travis?” Ivy asked. She shifted her attention to Darien. Her eyes were wide, her face pallid. “What if they’re trapped in there?”

“Try tracking them again,” Darien said. “One of you—track them. Right now.”

Jack got up and went to the kitchen to get a plastic zip-lock bag of Stygian salts. When he came back, he dumped half on the table and used the dull edge of a kitchen knife to drag some into a line.

“Is there any way you can get the forcefield down?” Darien asked Roark as Jack snorted the salt off the flat part of the blade. “Or even get me back in there?” Loren’s heart thumped out an uneven rhythm at the thought of Darien going back in there. Gods, if he left?—

But Roark shook his head. “I can’t. I’m sorry, but my hands are tied.”

Tanner said, “What about programming people out? Is that doable?”

“Not at this point,” Roark replied. “The military and others in positions of authority had their auras programmed in before the switch in forcefield. No one else can be added.”

Tanner swore.

“They’ll be pulling out before the missiles hit,” Roark concluded.

“Hidden…,” Jack murmured, his eyes shifting beneath his closed lids. His hands were in fists, his left knee bouncing under the table. Through clenched teeth, he said, “I can’t see anyone!” Ivy rubbed his shoulders and murmured words of comfort.

Darien faced Roark. “There’s no way you can get the forcefield down?” he pressed. “No way at all?”

He was already shaking his head. “Even if I were still on site, it wouldn’t have made a difference. The imperator has implemented what we call aBattleshort,”he explained. “Theforcefield cannot, under any circumstances, be shut off, not even by him.”

Oh gods. Loren’s heart raced so fast, she felt lightheaded. When Roark’s eyes locked with hers, she wondered if he, too, was thinking of her. Dallas.

Was she trapped there? Was that the reason she hadn’t called?

Jack opened his eyes and shoved the bag of salt and the knife aside in anger before hanging his head in his hands.

“If these friends of yours really are stuck in Yveswich…,” Roark mused. He sighed, his face grave. “I hate to say this, but...I’m afraid they’re on their own.”

80

The Tricking Ward (YGH)

YVESWICH, STATE OF KER

“It’s that one there,”Jewels said. She sat on the counter in the cold-storage medication room in the Tricking Ward of Yveswich General Hospital, her pale fingers gripping the counter’s edge. “You just had your hand over it.”

Travis moved his hand back to the left, his fingertips hovering over the small glass vials in the neatly stocked medicine cabinet. There were hundreds of the same identical vial, all labeled with funky names that were impossible to pronounce. How could anyone be expected to say these out loud? If he tried, he’d embarrass himself.

“This one?” He peered over his shoulder at Jewels.