Here it is.
We’ve reached the puzzle piece I have yet to share.
I glance at Jude, who’s been watching the conversation unfold with a look of measured restraint.
“We’ll give him what he wants,” I say.
Harper wrings her hands. “Do you know what that is?”
“Yesterday, right before I collapsed, when I saw Ivy alive in the Water Garden, I wasn’t myself. I was him. I was Vorat. I could hear his thoughts, and a couple of them were pretty loud. He needed two more, which he has now. But he also needed—” I swallow, refusing to meet Jude’s eye, knowing if I do, I’ll lose my nerve. “Me.”
The room goes very still.
“It’s why he sent the creature to cough up that seed. He wanted to give me a reason to come. And he wanted to give me a way in.” I rub my wrist. “If I open a rift somewhere else on the estate and he finds out I’m there, he’ll come after me.”
“No,” Jude says.
“It’s the only thing that will work,” I tell him.
“Then I’ll come with you.”
“You can’t.” Rafe called the Overlay animmune system. Together, Jude and I are a threat. “We can’t go in the same doorway. The Overlay won’t let us. The second we step near a rift, it’ll close.”
“You’re not going in by yourself.”
“I don’t plan to. It’s a pretty disorienting place. I’ll need someone who knows his way around.”
Jude starts shaking his head before I can finish. “No way.”
“But you just said it yourself. I can’t go in alone, and you have to admit, he’s been pretty good at keeping me alive lately.”
He stands from the couch. He shoves his hands into his hair, then pulls them forward and drags them down his face.
The room crackles with silent tension.
Naomi breaks it first.
“So, just to recap,” she says. “You’re going to open a doorway, go through it with Rafe, and lure Vorat away from his prisoners. Meanwhile, we’ll create some sort of diversion that will drive the police and the feds away from the spot where we’ve been strictly forbidden to go, and we’ll enter another dimension, through a doorway we can’t even see?—”
“Jude will guide you,” I say.
“And then what—we spontaneously combust and reappear inside his lair?” She looks from meto Twig. “That’s what happened to Lainey and Ivy, right? On Halloween night? You said they combusted.”
Harper looks horrified.
But a spark has caught fire in Twig’s eye. “They teleported.”
I nod encouragingly. “They defied the laws of physics.”
“I happen tolikethe laws of physics,” Naomi says.
“Same here,” Twig replies, “but you have to admit, this is a once in a lifetime opportunity.”
Harper releases another high-pitched laugh.
Naomi’s mouth has gone thin and tight. “All right. Weteleportinto his lair and we free the prisoners with blowtorches.”
I nod, hope and adrenaline coursing through my veins. Because finally, after all this time, we not only have a way in, we have a plan that could actually work. “You’ll free them with fire. Hopefully they’ll regain consciousness, but if they don’t, you’ll just have to carry them out. Rafe and I will douse the hedge maze in gasoline.”
