“Why is she here?”
I turn to look at her. “Because she knows things. And because Silas asked her to choose.”
“Choose what?”
“Us or them.”
Caroline is quiet for a moment. Then she steps past me and walks down the porch steps to meet them.
I watch her approach Helena. The two women are nothing alike—Caroline in her oversized sweater and bare feet, Helena in her traveling clothes with shadows under her eyes. But something passes between them when they’re close enough to see each other clearly. Recognition, maybe.
“You must be Caroline,” Helena says.
“You must be the one who’s been lying to my town for years.”
“Not by choice.”
“They never are.”
Helena almost smiles. “I think I’m going to like you.”
We gather in the living room. It’s crowded—me, Caroline, Griffin, Silas, Helena, Amara, and June, all crammed into a space designed for four. Thistle has retreated to the top of the bookshelf and is watching the proceedings with the detached judgment that only cats can achieve.
June pours tea for everyone. No one drinks it.
Helena stands by the fireplace because there aren’t enough seats, and she talks. She starts with the Rift—not the official story, but the real one. The pool of magic that Willowbrooksits on isn’t just a natural phenomenon. It’s a reservoir. Raw magical energy that collects in certain places around the world, concentrated and powerful and useful in ways that most people have forgotten.
“Or been made to forget,” Helena says.
She talks about Marcus Deveraux. His family was one of the original keeper lineages, removed from the records in the 1940s by the Council. The official reason was dereliction of duty. The real reason was that the Deverauxs understood what the Rift actually was—a source of energy that could be harvested—and the Council wanted that understanding for themselves.
“The monitoring equipment Deveraux funded three years ago,” Helena continues, “it’s not monitoring. It’s collection. The sensors pull energy from the Rift flares and feed it into a centralized system. That energy powers the Council’s infrastructure—the communication wards, the database networks, the tracking systems that keep every registered Omega in the Midwest on a leash.”
June sets her teacup down. “You’re telling me the Council is running on stolen magic.”
“I’m telling you the Council doesn’t see it as stolen. They see it as resource management. Willowbrook has an abundance of raw magical energy. The Council has a use for it. From their perspective, it’s no different than mining coal or tapping oil.”
“Except it’s not coal,” I say. “It’s people’s lives. Their biology. Their bonds.”
“Yes.” Helena’s voice is flat. “It is.”
She talks about Victor Ash. He was a regional representative—the same rank as our father—and the one who built the secondary ward structure. His job was to increase the Rift’s output, to make the flares more frequent and more powerful so the collection systems had more to harvest. He did it for twentyyears before he died in a car accident that probably wasn’t an accident.
“Why are we only learning about this now?” Amara asks.
“Because Victor Ash was good at his job. The wards were hidden, the records were sealed, and the effects were explained away as natural instability. No one thought to look harder because the official narrative made sense. Too many unbonded Omegas, unstable magic, a Rift that feeds on chaos. It’s a clean story. Easy to believe.”
“And the bonding failures?” June’s voice is tight. “Every Omega in this town who’s tried to bond and couldn’t?—”
“Was collateral. The Rift’s energy output interferes with the bond-forming process. It’s not an accident. It’s a feature. Unbonded Omegas produce more unstable magic, which feeds the Rift, which produces more energy for the Council. The system is self-sustaining.”
“Damn,” Griffin mutters.
Helena pauses. She looks at Caroline, then at me, then at the floor. Whatever comes next is harder than everything that came before.
“There’s something else. Something personal.”
“Tell them,” Silas says from beside her. His voice is quiet but firm.
