Lizza absently petted Mr. Charley as she looked over the latest results.
It’d been two agonizingly long days since Oriel left. Fell into shadow. He was being tormented in some dark underworld because of her, and the guilt of that was eating a giant hole in her stomach. Meanwhile, she needed to solve the dimensional drive problem—and figure out how not to turn grass into sludge—so they could make forward movement. Everyone was counting on her to deliver before Daxon—the super-hot billionaire who funded their experiments—showed up for his progress visit in three days. He knew nothing about angelings or the shadow realm, much less the larger forces at work trying to stop them… he just expected results. She had plenty to worry about, Oriel most of all, but despite that, she was making progress.
In no small part, thanks to him.
The latest run showed promise. She’d had a breakthrough after Oriel flew straight out of her apartment and her life—she’d realized that the Bounce Back run was fundamentally flawed. Forcing something living to be in two places at once? Then resolve? That was a recipe for green sludge in a pot. Just like angelings were either in the light or in shadow—but not both—her plant needed to move to the over-dimension and stay there, not dimensionally split in two to bring it back. So the next trick was finding a way to map where the object went… and then find a way to bring it back. She had an idea, but she needed to re-run her trim calculations because this next object would be very different.
She was sending Oriel’s angel blade through the machine.
He’d apparently dropped it on the roof, abandoning all vestiges of his life in the light. It tore into her heart, the idea of him leaving everything behind, but Tajael had explained that anything in the light was poison to him now. Where he was going, it wouldn’t help him anyway. A shudder went through her, making her pencil jitter a little as she circled the key factors just outside the MRI’s range. She had to not think too much about the price Oriel was paying—at least not the specifics of it—or she would lose focus. And she was committed even more now to the vow she made to her parents… to do something great with this second-life gift she’d been given.
Technically, third-life now. Oriel had fixed her soul.
That thought always arrested her from what she was doing and made her smile. She’d told him she was fine, and she totally believed that at the time. But when he breathed that life kiss into her… she could feel it working. Not just the temporary, super-hot jolt of energy. That part made her grab him and devour his kiss—her first real kiss—and he was obviously aroused by it too. But after he’d fled, and the horror of his Fall had fully sunk in, she still felt his blessing glow inside her. It had healed parts of her that she hadn’t known were broken. She’d only been sixteen when her parents died—just a kid—and parts of her had shut down. The part that loved. The part that was willing to let people into her life. Sure, her friends had abandoned her after the funerals—they just didn’t know what to say or do—but she could have made new friends. She could have dated. She could have done those things and science.
But she was broken inside—and letting herself love again was far too risky.
Because people died. People she loved. People who mattered left her when she needed them most. She never let herself get angry about her parents dying—it wasn’t their fault! Instead, she just locked away the part that might ever love again.
And then Oriel came along—beautiful, amazing, and kind—and suddenly there was a man in her life who wouldn’t die. Like, literally. Angelings lived much longer than humans. He’d told her that from the start. He would never die and leave her. Deep down, she knew that made loving Oriel possible—and it drew her in like crazy. But she didn’t consciously realize why until later, once he’d healed her soul. Suddenly, she could feel how much she’d been holding back.
And then he was gone.
He’d given up the one thing that mattered to angelings—being in the light—just to make sure she could love again.
Lizza pushed away the stack of paper with the results and rubbed the tears out of her eyes. She needed to focus on getting the trim right so she could send Oriel’s blade through the machine. That was the first step in a plan she’d put together to get the dimensional drive proved out and running. She was determined more than ever to make that happen, and not just because she would be the first traveler. She still hadn’t told that part of the plan to anyone but him. But once she had the machine working—once she proved it could work by traveling herself—then she was going after Oriel.
And she was bringing him back.
Either that or she would just stay wherever he was.
She pulled in a breath, shook her head to clear her thoughts, and dove into the numbers again. There had to be an error somewhere… it took another five minutes of focus, but she finally found it. She’d had to estimate a lot of parameters—the hardness coefficient for angel blades isn’t exactly something you can look up in a handbook—but one of them was simply entered wrong. At ten times the value it was supposed to be! That had to be the problem. She resubmitted the run and stood to stretch. She wanted to go check on the beacon Jimmy was building to her specs—that would go through the machine with the blade. But the simulation wouldn’t take long, and she’d just be bugging him anyway. So snatched up Mr. Charley and paced her cubicle.
The fuzzy creature felt reassuring in her hand. They’d come this far together—they’d see this through to the end. No matter how long it took.
The computational run finished up even faster than she thought. And the results were good! She downloaded the data and emailed it off to Jimmy, then booked it out of her cubicle and toward the lab. When she hurried inside, she swung the door straight into Tomaz.
“Hey!” He staggered back. “Carrying precious artifacts here.” He had a small black box in his hand. The one with Oriel’s blade.
“Ack! Sorry.” She quickly closed the door and glanced around. Just Charlotte, Tajael, and the three techs—Jimmy, Tomaz, and Richard—so they could speak freely. “Everything okay with the angel blade?” She had a hard time saying Oriel’s name now that he was gone.
“It’s fine.” Tomaz scowled. “I’m fine, too. Thanks for asking.” He was six-foot-two and built like he worked on a farm, not in a lab.
She frowned. “Dude, I did not hit you that hard.”
“I’m carrying a deadly weapon from the over-dimension,” he snipped back. “I’m just saying.” He carefully continued to set the box at the end of the MRI, in prep for the next run.
She sighed. Everyone was a bit on edge with the waiting.
Charlotte waved her hand as if to dismiss the bad vibes. “Tomaz is just bitter we won’t let him play with the blade.”
“I was a three-time fencing champion at college!” he called out. But he was busy fussing with the high-speed camera now.
Tajael just shrugged. “It won’t hurt humans. I don’t see why—”
“We are not letting Tomaz play pirate with an angel blade.” Charlotte scowled.
“I take offense at that!” Tomaz called out, even more buried in the camera. Looked like he was taking it apart to get at something.
Tajael gestured like it was out of his hands.
Charlotte just shook her head. “What’s up, Lizza?”
She let a smile blossom on her face. “I’ve got the specs trimmed out.”
Jimmy looked up from where he and Richard were working on the beacon. It was only a small box with a transmitter, but she’d just gotten the details to them earlier in the day. “Yeah?” Jimmy asked.
“Emailed them to you,” she replied, still grinning.
He nodded to Richard to keep going with the beacon while he hurried over to the monitor.
“Excellent,” Charlotte said. “What was the holdup?”
“Just an error on one of the coefficients,” Lizza replied. “I’ve been so focused on whether my assumptions are any good that I forgot to just check the values input.”
“So we’re sending Oriel’s angel blade this time?” Tajael asked.
In the back, Jimmy was giving a thumbs-up that the specs were uploaded and ready. “If the beacon is ready,” she said to Tajael, but loud enough for Richard to hear.
“Almost there…” He was hastily putting the circuit they’d been soldering back in the beacon container and snapping it shut.
“Can I take the sword out of the box now?” Tomaz asked. He already had the black case in his hand.
Charlotte rolled her eyes. “Okay, but don’t slash anything, all right? Especially Tajael.”
“I would heal quickly.” He put up his hands to defend himself from the scowl Charlotte was sending him.
All of it lifted Lizza’s heart.
She turned to watch Tomaz take Oriel’s blade from the box. He held it, turning it over and admiring the crystal grip. It hummed a little as he moved. Then he tested the pure-energy blade on his fingertip.
“Tomaz!” Lizza lurched forward.
“Doesn’t hurt,” he said, amazed. The blade passed right through his finger. “It’s like a lightsaber only it doesn’t cut anything.”
“Just shadow angelings.” Tajael’s voice was deadly serious. And it cast a pall over everything, most of all Lizza’s heart.
She cleared her throat. “Okay, we need the beacon attached to the blade. Which I guess means adhesive?” She directed that question to Richard, who was bringing the beacon box over.
“No go with the adhesive.” The box had a small black strap. “We’re going mechanical and just binding it to the grip. Don’t know what conditions are in the over-dimension, anyway. Adhesives might fatigue out.”
She was no materials expert—that’s what the engineers were for. “Sounds reasonable.”
Richard strapped the box to the blade as Tomaz held it between his fingers. Then Tomaz placed it in the MRI and scurried to put the camera back together.
Charlotte and Tajael came to stand by her, next to the machine.
“Will you need me to fetch it right away?” Tajael asked. The whole reason for using Oriel’s blade was so Tajael could track it in the over-dimension, find it, and bring it back.
“No,” Lizza replied, her gaze fixed on the blade. “Once we transport the blade, we’ll do a quick sweep for the beacon.” She looked back to Tajael. “We’ll need the wards down through the second run, but then you can raise them again.”
He scowled but nodded. She knew he didn’t like having the wards down for more than the split instant it took to transport whatever run they had for the day. But the beacon wasn’t like a GPS tracker or something—it was going to a different dimension. They would have to search for it with additional runs. That was where her new idea would either work… or be a dud that led her back to the drawing board again. Instead of transporting an object, like the pot of grass or the blade, they would transport the MRI imaging fields themselves. Sort of like shoving the entire virtual machine out of their plane of existence and into the magical realm. Once there, it should be able to detect the beacon, which would send out signals that would interfere with the MRI fields. That interference would come back to the lab. Her Bounce Back experiment didn’t work with sending/retrieving physical objects, but it could definitely work with sending/receiving information. At least, she hoped so.
“Ready when you are,” Tomaz said, final adjustments on the camera in place. “Got my special magical detection filter in place.”
Lizza arched her eyebrow. She wasn’t sure if he was kidding or not.
Charlotte handed her a headset. The MRI was already spooling up and clacking away.
Tajael got on the phone to coordinate the ward-drop. Jimmy counted it down. And before her eyes, Oriel’s blade—the one thing she had left of him—winked out of existence.
I’m coming for you, Oriel, she vowed in her head. As she did about ten times a day.
Jimmy quickly cycled through the second run, the one where they were trying to detect the beacon. Then he cut the power to the MRI, the universal signal to Tajael to have his Protector class angelings raise the wards again.
So far, so good. No shadow angelings dropping in and trying to kill them.
They all gathered around the monitor as the computer crunched the data. A tense ten seconds of waiting later… and a rough outline of the blade and beacon appeared on the screen.
“Yes,” said Charlotte.
Lizza just breathed a sigh of relief. “Okay, good. Now, we’re going to need about fifty more runs.”
“Fifty?” Tajael looked alarmed, and Charlotte wasn’t far behind.
“It’s like a sonar ping,” Lizza explained. “We’ve gotten one pulse back. We need to extensively ping the beacon in over-dimensional space to completely map it out. Calibrate it for functioning in that realm. Then, once we can get a fix on its measurements there, we should be able to use the MRI to bring it back here. Basically the opposite of when we send it. And I’m hoping it will bring the sword back with it, just like when Oriel brought me back from the over-dimension.”
The room fell silent. Oops. That wasn’t supposed to spill out.
Charlotte just nodded. “So you’ve seen it?”
The techs were staring wide-eyed at her.
“Just his cell.”
Charlotte’s eyebrows lifted.
Lizza scowled. “Not like that. And we weren’t there long.”
She and Tajael exchanged a look and barely repressed smiles.
Tomaz piped up. “Okay, I’m going to need to hear all about this.”
Lizza just rolled her eyes. “We’ve got work to do first. Maybe after, Tomaz.”
He grumbled and headed back to his camera.
“So you don’t need me to retrieve the sword yet?” Tajael’s brow scrunched up.
“Only if we can’t bring it back ourselves.” Lizza sighed. “Then definitely. But that means we’ll have to redesign the beacon and start over.”
He scowled. “So fifty is the minimum number of runs you’ll need?”
It was eighty-seven. But she could tell him that later. “Yeah.”
He looked to Charlotte. “We need to spread these out.”
“Or maybe do them in batches.” She looked to Jimmy. “Can we automate some of this?”
“Sure,” Jimmy said. “Won’t take long to program. But I’ll need to automate the upload and the calibrations. I’ll need the full matrix of specs just to get started.”
Lizza nodded. “Okay. I’ll work on getting batches of similar runs grouped together. See if we can minimize the total time we have with the wards down.”
Tajael had a grim look on his face, but he nodded his agreement.
“And… thanks, guys,” Lizza said to all of them. “We’re going to make this work.”
The pinched looks on their faces were all too familiar. It’s what people looked like when someone had died, and they just didn’t know what to say. But Oriel hadn’t died—she’d made sure of that in grilling Tajael. She’d had plenty of time for that since Tajael had taken over being her Guardian. He said it was only temporary—a female angeling was guarding Charlotte in the meantime—just until they found someone suitable to guard Lizza. She hadn’t told him she would do everything in her power to bring him back, regardless.
If it was possible.
Lizza ducked her head and scurried out of the lab.
First, her world-changing research. Then, she’d save the man who’d made it possible.