Damien nodded.
“You…” Buckley pointed to me. “Get with Jeremy and find out how to end this war. We’ve got them by the balls. Let’s strike while the iron is hot. Whatever you need, you have, including the entire United States Army. Deal?”
I’d gotten what I wanted for the Galadrias and now it was my turn to honor my part.
“Deal.”
We shook, and with that she fled the room.
I looked up at the man I’d once been paid to protect, the man who had somehow ended up protecting me.
“Damien…” My lip quivered. “You didn’t have to do that.”
He crossed the room, taking my head into his hands and cradling my chin. “What’s important to you is important to me, and Dawn has saved our lives countless times. It’s the least I can do.”
I realized in that moment that I was so deeply in love with him there was no turning back. I’d crossed that threshold, the point of no return in a relationship where you can’t get out without considerable scars.
“How do we end this?” I asked him. Jeremy was a genius no doubt, but so was Damien.
He looked over at me. “I don’t know yet, but I have over a dozen ideas. Let’s call our team together and start to brainstorm. We don’t sleep until we have a solid plan.”
He was right. So many variables had changed from Jeremy’s original idea to end the Dream Wars. The breeders were locking me out now—but we had the gateway. It was now or never, the time had come. No more nights spent in the Dream War as helpless little humans. The next time I stepped foot in that place would be to end it all. Consequences be dammed.
“We need to cull the breeder population. That’s step one.” Master Aki was drawing “1. Kill Breeders” on the whiteboard in our military tent that had been given to us to solve this problem. Other than my team, President Buckley and three of her top advisors sat in chairs at the edge of the room, offering advice and taking notes. We’d been at this an hour. Mostly because we’d let Jeremy go first and the poor kid had just launched into a never-ending monologue on parallel dimensions and frequencies and shit that was way over my head. In the end, Damien had gotten him to explain that he could probably create a device, a helmet, for me to wear that would send out a beacon to the entire hive mind of the breeders. This would call them to one location. Here. Where we could hopefully wipe them out.
“We can take care of the breeder culling no problem,” Buckley stated. “You use your… beacon device… to call them here and my army will wipe them out.”
Master Aki looked satisfied in that and sat down.
“Okay, and how do we kill the rest of them, grunts, skids, sentries, hundreds of thousands of them?” one of her advisors asked.
That was going to be my job…
I stood. “I will attempt to use my power to collapse the Dream War, opening a portal so big that it exposes their world to ours and folds it in on itself.”
Theoretically it sounded awesome, and would look really cool in a movie, but, realistically, I was terrified it wasn’t even—
Buckley called me out. “Is that even possible?”
“With a large part of the breeder population dead, yes,” Master Aki said with authority.
Buckley looked like she wasn’t buying it. “And if Kit can’t… what’s our plan B?”
Silence.
More silence.
Tons of awkward silence.
Jeremy stood. “Then we use Kit’s powers to tap into the entire ghoul hive mind and lure them all with the beacon before blowing them all up with a nuclear bomb. But that option will probably kill Kit.”
Damien’s voice was laced with mild anger. “That’s not an option, buddy.”
President Buckley nodded. “Agreed. Let’s hope plan A works.”
Ronnie stood and eyed President Buckley. “She needs to rest for twenty-four hours before we attempt anything.”
The president nodded. “This time tomorrow, we will commence with plan A. Let me know if you need anything. Until then, I will be fighting fires and having more soldiers shipped in.”
We all nodded.
Twenty-four hours. I had twenty-four hours to prepare for the end of the world…
Or the beginning.
I called my mom, Tatum, Santiago, anyone I could think of to say goodbye. I didn’t technically say goodbye, but I called to hear their voice one last time in case I didn’t make it through this. I’d lain around with Damien for a few hours, talking about future plans and dreaming of a life we might never have. Jeremy came and went, taking readings from the helmet he’d placed on my head.
But my last ten hours had been the most challenging. Those had been spent with Master Aki trying to talk and meditate my way through what I was going to do. We both agreed that I should not attempt anything mentally in practice. I should reserve all of my strength for the big moment, but that also made it hard for me to believe in myself, believe I would be able to do something I barely understood, when the time came.
The game changer would be killing off the breeders. Now that we knew that the Dream War was controlled and kept at bay by the breeders, we could expose a weakness. The only thing was I had no idea how many breeders the Dream War contained or how many were needed to keep it going. Now that the last of their ships had landed with their scouts, it was the perfect time to hit and end them.
The only thing left to do was have a talk with Dawn. She was my only source of inside information. I walked around the lake to where the Galadrias were being kept and smiled a little inside at the
