I watched her stalk off, wrapping my hands around the tea she’d brought. I’d learned more about Valk in the past minute than I had in years of working with her. I’d always thought she was neutral toward me at best—that she did her job simply because it was her job—but maybe there was more to it.
I was in this situation because I had no choice. People like Valk did. People like Torrance did. They believed in something.
Inside the van Valk had pointed me at, Torrance sat covered under a mountain of blankets, her dyed-blond locks a ruffled mess. She frowned intently at a screen, but brightened when I entered. She gestured at a stool by her side.
I sat, taking small sips of my tea and observing the monitor. I had to focus. I had a mission. “What are you doing?”
“Grunt work,” she said. “I’m summarizing some of the findings and double-checking the data.”
“Like what?” I tried to sound casual instead of interrogatory.
“I don’t know whether I’m supposed to tell you.”
“I’ve been keeping government secrets for sixteen years and a day.”
She gave me an appraising look.
“I tell you mine, you tell me yours?” I tried.
Torrance laughed. “What do you have?”
“The dragon said . . .” I watched her reaction for any scoffing or grimacing. I vividly recalled Facet’s dismissal at the hospital. So far, so good. “All right. Imagine it’s raining. There’s a hole in your shoe. You don’t know how to fix it, so you just wrap a plastic bag around the shoe. You know? So at least your foot won’t get wet?”
“That’s a very specific example.”
“It was last year and I had to walk back from mini-golf and I didn’t want to bother—Look, you understand what I mean, right? Blocking the hole instead of closing it. Like boarding up a broken door.”
“Yes. Hm.” She blew a lock from her eyes. “Could be interesting. How do we pull that off?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, how literal are we talking about? Is it a physical barrier?”
“I . . . don’t know.”
She snort-laughed. “I guess that’d have been too much to ask for. All right. We’ll look into it.”
“Yeah? For real?”
“For real.”
I knew I should be more skeptical of the MGA, but Torrance said it so decisively, so earnestly, that I felt myself believing her nonetheless.
“So,” I said, “your turn.”
She waffled a bit before giving in. “All right. They have a theory about the reason the rift bounces around. Imagine a piece of fabric, right? It’s wrapped around a basketball, stretched completely taut.” A hand emerged from her blankets. She drew a circle in the air, then tapped at one spot. “Now, right here, the fabric tears. What happens?” She was talking so animatedly she didn’t wait for an answer. “Because it’s under so much strain, the tear rips further. To prevent that, you might try to hold those torn sides together, right? So the weak fabric around the hole doesn’t get strained?”
“Yeah. I think.”
“Except the fabric is still pulled taut. So when you bring the two edges together, you put the fabric under so much extra strain that a hole might tear open somewhere else. In the next weakest spot. This is the process that we think makes the rift move. Well, it’s nothing like this at all, of course; I’m just helping you visualize it. Maybe I should’ve explained it in terms of weather and air pressure . . . Anyway. Point is, when the rift moves, it could simply be migrating to a welcoming environment. The weak spots.”
“What makes a weak spot?”
“It’s related to the magnetic field. And other things. I have no explanation that doesn’t require a degree in theoretical physics. Sorry.” She grimaced.
“But why? Once the rift opens in a welcoming weak spot, why move to a new spot? What’s the thing that, um, tries to hold the torn sides of the fabric together?”
“Excellent question!” Torrance nodded so enthusiastically that one of her blankets started slipping. She grabbed it before it hit the floor. “That’s one of the things they’re trying to determine. Is the rift too chaotic to remain stationary? Is something pushing it closed so it has to keep moving?”
I thought of the Power’s words: The fabric of nature is fairly resilient. What did that mean? Our world was pushing back and trying to close the rift, only for it to reopen elsewhere?
“I wonder whether this boarding-up-the-door solution you mentioned translates to somehow blocking or canceling out the weak spots. Making the environment inhospitable. We have some people exploring that already, but maybe . . . I’ll bring it up. Anyway.” She shook her head as though snapping herself out of it. “We’re getting close to identifying weak spots early. We can see where the fabric is fraying, so to speak, and determine likely next locations. Four out of five times, the rift reappears in one of our predicted locations. We’ve kept the National Guard informed so they can fully evacuate and lock down the high-risk areas. We also got them to empty out West Asherton so we don’t need to tiptoe around the population as much.”
“You said the rift was expanding further.”
“Yeah.” She scratched her head, messing her hair up even more. “The frayed edges allow it to grow. It’s especially worrisome because those weak spots are clustered around the Philadelphia area. Farther out, the fabric gets more stable. This means the rift is likely causing the weak spots in the area. Its presence destabilizes its surroundings, which then creates openings for it to migrate to. But when it keeps migrating, keeps destabilizing its surroundings, and keeps creating new weak spots, those weak spots eventually start to overlap.”
I mulled over her words. “So the rift itself can grow more easily, too?”
“Exactly. If the rift’s surroundings are frayed enough—and the whole Philadelphia area is looking pretty damn frayed—it’ll be like a bucket of water rushing to fill an open space. And if that space, that weak area, is miles across . . .”
The expression on her face said enough.
“Bye-bye, Pennsylvania,” I whispered.
“Bye-bye,” Torrance said, “North
