Promise bit her lip and squinted, barely able to discern the outline of a human brain camouflaged by trees and bushes that were unfamiliar to her. Waves cascaded out from the middle, darkening each level of forest until the final trees lay dead on the ground. “If I had to guess, that’s some sort of brain attack.” Oddly beautiful and ominous.
Mercy took a step back. “Um, yeah. That’s what I see, too.” Her lips looked bright pink against her pale skin.
“Everything okay?” The pressure against Promise’s temples increased, and she winced. Shielding her brain wasn’t easy.
“No.” Mercy retreated for the doorway and took her phone from her back pocket. Her eyes were round and her mind obviously spinning.
Promise wanted to follow the woman, but her head was about to explode. “Are you all right?”
“Yep. Just have work to do.” Mercy shut the door and disappeared from sight.
The pain stopped completely. Promise let out breath she hadn’t realized she’d trapped inside her lungs. With one last look at the stunning oil paintings still sliding across her computer monitor, she returned to her equations.
After about an hour, heavy footsteps sounded on the stairs outside. The door slowly opened.
“It’s about lunchtime, and I think Mercy is cooking. She was on the phone for an hour with her people and now seems like she’s in a snit about something. So we might die by tomorrow anyway if we eat her cooking. How’s it going?” Ivar stepped into the room, stress lines fanning out from his eyes. Even though the last two nights had been sensational, he appeared to be getting more and more cranky.
How could she tell him? She didn’t even have a conclusion yet, and considering he’d been in a mood ever since she’d talked to Dayne, this probably wasn’t the time. But the truth was the truth. “This will take years. For now, as far as we can tell, although Ronan’s world burst, the other two have remained intact.”
“Yes,” Ivar said. “For now.”
“Newton’s first law of motion,” she murmured, glancing down at the different marker colors all over her hand. She hadn’t even noticed.
Ivar came up behind her, bringing warmth and an electricity that heated her skin. “Meaning what?”
“It’s too early for me to say anything definitive,” she said. “But since there hasn’t been another event, we can assume the two remaining worlds have found a balance. Maybe with other worlds, perhaps in a void. There’s no way to know.”
He was quiet for a moment, but tension spiraled from him. “We will find out.”
She bit her lip. “I want to tell you what you want to hear, but the math is going in a different direction.” In other words, it’d be a mistake to try to affect Quade’s world ever again. “I think when the Seven bound those three worlds together, they used gravity in a way that messed with time. Or vice versa. Or they used a dimensional tool I can’t even imagine yet and haven’t discovered.” Her stomach cramped just like that time she’d brought home an A-. “The composition of these created worlds now might end this one.” And many others.
He looked at the covered boards. “But you’re postulating. I mean, you don’t know for sure, do you?”
“Newton on a cracker, not even close,” she admitted easily. “Like I said, problems like this take centuries and many different minds to solve.” She turned toward him so suddenly, his body tensed. “I want centuries.” She winced. That wasn’t smooth at all.
His chin lifted, and his eyelids dropped to half-mast. “Now isn’t the time.”
But the idea was in her head, so she had to push it. “It is the time. Exactly the time.”
His gaze hardened. “You want to mate.”
She swallowed, deliberately ignoring the warning in his tone. “Marriages of convenience are statistically stronger than those founded on chemicals in the body. On love. I can’t imagine that matings would be any different.” The memory of him biting her the night before threatened her reasonable line of thought. Her nipples hardened, and she glanced down to make sure her bra was doing its job. It was.
“You don’t understand.” He stood his ground, but his gaze darted to the doorway and back. His biceps bunched, and he shoved his hands in the front pockets of his soldier cargo pants, as if to keep them occupied.
“I do understand.” She turned more fully toward him. When the equation was solved, she wanted to be there. To protect the world,