The command center reeked of scorched coffee and naked fear. Daisy watched Christian and Cassius hunched over Mount Shasta's topographical maps, their identical profiles caught in the merciless fluorescent glare. Winter and summer, frost and light—two halves of a whole that time itself had failed to permanently sever. The sight should have been reassuring. Instead, it made her stomach twist into vicious knots.
Inside her, two impossible heartbeats fluttered—one steady and measured like Christian's frost, the other quick and mercurial like Cassius's light. Children who shouldn't exist, growing beneath her heart while existence itself frayed at the edges.
"The caldera here," Cassius was saying, golden light burning a path along the mountain's northern slope. "Elvira's been saturating the s
