“Your father.” Grandad shook his head. “I never did understand that boy. He was born selfish, only ever thinking about whatever shiny thing he wanted next. I never would have thought he could trick his mama like that. And Abby, she would have . . . she would have been so disappointed.”

Dani swallowed thickly. “I know.”

“The only thing that boy ever did right was making you.”

She preened for him, all false confidence. “Well, I am pretty amazing.”

“I just don’t feel right about taking from you. I’m supposed to leave behind something for you, not the other way around. You work hard, sweetheart. It’s not right to take that to save a used-up old farm I’m probably going to have to give up in a few years anyway.”

“Well, it’s my money, to do what I want with, and I happen to love that used-up old farm as it’s the only home I’ve ever known. So please don’t sell it to some land developer for condos.”

Grandad pinched his thin, trembling lips together and reached forward as if he was stroking the screen where Dani’s face was displayed. “I love you, Dani.”

“Love you, too, Grandad."

It was a good thing that the building was empty because the second she pressed the “end” button on the call, she put her face in her hands and wept like a baby. And then she sucked it up, wiped off her face, and wrote up a report containing her observations and thoughts on the rift. She submitted regular reports to Jillian, who didn’t seem perturbed by her lack of immediate and concrete progress. Jillian was about results, but the right results. She seemed to grasp that rushing through the work could cause more problems, and Dani appreciated her patience.

Or at least, that’s what she thought until she returned to the rift site one morning to discover she had company.

She moved beyond the magique line, toward “her rock,” the marker she’d made to note how close she could get to the rift without suffering ill effects. The site felt off somehow, not from the vibrations of the rift, but some other presence, which didn’t make sense because according to Zed, almost no one from town came out to the site, for the sake of their own ear drums.

Dani took her working stance, shoulders relaxed, feet apart, eyes closed. And she prepared to open herself to the rift, to begin the tiniest repairs to the edges of the rift to see what it would tolerate. But just as her lids shuttered close, she felt someone else’s energy pressing at her back. And the warning klaxons in her brain shouted, “UNSAFE! UNSAFE!”

Dani turned around to find a thin redheaded woman with pointed features standing nearly eye to eye with her. Dani shouted, raising her fist and swinging at the slight woman wearing head-to-toe khaki field clothes.