Having the senses of a falcon, Randall felt the tremor in his mind a few precious seconds before the Earth trembled beneath him. There was no turning back. The Urania Wand had foretold his future.

But as a falcon, he would be unable to use his full power. Unlike Malachai, he was not using a glamour—reverting to his original form would not be easy. Doing what he feared most, he gathered his wands beneath him and lay flat on the ground against them. He recited in his mind the phrases that would reverse the transformation. The Earth shuddered from one source of power, and he from another. A wing became an arm; a claw became a foot. He was using valuable energy and hoped it wouldn’t cost him in the end.

Finally, a naked young man emerged, glistening with sweat and gulping air into his expanded lungs. The transformation had left him stunned and shaken. A sound in the distance got his attention: rocks tumbling from cliffs and rolling down mountainsides, small ones at first but followed in quick succession by an avalanche of boulders the size of houses.

With the effort of a gladiator thrust into a den of lions, he grabbed every wand from his harness, held them tightly in his fist, and rammed them into the ground.

Coralis absorbed energy much like Dai She had done, but his eyes glowed with the white-hot intensity of the sun. In his mind’s eye, legion upon legion of warriors were gathering at the crest of a hill, readying for a gallant charge. And when he, too, could no longer contain it, he jammed his wand into the packed earth.

The impact nearly threw him, but he held steady, gripping the wand as searing heat drove through him and into the uranium.

The reaction was not instantaneous. The walls began to glow, but slowly. He needed more power, and there was only one source.

“Henry!” he shouted above a deafening roar. “Let yourself go!”

Henry gasped. Surely Joseph, Serena, or his mother was capable of greater power than he. What was he to let go of? He was doing all he could to help.

And yet a part of him was holding back. His imagination was haunted by the fear of turning Monument Valley into a mushroom cloud of destruction. Everything he had ever read about uranium, all the documentaries he had seen about atom bombs … If he were to accidentally do something to trigger a holocaust …

“Listen to Coralis.” Henry glanced down. Brianna had crawled into his pocket. “You must trust him, Henry.”