She could feel Artem’s chest puff up with pride next to her when he rasped, “Ah, my sweet—”
“But,” she interjected, “I want to keep my kitchen.”
Paloma watched him grimace. “The kitchen is ancient, treat. Wouldn’t you rather have something new and airy? I have more money than we can ever spend. Let me make it nice for you.”
“I want to keep the parts of the mining shack. I like that it’s part of the history of the home.” She paused, thinking, before adding, “But I will allow you to replace the appliances.”
Artem huffed. If he wasn’t grinning from ear to ear, the sound might have come off as annoyed. “My, what a generous little mate I have.”
She lifted her chin and teased, “Aren’t you lucky I’m so ni—”
The squeal of an alarm cut her off. Artem stiffened, instantly on alert, as Paloma dove for her phone.
“What’s that? What’s happening?”
“That’s my cluster alert,” she explained, unlocking the screen with a touch of her finger. She stared at the reading for the span of several heartbeats, trying to process what she was seeing, before she lurched upward and out of the nest.
“Paloma!”
She didn’t stop to explain as she hurtled out of the living room and down the hallway. Throwing herself into her lab, she immediately saw all of her screens lit up with an emergency alert. Huge, flashing warnings covered the monitors.
A wave of nausea rolled through her as she bent over her main monitor to triple check the readings. There was no mistaking it. There was no glitch or error from the weak signal.
A familiar hand settled on her lower back. “Paloma, tell me what’s wrong.”
She gripped the edge of her desk so hard her knuckles bleached white. “The cluster I was tracking,” she began, voice thick with panic, “the storm must have knocked it off course. My data just got its delayed refresh and recalculated its course.”
She nodded to the screen, her stomach twisting. “My signal is weak because of the snow pile-up. That’s why I didn’t get the alert sooner.” Fear made her breath short when she continued, “It joined with a cluster over Tahoe and is on course to land in the mountains. Here.”
Artem hovered close, his concern palpable. “I don’t understand. What does that mean?”
“It means that we’re about to have a full scale spontaneous event right here in Pineridge.”
His wings flexed out in a sharp little movement as the real scope of the danger finally settled in. “A spontaneous event. Like… like in San Francisco?”
Paloma felt the blood drain from her face. “No,” she answered, lips strangely stiff, like they didn’t want to form the words, “San Francisco survived their event. A town the size of Pineridge will be wiped off of the map.” Worse, it would not even be the first time.
There was a reason Pineridge had been settled and then abandoned so many times over the centuries; why it never really grew beyond mining shacks and distant homes and one perfectly situated research station.
His claws dug into the fabric of her shirt, pricking her skin. “Why?”
She turned her head to look at him. “Because that cluster is huge, and if it touches down in a populated area, the magical blowback of the birth will level everything within a fifty mile radius.”
Artem’s eyebrows snapped down over his eyes. “Birth?”
“Yes, birth.” Paloma swallowed. “An event like this isn’t just an m-storm, Artem. It’s the creation of a new being.”
He stared at her for a long moment, perhaps trying to comprehend something even she, one of the world’s foremost experts on the subject, struggled to wrap her head around, before his expression smoothed out. A seasoned Draakonriik soldier stood in the place of her usually easy-going, smiley Artem. “Tell me what you need me to do.”
She shook her head. “We need a Spot Unit to draw the cluster away from the town. We need to evacuate the town, but I don’t know how. With this snow, they won’t have anywhere to go besides the storm shelter. They might survive it in there, but depending on where the cluster touches down, the odds aren’t great. The chance gets better if a Spot Unit can draw it away, even a little bit, but…” She glanced at her phone and seethed. “The fucking storm took out all but the weakest signals. I won’t be able to get a hold of them in time.”
Artem peered at her. “Where is the Unit stationed?”
“The closest one is in Auburn. They have m-gates on command so they can meet a cluster wherever it lands, but it won’t make a difference if they don’t know one’s coming.”
He nodded toward her screen. “Show me on the map where it is.”
She frowned at him. Fear and panic were a buzz under her skin. “What? Why?”