Page 50 of My Dark Horse Prince

“The human eye can see several miles before the curvature of the earth obscures their view,” Aleks says.

“You can’t trust everything you read online,” Kris says.

“But.” He shrugs. “Two hundred and fifty acres, evenly distributed, is just under three miles, and. . .” He points. You can barely make out the ones at the end.

“Now that we’re here, looking at them, I’m a little nervous,” Kristiana says. “That’s going to take a lot of wind—”

She cuts off, because the sound around us is terrifying. It’s like the screaming of a thousand sheep. Screeching saws from a hundred different blades. And then the closest wind turbine in front of us begins to turn, slowly at first, but then gaining momentum, and the others in the row soon pick up speed as well.

Aleks, Kris, and I all stand utterly still, watching gape-mouthed, as wind tears through the air above our heads. Trees creak and moan. Birds shriek and dive away. A chipmunk chirps and darts around us, racing away.

I wish I could run.

It’s not like that’s Grigoriy’s fault, per se. I mean, he does need me here to do this horrifyingly scary thing, but even if he didn’t, I can’t run anywhere right now.

“Are we sure it’s safe to be here?” I ask.

Aleks nods, his hair whipping around his head. “He has total control. It’s just that, to power these, he has to lock in a very large, very concentrated amount of wind.”

The hair tie flies off Grigoriy’s knot, and his beautiful, dark brown hair looks just as tumultuous as his friend’s. I wonder how desperately tangled my hair will be by the time we’re done.

“Lock in?” I’m screaming now, just to be heard.

“We talked about it. We’re going to do twenty-one hours on, three hours off, then twenty-two hours on, four hours off, then twenty hours on, one hour off, in rotating waves. That will look strange to the auditors, but at least it won’t be as cut and dried as some kind of clockwork wind that never ceases.”

“He can do that?”

“It’s a combination of mathematical principles and the laws of physics,” Aleks says. “And—”

“Boring,” Kris says. “Stop.”

Aleks laughs.

“Almost done.” Grigoriy’s still looking at the turbines, but now they’re all turning, and the ones near us have picked up the pace. They don’t quite look like a sideways ceiling fan, but they’re closer than I’d have thought possible.

“This will keep going, even when you’re not here?”

“It’s about creating a sequence of tunnels in the air around us that will—”

“Ohmygosh,” Kris says. “The answer is, yes. They’ll keep going.”

“Yes,” Grigoriy says. “Sorry. That’s the answer.”

It takes him another ten minutes of total focus, but then he exhales and releases my hand.

I pretend it doesn’t bum me out.

“Can you two get in the car?” He tosses his head. “I need to walk around a turbine or two and check some things. I don’t want to send Mirdza back, in case I need her, but it’s distracting with all the chatter.”

Kristiana’s eyes widen. “Fine.” She and Aleks trot back, glancing over their shoulders most of the way.

“Should I come with you?” I ask.

He shakes his head. “I actually didn’t need them to leave for anything related to that.” He glances up at the closest turbine.

“What? Why, then?”

He smiles, but his words when he speaks are carefully enunciated to be audible over the strong winds. “We both got great news today, you about your surgery, and me with this.” He waves his hand around. “Aleks had explained his plan, and I thought I could do it, but I wasn’t entirely sure.”

---