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“The what?”

“The things that live in there. There have been many different reports, from Aurelians who survived shifts. Perhaps you have heard the old adage, one of my favorite pieces of knowledge from humans. Three blind men touched an elephant—one the trunk, who proclaimed it was a giant snake, one the leg, who said the elephant is like a giant tree, and—well, you get the picture, I am sure.”

“You sure the blind man touched the elephant’s trunk?” asks Evelyn, and Cal gives a long-suffering sigh.

“Your sense of humor never fails, Evelyn.”

I’m glad for her stupid little joke. It keeps me from thinking too deeply of that darkness that yawned, opening up to grab me.

“There’s nothing in there. Nothing could live there.”

“We thought the same of the deep oceans, under intense pressure. Life grows in strange ways.”

“There’s warmth in the deepest oceans. Geothermal life. The Rift has nothing. If anything… is alive in the Rift, it wasn’t born there. It’s using it, just like we use it, to travel to somewhere with resources, feasting, and going back through it.”

“It’s no habitat,” bursts out Evelyn, her voice tinged with sudden understanding. “It’s a conduit.”

Cal blinks, twice in rapid succession, then freezes. I look over at Evelyn and mouth, “Is he okay?”

She nods, leaning in closer to me. “He gets like this when he’s thinking deeply,” she whispers.

Cal snaps back into it. “I see. Yes, that makes perfect sense. It is possible.” His words of agreement are interspersed with involuntary shakes of his head, a physical manifestation of his brain working on overdrive. “Would you give me the timeline of your shift?”

I lean back in the chair, take a deep breath, and spill it out—from the moment we had the warning, the instant Doman told me we had to shift, then being trapped in the darkness. I say it impersonally, detached from it, laying it out as he probes me for information. When it’s done, I feel exhausted, but I’m glad to have shared it with the two people who can understand it the deepest.

Cal thanks me. He was standing the entire time, rigid and intently focused on every single word.

Evelyn hands me a tissue, and I realize my eyes are wet. “My triad hates talking about when they were trapped,” she says in a low voice, not much more than a whisper. “Thank you.”

“It’s fine. It’s over. Done with.”

“I was just up there with Doman and Bruton. They brought me in on the plan. My end will be set up.”

I raise my hand. “It’s better I don’t know the details, unless there’s a part for me to play.”

“No. Nothing for you to do. By the time you are wed, she will be safe and off the planet.”

There’s a distant hoot from above, a yell of excitement. Evelyn’s face lights up. “What is it?” I ask.

Her expression is slightly distant, the look a human gets when they are telepathically communicating with their triad. “They’ve dealt a blow to Obsidian. Come on,” she says, leading us back up into the estate and up the stairs to the top floor. I have to hurry to keep up with Cal’s long-legged gait and Evelyn’s certainstrides, and I’m the only one slightly out of breath when we get to the bar room, done in black wood and marble.

Doman has a hard expression, while Bruton is grinning.

“What happened?”

Doman presses a button on his watch, and a holo-vid appears on the bartop.

Evelyn shakes her head when she sees black ships blinking into existence over a planet. “I’ve had enough of war,” she says, excusing herself.

“Obsidian fell into one of our traps.”

The scene is crystal-clear graphics. A sprawling factory on a bleak, rocky planet, and ships descending downwards, lancing out Orb-Beams that glance off the heavy shields.

“We fed him false information. That this factory had the schematics for the Mark-13 cyborg prototypes. Watch,” says Doman, his voice filled with anticipation as the jet-black ships descend and the doors open, Aurelians diving out.

My eyes widen as I witness the War-God himself.

He towers over his forces, and at his sides are two shadowy dire wolves, as huge as he is, eating up the ground in long strides as they sprint towards the factory.