Page 1 of The Inheritance (Breach Wars #1)
H ealth insurance with a thousand-dollar maximum family deductible.
Prescription drug coverage with an eighty percent discount off list prices.
The first time I heard about gates, I imagined them to be these portals glowing with a magical blue light.
Too many video games, I guess. They were nothing like it.
This one was a hole. A deep, black, vertical hole that punched through reality, swirling with pale mist. The tendrils of white smoke curled and slithered within it, but none escaped into our world.
The gate appeared in front of the Elmwood Park Rec Center eight days ago.
To the left was Elmwood Public Library, all red brick and tinted windows.
To the right was a funeral home followed by perfectly ordinary, three-story boxes of apartment buildings covered in tan stucco.
Behind us, to the east, lay Chicago. And straight ahead was an interdimensional tear. Just another Monday.
If someone told me ten years ago that I would be standing in front of a hole leading into a dimensional breach filled with monsters and preparing to risk my life and go inside, I would’ve politely nodded, walked away, and later told Roger I’d met an unhinged person.
Of course, a decade ago I was thirty, happily married, with a daughter in elementary school, a son just out of diapers, and a low-risk private sector job I loved.
A different life that belonged to a different Adaline.
The future looked bright back then. Until the invasion shattered it.
Free emergency medical care when injured in the line of duty.
I took this job for the benefits, and when it got to me, like now, I recited them in my head like a prayer.
Dental, a one hundred fifty-dollar deductible, fifty percent off braces.
Things that came with age and children: appreciation of the dental plan with orthodontics. Braces were hellishly expensive.
Vision plan, fifteen percent discount off glasses and contacts.
The gate gaped like a dark maw.
At least thirty-five yards tall. Maybe taller. The threat scale ran from blue to red, and the prep packet put this gate at the low-orange risk level. On a dying scale of one to ten, it was about seven.
This was my one hundred and sixty-eighth gate. I’d gone into orange gates many times before. I didn’t want to go into this one. It made my hair stand on end. And the presence of the funeral home wasn’t helping.
“Ominous sonovabitch, isn’t he?” Melissa murmured next to me.
“Mhm.”
The mining foreman crossed her arms on her chest. She was a tall woman, two years older than me, with auburn hair she religiously dyed every four weeks and the kind of face that said she had everything under control.
We met years ago, on one of my earlier gate dives, bonded over kids, and stayed friendly ever since.
After the first gates burst, some people gained strange abilities that couldn’t be explained by science.
To be fair, science tried its hardest, but if it walked like magic and talked like magic, most people decided it was magic.
These abilities were called talents, and to make things extra confusing, people who had them were also called Talents.
Talents fell into two broad categories: combat and noncombat.
Combat Talents got a boost to physical prowess and developed abilities like forcefields, summoning energy weapons, or shooting fire from their fingertips.
Noncombat Talents got a random skill that was useful only in specific circumstances.
Melissa was a noncombat Talent. She could sense ores. She had to be right on top of them and actively concentrate, but that talent, combined with her previous experience in iron mining, let her rise to the position of the Mining Team Foreman.
Melissa ran her mining crew like a well-oiled machine. She didn’t get rattled, but she was staring at this gate like it was about to reach out and bite her. Something about this hole set both of us on edge.
Melissa narrowed her eyes. “Anja, tie your damn shoelaces.”
One of the younger miners rolled her eyes and crouched. “Always on my case…”
“Exactly. I am always on your case. I’m on everyone’s case. If we have to run for our lives out of that gate, I don’t need any of you tripping over your feet, because I’ll have to double back and get you. You have two toddlers to come home to.”
“Yes, Mother.”
Melissa heaved a sigh. “Everybody is full of sass today.”
Around us the mining crew checked their gear, twelve people in indigo Magnaprene coveralls and matching hard hats. Nobody seemed unusually worried. Toolbelts were adjusted, rock drills and shears tested, the generator and floodlights on four industrial carts inspected. The usual.
The escort, five combat Talents in tactical armor, had done their precheck ages ago and were now waiting.
Aaron, a bastion class fighter, sat on a crate, leaning against another crate, his eyes closed.
His massive adamant-reinforced shield rested on the ground next to him.
Three recon strikers mulled about, armed with SIG Spear rifles.
They specialized in ranged combat and rapid disengagement, which was tactical speak for shoot the shit out of everything and then run for the exit.
London, the escort unit leader, surveyed the mining crew.
He was a blade warden, which meant he could both dish out lethal damage and summon a protective forcefield that made him invulnerable for two minutes.
He carried a brutal-looking tactical axe, and on the few occasions I saw him use it, he cut through interdimensional monsters like he was chopping salad.
Both the mining crew and the escort wore indigo gear marked with the emblem of Cold Chaos, an upright sword wrapped in lightning in white on an indigo background.
I wore a white hard hat and grey coveralls with a patch of the Dimensional Defense Command on my sleeve.
The mining crew and the escorts were private contractors belonging to the Cold Chaos Guild, while I was a representative of the US Government.
My official title was Dimension Breach Resource Assessor.
The guilds called us DebrAs, and they were supposed to keep us alive at all costs.
If things went to shit, Aaron would put himself between the mining crew and the threat, the strikers would shoot down whatever got past him, and London would grab me, wrap us both in his warden forcefield, and drag me out of the gate so I could report the disaster to the DDC.
Of everyone here, I was the least expendable, as far as the government was concerned.
It didn’t make me feel any better.
The mist swirled inside the hole, sending tendrils of dread toward me. I resisted the urge to hug myself.
Twenty days of recuperation leave. Which was long overdue. Maybe that was part of the problem.
Basic Housing Allowance.
Child Tuition Assistance.
CTA was the big one. It helped me cover tuition for Hino’s Academy.
Things were tight but I hadn’t missed a payment yet.
The school had stellar academics, but I’d picked it for their underground shelter.
If a gate ruptured and a flood of invading monsters washed over the city, Tia and Noah would be safe until the military and the guilds repelled it.
Competition for the school was fierce, but since I was DDC, the kids were given special treatment, along with the children of guild members.
Advertising that Hino was the school of choice for the children of Talents was good for the academy’s prestige.
“Ada, London is checking you out again,” Melissa said.
Next to me, Stella, Melissa’s baby-faced protégé, snickered quietly. She was twenty, and flirting was still exciting.
A large German Shepherd sitting at Stella’s feet panted as if laughing.
Bear came from an illustrious line of police dogs with heroic careers.
She had the typical GS coloring, big brown eyes, huge ears, and petting her was off-limits.
I’d asked before and was told no. Bear was working like the rest of us. Petting would be distracting.
“Brace yourself, he’s coming this way,” Melissa murmured.
I turned. London was heading straight for us.
His real name was Alex Wright, and he was from Liverpool, but everyone called him London anyway.
People with combat talents were resistant to wear and tear, and at forty-five, London was still in his prime, tall, broad-shouldered, with blue eyes, wavy brown hair, and an easy smile.
His job was to keep the miners and me safe, and since he was my designated babysitter, he and I spent a lot of time in close proximity.
Even so, he’d been paying me too much attention lately.
London stopped by us. “Everything okay here?”
“Everything was fine until you showed up,” Melissa said.
He grinned at her. “Just doing my due diligence.”
They usually had a fun back-and-forth going. It put people at ease. I worked with guilds all over the Eastern US. In some mining crews, the tension was so thick you could cut it with a knife and make a sandwich. Cold Chaos was light and bright.
Their bickering was amusing, but in reality, London was in charge.
Melissa gave orders to the miners, but in the breach London had authority over everyone, me included.
Disobeying his command meant endangering the entire team, and it wouldn’t be tolerated.
If London got a bad feeling, he could halt the entire operation and pull everyone out, and Melissa couldn’t say a word about it.
“Are you worried about us, Escort Captain?” Stella tilted her head, and her mane of dark curly hair drooped to one side.
“It’s my job to worry, Miles. Have you been doing your sprints?” London asked.
“I have,” Stella told him. “Fifteen seconds for the dash.”
A hundred meters in fifteen seconds was damn impressive. It was good to be young. God, I was twice her age. How the hell did that even happen? I was twenty only a few years ago, right?