Page 14 of The Inheritance (Breach Wars #1)

I searched the perimeter of the cave, staying as far from the lake as I could.

There were no other tunnels, but there was a path up, along a ledge that climbed fifty feet above the cavern floor.

We took it and picked our way onto a natural stone bridge.

It brought us across the cavern to a dark fissure in the opposite wall, barely three feet wide.

We squeezed through it, and it spat us out into a wide tunnel.

Ahead the passageway gave way to a large natural arch, and beyond it I could see more ledges and passages, a warren of tunnels, some dark, some marked by bioluminescence.

Unlike the banks of the river, studded with jagged rocks, the floor of the tunnel was relatively flat, with ridges of hard stone breaking through here and there like the ribs of a buried giant skeleton.

Fossilized roots braided through solid rock between the stone ribs. The air smelled sour and acrid.

Next to me, Bear took a few steps to the side and sniffed something. I focused on it. Stalker poop.

“No,” I whispered and tugged the leash.

She came back and looked at me with slight disapproval. Sniffing strange poop was what dogs did, and I was clearly preventing her from fulfilling her duty.

I could see the other signs now: the faint trail leading to the fissure, more feces, stains from urine on the rocks.

These tunnels were stalker hunting grounds.

They came through here and took the bridge down to the water below, and because the bank of the river was hard to get to, some of them made their way to the lake to drink.

The lake dragon nabbed them like a crocodile ambushing wildebeests.

This wasn’t just a cave stuffed with random monsters.

This was an ecosystem. The lake dragon was an apex predator; the giant bug was probably a rank below, and the stalkers were mid-tier.

There must be prey species somewhere in these tunnels.

There was certainly enough vegetation to support small herbivores.

I could see the pale stains on the rocks, where stone had been bleached by generations of stalkers urinating on it. None of this environment looked new. This was an established bionetwork that developed over years, possibly centuries. All of this must’ve belonged somewhere, to a different world.

This was the longest I had ever been in a breach and the furthest I had gone into one.

Assault teams spent days, sometimes weeks in the breaches, but my normal MO was to get in, find the resources, stay just long enough for the miners to finish, and get out.

I had no idea if all breaches were like this, but if they were, what would happen to this place when the anchor was destroyed?

Did this environment disintegrate, or did it simply return to its place of origin?

The gates had been opening for ten years, and we knew so little about them.

Usually the assault teams made it out in time, but occasionally the gates collapsed while people were still trapped inside.

Sixty-two percent of those instances were considered to be fatalities.

Nobody escaped. In the rest of the cases, people were jettisoned back to the point of the gate’s origin.

A large percentage of those survivors showed brain damage with retrograde amnesia.

Some had to relearn basic skills like writing and holding a spoon.

Sooner or later, Cold Chaos would put another assault team into this breach. I had to get out before they shattered the anchor.

Bear growled softly.

I flexed . Four shapes were closing in on us, sneaking through the gloom. My talent grasped them, and knowledge came flooding in.

The re-nah . Fast, deadly, able to regurgitate acidic bile that would burn exposed skin on contact.

Pack hunters, cautious alone, brazen in large numbers.

The strongest of the group would attack first, drawing attention, while the rest would flank the prey.

Their hearts, on the right side, were possible to reach with a long narrow blade, but the best target was at the base of their throat, just under their chin.

A small organ that functioned like a secondary motor cortex.

It made them fast and helped them coordinate their movements when they swarmed, and when damaged or destroyed, it induced partial paralysis.

A memory unfurled. A clearing in a deep alien jungle, re-nah streaming from the caves in the mountain side, forming a massive horde. Eyes glowing, fangs bared, two males fighting, each trying to rip out the other’s throat…

I reached down and released Bear’s leash.

Around us the cave was perfectly silent, except for the faint sound of water dripping somewhere out of sight.

The bracer on my wrist flowed into my hand, its metal familiar by now, slightly textured and comfortable, like a favorite kitchen knife I had used for years.

I focused on the blade. Long, flat, an inch and a half wide.

As much damage as possible in a single thrust. The organ would be hard to hit on a moving target. Still better than a heart, though.

Drip. Drip. Drip.

There were no thoughts anymore. I just stood still and waited.

Drip. Drip.

Almost there. They were crouching along the walls, measuring the distance, shifting forward, paw over paw. One large male, two smaller ones, and a female hugging the left wall.

Drip.

The large male charged. He tore out of the gloom like a cannonball, jaws gaping.

There was no time to think. I just reacted.

My sword slid into the soft tissue of his neck.

The male crashed, its momentum carrying him forward despite his locked limbs.

Somehow I dodged, and then Bear was on him.

The stalker was twice her weight and almost twice her size, but his legs no longer worked.

She ripped into his throat, tearing at the wound I’d made.

The remaining males lunged, one from the left, the other from the right. The right one came high, snarling and loud, while the one on the left silently aimed for my legs.

I sliced, turning as I cut. The sword slashed the right stalker across the muzzle, carving a bright gash in his pelt.

The beast recoiled, but I kept going, cutting as I twisted.

My blade caught the left stalker’s leg. There was almost no resistance as the sword glided through flesh and bone.

The left stalker yelped and scuttled back on three legs, its front leg severed clean.

Bear ripped into the three-legged stalker. The other beast pivoted and charged toward her. I sprinted, slicing like my life depended on it. The right stalker’s head slid off its shoulders.

Bear and the three-legged beast were a clump of fur and teeth, rolling on the ground.

I flexed , willing the moment to stretch out like a rubber band.

It did. The frantic whirlwind of bodies slowed, and I narrowed my sword into a spike, and drove down into the base of the stalker’s neck. It went limp.

Time snapped back. A terrible weight smashed into my back. My knees buckled. Scalding teeth sank into my right shoulder.

Pain tore through me, turning into an ice-cold rage.

I turned the sword into a dagger, bent my elbow, and stabbed the blade straight into the female stalker’s face.

She dropped off me, backing away to the fissure.

I chased her, blood running down my arm.

She made it all the way through the gap before I caught her.

She spun to face me and bared her teeth, her nose wet with blood.

I bore down on her and kicked as hard as I could.

My foot connected with her head. She stumbled back and slid off the stone bridge.

For a moment she hung on, digging her claws into the bare rock, but her talons slipped, and she plunged into the river below.

Bear. Shit.

I spun around and sprinted back into the tunnel.

The three stalker bodies lay unmoving. Bear sat in the middle.

Her shoulder was bloody, and there was a long streak of red across her right side.

She panted, her eyes bright, her mouth opened in a happy canine smile, like she just ran around through the surf on some beach and was now waiting for a treat.

She saw me, grabbed the smallest stalker by the paw, and tried to drag it toward me. Hi, I’m Bear and these are my dead stalker friends. Look how fancy.

I dug into my pocket, fished out some jerky, and offered it to her. She took it from my fingers, dropped it to the ground, went back to the stalker, bit it some more, came back, and ate the jerky.

“Good girl, Bear. Best girl.”

We were both bleeding, but we were still alive. Four stalkers! We took down four…

I should be dead. And Bear should’ve been dead with me. It took the assault team a bucket of bullets to stop eight stalkers, and Bear and I killed four. A creature the size of a Great Dane had jumped on my back, and I stayed upright. It should’ve knocked me off my feet.

It wasn’t just the weird hallucinations and the unusual precision of my talent. I was changing. Physically changing.

The thought pierced me like a jolt of high-voltage current. The hair on the back of my neck rose.

The year after the divorce had twisted me.

I used to like flying. In my head, flying was married to vacation, because the flights of my childhood took me to the beach and amusement parks.

Suddenly I was terrified to board a plane.

The fear was so debilitating, I couldn’t even talk while boarding.

I became obsessed with traffic, avoiding driving whenever I could.

I developed a fixation on my health that bloomed into hypochondria.