Page 15 of The Inheritance (Breach Wars #1)

I ended up in therapy, where we got to the root of the problem.

I had realized that Roger was truly, completely gone and if something happened to me, the kids would be alone.

I was desperately trying to exert control over my environment, and when I failed, my body locked up and refused to respond.

It took years to get over it, and the hypochondria was the hardest to defeat.

Every time I thought I’d finally broken free, it would come back with a vengeance over some minor thing like a new mole or some weird pain in my arm.

In a way, becoming an assessor was the best thing for me. Facing death on a regular basis didn’t leave room for anxiety. I was too busy surviving.

In this moment, it was like all those years of therapy, exercise, and rewiring my brain’s responses never happened.

Was I dying? Was that glowing thing in my head eating at me like cancer?

No doctor would be able to get it out of me.

There was no treatment for whatever the fuck it was.

The woman had called me her daughter. Would this gem reshape me into someone like her?

What if I wasn’t human anymore? What if I got back to the gate and it wouldn’t let me exit back to Earth?

The grip of anxiety crushed me. I couldn’t talk, I couldn’t move, I just stood there, desperately cataloging everything happening in my body. My breathing, my aches and pains, the strange electric prickling feeling in my fingers. I could hear my own heartbeat. It was fast and so loud…

A cold nose nudged my hand.

I still couldn’t move.

Bear pushed her muzzle into my fingers, bumping me. I felt her fur slide against my hand.

Bump. Bump.

I exhaled slowly. The air escaped out of me, as if it had been trapped in my lungs. I swallowed, crouched, and hugged Bear. Gradually the sound of my heart receded.

Yes, I was changing. No, I had no control over it, and I didn’t know what I would become at the end of this process. But I was getting stronger. There were three stalker corpses on this cave floor. I made that happen.

I petted Bear, straightened, walked over to the nearest furry body, and flexed . One hundred and forty-three pounds. I grabbed the stalker by the front paws and lifted it off the ground. My shoulder whined in protest. I clenched my teeth against the pain.

I was holding one hundred and forty-three pounds of dead weight. It wasn’t resting on my back, no, I was holding it in front of me.

I wonder…

I spun around and threw the corpse. The stalker flew and landed on the cave floor. My shoulder screeched, and I grabbed at it. Okay, not the brightest moment.

The stalker corpse lay ten feet away. I threw one hundred and forty-three pounds across ten feet. Two weeks ago, I’d used a forty-five-pound plate for some overhead squats at the DDC gym, because someone was hogging the Smith machine, and I had a hard time holding it steady for ten reps.

“We’re not in Kansas anymore, Bear.”

Bear looked at me, padded over to the corpse I threw, and bit it.

“No worries. It’s dead. You are the best girl, Bear, you know that?”

Somewhere in the tangle of the tunnels a creature howled. We couldn’t stay here. We had to keep moving.

I pulled the antibacterial gel out, slathered some on my bleeding shoulder, popped four Motrins, and turned to Bear.

“Okay, girl, let’s treat your battle wounds.”

* * *

Something was wrong with Bear.

We had cut our way through the stalker tunnels.

Our trail was littered with corpses, and we had just killed our fifteenth beast. It hadn’t gotten easier, not at all.

I was so worn down, I could barely move.

My body hurt, the ache spreading through the muscles like a disease, sapping my new strength and making me slow.

Bear stumbled again. I thought it was fatigue at first, but we had rested for a few minutes before this last fight, and it hadn’t helped at all. I had kept her from serious injury. She’d been clawed and bitten once, but the bite had been shallow, so it likely wasn’t the blood loss.

Bear whined and fell.

Oh god.

I dropped to my knees by her. “What is it?”

The shepherd looked up at me, her eyes puzzled but trusting.

I flexed , focusing on her body, concentrating all of my power on her. What was it? Blood loss, infection…

The faint outline of Bear’s body glowed with pale blue-green, but I got nothing more. I had to push deeper. I focused my power into a thin scalpel and used it to slice through the surface glow.

It resisted.

I sliced harder.

Harder!

The glow broke, splintering vertically into multi-colored layers, and before I had a chance to stop, I punched through the top one. It was almost like falling through the floor to a lower level.

On this lower level, Bear’s body lit up with deep blue, the glow tracing her nerves, her blood vessels, and her organs. I had never before been able to do that, but that didn’t matter now.

Toxin. She was filled with it. I saw it, tiny flecks glowing brighter as they coursed through her like some deadly glitter. I had to find the origin of it. Was it from a stalker bite? No, the concentration of poison wasn’t dense there. Then what was it? Where was it the highest?

Her lungs. That fucking glitter saturated her lungs, slipping into her bloodstream with every breath. I had to go deeper. I pushed with my power. Before, it was like trying to slice through glass. Now it felt like punching through solid rock, and I hammered at it.

The top layer of the blue glow cracked, revealing a slightly different shade of blue underneath. I hit it again and again, locked onto the glitter with every drop of willpower I had.

The tiny specks expanded into spheres. What the hell was that?

I pounded on the glow, trying to enlarge it. The spheres came into greater focus. They weren’t uniformly round; they had four lobes clumped together and studded with spikes.

What are you? Where did you come from ?

A flash of white cut my vision. It lasted only a moment, but I knew I hit a wall. I wasn’t going any deeper. I would have to work at this level.

I blinked, trying to reacquire my vision.

My thighs were glowing with blue.

I jerked my hands up. Pale glitter swirling through my arms and fingers. This dust, this thing was inside me too, and I couldn’t identify it.

We were both infected, and it was killing us.

Panic drenched me in icy sweat. I wanted to rip a hole in my legs and just force the glitter out.

Bear whined softly like a puppy.

I was losing her. She trusted me, she followed me, and she fought with me, and now she was dying.

“You can’t die, Bear. Hold on. Please hold on for me.”

Bear licked my hand.

The urge to scream my head off gripped me. Wailing wouldn’t help. If only I could identify the poison.

Why couldn’t I identify it? Was it because it was inside us and it had become part of us? Or was I just not strong enough to differentiate it from our blood? It had started in the lungs, so we must have inhaled it.

I took a deep breath and exhaled on my hands.

There it was! A trace of the lethal glitter. I focused on it. The four-lobed spiked clumps, swirling, swirling… Something inside me connected, and I saw a faint image in my mind. The mauve flowers. We had been poisoned by their pollen.

I flexed harder, stabbing at the pollen with my talent. The tiny flecks opened up into a layered picture in my mind, and the top layer showed how toxic it was...

Oh god.

We were almost out of time. We needed an antidote. Now.

I strained, trying to access whatever power lay inside me, the same one that showed me the Grasping Hand and gave me the stalkers’ name. It didn’t answer.

Please. Please help me.

Nothing.

We would die right here, in this tunnel. I knew it, I could picture it, me wrapped around Bear, hugging her as we both grew cold…

No. There had to be an answer. We hadn’t come all this way to lay down and die. We did not kill and fight all these damn stalkers –

The stalkers. The stalkers went to the lake to drink. The flowers were all over the shore, but the stalkers had died because the lake dragon had torn them apart. The flowers didn’t poison them.

I jumped to my feet and ran to the nearest corpse. My talent reached out and grasped the body. There was pollen on the fur and on the muzzle and a faint smudge in the lungs, but none anywhere else. Not a trace in the blood. They were immune.

The poison had to be eliminated in the bloodstream. If it was purged in the liver or any other organ, there would’ve been traces of it in the blood vessels but there were none.

This wouldn’t help us any. Just because the stalkers had the immunity…

I flexed again. Within the stalker, the heart glowed with bright red.

My talent flagged something as red based on how much I wanted it.

I valued adamantite more than gold, so in my mind gold flared with pink but adamantite was a dark saturated red.

The stalker heart was so red, it was dripping with crimson glow.

I flipped the stalker on its back, shaped my sword into a knife, and stabbed the corpse, slicing it from the neck to the groin.

Bloody wet innards spilled out. I dug in the mush, pushing slippery tissue aside until I found the hard sack of the heart.

I carved it out and pulled the bloody organ free.

Flex.

The heart turned crimson. I smashed my talent against the top layer of the glow, trying to splinter it into layers, and it obeyed. I punched through the top red layer and saw the second, neon blue.

Toxic. It would poison us, too.

The red was stronger than the blue. That meant there was a slim chance we could make it. It was the difference of might-be-dead from the stalker heart or definitely-dead from the pollen. We didn’t have hours, we had minutes. The heart had to be the answer.

This was not how the immunity worked. This wasn’t how biology worked.

I blinked my enhanced vision off, shut my eyes for a long second, opened them, and flexed again.

The heart was still bright red. My talent was telling me it was our way out. I had nothing to lose.

I put it on a flat rock and minced the tough muscle into near mush. I scooped a handful of the bloody mess and staggered over to Bear.

She was still breathing. There was still a chance.

I pried her jaws open and shoved a clump of the stalker mince into her throat. She gulped and gagged. I held her mouth closed.

“Swallow, please swallow…”

Bear gulped again. Yes. It went down.

“What a good girl. The best girl. One more time. Let’s get a little more in there.”

I forced two more handfuls into her and flexed . The concentration of pollen in her stomach dimmed. Somehow it was acting as an antidote. I didn’t understand how. It didn’t matter. We were all out of choices.

Bear let out a soft, weak howl, almost a gasp. It must have hurt.

“I’m so sorry. I wouldn’t hurt you if there was any other way.”

If I ate the heart now, there was no telling what it would do to me. I could pass out right here, and we would both become stalker dinner.

About twenty minutes ago we had walked by a narrow stone bridge that spanned a deep cavern.

There had been a depression at the other end, a smaller cave within the wall of a larger cave.

At the time I thought it would be a good place to rest, because the stalkers could only come at us one by one, but I wanted to get out of the tunnels, and it seemed better to just keep moving.

We had to find a place to hide, and that was the closest safe spot I could think.

I should be able to find the bridge again. I just had to follow the trail of bodies and make it there before the poison got me.

I picked Bear up. She felt so heavy, impossibly heavy.

I spun around and trudged back the way we came.