Page 19 of The Inheritance (Breach Wars #1)

He’d seen this before. Some people grieved when faced with death, others got angry, and some tried to disconnect themselves from what happened.

“I understand,” he said. “Still, it might be a good idea. You’ve lost colleagues in a sudden traumatic way. Things like that can fester.”

“I’ll think about it,” she said.

“So how much gold was there?”

“A lot. It was everywhere in the water, like rocks. We weren’t even drilling; we were pulling it out by hand. Nuggets the size of walnuts. I ended up dumping like fifty pounds of it to make room for adamantite, and we’d been only gathering it for a few minutes.”

“I see. I appreciate your help, Ms. Chandran. The guild is grateful for your assistance. Please get some rest.”

She got up and paused. “You are a lot less scary than I thought you would be.”

“That’s good to hear.”

“Just so you know, Wagner told me not to talk to you.”

Elias raised his eyebrows. “Oh?”

“He said that miners don’t go into the breaches with guildmasters. They go with escort captains. He said it was something to keep in mind.”

“Thank you for your honesty.”

She nodded and walked out.

Elias pulled up the interview notes on his tablet. Neither Melissa nor London said anything about the gold. Malcolm wouldn’t have seen the buried adamantite, but gold was an entirely different beast. It was just lying there in the stream.

Was it just gold? Was that it? He’d been wracking his brain, trying to find the reason for the lapse in procedure, having this back and forth with Leo, wondering what he was missing, and all this time, the answer was depressingly simple. Well, no shit, Sherlock, here it is. Greed.

He had put so many regulations and checks in place, and somehow greed always won. He was so fucking tired.

Leo appeared in the open doorway like a wraith manifesting, met his gaze, and stepped back.

“Come inside and shut the door,” Elias growled.

Leo came in and closed the door behind him.

“Sit.”

Leo sat.

“Why do baby miners think I’m scary?”

“Because you are, sir. Most people find a man who can cut a car in half with a single strike and then throw the pieces at you frightening.”

“Hmm.”

“Also, we offer the highest pay and the best benefits among the top-tier guilds, and you are their boss who holds their livelihood in his gauntleted fingers…”

Elias raised his hand. “Did you know there was gold at the mining site?”

Leo’s eyes flashed with white. “I did not.”

“Apparently it was in the water. Nuggets the size of walnuts. Finally, I know something before you do.”

“Congratulations, sir.”

Elias let that go, pulled up the map of the site on his tablet, and pointed at the three tunnels, each carrying a current of water that merged into a single stream. “Gold washes downstream.”

“Malcolm left the tunnels open because he wanted to maximize the profit from the site.” Leo’s face snapped into a hard flat mask. “He must’ve expected that once they cleared the site, they would gather more gold upstream.”

“Remind me, how much did Malcolm make last year?”

“Seven million.”

“I want to know why gold got him so excited that he risked twenty lives by leaving the tunnels unsecured.”

“Twenty?” Leo frowned. “The mining crew, the escort, the scout, the DebrA…”

“And the dog.”

“Oh.”

“Malcolm took a significant risk. That’s not just greed. That’s desperation. How are his finances?”

“Squeaky clean as of the last audit, which was two months ago. Credit score of eight hundred and ten, low debt to assets, less than ten thousand owed on credit cards. I’m following up on a couple of things. We should know more in a few hours. Do you want me to get Wagner in to talk to you?”

“He won’t tell me anything. Wagner is forty-nine years old. He was a coal miner before the gates appeared, and we are his third guild. He’s used to getting screwed over by his bosses.”

“So, he developed an adversarial relationship with us despite fair treatment,” Leo said. “Seems counterintuitive.”

“It doesn’t matter what kind of treatment he gets. He’s cooked. He doesn’t trust us, he will never trust us, and he will always resent us no matter how many benefits he gets.”

“That’s not even logical.”

“It isn’t. It’s an emotional response. Trust me, we won’t get anything out of him.

I’d like you to reinterview Melissa instead.

As you said, I’m scary, so she may do better with you.

Don’t be confrontational. Be sympathetic and understanding.

Make it us against the government: we need to tell the DDC something and we need her help to make them go away.

Imply that her cooperation will be remembered and appreciated. ”

Leo nodded. “Should I bring up the families?”

Elias shook his head. “Normally the foreman would be the last to get out, just before the escorts. She was at the head of the pack. Either she was incredibly lucky, or she abandoned her crew and ran for her life. Either way, there is guilt there. If you lean too hard on it, she might shut down. Go with ‘ you were just doing your job, and we don’t blame you for surviving’ instead.

Get her a coffee, get some cookies, interview her in a comfortable setting, and see if she thaws and starts talking.

If she goes off on a tangent, let her. Don’t rush.

You are her friend; you are there to listen. ”

Leo nodded. “Will do.”

Elias leaned back. He was so over it. As soon as he hammered the assault team together, he would enter the gate.

He couldn’t wait to get out of this conference room.

There was no politics in the breach. Things were much simpler: the enemy was in front, the support was behind, and the anchor was an evil star that would lead him to victory.

Leo was still sitting in the chair. Some other problem must’ve reared its ugly head.

“Lay it on me,” Elias said.

“We can’t find Jackson.”

“What do you mean, you can’t find him?”

“He was supposed to fly out of Tokyo twenty minutes ago. He didn’t make it to the plane, and he isn’t answering his phone. I’m on it.”

Jackson was arguably the best healer in the US. He didn’t drink, he didn’t get high, and his biggest vice was collecting expensive bonsai. The man did not go AWOL. It was simply not who he was.

“Do whatever you have to do, but find him, Leo.”

The XO nodded. “I will.”

* * *

Something wet my hand. My eyes snapped open. Sometime between the waves of shivers and searing pain, my will had given out and I’d fallen asleep.

Bear lay next to me, licking the dry stalker blood off my hand. Her eyes were bright, and when she saw me stir, she sat up and panted.

My back ached, but the suffocating fatigue was gone. I felt strong again.

I flexed . No glitter. In her or in me. We had beaten the flowers.

For a few moments I just sat there, happy to be alive.

Bear danced from paw to paw, looking at my face as if expecting something.

“Are you thirsty?” I took off my helmet and poured some water into it from the canteen. She lapped it up.

The gashes on her shoulder and back had closed. I parted her fur to check. There was a narrow, pink scar, but even that was fading.

What was it Elena said about the stalkers? They soak up bullets like they’re nothing and keep coming.

I still had one stalker heart left. I had three to start, then ate one and a half, and Bear had finished the other half while I slept.

I focused on the heart, pushing as deep as my talent would let me go.

The heart unfurled before me, not just glowing, but splitting into layers of different properties, each with its own color, as it had done when I panicked trying to diagnose Bear.

It felt like the most natural thing now, as if my talent always worked this way.

I studied the layers. Previously they had been saturated with color but now they were almost pastel. The heart was now of limited use to me, and nothing it offered met an urgent need.

The red was still first, but the hue was lighter, and it looked different. It took me a second to figure out why it was there – my stomach felt empty despite all that raw flesh eating, and my talent tagged the heart as edible meat.

I pushed through the red to the second slice of color, a light blue.

When my talent interacted with the environment, I used to see a simple glow.

Occasionally I got swirls of color varying in saturation and vibrancy, which my brain somehow interpreted into data, but what I saw now was nothing like it.

My father used to collect topographic maps, detailed reliefs of mountain terrain in different parts of the world, with contour lines and color-coded heights: lighter color for the greater elevation, medium for the mid-lying areas, darker for the valleys.

This was exactly like that, except I knew that the valleys were a healthy baseline, and the peaks indicated how much toxins affected a particular body system.

Nervous and integumentary systems were barely influenced, the digestive and respiratory were moderately impacted, but the poison wreaked havoc on endocrine, exocrine, muscular, and circulatory systems.

And I somehow knew that the integumentary system was comprised of skin, hair, nails, sweat, and oil glands. Yesterday I had no idea what that word stood for.

In any case, the color of this slide seemed barely there, so while the toxicity would be deadly to most people, to me it would be a mild inconvenience now.

I focused on the next layer, the one glowing under the blue.

There was that unsettling feeling of falling through the glass floor again.

Another relief, in plain white this time. It took me a moment to figure it out.

Regeneration.