Page 23 of The Inheritance (Breach Wars #1)

“You know what my favorite dessert is? Sometimes, when life’s too hard, I go to Dairy Queen and get a Turtle Pecan Cluster Blizzard.

It has pecans and little bits of chocolate.

I don’t really like pecans, and I’m not much of a chocoholic, but there is something about that Blizzard.

It’s like happiness in a cup. I could so use one right now. ”

My stomach was begging for calories. If I counted from the moment Bear and I left the mining site, I’d been hiking for days and between the hikes I’d been fighting for my life. My body kept healing my wounds, and all that regeneration had to have a caloric cost.

I was starving. Everything ached. If I flexed right now, the meat would be bright red. I had to eat, or I would become someone else’s dinner. I couldn’t afford weakness.

I surrendered to my fate and bit into the thin slice.

No flash of pain. No broken glass. It tasted vile and it stank, but it was meat. I was squatting by the river in a breach and eating raw meat. I’d gone completely feral.

I would make it out of this cave, and then I would never think of this again. I would erase this from my memories.

I chewed the meat and tried to think of something else. Luckily for me, I had plenty to ponder.

When we crossed the stone bridge out of that small cave, I sensed something.

It was far in the distance, hidden behind countless cave walls and solid stone, a knot of…

something. I couldn’t quite describe it.

It felt almost like a hot magnet. It pulled on me, but not in a pleasant way.

It was more like a psychic ache, like a splinter that got stuck in my awareness.

The stalkers and other creatures had kept me busy, so I mostly noted it and kept moving. But right now, with no distractions, it nagged at me. It could’ve been anything, but the most plausible explanation was usually the right one.

I’d become aware of the anchor.

Most of the gate divers didn’t feel the anchor until they were right on top of it.

The distant awareness usually came with extraordinary power particular to top-tier Talents.

Not all the powerful guild members could feel the anchor from far away, but everyone who did was in the upper layer of the talent pool.

I leaned over the stream and tried to look at my reflection. I couldn’t really see myself. The light was too diffused. My arms and legs didn’t look that different, but then I was wearing coveralls.

I would have to find a reflective surface somewhere.

I didn’t want to dwell on it. As long as I still looked enough like myself to be recognized, I would be fine.

I’d been checking my blood through the lens of my talent, and I was reasonably sure that I would pass the DDC blood tests.

My regeneration ability lay far deeper, on a cellular level.

The bigger problem was the anchor. It was closer now than when we started.

We were walking toward it. I didn’t want to go toward the anchor.

I wanted to go toward the gate and the exit.

But right now, I didn’t have much choice.

Even if I wanted to backtrack, I couldn’t.

We had threaded the labyrinth of the tunnels like a needle, and I didn’t remember the way back.

The assault team had taken a route to the anchor that led away from the mining site. In theory, if I found the anchor chamber, I could try to find that route and use it to reach the gate. However, the closer you got to the anchor, the more difficult the fights became.

I had two choices: to wander aimlessly in these caves or to head for the anchor.

Even if I failed to find the route the first assault team had taken, eventually Cold Chaos would send in the second-strike team.

Joining up with them would be too dangerous.

There was a solid chance that Cold Chaos wanted me dead to avoid the massive PR storm and sanctions that would result from admitting that London abandoned me.

So running into the embrace of the Cold Chaos assault team wouldn’t be smart.

But I could retrace their steps or follow them to the gate, staying out of sight. I’d gotten very good at moving quietly.

The anchor was the only logical choice. I would have to chance it. At least I had a direction now.

Fifteen minutes later, Bear departed to poop in the corner by some rocks and came back.

“Good to go?”

The dog wagged her tail.

Maybe we could take a breather…

The cave wall by Bear’s poop moved.

“Come!” I barked.

Bear ran over to me.

The wall trembled and broke apart, cascading to the floor.

I jumped over the stream. Bear leaped with me. We cleared fifteen feet and landed on the other bank.

Chunks of the wall streamed to the stalker carcass. I flexed . Bugs, about a foot across, with a chitin carapace that perfectly mimicked the stone.

I backed away.

The bug whirlpool broke open, revealing a bare skeleton. Not a shred of flesh remained. If we had fallen asleep here…

“I fucking hate this place. Come on Bear. Before the cave piranha bugs eat us too.”

I headed into the gloom, my loyal dog trotting at my side.

* * *

I crouched on a narrow stone ledge protruding above a vast cavern. Bear lay next to me gnawing on a stalker femur.

Long veins of luminescent crystal split the ceiling here and there and slid up the walls, glowing like overpowered lamps, diluting the darkness to a gentle twilight.

My talent told me it was jubar stone, a breach mineral that shone like a floodlight.

The biggest jubar stone I had seen until now was about the size of my fist.

Two hundred and sixty-two feet below us, at the bottom of the cavern, enormous lianas climbed the stone wall, bearing giant flowers.

Each blossom, shaped like a twisted cornucopia, sported a funnel at least ten feet across and fifteen feet deep, fringed by thick, persimmon-colored petals that glowed weakly with coral and yellow.

It was as if a garden-variety trumpet vine had been thrown into the chasm and mutated out of control into a monstrous version of itself.

Strange beings moved along the cavern floor, clad in diaphanous pale robes. Their torsos seemed almost humanoid, but there was something oddly insectoid about their movements. They strode between the flowers, carrying long staves and pushing carts.

As I watched, one of them stopped at the opposite wall far below and tugged on the long green tendrils dripping from a large blossom. A spider the size of a small car slid from the flower. It was white and translucent, as if made of frosted glass.

The being checked it over, prodding it with a staff topped with a large chunk of green glass or maybe a huge jewel. My talent couldn’t identify it from this distance. The spider waited like a docile pet.

The being dipped a slender appendage into their cart, pulled out a glowing fuzzy sphere that looked like a giant dandelion, and tossed it to the spider. The monster arachnid caught it and slipped back into its flower.

The spider herder moved on to the next blossom.

It was surreal. I’d been watching them for about two hours and my mind still refused to come to terms with it.

There were hundreds of flowers down there, and most of them held spiders.

The herders had been clearly doing this for a long time – their movements were measured and routine, and they had made paths in the faintly glowing lichens sheathing the bottom of the cavern.

I was watching an alien civilization tend to its livestock.

“Do you know what this is, Bear? This is animal husbandry.”

Bear didn’t seem impressed.

If I had to herd spiders, this would certainly be a good place.

From this angle, the cavern looked almost like a canyon, relatively narrow with steep, mostly sheer walls.

They had a water source – the narrow ribbon of a shallow stream twisted along the cavern’s floor.

I couldn’t see any other entrances, although there had to be some, probably far to the left, behind the cavern’s bend.

If stalkers or other predators somehow invaded, they would be easy to bottleneck.

It was an ideal, sheltered location except for one thing.

Another spider herder emerged from behind the bend on the left. My ledge ended only a few feet away on that side so I couldn’t quite see where they came from. This one was pushing a larger cart.

“Here we go,” I murmured to Bear.

She flicked her ear.

The spider herder paused. Above them, about forty feet off the ground, a large blossom glowed with gold instead of red.

The herder raised their staff and leaped at the wall, clearing ten feet in a single jump.

They climbed up the vine, shockingly fast, reached the flower, and thrust the staff into the blossom.

I glanced to the right. Across the cavern, a fissure split the wall near the ceiling, a crack in the solid stone about eight feet tall and five feet across at its widest.

Nothing moved. The fissure remained dark.

The spider herder swirled the staff as if scraping the pancake batter out of a bowl.

The fissure stayed still.

The spider herder pulled their staff out. Three dense clumps of spider silk hung suspended from the top, glowing softly with cream-colored light. They were about the size of a beach ball.

A segmented body squeezed out of the fissure and dove, three pairs of translucent wings snapping open in flight. A wasp-like insect the size of a kayak zipped through the air, glinting with blue and yellow like a blue sapphire wrapped in gold filigree.

Bear jumped up and growled.

The spider herder saw the wasp and scrambled down, but not quickly enough.

The giant insect divebombed across the cavern, hooked one of the spider eggs with its segmented legs, tearing it from the bundle, and shot up, buzzing along the wall into a U-turn.

A moment and it squeezed back into the fissure, taking its prize with it.