Page 27 of The Inheritance (Breach Wars #1)

I flexed . Some pollen had gotten on the eggs in the net sack.

I waved my hands over it, trying to clean them.

The pollen was featherlight, and after a couple of minutes most of it was off.

I tied the rope to the net sack containing the four regular eggs, tied the other end of it around a rock, and held the sack above the drop.

Still no reaction.

I gently lowered the sack down. The rope was long enough. The trick was to keep from bumping the eggs against the cliff wall.

Nice and slow.

A spider herder stepped forward. I lowered the sack into their arms. The herder sliced at the rope with their hand, cutting the net sack free.

There was no tug, no pull. One moment the weight of the eggs was on the rope and the next it vanished.

The spider herder moved to the back with their prize, and I pulled the rope back up.

I still had the coral egg, Bear, and myself.

Bear would have to be next. I looped the rope around the rock three more times, then wrapped it around her, threading it through her harness.

“You will be okay, girl. I’ll be right down.”

I took a deep breath and gently lowered Bear off the cliff, supporting her weight with my arms. When she was about three feet down, I backed up, strung the rope over my shoulders, and began to let it out, little by little, foot by foot, going as slowly as I could.

There was no way the old me could have done this. She would’ve been too heavy.

I ran out of rope and looked down. I’d calculated correctly.

Bear was hanging about six feet off the ground.

Letting her down all the way would’ve been a dangerous gamble.

Bear was smart but she was a dog. There was no telling what she would do when facing giant spiders and weird looking beings.

She could wait for me like a good girl, or she could decide it was biting time and get herself killed.

Leaving her hanging was the safest choice.

The spider herders made no move toward her and if the rope snapped and she fell, she wouldn’t get injured.

It was my turn. I hung the sack with the last egg around my neck, threading one arm through so Bear’s leash crossed my back.

The egg was now against my chest. If I smacked into the cliff face, I could use my arms and legs to cushion the impact and keep it safe.

I grabbed the second rope. I had never rappelled off anything in my life. Hell of a way to start learning.

It was easier than I thought. The first time I had pushed off a little too hard, but by the fourth bump I got the hang of it.

Push.

Push.

Push.

My feet met the solid ground. I let go of the rope and turned around.

The spider herders stood motionless. They were almost eight feet tall, and they towered over me, menacing and silent, their faces hidden behind veils.

Only the eyes were visible, two of them per face, large, narrow, with a strange-looking white iris on a solid black sclera that didn’t seem the least bit insectoid.

I lifted my paper sack off my back, pulled the paper open, and held the coral egg out.

“ Bekh-razz.” My voice sounded ragged.

The spider herder in the center stepped forward. A bubble of light popped inside my head, and I knew that the herder was male and the staff in his hand, with the symbols etched into its shaft, meant he was in charge of this cluster.

The herder’s robe stirred softly as he moved and I realized that the humanoid shape was an illusion.

The top half of him, the upright half, seemed human.

His arms, unnaturally white, were long and thin, and his hands had six segmented fingers, each tipped with a black claw.

He seemed to float forward rather than walk, and as he moved, I glimpsed the outline of four segmented legs underneath the pale silk.

A soft voice issued forth from the spider herder. “ Horsun, gehr tirr did sembadzer .”

Something inside me recognized this language. The steady cadence sounded so familiar. I knew the words, but their meaning kept avoiding me, as if I was trying to hold on to slippery, wet mud.

“ Dzerhen tam dzal lukr tuhta gef .”

I used to speak this. A long time ago. I just forgot how… No, wait, it wasn’t me.

“…Dzer lohr dzal, Sadrin .”

Me. I was sadrin . That was more than a name. It was an occupation… no, a purpose. This was my goal in life. It was why I existed. The core of my… The understanding slipped away from me, and I almost growled out of sheer frustration. So close.

Something tore in my mind like a piece of paper and suddenly some of the clicks and odd syllables made sense.

“… hyrt argadi…”

Daughter. Argadi meant daughter. I saved a female child.

“… Argadi dzal to na yen sah - dejjit …”

Sah-dejjit. Friend. They considered me a friend.

“Dzer meq dzal bekh-razz danur. Bekh-razz danir.”

Safe passage for now and forever. Oh.

The spider herder pointed at my left arm. I stepped forward and held it out. The light on his staff flared into a needle-thin green beam and hit my arm. Pain lashed me. I gritted my teeth.

The light died. A narrow scar marked my arm, twisting into a flowing symbol. My talent focused on it.

The vision burst in my mind. Groups of spider herders, one after another, different landscapes, different times, all nodding and parting to let me pass. I had been given a great, rare honor.

The words formed on my lips on their own.

“ Adaren kullnemeq, Sindra-ron. Sadrin issun tanil danir. ”

Thank you for the priceless gift, children of Sindra. I shall be forever grateful.

The spider herders moved aside, and the sea of spiders behind them parted before me.

* * *

The weight room at the Elmwood Park Rec Center was small, but it did have a bench press.

The gym stood empty. The gate was considered high risk now and the residents in the immediate area had been evacuated long ago.

Elias loaded four plates on each side of the bar.

Four hundred and five pounds. He would need an extra two hundred pounds to really get going, but there were no plates left. A light workout it is.

Elias slid onto the bench, took a close grip with his fists nearly touching, lifted the bar off the rungs, and slowly lowered it to about an inch off his chest. He held it there for a few breaths, slowly pushed it up, and brought it back down.

The workout wasn’t planned, but sitting on his hands was getting to him. He had to let off some steam or he would explode.

Thirty minutes later, he had finished with the chest press and the leg press machine and was on the dip bars, with four plates chained to him, going into his second set of fifty dips, when Leo walked into the gym carrying his tablet.

The XO looked like a cat who’d caught a mouse and was very satisfied with his hunting skills.

Elias nodded to him. “Good news?”

“In a manner of speaking. Malcolm has a brother.” Leo held up his tablet.

On it a man strikingly similar to Malcolm smiled into the camera, poised against a forest. Same height, same lanky build, same dark hair and brown eyes.

If you put him into tactical gear, Elias might have mistaken him for the Elmwood gate assault team leader.

Elias kept moving, lifting his body up and down, the plates a comfortable weight tugging on him. “Are they twins?”

“No, Peter is two years younger.”

“Is he a Talent?”

Leo shook his head. “He is a biologist. He spends most of his time in Australia.”

“What is he doing there?”

“Trying to contain an outbreak of chlamydia in koalas.”

Elias paused midway into the lift and looked at Leo.

“Apparently koalas are highly susceptible to chlamydia,” Leo said. “The latest strain is threatening to make them extinct in New South Wales.”

Elias shook his head and resumed the dips.

“Interesting fact,” Leo continued. “Dr. Peter Nevin can apparently be in two places at once. Here he is speaking at the National Koala Conference in Port Macquarie in New South Wales.”

He flicked the tablet and a picture of Peter Nevin at the podium slid onto the screen.

“And here he is in Vegas after losing three hundred thousand dollars at the poker table on the same day.” Leo swiped across the tablet, presenting a picture of Malcolm exiting a casino, his face flat.

Elias ran out of dips, jumped to the floor, and began to unchain the weights. “Malcolm gambled under his brother’s name.”

“Oh, he didn’t just gamble. When someone like Malcolm lands in Vegas, a siren goes off and they roll out the red carpet from the plane all the way to the strip.”

“How deep is the hole?”

“Twenty-three million.”

Elias took special care to slide the weight plate back onto the rack. Breaking community equipment would not be good. Except that whatever pressure he’d managed to vent now doubled.

Twenty-three million. Over three times Malcolm’s annual pay with bonuses.

Malcolm was a gambler. Everything suddenly made sense. If the motherlode of gold wasn’t an exaggeration, Malcolm could’ve walked away with a bonus of several hundred thousand.

The casinos had to know who they were dealing with. Nobody would allow a koala scientist to carry that kind of debt, but a star assault team leader from a large guild was a different story. If they had any decency, they would’ve cut Malcolm off, but then they weren’t in the decency business.

“He is on a payment plan,” Leo said.

“Of course he is.”

And they would let him dig that hole deeper and deeper.

Why not? He’d become a passive income golden goose.

And all of this should have been caught during his audits.

Those payments had to have come from somewhere, and Malcolm would’ve been at it for years.

Any bookkeeper worth their salt would’ve noticed a large amount of money going out.

“The auditor…”

“Already got her, sir.”

Her? Malcolm’s auditor was a man… and he had retired two years ago. The Guild must’ve assigned him to someone else. “Is it Susan Calloway?”

“It is.”

“Are they having an affair?”

Leo blinked. “They are! How…”

“Three years ago at the Establishment Party. He got two drinks, one for his wife and one for Susan, and when he handed the champagne to her, her face lit up. Then her husband returned to the table, and she stopped smiling.”

He had reminded Malcolm and Susan separately after that party that rules applied to them.

The guild had a code of conduct, and every prospective guild member signed a document stating they read it and agreed to abide by it during the contract stage.

Cold Chaos didn’t tolerate affairs. If both parties were single, relationships between guild members were fine, but cheating on your spouse, in or outside of the guild, would result in severe sanctions.

Adultery undermined trust, destroyed morale, and eroded the chain of command.

That was the official position of the US Army, and during his tenure as an officer, he had seen that directive ignored time and time again.

From the senior NCOs who made bets on who would be the first to get into a freshly-minted attractive lieutenant’s pants to officers who led double lives every time they went on a prolonged deployment. It never ended well.

He wanted none of that in the guild. If you didn’t have the discipline or moral resilience to remain faithful to the one person who should’ve mattered most in your life, how could anyone rely on you in the breach, where lives were on the line?

He’d made his position quite clear. Both Malcolm and Susan swore nothing was going on, and Elias hadn’t seen any signs of trouble since. Meanwhile Susan quietly became Malcolm’s auditor and chose to ignore his gambling.

Elias hid a sigh. Some days he was just done.

“Is Legal aware?” he asked.

“Yes. They do not believe that the casino will attempt to collect against Malcolm’s estate. They’ve gotten enough money from him already, and hounding the widow of a dead Talent is a bad look. Not to mention the fraud involved in all of this.”

“Jackson?”

“No news yet.”

“It won’t be long now,” Elias told him.

Elias’s phone chimed as if on cue. He glanced at it. An 81 country code.

“Speak of the devil.”

He took the call.

Yasuo Morita appeared on the screen, a trim man in his forties, dark hair cropped short, a shadow of a beard darkening his jaw and crow’s feet at the corners of his smart eyes.

“Elias. Good to see you,” Yasuo said. The Vice-Guildmaster of Hikari no Ryu spoke English with the barest trace of an accent.

“Good to see you as well.”

“Your healer is on a plane heading home. My people sent over the flight information.”

Out of Yasuo’s view Leo waved his tablet and nodded.

“This was not done at our request,” Yasuo said. “Someone got overzealous in currying favor. This mistake has been corrected.”

“Good to hear.”

“You surprised me. Nicely done.”

“Glad to know I can still keep you on your toes.”

Yasuo smiled. “It won’t happen again.”

There were a couple dozen high-profile US-born Talents working in Japan. This morning nine of them simultaneously asked for leave and booked tickets home. It was a hell of a statement, and it looked impressive, but it wasn’t made for the sake of Cold Chaos.

The guild sandbox was small and great healers were rare.

Especially healers like Jackson who went out of his way to step in during an emergency.

Elias had called every Talent who knew Jackson or benefited from the healer’s involvement.

Some knew Jackson personally, others through family members, but all agreed that interference with healers had to be off limits.

Explaining all of this to Yasuo was unnecessary. They were much better off letting him think that Cold Chaos had extensive reach.

“How is my brother?” Yasuo asked.

“Yosuke is well. He’s been promoted to the lead damage dealer of the Assault Team 2.”

“As he should be. When you see him next, I hope you will do me the favor of reminding him that our father hasn’t seen him in two years.”

“I’ll mention it.”

“Good-bye and good luck.”

“You as well.”

Elias ended the call. “When does he land?”

“Not for a while.” Leo grimaced. “There is a typhoon heading for Japan. They are rerouting everything. The plane just boarded, and he’s on a flight out of Narita with an overnight layover in Hong Kong. I will start the prep.”

Even if Jackson was delayed by a day, things were moving. They would finally crack this damn breach. Elias squared his shoulders.

Everything would fall into place once they entered the gate.