Page 29 of The Inheritance (Breach Wars #1)

They lay strewn around the bottom of the cave like Noah’s action figures thrown onto the bed. Some were missing limbs, some had been cut in half. It looked familiar. I had seen this at the mining site. This controlled carnage. One slice. One death.

I forced myself to focus on the corpses. They were too far to fully analyze, but I noticed that when I measured distances with my Talent, it gave me a moment of enhanced distance vision. The body directly under me was lying on its back. I flexed , and for a split second my talent grasped its face.

Malcolm. This was the original assault team.

Something flashed by Malcolm’s body. I concentrated on it. The cheesecake stone.

My heart hammered in my chest. As soon as London made it out, the gate coordinator would have gone into the breach and activated the cheesecake, the signal stone, twin to the one that was now blinking below me.

The moment the cheesecake started flashing, the assault team would’ve turned around and marched back to the gate.

They never made it, which meant they were either already dead by the time the cheesecake started flashing, or they were en route back to the gate when they died.

The assault team went into the gate an hour before the mining team. The mining team died about thirty minutes after entering.

The gate was less than two hours away. Had to be.

If I could get down there, I could walk out of the breach in two hours. Bear and I would be out of this nightmare. We could go home.

I scrambled from the edge and sat, trying to get a grip. I had to calm down.

Could we get down there? Was it physically possible?

I crawled back to the edge and looked down again, measuring the distance with my talent for the second time. Two hundred and eleven feet. The rope in my backpack was only fifty feet long, whatever the spider herders helped me cut from the length I used to rappel down the cliff.

Nowhere near long enough.

I could jump pretty far now, and a drop of thirty feet wasn’t out of the question. But that and my rope still only gave me eighty. I would need one hundred and thirty-one feet. At least.

I surveyed the walls. Sheer. No way to climb down. Even if I somehow strapped Bear to myself, we wouldn’t make it.

I felt like screaming. We were so close. Damn it.

So fucking close.

I looked below again, surveying the bodies, the floor, the walls…

I had to let it go. There was no way down. We couldn’t afford to sit here wasting time and energy obsessing over it.

I felt the weight of someone’s stare. The tiny hairs on the back of my neck rose.

I concentrated. The hidden watcher was across the cavern, perpendicular to the bridge.

Slowly I reached into my backpack, pulled out my hard hat, slid the selector on the light to maximum beam, and jerked the helmet up.

Across from us a face with two shining eyes peered at me through the gap in the far wall. My talent grasped an outline of a long humanoid head. A blink and it jerked out of sight, behind the stone.

The light on the helmet sputtered and died.

“And now we know we haven’t lost it, Bear.”

Something was following us. Not just something. Someone. And they glowed bright red.

Red meant value. Our hunter offered something useful, something that, judging by the intensity of the color, we desperately needed.

I got up and stuffed the helmet back into my sack. It was useless as a light source, but it still worked as Bear’s water bowl. The anchor was still pulsing on the edge of my awareness.

“If we find the anchor, maybe we can find a way down.”

Bear wagged her tail.

“Come on, Bearkins.”

I started forward and Bear chased after me.

* * *

Bear and I trudged across another stone bridge, a vast drop below us.

This part of the breach seemed to consist of massive caverns and deep shafts connected by short tunnels.

Natural stone bridges crisscrossed the sheer drops.

Water was scarce. I’d filled our canteens when we killed the latest lake dragon, and half of our water supply was gone.

It made me nervous. I kept hoping for streams and not finding any.

We could probably get some moisture from the blood of the monsters we killed, but they had grown scarce too.

Nobody barred our path. Maybe the inhabitants of the breach simultaneously decided that we were too much of a threat, but I doubted it.

A few times I glimpsed creature corpses below, broken as if they had fallen from a great height.

The fall wasn’t the only thing that killed them.

The bodies were torn, shredded by something with terrible claws.

And worse, nothing had touched them since their death.

This place was full of scavengers, yet all of that meat was going to waste.

There was only one answer: whatever slaughtered the creatures was so frightening, that nothing else dared to touch their kill.

The anchor was ahead and slightly to the right. We had been drawing closer, but our route didn’t run in a straight line. We were making circles around it, getting nearer in a spiral that became tighter and tighter.

Behind me, Bear halted. I turned. She was looking to our right, across the cavern. That side of the chamber lay shrouded in gloom.

Bear let out a quiet, deliberate woof.

Something was definitely there, in the darkness.

I flexed . My talent rolled outward, trying to measure the distance to the gloom, and falling short.

Woof.

Another stone bridge ran below us, leading to the right. It was a twenty-foot drop. If we got down there, I could use my rope to climb back up.

Woof.

“Okay. We’ll go check it out. Up!”

Bear leaped into my arms. I held her the same way I carried Mellow, my cream cat, and jumped down.

We landed on the lower stone bridge. The impact punched through the soles of my feet into my legs.

I stuck the landing like an Olympic gymnast. Maybe once I got out of here, I would go for a career change.

Not many forty-year-old acrobats debuting out there. I’d be a sensation.

I let Bear down, and we headed toward the shadows.

What the hell would I do once I got out?

First, I’d need to make sure Cold Chaos didn’t have a chance to unalive me, as Tia would put it.

I was living proof of their fuckup. A huge liability.

A week ago, or however long it had been since we entered, I would have said that a major guild, especially Cold Chaos, wouldn’t stoop that low.

The risks were too great. But now I didn’t just expect the worst, I counted on it.

Assuming that we made it out alive and jumped the Cold Chaos hurdle, the DDC would want the full account of what happened. I had two choices. First, I could demonstrate my newfound powers and come clean. Second, I could hide.

The first option meant … the end of my life as I knew it.

Possibly in more ways than one. I had encountered sentient, sapient lifeforms. I communicated with them, I traded with them, and I witnessed irrefutable evidence of other civilizations.

Not just one vague amorphous enemy, but an entire constellation of different sophont species.

Not beasts, not monsters. Thinking, feeling beings.

And some of them, like the spider herders, were not overtly hostile. They would defend themselves if we gave them no choice, but that brief flash of knowledge from my gem assured me that they just wanted to be left alone.

The spider herders didn’t seem surprised to see me. Looking back at their calm reactions, they had to have seen humans before, and they instantly knew I was sadrin . I didn’t understand what sadrin was, but they did, and they treated me with respect.

The breaches had been active for nearly a decade. Thousands of gates, maybe a hundred thousand gate divers worldwide. Someone had to have seen what I’d seen, and yet there was no mention of non-hostile sophonts anywhere in the DDC archives.

Which meant that somewhere, very high up, a decision was made to keep their existence suppressed.

It made sense. When I was in college, I read a science fiction novel about space marines fighting against insectoid aliens.

Bugs. Big horrific bugs. The space marines slaughtered them by thousands and never felt bad about it, because in real life we designated bugs as something that could be killed without guilt.

We had exterminators and pesticides, and we never questioned the ethics of it.

Reducing your enemy to the level of a bug or a mindless monster eliminated the guilt of taking their life. When faced with war, humans always dehumanized their opponents. You only had to look at the WWII era cartoons to see it.

Right now, the breaches were filled with monsters.

The gate divers fought them, and the rest of us supported them and thanked them for their service.

We unified to repel the invasion, and we did not question the morality of that fight.

It was okay to hate the enemy, because it was a mindless horde of bioweapons who sought to wipe us from existence.

If I came out and told everyone that I encountered sapient beings, had a chat with some of them, and met a human who spoke to me and put something into my head that was actively changing who I was, I would explode that social construct.

The united front would fracture. Some people would immediately argue for scouring the breach in an effort to bargain and communicate; some people would panic; others would attempt to defect.

The major religions would have to undergo yet another series of contortions to try to explain away the multitude of civilizations just like they had to twist themselves into a pretzel a decade ago to explain the gates to their worshippers.

Humanity would stew in its own instability and navel gazing, and we couldn’t afford to do that.

We had to continue to destroy the anchors, or we would be overrun.