Page 3 of The Inheritance (Breach Wars #1)

Gate divers were like ancient sailors. We ventured into the unknown that could kill us at any moment.

In the breach, survival depended on luck and intuition, and our rituals were an acknowledgment of that.

We knocked on wood, we muttered lucky sayings under our breath, and we trusted our instincts.

My instincts were pumping out all of the dread they could muster.

“Anything specific?” London asked.

“It makes my skin crawl.”

“Don’t worry,” he promised quietly. “I’ll get you out of here in one piece.”

I glanced at him.

“I mean it, Ada. The only way you go down is if I’m down, and I’m really good at surviving. We get in, get out, and you can go home and sort the kid issues out. Tomorrow will be like this never happened.”

“Thank you.”

He nodded.

Ten years had passed since Roger had abandoned us.

I’d been on my own for a decade, taking care of the kids, paying the bills, surviving.

Every decision in my life was up to me, and I made them without support or help from anyone else.

I’d become used to it, but London just reminded me how it felt to share all of that with someone. Someone who cared if you lived or died.

This was the worst moment to wonder about things. I promised my daughter I would come back. I had to concentrate on that.

The passageway forked. We turned right. Hotchkins, a short, dark-haired man, spraypainted a backward orange arrow on the wall. He would do this every time we made a turn. It was a proven fact that people running for their lives had trouble orienting themselves.

Ahead a glowing stick shone among the rocks. Beyond it eight furry bodies sprawled on the ground in a puddle of blood. My foot slid on something. A spent shell casing. The cave floor was littered with them. The assault team had made a stand here.

We passed the bodies, skirting them to the sides.

The dead things were large, about the size of a Great Dane, with long lupine jaws and massive feet armed with hook-like claws.

Their pelts, chewed up by bullets, were shaggy with blue-grey fur.

They didn’t look like anything our planet could’ve spawned.

“A variant of Calloway’s stalkers,” London said. His voice was perfectly calm.

“Yeah. There were a lot of them, and they are spongy. They soak up bullets like they’re nothing and keep coming,” Elena said. “And they spit acidic bile.”

“Good to know,” London said.

“We did our best to clean up, but the place is a maze.” Elena kept her voice low. “Passages going everywhere, so we may run into some. We didn’t see anything more dangerous until we went much deeper, so there is that.”

“No worries,” Stella offered from behind them. “Bear will let us know if anything is coming.”

Elena gave her a cold smile. “ I will let us know if anything is coming.”

“Don’t pay her any attention, Bear,” Stella murmured. “She didn’t mean anything by it.”

Bear twitched her right ear. One day I would pet that dog.

Elena kept gliding forward, her face portraying all of the warmth of an iceberg.

A lot of combat Talents developed similar abilities, so many that the government began to classify them.

Tank classes, like London’s blade warden or Aaron’s bastion, had a lot of defensive skills, so they drew the attention of the enemy and absorbed damage.

Damage dealers, like strikers or pulse carvers, attacked the target, causing rapid destruction.

Elena was a pathfinder, a scout class that came with heightened hearing and vision, upgraded speed, and an unerring sense of direction.

If she concentrated hard enough, she could hear a person murmuring behind a closed door two floors above her.

But as awesome as Elena was, I would trust Bear over her any day.

There was a reason every guild brought canines into the breaches.

The transdimensional monstrosities wigged them out, and they let us know when something came near.

Dogs were the best early warning system we had.

The cave passage kept branching. Left, left, right, another right, each tunnel glowing with swirls of colorful lichens and fungi.

Elena was right, the place was a maze. At least we didn’t have that far to go.

I had seen the preliminary survey of the breach, and the mining site was half-a-mile from the entrance, off to the side.

The way was clear, the tunnels were empty, and Bear stayed quiet. Just like any other gate dive. It should’ve felt routine, but it didn’t. I kept expecting some kind of awful shoe to drop.

Ten years ago, when the first set of gates appeared out of nowhere near the major population centers, they’d taken humanity by surprise. We’d cordoned them off so we could carefully study them and before anyone had a chance to adjust, the gates burst, spilling a horde of monsters into the world.

We knew a lot more about the gates now. Beyond every gate lay the breach, a miniature dimension stuffed to the brim with creatures so dangerous, they were biological weapons rather than living beings.

That dimension connected Earth and the hostile world like a gangplank linking two ships.

The breaches were how the enemy got from their world to ours.

Every breach had an anchor, a core that stabilized it.

Once the breach appeared, the anchor began to accumulate energy.

When it got enough, the gate would burn through the fabric of our reality and rip open, releasing the monsters into our world to rampage and murder everything they came across.

The more dangerous the breach was, the longer it took to burst.

There was a brief period, anywhere from a few days to a few months from the moment the gate appeared, when the monsters couldn’t escape yet, but we could enter the gate from our side.

It gave us a chance to extinguish the anchor and collapse the breach.

The moment a gate manifested, the clock started ticking.

At first, destroying the anchors was the sole responsibility of the military, but it quickly got prohibitively expensive.

Regular humans were no match for the breach beasts, and casualties were high.

And it was discovered that the breaches contained a wealth of materials: strange ores, medicinal plants, and monster bones with incredible properties.

Resources that could aid our fight and make us stronger.

It wasn’t just about destroying the anchors anymore.

We had to strip the breach of anything valuable before it collapsed.

Within months after the first Talents manifested their abilities, they banded into guilds, and governments around the world began to outsource gates to them, taking a percentage of the profits. Economic and security crisis solved at the cost of volunteer lives.

By now, the process of gate diving was almost routine.

As soon as a gate appeared, it was graded, its threat level measured, a government assessor like me assigned, and the appropriate guild contacted.

The guild sent a team in to do a preliminary survey and let the DDC know when they were ready to proceed, at which point I arrived at the site.

The attack began with the assault team, heavy hitters with combat talents, who entered the gate and cut and burned through the miniature pocket dimension until they found the anchor and destroyed it. The journey to the anchor took days, sometimes weeks.

While the assault team worked their way to the anchor, the mining crew came in and stripped the breach bare, extracting anything that could be of use and would help humanity keep fighting.

Each breach’s resources were unique and precious.

My job was to assess the space, guide the mining team, and make sure that the government got their thirty percent cut.

Once the anchor was destroyed, the assault team would rush back to the exit, because without the anchor, the gate would collapse in three days.

Nobody knew what happened to the breaches once the gate closed.

Hopefully everybody got out before the gate vanished, and when the next one appeared, we would do it all over again.

Ahead Aaron stopped. Finally. It was time to earn my paycheck. The sooner I found something of value, the sooner we all got out of here.

Apprehension curled around me like a cold snake. I could just turn around and run back to the gate, quit, and never go into any breaches again. I could absolutely do that. But then whatever this breach held would stay in it instead of becoming weapons, armor, and medicine.

I took a deep breath and pushed forward, past the miners, to do my job.