Page 33 of The Inheritance (Breach Wars #1)

Even if that route were possible, Elias didn’t want to take it. They lost people inside that damn breach. This was their mess, their responsibility. They owed it to the families.

“We can’t lose the gate,” Elias said.

“No, we can’t,” Jackson agreed.

“Our people died in there.”

“And we need to bring them home,” the healer finished.

“I’ve got two kids sitting in our HQ. They still think their mother is alive. We must give people answers.”

“What do you want to do?”

“The DDC press conferences are always scheduled for ten am,” Elias said. “We go in at first light. They can’t reassign the breach if we are in it.”

Jackson laughed softly.

They would rest tonight. Tomorrow, they would take the breach.

“Do you think you could’ve cured Brenda if she hadn’t died?” Elias asked.

“You asked me that nine years ago, remember?”

He remembered.It was on the day they met.

There were eight of them in that original group: Elias, Jackson, Stephanie, Leo, Graham, Simone, Nolan, and Miles.

It was the first gate dive for most of them.

Leo was barely twenty-two back then, a kid.

Stephanie no longer entered the gates; Miles was dead; Nolan took the civil service route and climbed up the ranks in the DDC; Simone became the COO of the Telluric Vanguard; and Graham ran the Guardians. A lot happened in a decade.

Jackson’s eyes were kind and mournful. “I’m going to tell you the same thing I told you back then. The past has happened. It cannot be changed.Don’t do this to yourself.”

Elias drank his coffee. Jackson was watching him with a particular focus.

“Don’t do it,” Elias warned him.

“Do what?”

“Put me into restorative sleep.”

“You look like you need it,” Jackson said.

“What I need is to enter that damn breach. I’ve been sitting on my hands for five days now. What the hell possessed you to go to Japan anyway?”

Jackson smiled. “The trees, Elias. They are good for your soul. Now tell me more about this cave.”

* * *

The three of us, Jovo, Bear, and I, crouched on the ledge. Below us the remains of the assault team sprawled on the rocks. We had doubled back to the kill site.

The corpses were still there, untouched. I pointed at the bodies, looked at Jovo, and made a cutting motion. “Knife.”

The lees pondered the bodies below.

The first thing Jovo did after we rested was to scale the sheer side of a cliff to a higher ledge to get a better view of the cavern.

He’d scrambled a forty-foot wall like it was nothing, which gave me an idea.

Jovo needed a weapon, and the only unclaimed weapons in the breach lay there below us.

They were out of my reach but maybe not out of his.

The fox took a deep breath, put his marble into his mouth, and leaped off the stone bridge. He bounced off the rock, weightless, bounced again, zigzagging down the wall like a superhero squirrel, and then landed among the bodies.

Wow.

Jovo gagged, coughed, waved his hand in front of his nose, and began rummaging through the corpses. I sat on the stone bridge and watched. Once he armed himself, we would head to the anchor.

Jovo pulled a tactical belt with five pouches on it from a corpse, and wrapped it around himself, over one shoulder, bandolier style.

I could smell the bodies now. The sickening, cloying stench reached all the way up to the bridge.

Jovo picked up a machete, swung it a couple of times, and tossed it over his shoulder. A big ugly knife was next. He waved it around, and over the shoulder it went. It would be almost comically cute if it weren’t for the rotting corpses.

Bear stared up ahead, at the darkness beyond.

“What is it?” I whispered.

The shepherd went still, focused on something in the gloom. She didn’t woof though.

At the bottom, Jovo raised two small, curved blades. They had six-inch blades shaped like claws and rings in their handles. There was a specific name for that kind of knife… care… kura… karambit. That was it. The style of the knife originated in Southeast Asia.

Those were Ximena’s backup blades. She was a pulse carver, a burst damage dealer with enhanced speed who slashed at her opponents. She was like a whirlwind on the battlefield, and now she was dead, decomposing below.

Did we actually have a chance to win a fight with the gress? Or was I deluding myself?

Jovo slid his fingers through the rings in the handle, holding the blades out, and sliced the air in two vicious, lightning-fast strikes.

Okay.

Jovo spun on one foot, danced across the rocky ground, cutting and carving, and leapt into the air spinning like a windmill. The twin blades flashed as he sliced his imaginary opponents in twin X slashes and landed in a crouch.

Holy shit. How the hell had the gress even caught him?

Jovo straightened, looked at the knives, let out a giggle, and bounced from paw to paw, doing a little happy dance.

Bear’s black lips trembled. She let out a low, grumbling growl.

“Jovo!”

The lees was still bouncing and waving his knives around.

The darkness at the edge of the chamber shifted.

Bear snarled.

“Jovo!” I waved at him frantically. “Up! Up!”

Jovo glanced at me.

“Dangerous! Up! ”

Bear broke into barks, snarling.

The shape within the darkness lunged forward.

Jovo leaped at the wall and scrambled up as if he had a ladder. A blink and he was thirty feet up, then fifty.

A creature stalked into the open, its lunge aborted at the last moment.

It was definitely feline, but as big as an SUV, with the broad build of a jaguar.

Its stocky frame rippled with muscle that shifted and bulged as it walked.

Its dense fur was like nothing I had ever seen.

Each hair started with a deep ruby, then darkened toward the end into tar black.

Like a smoke-colored cat, except that smoke cats of our world went white to black and their coloring was solid, while this creature’s pelt shifted as it walked, the multicolored fur forming rosettes and stripes that vanished with the next step.

Its paws were enormous, as big as my head, and they had too many toes.

Jovo shot up the wall, conquered the last dozen feet, and landed on the bridge next to me.

The beast below tilted its huge head and stared at us, its eyes a malevolent, terrible green.

I put my hand on Bear’s back. The shepherd clicked her mouth closed and glared at the monster.

This thing did not belong in the breach.

Every animal that was a native part of this ecosystem – the stalkers, the goats, the bugs - was grey, blue, or purple with fluorescence or a flash of contrasting color here and there.

The only exception was the red Grasping Hand, but that was a stationary invertebrate. It didn’t hunt or roam.

This cat didn’t fit the color scheme and that fur said it was a forest predator. It was as alien to the caves as Jovo and I.

There was a frightening intelligence in those eyes. It reminded me of Bear, the new upgraded version. When I looked into my dog’s eyes, something more than a typical canine intelligence looked back. This creature was like that: smart and cunning.

The giant cat took a step back, turned soundlessly, and vanished back into the gloom.

Now I knew why the corpses hadn’t been eaten.

“Skelzhar,” Jovo hissed.

I pointed at him. “Jovo…”

The fox shook his head and touched his chest. “Lees.” He pointed at the beast. “Skelzhar.”

Species name.

He pulled his marble out and squeezed it. Five gress walking out of the darkness, two skelzhars flanking them like hounds. When I compared it to Bear, I had no idea how right I was.

“Dan-je-rous,” Jovo said carefully.

The gress by itself was bad enough. This took it to another level.

I stood up. “Let’s get moving.”