Page 34 of The Inheritance (Breach Wars #1)

T he stench of decomposition started as a faint whiff of cloying odor. It drifted from the warren of passages and tunnels. The farther we walked, the stronger it became.

Jovo waved his hand in front of his nose.

I nodded. It stank.

We kept moving. This part of the breach resembled the inside of a sponge: short roundish chambers connected by a myriad of shorter tunnels, endlessly intersecting. My senses told me we were getting closer and closer to the anchor. It had to be less than a mile away.

This area should have been filled with monsters.

The closer to the anchor, the higher the density of creatures.

That was a hard and fast rule that had been proven over and over again in the last ten years.

This distribution was exactly why the miners stuck to the sites in close proximity to the gates.

The Sponge was deserted. And the stench kept getting thicker.

Nothing in this breach went the way it was supposed to. I wanted answers.

Another hundred yards.

The odor was almost unbearable now.

Our tunnel turned and opened. An enormous cavern unrolled in front of us, its ceiling three hundred feet high and studded with glowing crystals. A narrow river wound its way through the cavern’s floor.

Monster corpses littered the ground.

Huge, spiked, armored, grotesque, they sprawled along the banks. There had to be hundreds of them. The scale of the slaughter was horrifying. My mind refused to accept it.

This was too much for any being to kill alone. Had a bomb gone off here? But nothing except the monsters was damaged. The walls weren’t scorched, there was no crater, and flowers still bloomed along the banks.

Jovo clamped his hand over his nose and pulled on my sleeve. I glanced down at him. He pointed into the cavern.

I looked in the direction he indicated and flexed . A complex metal device sat in the center of the cavern, opened almost like a flower with concentric ridges forming petals.

Jovo let go of his nose and opened the fingers of both hands raising his arms. “Boom!”

Someone had deployed a literal weapon of mass destruction, but instead of destruction, it was just death. Mass death on an unprecedented scale.

I concentrated on the bodies. They didn’t look native to the breach.

Too large, too many of them, and all clearly nasty in a fight.

The mechanism of the breaches was becoming a little clearer.

Whoever built them took a section of an actual ecosystem, wedged it between our worlds, and then dumped a large number of predators into it.

I had no idea how they transported them in or kept them from immediately killing each other, but it was clear that the monsters were plonked here and then expected to spread through the caves.

There was probably enough wildlife for them to survive for the next couple of weeks, but by the time the gate burst, they would be ravenous.

It made no sense for whoever built the breach to stuff it with monsters and then nuke them. This felt like the work of a third party. There were the creators of the breach, us, and then there was the alien woman and the gress.

“Gress?” I asked Jovo.

He shrugged. He didn’t know.

It had to be the gress. If the alien woman entered the breach and the gress were pursuing her for some reason, clearing the monsters would make that pursuit much easier.

The gress must’ve killed them shortly after the breach was created, if not right away, because the creatures didn’t even have a chance to spread.

But why did the woman enter? Was she escaping? Was she supposed to do something here?

I pointed at the cavern and made a walking motion with my fingers. “Dangerous?”

Jovo took an exaggerated sniff and shook his head.

The anchor lay on the other side of the cavern, through one of the passages puncturing the opposite wall. I took a breath, gagged, and started forward.

* * *

Jovo squeezed his marble. A gathering of lees appeared, most of them white furred and green eyed. “Sai. Phff!”

He had started this halfway into the monster slaughter, probably out of sheer self-preservation against the horror and the stench.

Apparently, the lees existed in large family groups, and there were a lot of them.

They greatly varied in fur color, markings, and eye color.

A lot of the clans must have been wealthy, because the lees wore jewelry and elaborately decorated sashes, aprons, and kilts.

There had to be some meaning to the clothes, but I couldn’t decipher it. Perhaps it was regional.

The one thing Jovo made absolutely clear was that Clan Kiar was far superior to all others. We’d left the monster mass graveyard behind ten minutes ago, and he was still going.

I was still struggling with the odor. It seemed to stick to us, coating our clothes, skin, and hair.

I should’ve gotten used to it by now, but it still bothered me.

My hearing and eyesight had gotten better.

My olfactory sense probably got an upgrade as well, and right now it felt like a mixed blessing.

Bear sneezed next to me. She hadn’t even tried to investigate the bodies. All of that stench must have been hell on her sensitive nose.

Another squeeze of the marble. A new clan, this one with white, grey, and blue fur colors and turquoise and gold eyes.

“Nuan. Blah.”

“Blah?”

Jovo squeezed the marble, projecting an image of a plump pillow and made a squishing motion. “Nuan. Phah!”

Clearly, Clan Nuan was soft like a cushion.

I humored him. “Kiar not phah?”

Jovo pulled his knives out and spun through the tunnel in front of us, slashing left and right. “Kiar!”

Bear barked.

“He is exciting, isn’t he?”

Bear was the smartest girl ever, because any other dog would’ve chased him by now.

Jovo paused, posing on one foot.

I nodded solemnly, acknowledging the warrior badassery of Clan Kiar.

Jovo flipped backwards, slicing with his weapons, pirouetted to the end of the tunnel, and stopped, dropping into a crouch.

Uh oh.

Bear and I closed in. The tunnel opened into a large space, about a hundred and fifty feet wide and seventy-five feet deep. Multiple openings gaped on the sides, probably leading back to the Sponge. Straight ahead a thick wall rose, with a rectangular doorway dead center.

Jovo hissed.

I flexed on the doorway. Beyond it lay a large room.

I glimpsed an identical doorway at the other end.

Between them a short pillar rose from the floor.

It was rectangular and cut from a single block of black stone that seemed to swallow the light around it.

White glyphs shone on its sides, carved into the cosmic blackness, and then painted over with an even glow.

My eyes told me that the pillar was only three and a half feet tall, but in my mind it loomed, an enormous obelisk, a towering monolith brimming with malevolent power.

We had found the anchor.

The vision of the giant anchor filled my brain. The urge to dash across the open space and into that room gripped me. The anchor was an abomination. I had to crush it.

The pillar throbbed, sending pulses of concentrated power through me. I gritted my teeth.

Get out of my head.

Bear licked my hand.

The connection broke. I reeled, suddenly free. That destructive urge hadn’t come from the gem. No, that was something born of my humanity.

I petted Bear’s head and forced myself to focus. Something hung above the anchor. Something foreign that didn’t belong in that room.

I risked another flex and scanned the object. A knapsack, suspended by a familiar metal-plastic cord. I glanced at Jovo. He was laser-locked on it, his body rigid, compressed like a tightly coiled spring.

This was a trap. The Sponge was a labyrinth. Our hunter didn’t want to chase us through it. He wanted us in that room. That was where the last fight would be.

There might have been a way to go around the anchor chamber, but it would take a long time to find it and I didn’t want to look for it. I wanted answers. And I wanted this to be over. Every instinct I had assured me that the way to the gate lay through that room.

A faint whisper of a movement made me spin.

A dark form appeared behind us, at the entrance of the tunnel.

Darkness pulsed and the form fluttered away like a piece of fabric jerked out of sight, leaving a bone barrier dial hanging in its place.

The gress had blocked our escape. It was trying to trap us in the tunnel.

I dashed forward, to the opening that led to the anchor room, pulling my stolen dial out of the pack.

Jovo tried to rush past me, and I shoved him back, thrust the dial where the passageway met the wider chamber, and activated it.

My barrier pulsed with darkness and settled at the mouth of the tunnel, blocking the exit to the anchor room.

Even if the gress showed up now, he wouldn’t be able to place another barrier on top of this one.

The forcefield had a twenty-six-foot limit, and it had to reach something solid to activate.

Since I blocked the tunnel, the gress’ only option would be to set his barrier in the outer chamber, but that space was too wide.

Either the gress wanted to trap us in this small tunnel so he could wait until we ran out of water or food and died, or he wanted to panic us and force us to the anchor.

Impulsively charging into the anchor chamber, with Jovo keyed up so high he was practically bouncing off the walls, would be suicide.

We needed to be calm and calculating if we had any chance of winning.

My barrier bought us temporary safety and time.

Jovo thrust himself in front of me, his face furious, and stabbed his finger at the anchor.

“I know,” I told him. “We will go.”

He pointed at the anchor again. I pointed at him and waved my arms frantically, then moved my hands down slowly, spreading them. “Calm down.”

Jovo trembled.

“It’s a trap.” I clamped my hands together, imitating a bear trap closing.