Page 38 of The Inheritance (Breach Wars #1)

The Rakalan resisted for almost thirteen centuries. Thirteen hundred years of war. The enormity of it slammed into me. I sat down on the ground by the gress’s body. My legs refused to hold my weight.

How many gates was that? How many deaths? Generations and generations, born with the war already burning and dying while it still raged. Thirteen hundred years. We’ve been fighting for only ten, and it already completely changed our lives. Over a thousand years of this?

And in the end, the Rakalan still lost and gave up their sadrin . If the Tsuun found out I existed and carried all of that generational knowledge in my head, they could pressure the Earth to turn me over.

Would my planet give me up? Was there even a point to going on?

Something nudged me. Bear brought me a bloody feline femur with shreds of flesh on it. The claw marks on her back weren’t bleeding anymore.

I flexed on autopilot. Well, the meat wasn’t poisonous, and she had already eaten some of it, so it was probably too late to make a fuss about it.

Bear nudged me again.

“Hey, Bear.”

She dropped the femur at my feet. I crouched. I’d read somewhere that dogs didn’t like being hugged. I had hugged her before because I was too far gone, but I was calm now, so I leaned against her, stroking her side. She leaned back against me and licked my cheek.

The flat, empty feeling inside me faded.

I felt more like myself.

There were so many fucking questions I didn’t have the answers to. What happened to the worlds after the Tsuun won? They could be destroyed, occupied, vassalized… Did anyone ever win against the Tsuun?

The answers to all those questions were likely in my head and out of reach for now. The most pressing question was, what do I do now? How do I fix this mess?

Staggering out of the gate and announcing to the world that I was sadrin was out of the question.

I had no intention of becoming a bargaining chip.

Nor would I let the government collect me like a weird specimen or turn me into a weapon by keeping my kids hostage.

If they understood what I was, I would face the choice of being eliminated, confined, or controlled for the rest of my life. Not going to happen.

My priorities were the same: get out of the breach alive and return to my children. But now there was one final part to that awesome plan. Once I managed to escape, I would end this invasion.

There would be no thirteen centuries of conflict. My children deserved a safe future. I deserved it.

The Tsuun wanted my mother because she was a threat.

I would use her legacy. I had to get out and study the gem.

I needed to learn what it contained, how to access it quickly, and where to find the information I required.

I needed to know what we faced. I needed to learn the limits of my new body.

All of this meant I would need to hide until I accomplished that.

Bear and I had been stuck in this breach for at least a week.

Whoever had the rights to this breach – whether it was still Cold Chaos or some other guild – would be sending a new team in.

For all I knew, they were already inside.

That team would attempt to blast through the passageway London collapsed, because they would want to recover the corpses and the incredibly valuable adamantite.

London’s face flashed before me. Soon. We would meet very soon.

When the second assault team entered that cave, they would find the corpses of four alien humanoids and my mother. I couldn’t let that happen. I had to avoid anything that drew attention to the existence of sadrin .

If our government already knew about the Tsuun and other sophonts on the other side of the breach and were actively hiding it, they could disappear the entire assault team for just discovering the bodies.

Not to mention that the devourer shroud required living hosts.

By now it would have fallen into a semi-dormant state from starvation but the moment a human approached one of the gress corpses, the shroud would strike. People would die.

London was pond scum, Melissa was a selfish coward, but the rest of the Cold Chaos members didn’t deserve to die or disappear if I could prevent it.

I looked at the anchor. It still loomed large in my mind’s vision, an ominous evil thing that had to be destroyed.

I focused. Still solid black, impenetrable to my talent.

I didn’t know what it was made of or how it came to be, but I understood what it did far better now.

It was a pushpin. The breach was a notecard.

Someone picked it up from its place on a desk and used a pushpin to stick it to a corkboard.

Once the pushpin disappeared, the note card would fall back to its place on the desk.

The caves, the spider herders, the lake dragons, they probably wouldn’t even notice the shift as their little slice of biosphere returned to its rightful spot in the world that had spawned it.

If I shattered the anchor, the gate would collapse in three days, as the breach ran out of energy to stay wedged between dimensions. But it wouldn’t solve the problem of the bodies, because it left enough time to search the mining site. The corpses would still be found.

Besides, everyone would know that I had destroyed the anchor. The anchors didn’t just spontaneously collapse on their own. I couldn’t stagger out of the breach and have it collapse behind me. My life would be over.

The compulsion burned in me. I had to destroy it.

No. I was my own person. I had other things to do. I had to clean this up. The sooner the better.

I turned to the body of the gress, squeezed the amulet until it clicked, and spoke a single word in an alien language. “Irhkzurr.”

The amulet on the gress’ exposed chest turned red, then orange. The assassin’s flesh sizzled. The devourer shroud hissed, trying to crawl away from the heat and failing, trapped by its roots with the alien body.

The amulet grew yellow, then finally a blinding white, and the corpse turned to ash, the grey shroud writhing as it too was incinerated. A moment and the pile of ash collapsed onto the floor.

Jovo stood up on the dead skelzhar’s head, his bracelet clutched in his hand. He was splattered with blood and his eyes looked a little wild.

I gave him a little wave.

The lees hopped off the corpse of his enemy, shook himself, flinging blood everywhere, ran over to me, and showed me the bracelet. It was a metal band about two inches wide, that looked to be made of copper. Thin red lines crossed it, carving it into smaller sections.

He grinned at me.

“Home,” I said.

“Home!”

He jumped from foot to foot, spinning in place, then turned around, and hugged me. “Ada.”

“Jovo.”

He took my hand, squeezed it to his chest, and pointed to the exit, toward the gate. “Home.”

I nodded. “My home.”

Jovo put his paw on his chest and said, pronouncing the words very carefully. “Help.” He pointed at me. “Ada. Dan-ge-rous. Help.”

He waved his knives around and struck a dramatic pose.

It took me a minute. My nice new friend from a different world, who helped me kill an assassin from an alien planet, was determined to walk me home. Because it wasn’t safe. Gentleman Jovo.

I sat on the floor and laughed.

* * *

The trek from the anchor chamber to the gate was short.

So short, I nearly cried. Only a few dozen yards on the other side of the anchor chamber the ground sloped downhill into a wide tunnel that led pretty much straight to the gate.

I had wandered through the tunnels for days.

I must’ve crossed above this tunnel several times, never finding access to it.

After the first few minutes I started running. Jovo kept up with me and we bounded through the passage, with Bear in the lead. The way was clear. All the monsters were either dead or too scared to get in our way.

We’d crossed the killing site of Malcolm’s team. I stopped long enough to pick up some aetherium charges. I didn’t look at the bodies.

The assault team had marked their path with white arrows painted on the walls. Following their route was easy.

We’d been running for what felt like an hour, when I saw an orange arrow on the wall. I remembered when Hotchkins drew it. We had reached the turn off to the mining site.

Finding London’s cave-in took no time at all. Two aetherium detonations later, we blasted a hole through the rubble. With my new strength, I could’ve dug through it, but I was in a hurry, and when I flexed , my talent conveniently marked the best place for an explosion.

We made it into the mining site. The bodies lay where they fell.

Nothing fed on them, nothing touched them.

They had been decomposing for a week and some were beginning to bloat.

The four gress, however, had shrunk as the shrouds drained the last of their body fluids.

I set off the remaining amulets one by one, until the dead gress became ash.

My mother was decomposing too, although much slower than the humans around her.

I wrapped her in her robe, carried her into a side tunnel, to one of the dead ends, and placed her on the bottom of a shallow pool while Jovo stood guard.

I used the last aetherium charge to collapse the passageway.

Cold Chaos had no reason to go this way and with luck, her body would remain undiscovered.

I stood there by her tomb in silence for a long moment.

Thank you for your gift. I promise I won’t squander it.

The secret of the breach was hidden. It was time to go home.

* * *

Main blade, backup blade, four aetherium grenades…

Elias turned away from the table filled with his gear. Something was going on outside. He headed to the library’s entrance. Outside the window, the sunrise barely began, the street and the gate awash in the early dawn light.