Page 9 of The Inheritance (Breach Wars #1)

R ight leg hurt, left arm hurt, everything fucking hurt. There was alien slime dripping from his armor, and it stank like yesterday’s vomit.

The gate loomed in front of him. Elias McFeron stepped through it.

Blue sky. Finally.

He took a deep breath and tasted home. That first gulp of Earth’s air. There was nothing like it.

Behind him the rest of the assault team staggered out.

He’d force-marched them for the last three days, all the way from the anchor chamber.

It was a hard pace even for the top Talents, and it took longer than expected because the markers they had placed to guide their way through the swamp had sunk.

The first responders dashed toward him with the stretcher. Elias let them get in position, lifted Damion Bonilla off his shoulders, and carefully transferred him to it. The pulse carver’s blood-smeared face was a mask of pain.

“Thank you, Guildmaster. I’m sorry.”

Elias nodded. “Nothing to be sorry about. Rest. You’ve earned it.”

The first responders carried Bonilla off. His legs were bloody mush below the knees, but he would walk again. The healers would fix him. They fixed anything except dead if you got to them in time.

This was the last time. Elias had promised himself that every time he went into the breach, but this time he meant it.

He would strip off the armor, take a long shower in his hotel, board the guild jet with the rest of his team, and go home.

He would eat well, sleep in his own bed, and then in the morning he would put on a suit, go into his office, and do paperwork like a normal fucking human being.

That’s where he belonged. Running the guild, which had plenty of blade wardens without him.

The medics swarmed the assault team. A young kid with a healer’s white caduceus on his jacket ran up to him.

Elias waved him off and squinted at the familiar orderly chaos in front of the gate, looking for the mining crew.

He’d sent a scout ahead with the orders to wrap it up.

The miners were on the left, stowing their gear.

He counted them out of habit. Fifteen and eight escorts. Good. Everyone was out.

A familiar tall, lean figure in a black Tom Ford suit tugged at his attention.

Leo Martinez, who seemed to be born to wear elegant suits and be the public face of a guild, the only man standing still in the flurry of activity.

His XO, who should’ve been back at HQ, 2,000 miles away. Something had happened.

Leo started toward him.

Elias made himself walk forward. Whatever it was, he didn’t want to deal with it but avoiding it would make things worse.

A sharp sound cut through the human clamor, like the noise of a thousand paper sheets being ripped at once magnified through concert level speakers. The gate collapsed.

Leo reached him. “Cutting it a little close, sir.”

“Happens.” Elias headed for the familiar black SUV. The back hatch rose as he approached, and he began stripping his armor and tossing it into the plastic-lined vehicle. “What is it?”

Leo kept his voice low. “We had a fatal event.”

He’d figured that. “Where?”

“Elmwood Gate. The assault team is presumed dead. We lost nine of twelve miners, including a K9 and handler, four of the escorts, a scout, and a DebrA.”

Elias stopped for a moment. Twenty-eight people.

Good people. He’d approved the line up himself.

It was a solid team that should’ve been more than adequate for the low orange gate.

He’d personally trained them, he’d gone into breaches with them, and now they were dead.

Half of them under the age of thirty. He’d sent kids to their deaths again.

This wasn’t a fatal event, this was a catastrophe. What the hell went wrong over there?

Leo’s face was carefully neutral. “The DebrA is?—"

“Adaline Moore.” The best DebrA in the Eastern US died in their gate dive.

“Yes, sir. I’ve got the mining foreman, the surviving miners, and London under lockdown.”

“London made it out?”

The crisp line of Leo’s jaw got sharper. “Yes, sir.”

“Hmm.”

“I’ve reported to the DDC,” Leo continued.

“Cora Ward owes me a favor, so she will sit on it for as long as she can, but sooner or later this will get out and when it does, both the Hermetic Alliance and the Guardian Guild will scream bloody murder. The Guardians, in particular, have been vocal about our share of the gates.”

Adaline Moore had been in high demand. DebrAs of her caliber were rare and monopolized by the DDC.

Elias liked to know who he was working with, so he kept tabs on the assessors.

Adaline was divorced, with an absentee ex-husband, two children, and a cat, and her life revolved around work and family.

The very definition of a noncombatant. Her children were now orphans.

Leo was right, the fallout from this would hit them like a hammer, but the political mess and the PR nightmare weren’t important right now. He would deal with that later. “What does London say happened?”

“Humanoid combatants. Highest red level.”

“What kind of humanoids?” They had come across humanoid combatants in the breaches, but the word humanoid was used loosely, as in anything that was bipedal and somewhat human in shape.

A slight edge slipped into Leo’s voice. “He doesn’t know. He’s never seen anything like them before.”

Perfect.

“His entire crew and the DebrA are dead, and he doesn’t know. Did he see the DebrA die?”

“He says he did. The mining foreman backs up his story.”

The foreman made it out, too. “What about the other two miners?”

“They aren’t saying much. One didn’t see anything, and the other is keeping his mouth shut.”

Elias deposited the last bit of gear into the SUV and slapped it shut. The vehicle rocked. His control got away from him a hair.

Leo got behind the wheel, Elias climbed into the passenger seat, and they drove out, past the police barricade and the onlookers onto I-205, heading north, toward the airport, where the guild jet waited.

“From what London described, we will need the primary team,” Leo said. “Kovalenko is on loan to Texas’ Lone Star Guild and Krista is on vacation in the Caribbean. Jackson is in Japan.”

And they would have to wait for Jackson because they would need their best healer.

When it came to Talents, quality far outpaced quantity.

Jackson was a top-tier healer, capable of near miracles.

In the breach, where split seconds mattered, he was irreplaceable.

Sending in five mid-tier healers wouldn’t have the same impact.

No, they needed Jackson. Both for his heals and his forensic capabilities.

They needed to know how their people died.

“Jackson has the longest travel but should make it within forty-eight hours. The real problem is the tank,” Leo said. “Both Karen and Amir are inside gates right now, and both have gone in less than twenty-four hours ago. We can substitute Geneva, but she lacks experience…”

“No need,” Elias said. “I’ll take them in myself. Tell Krista I authorized triple rates. We can swing by Dallas and pick up Kovalenko. We have twenty-eight people in that breach. We must recover the bodies so their families will have something to bury.”

If there was anything to recover. With the kind of delay they were facing, they could get there and find only bones stripped bare. Dead people became meat, and meat didn’t last long in a breach. He would shower and sleep on the plane. The office would have to wait.

“Are we pulling them to HQ or straight to Elmwood?” Leo asked.

“Straight to Elmwood. Nobody goes into that gate until I get there.”

“Understood.”

Elias looked at the city soaking in the dreary rain of the Pacific Northwest outside the window and glanced back at his XO. “Was London injured?”

A hint of bright electric lightning flared in Leo’s eyes, turning them an unnatural silver white. He pronounced words with crisp exactness. “Not a scratch, sir.”

“Hmm.”

He had to get to Elmwood. The sooner, the better.

* * *

The cave passage gaped in front of me, a narrow tunnel painted with bioluminescent swirls of strange vegetation. It split about twenty yards ahead, with one end of it curving to the right and the other cutting straight into the gloom.

I had a light on my hard hat but decided against using it.

It didn’t illuminate much, while making me easy to target, and I had no idea how long the battery would last. It was better to save it for emergencies.

The pale green and pink radiance of the foreign fungi and lichens offered some light, but it made the darkness seem even deeper.

It was like I’d turned five years old again, lying in my bed in the middle of the night, too afraid to move, until the need to pee won out and forced me to make a mad dash to the bathroom.

Except that back then, if I got really scared, I could flick the lights on.

As long as you had electric light, it gave you an illusion of safety and control.

Without it, I felt naked. It was just me, Bear, and the tunnels filled with underground dusk.

There would be no dashing here.We would go carefully, quietly, and slowly.

A cold draft flowed from the tunnel, bringing with it an odd acrid stench.

Bear whined softly by my side.

Whining seemed entirely appropriate. I didn’t want to go into that gloom either.

“We don’t have a choice,” I told the dog.

Something rustled in the darkness, a strange whispering sound.

Bear hid behind me.

“Some attack dog you are.”

That’s probably why she survived. If she were braver, she’d be dead.

“The exit is to our left. This is the closest tunnel to it. The other two branch off to the right, which will take us further from the gate.”