Page 30 of The Inheritance
It wasn’t just the weird hallucinations and the unusual precision of my talent. I was changing. Physically changing.
The thought pierced me like a jolt of high-voltage current. The hair on the back of my neck rose.
The year after the divorce had twisted me. I used to like flying. In my head, flying was married to vacation, because the flights of my childhood took me to the beach and amusement parks. Suddenly I was terrified to board a plane. The fear was so debilitating, I couldn’t even talk while boarding. I became obsessed with traffic, avoiding driving whenever I could. I developed a fixation on my health that bloomed into hypochondria.
I ended up in therapy, where we got to the root of the problem. I had realized that Roger was truly, completely gone and if something happened to me, the kids would be alone. I was desperately trying to exert control over my environment, and when I failed, my body locked up and refused to respond. It took years to get over it, and the hypochondria was the hardest to defeat. Every time I thought I’d finally broken free, it would come back with a vengeance over some minor thing like a new mole or some weird pain in my arm.
In a way, becoming an assessor was the best thing for me. Facing death on a regular basis didn’t leave room for anxiety. I was too busy surviving.
In this moment, it was like all those years of therapy, exercise, and rewiring my brain’s responses never happened. Was I dying? Was that glowing thing in my head eating at me like cancer? No doctor would be able to get it out of me. There was no treatment for whatever the fuck it was. The woman had called me her daughter. Would this gem reshape me into someone like her? What if I wasn’t human anymore? What if I got back to the gate and it wouldn’t let me exit back to Earth?
The grip of anxiety crushed me. I couldn’t talk, I couldn’t move, I just stood there, desperately cataloging everything happening in my body. My breathing, my aches and pains, the strange electric prickling feeling in my fingers. I could hear my own heartbeat. It was fast and so loud…
A cold nose nudged my hand.
I still couldn’t move.
Bear pushed her muzzle into my fingers, bumping me. I felt her fur slide against my hand.
Bump. Bump.
I exhaled slowly. The air escaped out of me, as if it had been trapped in my lungs. I swallowed, crouched, and hugged Bear. Gradually the sound of my heart receded.
Yes, I was changing. No, I had no control over it, and I didn’t know what I would become at the end of this process. But I was getting stronger. There were three stalker corpses on this cave floor. I made that happen.
I petted Bear, straightened, walked over to the nearest furry body, and flexed. One hundred and forty-three pounds. I grabbed the stalker by the front paws and lifted it off the ground. My shoulder whined in protest. I clenched my teeth against the pain.
I was holding one hundred and forty-three pounds of dead weight. It wasn’t resting on my back, no, I was holding it in front of me.
I wonder…
I spun around and threw the corpse. The stalker flew and landed on the cave floor. My shoulder screeched, and I grabbed at it. Okay, not the brightest moment.
The stalker corpse lay ten feet away. I threw one hundred and forty-three pounds across ten feet. Two weeks ago, I’d used a forty-five-pound plate for some overhead squats at the DDC gym, because someone was hogging the Smith machine, and I had a hard time holding it steady for ten reps.
“We’re not in Kansas anymore, Bear.”
Bear looked at me, padded over to the corpse I threw, and bit it.
“No worries. It’s dead. You are the best girl, Bear, you know that?”
Somewhere in the tangle of the tunnels a creature howled. We couldn’t stay here. We had to keep moving.
I pulled the antibacterial gel out, slathered some on my bleeding shoulder, popped four Motrins, and turned to Bear.
“Okay, girl, let’s treat your battle wounds.”
Something was wrong with Bear.
We had cut our way through the stalker tunnels. Our trail was littered with corpses, and we had just killed our fifteenth beast. It hadn’t gotten easier, not at all. I was so worn down, I could barely move. My body hurt, the ache spreading through the muscles like a disease, sapping my new strength and making me slow.
Bear stumbled again. I thought it was fatigue at first, but we had rested for a few minutes before this last fight, and it hadn’t helped at all. I had kept her from serious injury. She’d been clawed and bitten once, but the bite had been shallow, so it likely wasn’t the blood loss.
Bear whined and fell.
Oh god.
I dropped to my knees by her. “What is it?”
