Page 6 of The Inheritance
“Doing okay?” London murmured.
“Yes,” I lied.
“Is Tia alright?”
“Yes. She’s a smart kid. She will handle it. Thank you for the three minutes.”
“You’re welcome.” He glanced at me, his eyes concerned. “Not feeling this one?”
“No.”
Gate divers were like ancient sailors. We ventured into the unknown that could kill us at any moment. In the breach, survival depended on luck and intuition, and our rituals were an acknowledgment of that. We knocked on wood, we muttered lucky sayings under our breath, and we trusted our instincts. My instincts were pumping out all of the dread they could muster.
“Anything specific?” London asked.
“It makes my skin crawl.”
“Don’t worry,” he promised quietly. “I’ll get you out of here in one piece.”
I glanced at him.
“I mean it, Ada. The only way you go down is if I’m down, and I’m really good at surviving. We get in, get out, and you can go home and sort the kid issues out. Tomorrow will be like this never happened.”
“Thank you.”
He nodded.
Ten years had passed since Roger had abandoned us. I’d been on my own for a decade, taking care of the kids, paying the bills, surviving. Every decision in my life was up to me, and I made them without support or help from anyone else. I’d become used to it, but London just reminded me how it felt to share all of that with someone. Someone who cared if you lived or died.
This was the worst moment to wonder about things. I promised my daughter I would come back. I had to concentrate on that.
The passageway forked. We turned right. Hotchkins, a short, dark-haired man, spraypainted a backward orange arrow on the wall. He would do this every time we made a turn. It was a proven fact that people running for their lives had trouble orienting themselves.
Ahead a glowing stick shone among the rocks. Beyond it eight furry bodies sprawled on the ground in a puddle of blood. My foot slid on something. A spent shell casing. The cave floor was littered with them. The assault team had made a stand here.
We passed the bodies, skirting them to the sides. The dead things were large, about the size of a Great Dane, with long lupine jaws and massive feet armed with hook-like claws. Their pelts, chewed up by bullets, were shaggy with blue-grey fur. They didn’t look like anything our planet could’ve spawned.
“A variant of Calloway’s stalkers,” London said. His voice was perfectly calm.
“Yeah. There were a lot of them, and they are spongy. They soak up bullets like they’re nothing and keep coming,” Elena said. “And they spit acidic bile.”
“Good to know,” London said.
“We did our best to clean up, but the place is a maze.” Elena kept her voice low. “Passages going everywhere, so we may run into some. We didn’t see anything more dangerous until we went much deeper, so there is that.”
“No worries,” Stella offered from behind them. “Bear will let us know if anything is coming.”
Elena gave her a cold smile. “I will let us know if anything is coming.”
“Don’t pay her any attention, Bear,” Stella murmured. “She didn’t mean anything by it.”
Bear twitched her right ear. One day I would pet that dog.
Elena kept gliding forward, her face portraying all of the warmth of an iceberg.
A lot of combat Talents developed similar abilities, so many that the government began to classify them. Tank classes, like London’s blade warden or Aaron’s bastion, had a lot of defensive skills, so they drew the attention of the enemy and absorbed damage. Damage dealers, like strikers or pulse carvers, attacked the target, causing rapid destruction.
Elena was a pathfinder, a scout class that came with heightened hearing and vision, upgraded speed, and an unerring sense of direction. If she concentrated hard enough, she could hear a person murmuring behind a closed door two floors above her. But as awesome as Elena was, I would trust Bear over her any day. There was a reason every guild brought canines into the breaches. The transdimensional monstrosities wigged them out, and they let us know when something came near. Dogs were the best early warning system we had.
