Page 60 of The Inheritance
Technically, that was how speech worked in general. We formed intent to speak, and our body produced the sound, but when I spoke English, that process was instant. With the spider herders, I felt that neural connection happen in slow motion. It was disconcerting.
What did that woman put into my head?
Bear trotted to the pond, drank, and ran over to me. It was time to go.
We trekked across the cavern to another tunnel. I closed my eyes for a moment, checking the position of the anchor. Yep, still straight ahead. It was very close now and it had gotten more distracting. I’d compared it to a psychic splinter before; that splinter had become infected. It wedged itself in my consciousness and throbbed.
The anchor was usually well protected. I had leveled up, figuratively speaking, but I wasn’t sure I could take whatever guarded it. A part of me wanted to try. Wanted something to be there, something I could slice to pieces. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to punish whoever created the breach in the first place by killing their prized bioweapon or if I wanted to prove something to myself because deep down, I was still scared. Dwelling on it wouldn’t do me any good. The anchor was our destination. We would get to it.
Maybe I would get some answers there.
The tunnel ended and Bear and I walked onto another stone bridge. An oval cavern stretched out on both sides of us, not very large but deep, about one hundred yards across and twice that down. The narrow stone bridge spanned it just off center. On the other side, another tunnel waited.
We kept walking, sticking to the center of the path. We were about halfway across when I caught a glint of something below.
“Rest.”
Bear lay down. We were working on new commands. Cold Chaos likely taught most of them already, but I didn’t know the German words for them, so we had to improvise. So far, she got rest, up, drop it, and back. That last one was especially useful in a fight. Our battle strategies generally went one of two ways. If the opponent was smaller or roughly the same size as Bear, she rammed them and went for their throat. If the enemy was larger, she usually targeted a limb, clamped on, and used her weight to slow them while I cut them down. Calling her back behind me was crucial, because some creatures, like the lake dragon, were strong enough to fling her away. Although lately when Bear bit something, she stayed on. Her cuspids were now three point two inches long and the rest of her teeth had gotten larger as well.
She also seemed to understand not food, but we had mixed success with that.
I had no idea how hard it was to train a dog, but cute puppy videos on Instagram taught me that it required repetition. Command, compliance, reward, rinse and repeat. It took Bear only five repetitions to learn a command, and once she learned it, it stuck. I was sure it wasn’t normal, but nothing had been since I walked into this breach. Normal had packed its bags and left the building.
I knelt and carefully leaned over the edge to look down.
Bodies sprawled below. Human bodies in the familiar indigo of Cold Chaos.
I went cold.
They lay strewn around the bottom of the cave like Noah’s action figures thrown onto the bed. Some were missing limbs, some had been cut in half. It looked familiar. I had seen this at the mining site. This controlled carnage. One slice. One death.
I forced myself to focus on the corpses. They were too far to fully analyze, but I noticed that when I measured distances with my Talent, it gave me a moment of enhanced distance vision. The body directly under me was lying on its back. I flexed, and for a split second my talent grasped its face.
Malcolm. This was the original assault team.
Something flashed by Malcolm’s body. I concentrated on it. The cheesecake stone.
My heart hammered in my chest. As soon as London made it out, the gate coordinator would have gone into the breach and activated the cheesecake, the signal stone, twin to the one that was now blinking below me. The moment the cheesecake started flashing, the assault team would’ve turned around and marched back to the gate. They never made it, which meant they were either already dead by the time the cheesecake started flashing, or they were en route back to the gate when they died.
The assault team went into the gate an hour before the mining team. The mining team died about thirty minutes after entering.
The gate was less than two hours away. Had to be.
If I could get down there, I could walk out of the breach in two hours. Bear and I would be out of this nightmare. We could go home.
I scrambled from the edge and sat, trying to get a grip. I had to calm down.
Could we get down there? Was it physically possible?
I crawled back to the edge and looked down again, measuring the distance with my talent for the second time. Two hundred and eleven feet. The rope in my backpack was only fifty feet long, whatever the spider herders helped me cut from the length I used to rappel down the cliff.
Nowhere near long enough.
I could jump pretty far now, and a drop of thirty feet wasn’t out of the question. But that and my rope still only gave me eighty. I would need one hundred and thirty-one feet. At least.
I surveyed the walls. Sheer. No way to climb down. Even if I somehow strapped Bear to myself, we wouldn’t make it.
I felt like screaming. We were so close. Damn it.
