Page 69 of The Inheritance
Elias sighed and fished his phone and tablet from the wreckage.
They moved into the lounge outside of the office on the second floor, overlooking the library floor below.
Elias gulped his coffee. It did taste like swill, but at least it wasn’t cold. “How did you get here so fast?”
“Called in a favor,” Jackson said. “I didn’t have a choice about the departing flight. They escorted me all the way to my seat. Got off the plane in Hong Kong, got onto another plane instead of cooling my heels, flew around the storm, and here I am.”
Elias quietly exhaled.
The healer sipped his coffee and grimaced. “Foul.”
“It’s hot.”
“Well, there is that,” Jackson agreed.
He was a lean man, not just thin, but slight, short, and pale, with thoughtful eyes and light brown hair cropped close to his head. Easy to overlook. Easy to dismiss.
“A fine mess we landed in,” Jackson said.
“Yes.”
“Leo tells me that the DDC will be releasing the update tomorrow.”
“That’s right,” Elias said.
They were out of time. The DDC could only sit on the fatal event for so long, and Leo’s contact warned him that things had changed, and she couldn’t keep it quiet any longer. A press release would be coming tomorrow. As soon as it hit, Cold Chaos would become the focal point of the country.
It looked bad. An assault team and a mining crew were dead, a week had passed since they were killed, and both the DDC and Cold Chaos had done nothing about it. The media would be all over it. The politicians would hijack it for their own purposes. The rival guilds would accuse Cold Chaos of cowardice and dereliction of duty. Public pressure would be immense.
The law gave the DDC authority to reassign the ownership of the breach if the original guild was unable to close a gate. Tomorrow the country would demand accountability. The DDC would reassign the gate to get the focus off themselves.
The guilds existed in cutthroat competition with each other. It didn’t matter how good your track record was; it only mattered how well you closed the latest breach. Cold Chaos couldn’t afford to give up Elmwood. If they let another guild recover the bodies because Cold Chaos was too weak to handle it, the DDC would divert the higher difficulty gates to someone else. It would take them years to regain their standing.
Even if that route were possible, Elias didn’t want to take it. They lost people inside that damn breach. This was their mess, their responsibility. They owed it to the families.
“We can’t lose the gate,” Elias said.
“No, we can’t,” Jackson agreed.
“Our people died in there.”
“And we need to bring them home,” the healer finished.
“I’ve got two kids sitting in our HQ. They still think their mother is alive. We must give people answers.”
“What do you want to do?”
“The DDC press conferences are always scheduled for ten am,” Elias said. “We go in at first light. They can’t reassign the breach if we are in it.”
Jackson laughed softly.
They would rest tonight. Tomorrow, they would take the breach.
“Do you think you could’ve cured Brenda if she hadn’t died?” Elias asked.
“You asked me that nine years ago, remember?”
He remembered. It was on the day they met. There were eight of them in that original group: Elias, Jackson, Stephanie, Leo, Graham, Simone, Nolan, and Miles. It was the first gate dive for most of them. Leo was barely twenty-two back then, a kid. Stephanie no longer entered the gates; Miles was dead; Nolan took the civil service route and climbed up the ranks in the DDC; Simone became the COO of the Telluric Vanguard; and Graham ran the Guardians. A lot happened in a decade.
