Page 80 of The Inheritance
The flat, empty feeling inside me faded.
I felt more like myself.
There were so many fucking questions I didn’t have the answers to. What happened to the worlds after the Tsuun won? They could be destroyed, occupied, vassalized… Did anyone ever win against the Tsuun?
The answers to all those questions were likely in my head and out of reach for now. The most pressing question was, what do I do now? How do I fix this mess?
Staggering out of the gate and announcing to the world that I was sadrin was out of the question. I had no intention of becoming a bargaining chip. Nor would I let the government collect me like a weird specimen or turn me into a weapon by keeping my kids hostage. If they understood what I was, I would face the choice of being eliminated, confined, or controlled for the rest of my life. Not going to happen.
My priorities were the same: get out of the breach alive and return to my children. But now there was one final part to that awesome plan. Once I managed to escape, I would end this invasion.
There would be no thirteen centuries of conflict. My children deserved a safe future. I deserved it.
The Tsuun wanted my mother because she was a threat. I would use her legacy. I had to get out and study the gem. I needed to learn what it contained, how to access it quickly, and where to find the information I required. I needed to know what we faced. I needed to learn the limits of my new body. All of this meant I would need to hide until I accomplished that.
Bear and I had been stuck in this breach for at least a week. Whoever had the rights to this breach – whether it was still Cold Chaos or some other guild – would be sending a new team in. For all I knew, they were already inside. That team would attempt to blast through the passageway London collapsed, because they would want to recover the corpses and the incredibly valuable adamantite.
London’s face flashed before me. Soon. We would meet very soon.
When the second assault team entered that cave, they would find the corpses of four alien humanoids and my mother. I couldn’t let that happen. I had to avoid anything that drew attention to the existence of sadrin.
If our government already knew about the Tsuun and other sophonts on the other side of the breach and were actively hiding it, they could disappear the entire assault team for just discovering the bodies. Not to mention that the devourer shroud required living hosts. By now it would have fallen into a semi-dormant state from starvation but the moment a human approached one of the gress corpses, the shroud would strike. People would die.
London was pond scum, Melissa was a selfish coward, but the rest of the Cold Chaos members didn’t deserve to die or disappear if I could prevent it.
I looked at the anchor. It still loomed large in my mind’s vision, an ominous evil thing that had to be destroyed.
I focused. Still solid black, impenetrable to my talent. I didn’t know what it was made of or how it came to be, but I understood what it did far better now. It was a pushpin. The breach was a notecard. Someone picked it up from its place on a desk and used a pushpin to stick it to a corkboard. Once the pushpin disappeared, the note card would fall back to its place on the desk. The caves, the spider herders, the lake dragons, they probably wouldn’t even notice the shift as their little slice of biosphere returned to its rightful spot in the world that had spawned it.
If I shattered the anchor, the gate would collapse in three days, as the breach ran out of energy to stay wedged between dimensions. But it wouldn’t solve the problem of the bodies, because it left enough time to search the mining site. The corpses would still be found.
Besides, everyone would know that I had destroyed the anchor. The anchors didn’t just spontaneously collapse on their own. I couldn’t stagger out of the breach and have it collapse behind me. My life would be over.
The compulsion burned in me. I had to destroy it.
No. I was my own person. I had other things to do. I had to clean this up. The sooner the better.
I turned to the body of the gress, squeezed the amulet until it clicked, and spoke a single word in an alien language. “Irhkzurr.”
The amulet on the gress’ exposed chest turned red, then orange. The assassin’s flesh sizzled. The devourer shroud hissed, trying to crawl away from the heat and failing, trapped by its roots with the alien body.
The amulet grew yellow, then finally a blinding white, and the corpse turned to ash, the grey shroud writhing as it too was incinerated. A moment and the pile of ash collapsed onto the floor.
Jovo stood up on the dead skelzhar’s head, his bracelet clutched in his hand. He was splattered with blood and his eyes looked a little wild.
I gave him a little wave.
The lees hopped off the corpse of his enemy, shook himself, flinging blood everywhere, ran over to me, and showed me the bracelet. It was a metal band about two inches wide, that looked to be made of copper. Thin red lines crossed it, carving it into smaller sections.
He grinned at me.
“Home,” I said.
“Home!”
He jumped from foot to foot, spinning in place, then turned around, and hugged me. “Ada.”
“Jovo.”
