Total pages in book: 86
Estimated words: 80829 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 404(@200wpm)___ 323(@250wpm)___ 269(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 80829 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 404(@200wpm)___ 323(@250wpm)___ 269(@300wpm)
Adaline is a Talent. Ten years ago, she had a happy marriage and a job she loved. The invasion shattered both. Now she works for the government, searching the breaches for magic metals and medicine to help Earth repel an interdimensional enemy. Two kids, one cat, bills, benefits, mortgage and school tuition...Risking her life became routine.
She had gone into the dimensional gates hundreds of times. She was always well protected. This time everything goes wrong. Now Ada is trapped in the labyrinth of alien caves unlike any other. Her only companion is a scared German Shepherd named Bear. Together they must uncover the breach's secrets and escape, because Ada promised her children that she will come home.
The future of humanity depends on it
*************FULL BOOK START HERE*************
1
Health insurance with a thousand-dollar maximum family deductible.
Prescription drug coverage with an eighty percent discount off list prices.
The first time I heard about gates, I imagined them to be these portals glowing with a magical blue light. Too many video games, I guess. They were nothing like it. This one was a hole. A deep, black, vertical hole that punched through reality, swirling with pale mist. The tendrils of white smoke curled and slithered within it, but none escaped into our world.
The gate appeared in front of the Elmwood Park Rec Center eight days ago. To the left was Elmwood Public Library, all red brick and tinted windows. To the right was a funeral home followed by perfectly ordinary, three-story boxes of apartment buildings covered in tan stucco. Behind us, to the east, lay Chicago. And straight ahead was an interdimensional tear. Just another Monday.
If someone told me ten years ago that I would be standing in front of a hole leading into a dimensional breach filled with monsters and preparing to risk my life and go inside, I would’ve politely nodded, walked away, and later told Roger I’d met an unhinged person. Of course, a decade ago I was thirty, happily married, with a daughter in elementary school, a son just out of diapers, and a low-risk private sector job I loved. A different life that belonged to a different Adaline.
The future looked bright back then. Until the invasion shattered it.
Free emergency medical care when injured in the line of duty.
I took this job for the benefits, and when it got to me, like now, I recited them in my head like a prayer.
Dental, a one hundred fifty-dollar deductible, fifty percent off braces.
Things that came with age and children: appreciation of the dental plan with orthodontics. Braces were hellishly expensive.
Vision plan, fifteen percent discount off glasses and contacts.
The gate gaped like a dark maw.
At least thirty-five yards tall. Maybe taller. The threat scale ran from blue to red, and the prep packet put this gate at the low-orange risk level. On a dying scale of one to ten, it was about seven.
This was my one hundred and sixty-eighth gate. I’d gone into orange gates many times before. I didn’t want to go into this one. It made my hair stand on end. And the presence of the funeral home wasn’t helping.
“Ominous sonovabitch, isn’t he?” Melissa murmured next to me.
“Mhm.”
The mining foreman crossed her arms on her chest. She was a tall woman, two years older than me, with auburn hair she religiously dyed every four weeks and the kind of face that said she had everything under control. We met years ago, on one of my earlier gate dives, bonded over kids, and stayed friendly ever since.
After the first gates burst, some people gained strange abilities that couldn’t be explained by science. To be fair, science tried its hardest, but if it walked like magic and talked like magic, most people decided it was magic. These abilities were called talents, and to make things extra confusing, people who had them were also called Talents.
Talents fell into two broad categories: combat and noncombat. Combat Talents got a boost to physical prowess and developed abilities like forcefields, summoning energy weapons, or shooting fire from their fingertips. Noncombat Talents got a random skill that was useful only in specific circumstances.
Melissa was a noncombat Talent. She could sense ores. She had to be right on top of them and actively concentrate, but that talent, combined with her previous experience in iron mining, let her rise to the position of the Mining Team Foreman.
Melissa ran her mining crew like a well-oiled machine. She didn’t get rattled, but she was staring at this gate like it was about to reach out and bite her. Something about this hole set both of us on edge.
Melissa narrowed her eyes. “Anja, tie your damn shoelaces.”
One of the younger miners rolled her eyes and crouched. “Always on my case…”
“Exactly. I am always on your case. I’m on everyone’s case. If we have to run for our lives out of that gate, I don’t need any of you tripping over your feet, because I’ll have to double back and get you. You have two toddlers to come home to.”
“Yes, Mother.”
Melissa heaved a sigh. “Everybody is full of sass today.”
Around us the mining crew checked their gear, twelve people in indigo Magnaprene coveralls and matching hard hats. Nobody seemed unusually worried. Toolbelts were adjusted, rock drills and shears tested, the generator and floodlights on four industrial carts inspected. The usual.
The escort, five combat Talents in tactical armor, had done their precheck ages ago and were now waiting. Aaron, a bastion class fighter, sat on a crate, leaning against another crate, his eyes closed. His massive adamant-reinforced shield rested on the ground next to him. Three recon strikers mulled about, armed with SIG Spear rifles. They specialized in ranged combat and rapid disengagement, which was tactical speak for shoot the shit out of everything and then run for the exit.