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)
Why couldn’t I identify it? Was it because it was inside us and it had become part of us? Or was I just not strong enough to differentiate it from our blood? It had started in the lungs, so we must have inhaled it.
I took a deep breath and exhaled on my hands.
There it was! A trace of the lethal glitter. I focused on it. The four-lobed spiked clumps, swirling, swirling… Something inside me connected, and I saw a faint image in my mind. The mauve flowers. We had been poisoned by their pollen.
I flexed harder, stabbing at the pollen with my talent. The tiny flecks opened up into a layered picture in my mind, and the top layer showed how toxic it was...
Oh god.
We were almost out of time. We needed an antidote. Now.
I strained, trying to access whatever power lay inside me, the same one that showed me the Grasping Hand and gave me the stalkers’ name. It didn’t answer.
Please. Please help me.
Nothing.
We would die right here, in this tunnel. I knew it, I could picture it, me wrapped around Bear, hugging her as we both grew cold…
No. There had to be an answer. We hadn’t come all this way to lay down and die. We did not kill and fight all these damn stalkers –
The stalkers. The stalkers went to the lake to drink. The flowers were all over the shore, but the stalkers had died because the lake dragon had torn them apart. The flowers didn’t poison them.
I jumped to my feet and ran to the nearest corpse. My talent reached out and grasped the body. There was pollen on the fur and on the muzzle and a faint smudge in the lungs, but none anywhere else. Not a trace in the blood. They were immune.
The poison had to be eliminated in the bloodstream. If it was purged in the liver or any other organ, there would’ve been traces of it in the blood vessels but there were none.
This wouldn’t help us any. Just because the stalkers had the immunity…
I flexed again. Within the stalker, the heart glowed with bright red. My talent flagged something as red based on how much I wanted it. I valued adamantite more than gold, so in my mind gold flared with pink but adamantite was a dark saturated red. The stalker heart was so red, it was dripping with crimson glow.
I flipped the stalker on its back, shaped my sword into a knife, and stabbed the corpse, slicing it from the neck to the groin. Bloody wet innards spilled out. I dug in the mush, pushing slippery tissue aside until I found the hard sack of the heart. I carved it out and pulled the bloody organ free.
Flex.
The heart turned crimson. I smashed my talent against the top layer of the glow, trying to splinter it into layers, and it obeyed. I punched through the top red layer and saw the second, neon blue.
Toxic. It would poison us, too.
The red was stronger than the blue. That meant there was a slim chance we could make it. It was the difference of might-be-dead from the stalker heart or definitely-dead from the pollen. We didn’t have hours, we had minutes. The heart had to be the answer.
This was not how the immunity worked. This wasn’t how biology worked.
I blinked my enhanced vision off, shut my eyes for a long second, opened them, and flexed again.
The heart was still bright red. My talent was telling me it was our way out. I had nothing to lose.
I put it on a flat rock and minced the tough muscle into near mush. I scooped a handful of the bloody mess and staggered over to Bear.
She was still breathing. There was still a chance.
I pried her jaws open and shoved a clump of the stalker mince into her throat. She gulped and gagged. I held her mouth closed.
“Swallow, please swallow…”
Bear gulped again. Yes. It went down.
“What a good girl. The best girl. One more time. Let’s get a little more in there.”
I forced two more handfuls into her and flexed. The concentration of pollen in her stomach dimmed. Somehow it was acting as an antidote. I didn’t understand how. It didn’t matter. We were all out of choices.
Bear let out a soft, weak howl, almost a gasp. It must have hurt.
“I’m so sorry. I wouldn’t hurt you if there was any other way.”
If I ate the heart now, there was no telling what it would do to me. I could pass out right here, and we would both become stalker dinner.
About twenty minutes ago we had walked by a narrow stone bridge that spanned a deep cavern. There had been a depression at the other end, a smaller cave within the wall of a larger cave. At the time I thought it would be a good place to rest, because the stalkers could only come at us one by one, but I wanted to get out of the tunnels, and it seemed better to just keep moving. We had to find a place to hide, and that was the closest safe spot I could think.