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)
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.
So fucking close.
I looked below again, surveying the bodies, the floor, the walls…
I had to let it go. There was no way down. We couldn’t afford to sit here wasting time and energy obsessing over it.
I felt the weight of someone’s stare. The tiny hairs on the back of my neck rose.
I concentrated. The hidden watcher was across the cavern, perpendicular to the bridge.
Slowly I reached into my backpack, pulled out my hard hat, slid the selector on the light to maximum beam, and jerked the helmet up.
Across from us a face with two shining eyes peered at me through the gap in the far wall. My talent grasped an outline of a long humanoid head. A blink and it jerked out of sight, behind the stone.
The light on the helmet sputtered and died.
“And now we know we haven’t lost it, Bear.”
Something was following us. Not just something. Someone. And they glowed bright red.
Red meant value. Our hunter offered something useful, something that, judging by the intensity of the color, we desperately needed.
I got up and stuffed the helmet back into my sack. It was useless as a light source, but it still worked as Bear’s water bowl. The anchor was still pulsing on the edge of my awareness.
“If we find the anchor, maybe we can find a way down.”
Bear wagged her tail.
“Come on, Bearkins.”
I started forward and Bear chased after me.
Bear and I trudged across another stone bridge, a vast drop below us. This part of the breach seemed to consist of massive caverns and deep shafts connected by short tunnels. Natural stone bridges crisscrossed the sheer drops. Water was scarce. I’d filled our canteens when we killed the latest lake dragon, and half of our water supply was gone. It made me nervous. I kept hoping for streams and not finding any.
We could probably get some moisture from the blood of the monsters we killed, but they had grown scarce too. Nobody barred our path. Maybe the inhabitants of the breach simultaneously decided that we were too much of a threat, but I doubted it. A few times I glimpsed creature corpses below, broken as if they had fallen from a great height. The fall wasn’t the only thing that killed them. The bodies were torn, shredded by something with terrible claws. And worse, nothing had touched them since their death. This place was full of scavengers, yet all of that meat was going to waste. There was only one answer: whatever slaughtered the creatures was so frightening, that nothing else dared to touch their kill.
The anchor was ahead and slightly to the right. We had been drawing closer, but our route didn’t run in a straight line. We were making circles around it, getting nearer in a spiral that became tighter and tighter.
Behind me, Bear halted. I turned. She was looking to our right, across the cavern. That side of the chamber lay shrouded in gloom.
Bear let out a quiet, deliberate woof.