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)
“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.
Jackson’s eyes were kind and mournful. “I’m going to tell you the same thing I told you back then. The past has happened. It cannot be changed. Don’t do this to yourself.”
Elias drank his coffee. Jackson was watching him with a particular focus.
“Don’t do it,” Elias warned him.
“Do what?”
“Put me into restorative sleep.”
“You look like you need it,” Jackson said.
“What I need is to enter that damn breach. I’ve been sitting on my hands for five days now. What the hell possessed you to go to Japan anyway?”
Jackson smiled. “The trees, Elias. They are good for your soul. Now tell me more about this cave.”
The three of us, Jovo, Bear, and I, crouched on the ledge. Below us the remains of the assault team sprawled on the rocks. We had doubled back to the kill site.
The corpses were still there, untouched. I pointed at the bodies, looked at Jovo, and made a cutting motion. “Knife.”
The lees pondered the bodies below.
The first thing Jovo did after we rested was to scale the sheer side of a cliff to a higher ledge to get a better view of the cavern. He’d scrambled a forty-foot wall like it was nothing, which gave me an idea. Jovo needed a weapon, and the only unclaimed weapons in the breach lay there below us. They were out of my reach but maybe not out of his.
The fox took a deep breath, put his marble into his mouth, and leaped off the stone bridge. He bounced off the rock, weightless, bounced again, zigzagging down the wall like a superhero squirrel, and then landed among the bodies.
Wow.
Jovo gagged, coughed, waved his hand in front of his nose, and began rummaging through the corpses. I sat on the stone bridge and watched. Once he armed himself, we would head to the anchor.
Jovo pulled a tactical belt with five pouches on it from a corpse, and wrapped it around himself, over one shoulder, bandolier style.
I could smell the bodies now. The sickening, cloying stench reached all the way up to the bridge.