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)
“No need,” Elias said. “I’ve been meaning to try this.”
He concentrated. A faint golden glow slid from him and clutched the cat’s injured limb. The bleeding stopped. The severed muscle began to knit itself closed. It wasn’t instant the way Jackson’s heals were. It was slow and Elias could feel his reserves draining from the strain of it, but it was healing.
“You can heal?” Leo’s jaw hung open. “Since when?”
“Since this morning."
For almost a year now he felt a vague stirring of something, some aspect of his talent that he couldn’t quite grasp. It was just like the time he learned to imbue his blade. He’d felt the ability building for months before he finally learned what it was and how to use it. This morning, as he watched Adaline hug her children, it came to him in a flash, like a door suddenly flung open deep inside his soul.
The cat leaned its massive head and butted him in the chest.
“Oh my God, how cute!” Samantha cooed.
Elias reached over and gently scratched the cat’s jaw.
“You’ve lost your minds,” Leo announced.
“Can we keep it?” Samantha asked. “Please, please, can we keep it, Elias?”
“We can’t take a beast out of a breach.” Leo shook his head. “It won’t be able to get through the gate.”
“It will,” Samantha said. “It isn’t part of the breach.”
“How do you know?”
“It feels different. More like that dog the assessor brought with her than a breach creature.”
“That was our dog,” Leo said.
Was being the operative term.
The cat stretched a little, trying to get more pets.
“You can’t abandon it here,” Samantha said. “This cat isn’t part of whatever this is. It will die on its own.”
“Where would we keep it?” Leo asked.
“In the HQ,” Samantha countered. “We have an R&D department. We can claim it’s for research.”
“No! The DDC would lose its shit.”
“The DDC doesn’t have to know. We can sneak it out tonight.”
“Sam!”
“’You become responsible, forever, for what you have tamed,’” Samantha quoted.
“That’s great. When we are hauled before a congressional committee and the guild is in danger of being disbanded, you can tell them we did it because The Little Prince said so.”
The cat pressed its head against Elias’ arm and made a low rumbling noise.
“It’s purring!”
“It’s growling!”
“Keep it!”
“Kill it.”
The cat looked at him with big green eyes.
“You know, your kind usually doesn’t like me,” Elias told it.
The beast purred louder.
“Guildmaster?” Sam prompted.
“We’re keeping it,” Elias said.
“Yessss!” Samantha jumped three feet into the air.
Leo spun away waving his arms. “Why doesn’t anyone listen to me?”
“I can’t leave it here without food or water,” Elias said. “The wound is closed, but it will need time to recover.”
“This will end in disaster. Mark my words…”
“Leonard,” Elias said.
Leo stopped.
“What I say now stays between the three of us. Adaline mentioned spider herders. I didn’t get a chance to find out more, because getting our story straight before the DDC showed up took priority, but I’m certain she encountered sophonts in this breach.”
In nine years of gate diving, he’d only seen sophonts twice and even now he wasn’t sure exactly what he’d witnessed.
“The DDC actively suppresses any news of sophonts. I don’t know why. It may be political. It may be that someone somewhere up the chain of command decided that hiding their existence was in the interests of national security. That means they won’t tell us what they know until they absolutely have no choice about it. They are withholding information while we are risking our lives in the breaches.”
Leo and Samantha stared at him.
“This cat is evidence of sophont activity. It’s a working animal. It was left in this cave guarded by a piece of technology we’ve never seen before. It has a collar. We cannot rely on the mercy of the DDC to keep us informed. We must obtain our own intel. We’re going to gather everything in this chamber, including the cat, and we’re going to learn as much as we can from it. And we’ll need to figure out what this is.”
Elias reached over and picked up the metal device hanging from the cat’s collar. It was a sphere about the size of an apple. Something shifted under the pressure of his fingers. He heard a faint click.
A beam of light emanated from the sphere and flared into a massive image on the cavern’s closest wall, like a projector streaming a film. An anchor chamber, filmed from above, as if from a drone camera. Adaline Moore dashed across the floor, chased by a four-armed alien wrapped in some sort of garment. There was a sword in her hand.
Adaline stumbled, slowing. The four-armed creature threw itself at her. She dodged in a blur and sliced at his back, cutting through the garment. A chunk of it fell off onto the floor. The creature shrieked and fell to its knees. She yanked a rope off her arm and looped it around its neck. The creature tried to run, but she’d tethered it to herself, and she jerked it back and stabbed it in a controlled, cold frenzy. She severed its arms off one by one, dragged it across the floor to the pillar, and tied it to the anchor. She bent over it, doing something he couldn’t see, and then she hissed something in a language he didn’t understand and walked away.